Those who have seen the film remember it as a very sophisticated, very affecting story in which Diane Keaton appears in Woody Allen’s life like a wonderful, deliriously spastic bird. He is beguiled by her goofy charm, which swirls and swoops alongside his brooding seriousness. But Woody, wanting to mold her, to make her deeper and better educated, sends her into analysis and college courses, drags her to grim documentaries, and buys her books on death. The daffy girl grows; she becomes more independent; she hangs out with her professors. (“Adult education,” cries Woody in a stunning reversal, “is such junk! The professors are so phony! How can you do it?”) Worst of all, she begins to trust her own judgment, which includes an alarming taste for the “Mellow.” And Woody—“If I get too mellow, I ripen and rot”—loses her. Most painful, he loses her to a mantra-ridden West Coast record producer whose life style and values are antithetical to his own.
Despite the intensity of the hurts and sorrows, audiences found Annie Hall very funny; and perhaps because for the first time Woody dealt with issues that were very close to their hearts, this movie has made him one of the foremost directors in America today. It was a story told with great wit and humor, which generated more continuous laughter than any previous Allen film, and with a denouement that left many viewers in tears. This love story was not, however, the intended focus of the film.
Throughout 1976 and the first half of 1977 Woody had in mind a film that would be called “Anhedonia,” meaning the inability to experience pleasure (a title choice that at United Artists, at least, generated very little pleasure indeed). “Woody wanted to take a risk and do something different,” recalls co-author Marshall Brickman. “The first draft was a story of a guy who lived in New York and was forty years old and was examining his life. His life consisted of several strands. One was a relationship with a young woman, another was a concern with the banality of the life that we all live, and a third an obsession with proving himself and testing himself to find out what kind of character he had. Woody is not a frivolous person. He has his commercial side, as one must to survive in the business, but I think he’s genuinely concerned with his philosophy, he feels advancing age, and he worries about death. And he’s always intuitively tried to use his personal material in his work.”
Woody had turned forty in 1975. He found himself to be a man who had taken life very seriously, had struggled to develop and to overcome his limitations, and yet was still extremely dissatisfied with himself, at odds with his environment, and unsure about exactly how much he could blame certain of his own shortcomings on society’s. “I’m a complainer,” Woody admits, “a big whiner,” and in creating Alvy Singer, a character he describes as “mildly misanthropic and socially discontent,” his purpose seemed to be to put his own perpetual discontent into a comic context and thereby burst an inner tension and doubt over its legitimacy. His ambivalence, his emotional division over this issue, persists:
Q: “Are the character’s constant complaints legitimate or are they neurotic?”
Woody: “I think the character’s complaints are all completely legitimate. The degree to which he obsesses over them in the movie gets to be seen as neurotic, but to me that’s not neurotic.”
Q: “But in the movie you make fun of his obsession, imply that he’s carrying it too far.”
Woody: “Right. Because I recognize that as the more rational point of view. I just don’t happen to hold that.”
The first cut of what has come to be known as Annie Hall was two hours and twenty minutes long and took us about six weeks to complete. Far from being the story of a love affair—“The best love story of the decade,” said Pat Collins of New York’s WCBS-TV; “One of the most endearing romantic comedies in the history of movies,” said Gene Shalit on WNBC-TV; “A love story told with piercing sweetness and grief,” wrote Penelope Gilliat in The New Yorker—it was the surrealistic and abstract adventures of a neurotic Jewish comedian who was reliving his highly flawed life and in the process satirizing much of our culture. Diane Keaton makes a brief appearance after Woody’s reference to her in the opening monologue and disappears for ten or fifteen minutes thereafter. The movie was like a visual monologue, a more sophisticated and more philosophical version of Take the Money and Run. Its stream-of-consciousness continuity, rambling commentary, and bizarre gags completely obscured the skeletal plot. “The thing was supposed to take place in my mind,” says Woody. “Something that would happen would remind me of a quick childhood flash, and that would remind me of a surrealistic image. . . . None of that worked.”
