We spend five minutes with Annie at the theater and in bed afterward. Annie tries to reassure Alvy about her unwillingness to have sex by referring to his sexual problems with his first wife, Allison Portchnick, and in a four-and-a-half-minute flash-back to the Stevenson rally where Woody meets Allison and the bedroom scene where he avoids her by favoring an obsession with the Kennedy assassination we put Allison away for good. We had to get back to Annie, because if she was going to be the dramatic focus that would hold this picture together, we could not stray from her for long. As Woody and I saw the picture heading in her direction, we realized that the other relationships had to be trimmed. Gone are Cousin Doris, the Nazi comics, and the interrogation dream he relates to Allison. After another three minutes with Annie and the lobsters and a glimpse at her former lover, we flash back to Woody’s second marriage. It’s Robin and Alvy at the cocktail party, but the movie is more and more about relationships now, and the anti-intellectual humor of this scene began to pull the picture off course. Out went the academic one-liners and the philosophers’ basketball game. Robin had to be gotten through with, and with severe cutting, Woody’s second marriage was off the screen in under three minutes.
In the emerging movie, twenty-four minutes have elapsed when Woody and Rob arrive at the Wall Street Tennis Club for the scene in which Annie and Alvy first meet. The pace until now has been brisk. The two main characters have been introduced, and we’ve learned something about their personalities, their backgrounds, and the conflicts between them. Light-headed, devil-may-care Midwestern girl who grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting meets urban Jewish comedian who has enough awareness for both of them and hang-ups to match. To the extent that we’ve focused on Woody’s background, it has been to serve the portrayal of this relationship, which, we were now beginning to realize, was completely taking over the film. The tennis-court meeting, coming as it does one-quarter of the way into the picture, has the refreshing effect of a new beginning. We’ve been alerted to the problems; now we shall see the chronology, how it all happened.
Allen and Keaton stay on the screen together for the next ninteen minutes—at the tennis court, driving uptown in her Volkswagen, and at her apartment afterward; on their first date and then in bed; at the bookstore where he buys her books about death, strolling through the park where they make fun of passersby, and on the dock where he tells her he loves her; in his apartment as she moves in; at the beach house where he refuses to let her smoke pot, her spirit leaving her body during sex as a result. Only then did we cut to a younger Alvy, pretending to enjoy the routine of a horrible comic for whom he is being hired to write material, a scene that proved a useful transition to Woody’s onstage appearance in Wisconsin prior to his visit to Annie’s home.
When Brickman saw this new version with so much of his original material removed, he felt as if his “flesh had been ripped off,” but he realized that his initial panic had been unfounded and that a legitimate film was emerging. Woody, too, had mixed feelings: “There was a lot of material taken out of that picture that I thought was wonderfully funny,” says Woody. “I was sorry to lose just about all that surrealistic stuff. It was what I had intended to do. I didn’t sit down with Marshall Brickman and say, ‘We’re going to write a picture about a relationship.’ I mean the whole concept of the picture changed as we were cutting it. It was originally a picture about me, exclusively, not about a relationship. It was about me, my life, my thoughts, my ideas, my background, and the relationship was one major part of it. But sometimes it’s hard to foresee at the outset what’s going to be the most interesting drift. The guesses we started out with, many of them were wrong. But we wound up with the right guesses.”
As the movie evolved, we struggled, twisted, stretched, and pulled in order to build a story rationale into the transitions. Marshall Brickman was in favor of abandoning the original time-shifting structure entirely and putting the film together in straight chronological order—opening with the tennis meeting and proceeding to the break-up—but this would not have simplified our task. A typical problem was finding a logical place to have Annie move into Alvy’s apartment. The script called for her to move in after two flashbacks to Woody’s childhood, the Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers fantasy visit to Beverly Hills, and the scene with Woody and the abominable comic. I realized, after many trials and errors, that in terms of emotional buildup the logical place for her to move in came much earlier, after they profess their love for each other on the pier. Shifting the material around into logical and dramatically appropriate positions was as time-consuming as it had been for Take the Money and Run, and when we were unable to force a juxtaposition, Woody again had to shoot new scenes.
When you shake a picture down to this extent, some essential ingredients are bound to fall out. Little episodes, verbal asides that were meant to bridge the continuity, cling to the extraneous material and are lost. Among the scenes that we eliminated was one that focused on Alvy’s negativeness. It had included an important piece of transitional material in which Woody whines about a West Coast obligation: “Now I’ve got to go to Los Angeles. . . . I hate L.A. . . . . They want me to be on one of those meaningless awards shows. . . . My agent says the masses like it.” Without these lines we had no way of explaining the cut to California, and so among the additional material Woody filmed was a scene at a party in which the carving up of a fresh shipment of cocaine paves the way for the transitional lines:
COKE FIEND: It’s great stuff, Alvy. Friend of mine just brought it in from California.
ANNIE: Oh, do you know something? I didn’t tell yuh, we’re going to California next week.
GIRL: Oh really?
ANNIE: Yeah.
ALVY: On my agent’s advice, sold out. I’m gonna do an appearance on TV.
