Annie Hall
Screenwriter Clay Frohman brought this movie to my attention to show that—even when a director has finished the movie he wrote and spent millions on—it can be a complete nothing for an audience. Sometimes an editor is the only one with enough insight and distance from the writer and director to make an actual satisfying, likable movie.
Example: Annie Hall was originally called Anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure). The information below is from a book called When the Shooting Stops by Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen.
The thrust of the chapter called Annie Hall (written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman) is about how the movie they wrote had almost nothing to do with the movie that Ralph Rosenblum edited.
The movie released was 93 minutes long and won the academy award. The first edit of the movie that Woody Allen directed was 150 minutes long— almost 2x longer! When he viewed that editing Ralph Rosenblum said he couldn’t find a movie.
Woody & Marshall originally wrote about a 40-year-old Jewish comic who couldn’t experience pleasure. They put in a gazillion flashbacks about growing up, being a teen, being an adult, getting tossed in jail for speeding in a parking lot and out-joking the convicts in jail, ALL this stuff had nothing to do with a present-tense movie about a love relationship between Alvy Singer & Annie Hall.
Ralph Rosenblum said, “Once Diane Keaton showed up (about 20 minutes into the first edit of the movie), the movie finally felt like it was about something, instead of a quasi-documentary about a Jewish comic who wasn’t all that funny.”
Ralph said, “Sure there were some funny parts and lots of jokes, but they didn’t add up to a movie (story). Especially one that audiences would go see, talk about, or recommend to their friends.”
Ralph said as he started editing out Woody’s rambling monologues and jokes, and concentrating on the scenes of Woody and Diane Keaton together —showing their relationship—the movie finally started taking shape. It was a love story with a sad ending. Ralph then said they re-shot the ending for three-to-four months, before he, Ralph, finally stumbled upon a made-up ending.
In that ending, Woody was reviewing in his mind the highlights of their relationship (the lobster scene, the negligee scene, the joke scene outside the movie theater showing The Sorrow and the Pity). Ralph added these snippets while a song played and Woody retold an old Jewish joke about this guy whose brother thinks he’s a chicken.
In the joke, the friend says turn your brother in—he’s crazy. The other guy says, “But I need the eggs.” In the voice-over at the end Woody tells that joke, then segues into a thought about that’s what relationships are: crazy. But you need love in your life if you’re going to make it through.
That line gave the previous 90 minutes all the poignancy in the world—and it’s what made the movie into such a romantic hit. Relationships are hard, but without them, we’re nothing. Annie Hall became a completely different movie than what Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman wrote.
I re-watched Annie Hall after reading about how the editing saved the movie. It was very good. Then I re-read the script. As I was going through the ending that Ralph talked about how he made it up, it reminded me of the ending of La La Land where Damien Chazelle puts in the tidbits of their relationship as Seb (Ryan Gosling) sings “their” song.
In Annie Hall it is Diane Keaton who is doing the singing as Woody Allen thinks about their relationship. The “spin” in La La Land is that Seb re-works the whole relationship to show he and Mia staying together, getting married, etc. Woody doesn’t do that at the end of Annie Hall.
They say movies are written three times: once during the writing of the screenplay, the second time during the filming, and the third time in the editing room.
That’s what we need to do as writers. Write it three times. Once as the writer, the second time as the director, and the third time as an editor. The story has a much better chance of having an emotional impact if we look at it from all angles.