In the version that Woody and I screened for Marshall Brickman late in 1976, the opening monologue was very long and repeatedly broken by cuts to scenes that amplified Woody’s grievances and hang-ups. It was loaded with some of the freest, funniest, most sophisticated material Woody had ever created, and it hurt him to lose it. With a voice-over narration, Alvy Singer takes us to the Brooklyn neighborhood where he was raised and introduces his family.
MOTHER: It’s not the same now that the element has moved in.
ALVY (appearing on the scene as an adult and addressing the audience): The element. Can you believe that? My mother was always worried that ‘the element’ would move in. It’s like a science-fiction movie.
And with that we are presented with the opening scene of a black and white SF film called The Invasion of the Element: “Little did the small and serene community in Brooklyn realize,” says the stern-voiced narrator, “that they were about to be invaded by the element.” A moving van arrives and a black family emerges. White women faint.
We proceed to Woody’s grade-school class, a scene that we eventually used in abbreviated form. Woody, a problem pupil who probably would have won his teacher’s vote for “least likely to succeed,” asks his little classmates to tell the viewers where they are today. Donald, the model student, runs a “profitable dress company.” We cut to Donald’s present-day home, Woody asking questions like a visitor from another planet: How can Donald possibly enjoy such a drab, predictable, plastic, suburban life? Donald escorts Woody around the house, while undisciplined children (one of whom, we find out from the proud father, can sing all the words to a detergent commercial) make a racket in the background and Donald’s overdressed, overcoiffed wife chirps, “Who is this guy? . . . Is he saying something about our house?” A TV set is running continuously, tuned to a cheap giveaway show.
ALVY: This is the worst kind of show.
TV HOST (responding right from the picture tube): What do you mean this is the worst kind of show? This show is very popular.
ALVY: This is a popular show?
HOST: That’s right. We give away a lot of prizes—that’s fun.
ALVY: You’re tranquillizing with the trivial—that’s what Kierkegaard said.
HOST (genuinely bewildered): Who? Who? Kierkegaard? What show is he on?
They continue to argue, while Donald’s wife gets into a conversation with a female contestant (“Darling, where did you get that suit?”).
We return to the classroom. There are other destinies to unravel, including that of Judy Horowitz, a little beauty whom Alvy worshiped. We see her today, fat, surrounded by kids, caked with makeup and cosmetic fakery.
Various gags take Woody from being a peculiar child who never had a “latency period” to a full-blown neurotic adult. We see two kids under the old Coney Island boardwalk. A chum is giving Little Alvy (played by Jonathan Monk) a condom, as Woody explains on the sound track: “When I was ten I knew I should carry around an emergency contraceptive.” Another shot under the boardwalk. This time it’s Woody with a girl friend and he’s removing the latex relic. “By the time I got to use it, it was dust. It’s now powder.”
As his mother complains about his isolation—“You always saw the worst in people. . . . Even when you became famous, you still distrusted the world”—we see snatches of Woody on the Dick Cavett and Ed Sullivan shows. It’s the end of the prologue, about thirteen or fourteen minutes, only a fractio
n of which will be used.
If we were to look at the first cut now, something we cannot do because it no longer exists, the first dramatic shot that would recall the movie as we’ve come to know it would hit the screen at this point—the long shot of Woody and Tony Roberts (Rob) approaching the camera as Woody carries on about anti-Semitism. (“I was having lunch with some guys at NBC, and I said, did you eat yet or what? And Tom Christie said, ‘No—Jew?’”) Woody then goes to meet Diane at the movies; the thug pursues Woody for his autograph; the Columbia professor pontificates on the ticket line about Fellini and McLuhan, and, in a stunning coup, Woody produces McLuhan from behind a placard. After several minutes of this familiar material, we’d then be surprised to find that Woody and McLuhan begin a conversation about Woody’s college days, particularly an incident for which he was expelled from school after just one year. This triggers a complete flashback scene to a dean’s office in which Woody is being reprimanded for burning another dean in effigy.