Although this scene was written and shot just for this information, audiences were always much more focused on the cocaine, and when Woody sneezes into what we’ve just learned is a two-thousand-dollar cache, blowing white powder all over the living room—an old-fashioned, lowest-common-denominator, slip-on-the-banana-peel joke—the film gets its single largest laugh. (“A complete unplanned accident,” says Woody.) The laughter was so great at each of our test screenings that I kept having to add more and more feet of dead film to keep the laughter from pushing the next scene right off the screen. Woody and I both prefer to let laughter intrude a little into the next shot, even to the extent of letting the audience miss a few lines, rather than compromise the pace, but in this case the laughter was so sustained we had no choice but to hold the scene for what seemed to me an interminable and embarrassing length of time (actually about five or six seconds). Even so, the transitional information was lost on many viewers: when they stop laughing and spot Alvy and Annie in a car with Rob, who’s discussing how life has changed for him since he emigrated to Beverly Hills, they are momentarily uncertain about how or why the couple got there.
The more we became involved in the plot of the relationship, the more we had to prune. Even scenes involving both Keaton and Allen had to be dropped if they stalled the dramatic flow. One of the funniest examples, which included the major portion of Colleen Dewhurst’s performance, took place at the Hall home in Wisconsin. Dewhurst, as Annie’s mother, is taking snapshots after dinner as her husband serves drinks and argues with Annie about art. Suddenly Mom remembers a dream she had the night before and asks Alvy to interpret it. She was having a fight with a man—“It was not Dad, Annie, but he was wearing your dad’s bathrobe”—over who had control of the TV set. She gets very mad and breaks the aerial off, and when the man demands it back, she runs upstairs and flushes it down the toilet. “So what do you think about that, Alvy?” Woody: “Are you kidding?” Dewhurst: “No. What would your psychiatrist say?” Woody: “You must be joking. It’s obviously a phallic dream.” Dad: “A what?” Woody: “A phallic dream . . . it represents an unconscious impulse toward castration.” The entire family is scandalized.
“My own feeling,�
�� says Woody, “was that the whole section ran too long. Ralph felt that the scene just didn’t come off, and it was hurt by the material before it, and we should move the story along.” With a ruthless editorial momentum, we chopped off the next scene, too, in which Annie’s brother (Christopher Walken) confesses to Alvy about a wish to drive head on into oncoming vehicles.
“It was that way till a week before we completed the thing,” recalls Woody, “and we stuck the brother back in—we were getting such good responses we started to put back one or two things that we liked.”
Like Colleen Dewhurst, Shelly Duvall also lost most of her performance. Half the Maharishi scene was cut, as was the trip to the Garden of Eden. Duvall is reduced to little more than a walk-on part, although one of the lines she speaks in her zonked-out nasal monotone—“Sex with you,” she tells Woody as they’re lying uncomfortably in his bed, “is really a Kafkaesque experience”—is one of the most hilarious of the film.
As we plowed through the second half of the picture, we had no time for references to Woody’s childhood or what had become by now gratuitous raps at the culture. We plundered the long trip to Brooklyn for a few useful moments and discarded the rest, including the conflict in the junk-food establishment, causing the loss of Danny Aiello’s only scene, one in which he gave a very good and very funny performance.
Of all the things we removed from the film the cut that Woody resisted most strongly was the one in which he was thrown into jail after his parking-lot mishap. The movie was speeding toward a conclusion and could not afford to stop for this charming incident. His attachment to it was one of his few lapses in plot sense. “You work so closely on the thing, shoot it every day for months,” explains Woody, “and it’s very hard to maintain objectivity. I thought the jailhouse sequence would be an interesting end for the movie. The character I was playing had a more human experience. He was thrown into this context with these terrible-looking people and these lowlifes, and it turned out they were not so bad, that his initial fear of them was not really justified, and that by telling some jokes with them—you know, it had a warmer feeling to it.”
As usual, Woody was in a terrible quandary about how to end the film. On three separate outings in October, November, and December of 1976 he shot additional material for the last segment, much of it an attempt to show the process by which Alvy comes to miss Annie. He shot scenes in which he’s calling Annie on the West Coast over and over again, scenes in which he’s doing public-service commercials for educational TV, scenes with a new girl friend with whom he seems to be living while still unable to overcome his longing for Annie. He would audition this material for me in the cutting room and we would try to insert it in the movie. But finally I urged him to forget all of these dramatic transitions and have Alvy say “I miss Annie—I made a terrible mistake,” on a flat cut from the scene in which Annie and Alvy are sorting out their things in his apartment—which is finally how the last segment gets underway.
The final moments gave Woody the biggest problems. Several conclusions were shot. One of them, true to Woody’s inclinations, was a real downer. He meets Annie, repatriated in New York, dragging her new boy friend to see The Sorrow and the Pity. The former lovers achieve “maximum awkwardness,” and then, the awkwardness serving as the tear-jerker, they say good-bye. As I had done on Take the Money and Run and Bananas, I suggested he return to the beginning of the film for a clue about how to end.
In the opening monologue he attempts to summarize his attitudes toward life and toward women. He relates an old Groucho Marx joke—“I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”—and says, “That’s the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women.”
