On this date in 1977 Woody Allen's film Annie Hall premièred. 10 facts about this film:
This film earned Woody Allen his first two Oscars (for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay). It also won best actress and Best picture, the second shortest film to win the Best Picture Oscar (the shortest being Marty (1955) at 91 minutes). It’s also hailed as a film of great cultural significance.
Nevertheless, Woody Allen wasn’t satisfied with it. To his mind, it didn’t live up to his original vision.
Which wasn’t a romantic comedy at all. Allen and his writing partner, Marshall Brickman, conceived the story as an exploration of the main character’s life and psyche, with the romance being just one aspect. Another sub plot was a murder mystery but that was dropped fairly early on. That idea eventually became Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).
The original title was Anhedonia, a condition in which a person is unable to feel pleasure or joy. United Artists hated the title as they couldn’t see an effective way to market it. Other titles suggested were "It Had to Be Jew," "A Rollercoaster Named Desire," and "Me and My Goy." It wasn’t until three weeks before the premiere that Allen decided the name of the female protagonist would be an acceptable title.
It’s essentially named after the lead actress, Diane Keaton. Her real name is Diane Hall and her nickname is Annie.
Keaton dressed in her own clothes during filming, despite pressure from the costume designer to adopt a less “crazy” look. However, her style became a fashion craze after the film’s release.
One of the film’s innovations was the way it used split screen scenes. One scene shows the two main characters in therapy at the same time. It was quite low tech, in fact, as it was shot on two adjacent sets with a thin wall between them.
When Annie and Alvy are people watching and one passer by is dubbed “The winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest”, the passer by in question is the real Truman Capote in a cameo role.
The scene where Alvy sneezes and a container of cocaine is spread around the room wasn’t scripted. Woody Allen actually sneezed during the scene. Test audiences loved it so much that the sneeze was kept in.
Included among the original script’s fantasy scenes were Alvy and Annie time travelling to the Garden of Eden, the French Resistance, and Nazi Germany, parodies of other films including Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and a basketball game between the New York Knicks and philosophers like Friedrich Nietsche and SSoren Kierkegaard. Allen was sorry to lose most of them, but one in which a sentient traffic light convinces Alvy to fly across country and win Annie back, he allegedly hated so much that he tossed the prints into New York City’s East River.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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