Returning to the present we’d again find a strand of the movie we know: Alvy and Annie in bed after viewing The Sorrow and the Pity for the second time, Annie unwilling to make love to him, and then the flashback to Woody’s first wife, Allison Portchnik (Carol Kane), whom he meets at an Adlai Stevenson rally. But we would hardly have time to feel at home with this material before we’d be off on a strange second flashback built on the first. Little Alvy, faking a fever by holding his thermometer over the radiator, is visited by his voluptuous cousin Doris. Doris brings him comic books about Hitler, Nazi spies, German submarines, and similar subjects. As she reads to him, he swoons over her and begins to drool. (“Alvy, you’re drooling.”) Another cut in time. We are in Nazi headquarters. Two officers are speaking in German. The subtitles: “We caught two from the resistance. We tortured the Frenchman, Sartre, but he refuses to talk. Here’s the American.” He produces Woody, who steadfastly declines to implicate his associates. The Nazis put a gun to his head and threaten to execute him on the spot. Suddenly Woody pulls a hand puppet from his pocket: “Because of my moral convictions,” says the intrepid resistance fighter, “I cannot name names. But he”—the puppet—“can,” and he proceeds to provide the information they want ventriloquially.
We are now in the home of Alvy and Allison, where Woody is awakening from the former scene. “Why!?” he cries. “Why am I always the coward?” Allison: “Not the same dream?” It is obviously familiar ground. Before we return to Woody and Diane, herding wild lobsters at their beach house, Allison has to put up with his lamentations about cowardice, testing, the Warsaw ghetto, and the earthquake in Chile: “I should be there,” he moans, “I’m not helping my fellow man.”
Time and again, if we could view this first cut, we would be surprised to find the film dwelling on issues that were just touched in passing in the version we know. From an anxiety about proving himself and being tested to a distaste for intellectuals and an envy of athletes, Woody seemed to be intent on covering every issue of his adult life. Once we got it on the screen, the problem was obvious: “It was like the first draft of a novel,” says Brickman, “like the raw material from which a film could be assembled, from which two or three films could possibly be assembled.” When Woody and his second wife, Robin, a tough, uptight New York intellectual (played by Janet Margolin, barely recognizable from her tenderhearted role in Take the Money), attend the literary cocktail party, they stay much longer, plenty of time for Woody to establish “how creepy the thinkers are.” Cutting about the room, we overhear a plethora of one-liners that would burn holes in the pages of The New York Review of Books:
SIDNEY: My book was called Alternate Modes of Perspectives. His was Alternate Styles of Perspectives.
NORMAN: I’m going to say one word that will refute your entire argument: Beowulf.
NEEDLEMAN: I’m inner-directed, he’s outer-directed, but his outer direction is inner-directed.
DWIGHT: I’ll review yours and you review mine.
Failing to seduce Robin in the bedroom where she discovers him alone amid the piles of coats, watching the Knicks game, Woody turns back to the TV set. “Knicks ball—out of bounds—Jackson to Bradley—shot! No good! Rebound—Kierkegaard. Passes to Nietzsche—fast break to Kafka! Top of the key—it’s Kafka and Alvy—all alone—they’re both gripped with anxiety—and guilt—and neither can shoot! Now Earl Monroe steals it! And the Knicks have a four on two—”
As we move into the second half of this original version, Annie finally begins to emerge, because almost all the present-tense material relates to her in some way. But despite the importance of Alvy’s problems with Annie—her need to smoke pot before they can make love, his unnerving visit to her Wisconsin home, his jealousy, his anxiety about her moving in with him, her infatuation with Los Angeles and with Tony Lacey, the West Coast record producer played by Paul Simon, and Alvy’s great sense of loss when she leaves him—his relationship with her is also a taking-off point for innumerable flights into the past, into fantasy, into current dramatic action that further amplifies his personal themes. Among the scenes that would lead us away from an involvement with the Keaton-Allen love affair as we watch the second half would be:
• Alvy’s fantasy trip to California. He and Annie are visiting Rob in Beverly Hills. Rob speaks in a strange zombielike voice: “I prepared these two pods—one for each of you. When you sleep they will take over your bodies, and you will then be happy citizens of Los Angeles.”
• A scene on the boardwalk from Alvy’s teenage years in which the Surf Avenue Angels, unamused by his banter, can’t decide whether to throw him into the water or break his head with a baseball bat.