Woody agreed that returning to this material in some way was his best option. He had hardly given it any thought before we were in a cab heading down to the studio, Woody scribbling notes on a piece of scrap paper on the way. The reading (which I do not remember and of which there is no record) came close to providing the finale we wanted, but it wasn’t close enough. The following day he said he wanted to try something else, so again we jumped into a cab and Woody jotted down some new ideas as we rode. “It was no big planned thing,” he recalls. “I mean we were sitting grousing all day, looking at footage, cutting, recutting, dealing with other problems. I remember sitting with Ralph in the cutting room at five o’clock preparing for a seven o’clock screening that night and saying, let’s go down to the sound studio and I’ll put a jump at the end of the picture and wing the joke about the eggs. At five-thirty that night we got into the recording booth, ran back uptown and stuck that joke in, and it stayed forever.”
The joke about the eggs was a tired old vaudeville gag that Woody adapted to his context. “It was great seeing Annie again . . .” Woody narrates, as Annie and Alvy shake hands and part after a reminiscing lunch near Lincoln Center. “I realized what a terrific person she was, and how much fun it was just knowing her. And I thought of that old joke: You know, this, this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ And, uh, the doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would but I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that is pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but, uh, I guess we keep goin’ through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.”
I suggested that Woody read the lines against the picture—that is, read them while simultaneously viewing the image of him and Keaton on the screen saying good-bye, something he rarely cares to do. When he was finished, he said, “What do you think?” I knew his inclination would be to do a dozen more readings, each with slightly different accents and pauses and carefully timed stammers. I said, “Leave it alone. Let’s just walk away from it.” And later that night when I saw that ending with an audience, I knew my instinct was right. They were grabbed, the picture was wrapped up, and the ending gave everything that came before it a new coloring: this was not just an hour and a half of light humor, but something more poignant.
At one point during the editing of those last few minutes, after it was decided to have Alvy and Annie meet for the Lincoln Center lunch, Woody said something to me like, “What about memory— shouldn’t we have them discuss old times?” It was an incident I had forgotten about until, during the writing of this book, I asked my assistant, Sandy Morse, what had struck her most about the cutting of that picture. As soon as the subject of memory arose, I knew what we needed to do. Sandy, who was relatively new to the cutting room then (she has since edited Woody’s Manhattan), was startled by what followed. I rattled off descriptions of pieces of film I wanted her to get for me—a shot of Annie and Alvy driving uptown from the tennis courts, a shot of Woody squeamishly putting a wild lobster in the pot, a shot of them at the beach, a shot of them in bed (Annie reading and Alvy reaching over to kiss her), shots of Annie arriving at Alvy’s apartment with her luggage, Annie holding up the porno negligee Alvy bought her for her birthday, and perhaps a dozen others—many more than we finally used. Sandy quickly fetched me the reels, and I held them up to the light, showing her which frames I wanted— twenty feet of this, three feet of that, eight feet of this . . . make this number one, this number two, and so on. She spliced them all together on a single reel, and I edited them down to a reprise of Keaton singing her nightclub number, “Seems Like Old Times” (all the memory moments are silent). One of my favorite cuts in that montage was Woody and Diane on a pier. He points, and we cut to what they “see,” which turns out to be another memory cut of them kissing. That little transition helped augment the power of the reprise, although I put it together so intuitively I was hardly aware of its existence until Woody and I screened the film some time later. The creation of that sequence was an insignificant moment for me, because after years in the cutting room, manufacturing similar sequences for The Pawnbroker, A Thousand Clowns, and Goodbye Columbus, it was as nat
ural an option for me as an old vaudeville joke was for Woody.
“I’ll never forget,” says Marshall Brickman, describing the moment he first saw the film with this new conclusion, “suddenly there was an ending there—not only that, but an ending that was cinematic, that was moving, with that simple recapitulation of some of the previous scenes, with that music. . . . The whole film could have gone into the toilet if there hadn’t been that last beat on it. I think every writer of comedy wants to send them out with something like that, to keep them laughing, extremely hysterical, for an hour and twenty-eight minutes, and then for the last two minutes turn it around and let them walk away with something they can chew on.”
There remained, however, the problem of the title. Brickman came up to the cutting room, and he and Woody engaged in one of their title sessions, Marshall spewing forth proposals—“Rollercoaster Named Desire,” “Me and My Goy,” “It Had to Be Jew”—with manic glee. This seemed to have little impact on Woody, though, for he remained committed to “Anhedonia” until the very end. “He first sprung it on me at an early title session,” remembers Brickman. “Arthur Krim, who was the head of United Artists then, walked over to the window and threatened to jump.” Nevertheless, with the release date approaching, UA hired an advertising firm and asked them to make a presentation for a campaign based on that title. Their proposal, which was ingenious but which would have added several million dollars to the release budget, was to take out advertisements in newspapers across the country, ads that would include a definition of the obscure word and look like the front page of a tabloid newspaper. Banner headlines would scream: “ANHEDONIA STRIKES CLEVELAND!” or “ANHEDONIA STRIKES TUCSON!”
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