“I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.”
The film’s working title was “Anhedonia”, meaning the inability to feel pleasure. United Artists fought against it because they couldn’t come up with an ad campaign that explained what the word meant. Woody Allen renamed the film based on the main character just three weeks before it premiered. Coincidentally, Diane Keaton’s real name is Diane Hall and her nickname is Annie. Annie Hall’s outfits, which caused a brief fashion rage, were Diane Keaton’s own clothes. Allen originally envisioned this movie as a murder mystery, with a subplot about a romance. During script revisions, he dropped the murder plot, which he and Marshall Brickman later used in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). Alvy Singer’s (Woody Allen) scene where he sneezes into the bowl of cocaine was an unscripted accident. When previewed, the audience laughed so hard that Allen decided to leave it in, but had to add footage to compensate for people missing the following jokes from laughing so hard. Marshall McLuhan’s cameo was not Allen’s first choice. Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini were asked first. The passerby Alvy refers to as “the winner of the Truman Capote look-alike contest” is in fact, really Capote, who appears uncredited. The rough cut ran 2 hours 20 minutes. Scenes eliminated include a fantasy of Annie and Alvy visiting hell. Allen rewrote this scene 20 years later for his film Deconstructing Harry (1997). Also cut was a big fantasy scene at Madison Square Garden where the New York Knicks played against a team of great philosophers.