• A fantasy in which Woody and Shelly Duvall (playing the Rolling Stone reporter he dates after breaking up with Annie) are transported from the “transplendent” Maharishi gathering at Yankee Stadium to the garden of Eden, where they discuss sex, anatomy, and the female orgasm with God. The Latter is in the midst of declaring that He is “for all time creating man and woman” when Woody brashly advises, “Well, don’t put the sexual organs too close to the excretory ones—it’ll only cause problems later.”
• A ten-to-fifteen-minute sequence in which Alvy, Rob, and Annie take a tour—in time and space—of the “old neighborhood” in Brooklyn where the two men grew up, including a flashback scene of Little Alvy in the schoolyard taking his temperature with a thermometer he carries with him at all times, as well as other images of Rob and Alvy as boys; a contrast shot of Alvy’s coarse, feuding parents and Annie’s refined, courteous parents; an incredible sequence in which Woody imagines his parents speaking with the Halls’ civility (Father: “Make me a martini.” Mother: “Of course, sweetheart. How would you like it, dear?” Father: “On white bread with mayonnaise”); visions of Alvy’s boisterous relatives at a post-World War II coming-home party for his cousin; a discussion of the afterlife during which a street elevator rises from the ground bearing the Devil, who takes the trio on a guided tour of Hell—all nine layers (“Layer Five: organized crime, fascist dictators, and people who don’t appreciate oral sex”); a fight between two men in a junk-food establishment, Rob and Alvy trying to intercede on behalf of the smaller man and escaping with their teeth only because the bully in the brawl recognizes Alvy as a TV personality.
• A jailhouse scene in which Woody, arrested for his reckless parking-lot driving spree in Los Angeles, is thrown in with a bunch of tough cons and wins them over by entering their joke-telling session with a tour-de-force performance.
All told, this first cut was as different in its way from the movie that became Annie Hall as the first cut of The Night They Raided Minsky’s was from the film that was finished eleven months later. Woody and I were both discouraged by what we saw, but Marshall Brickman, who had had very little experience viewing first assemblies, was despondent.
“I was very disappointed,” says Marshall. “I thought that the first twenty-five minutes didn’t work at all. I felt that the film was running off in n
ine different directions. I kept saying to myself—you always feel this when you see the first assembly. And yet there was that persistent and very convincing notion that I was right, that it didn’t work. The film never got going—actually until Paul Simon appeared, which is pretty late into the film. It was a very commentative film—and Woody of course is brilliant at that—and it was funny, but, I felt, nondramatic and ultimately uninteresting, a kind of cerebral exercise. Stuff that’s wonderful fun to write is often less fun’for the audience to see, and all that stuff that Woody and I had written was cerebral, surreal, highly intellectual, overliterate, overeducated, self-conscious commentary. And just for a moment I had a sense of panic: we took a chance, and it didn’t work; we will be humiliated; is there any way to stop the project?
It was clear to Woody and me that the film started moving whenever present-tense material with him and Keaton dominated the screen, and so we began cutting in the direction of that relationship. We were still, as far as we knew, working on the same film, about a comic who can feel no joy and about his jaded view of the world. But we sensed immediately where the life was, and Woody, with his sure commercial sense, had no hesitation about trimming away much of the first twenty minutes in order to establish Keaton more quickly. After several weeks of working and reworking the material, we hit on the formula that got Woody swiftly through his opening monologue and childhood scenes—first his mother taking him to a doctor (he’s upset and refuses to eat because the universe is expanding—a short scene extracted from the middle of the movie); then the classroom scene where the grown Woody defends himself against his third-grade teacher, and his classmates tell where they are today (Donald says he’s a “profitable dress manufacturer,” and we move on to the next child—no foray into the suburban home, no conversation with the television); a glimpse of Woody on the Dick Cavett show, his mother complaining that he always saw the worst in people, and the opening narration is over. Six minutes. Now Alvy and Rob are on the street in the present time, Alvy complaining about anti-Semitism, and the audience senses the action is about to begin. A minute later Woody is waiting to meet Diane at the theater; she arrives late in a bad mood, she’s missed her therapy session, and she refers (in much too loud a voice) to their “sexual problem.”
When The Shooting Stops Page 31