Annie Hall - Writing

Writing

The idea for what would become Annie Hall was developed as Allen walked around New York with co-writer Marshall Brickman. The pair discussed the project on alternate days, sometimes becoming frustrated and rejecting the idea. Allen wrote a first draft of a screenplay within a four day period, sending it to Brickman to make alterations. According to Brickman, this draft centered on a man in his forties, someone whose life consisted "of several strands. One was a relationship with a young woman, another was a concern about the banality of life we all live, and a third an obsession with proving himself and testing himself to find out what kind of character he had."

Allen had himself turned forty in 1975. Brickman suggests that his "advancing age" and "worries about his death" had influenced Allen's philosophical, personal approach to complement his "commercial side". Allen said that he had decided to "sacrifice some of the laughs for a story about human beings". He was also influenced by Federico Fellini's 1963 comedy-drama 8½, which the Italian director had created at a similar turning point, and for both of which their director's psychoanalysis play a part. The pair sent the screenplay back and forth between them until they were ready to ask United Artists for $4 million.

Many elements from the early drafts did not survive. It was originally a drama centered on a murder mystery with a comic and romantic subplot. According to Allen, the murder occurred after a scene that remains in the film, the sequence in which Annie and Alvy miss the Ingmar Bergman film Face to Face. Although they decided to drop the murder plot, Allen and Brickman made a murder mystery many years later: 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, also starring Diane Keaton. The draft that Allen presented to the film's editor, Ralph Rosenblum, concluded with the words, "ending to be shot." It was "like a first draft of a novel ... from which two or three films could possibly be assembled," Rosenblum says.

Allen's working title for the film was "Anhedonia", a term for the inability to experience pleasure. However, United Artists considered this unmarketable, as were Brickman's suggested alternatives: "It Had to Be Jew", "Rollercoaster Named Desire" and "Me and My Goy". An advertising agency, hired by UA, embraced Allen's choice of an obscure word by suggesting advertising in tabloid newspapers using vague slogans such as "Anhedonia Strikes Cleveland". However, Allen tried several titles over five test screenings, including "Anxiety" and "Alvy and Me", before settling on "Annie Hall".