Where to watch Annie Hall (1977)

Trivia & production notes

• Woody Allen wrote the first draft of Annie Hall in just four days, then sent it to Marshall Brickman for revisions as they developed the screenplay by walking around New York City together.
• The original script was centered on a murder mystery, but Allen and Brickman dropped the plot and later recycled the concept into Manhattan Murder Mystery in 1993, also starring Diane Keaton.
• Allen considered Anhedonia, a psychological term for the inability to experience pleasure, as the working title, while Brickman suggested alternatives like It Had to Be Jew and Rollercoaster Named Desire before the filmmakers settled on Annie Hall.
• Diane Keaton's real surname is Hall and Annie was her childhood nickname, and the character was written specifically for her after they had worked together on three previous films.
• Federico Fellini was Allen's first choice to appear in the cinema lobby scene, but both Fellini and Luis Buñuel declined the cameo, leading Allen to cast cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan instead.
• Allen spotted the Coney Island Thunderbolt roller coaster while scouting locations in Brooklyn and immediately rewrote the script to make it Alvy's childhood home, envisioning the house underneath it.
• The scene where Alvy sneezes and scatters cocaine was not in the original script but emerged during rehearsal and was kept in the film because test audiences laughed so hard that dialogue had to be cut to accommodate the reaction.
• Editor Ralph Rosenblum's first assembly was over two hours long and ran in multiple directions until Allen and Rosenblum recognized that the present-tense relationship between Alvy and Annie should be the dramatic spine.
• The film's closing narration featuring the joke about needing eggs was conceived and recorded just two hours before a test screening.
• Charles H. Joffe, one of Allen's two managers credited on the film, received the Academy Award for Best Picture because he took producer credit while Jack Rollins did not.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Annie Hall, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.