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Q4 2017

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80 CINEMONTAGE / Q4 2017 didn't matter too much where one scene or another ended up," Rosenblum wrote in his book. "I was able to move things around at will to serve the rhythm and the pace." By the time their work was complete, Kalish remembers, the film ran about 75 minutes. "[The producers] said, 'No, Woody, we need at least an 80-minute film,'" he recounts. Rosenblum, who had already rejected several proposed endings as "sentimental, weakly amusing or sad," asked for a fresh finish — including the famous scene of the now-imprisoned Starkwell molding a bar of soap into a firearm — and boosted the running time to 85 minutes. Rosenblum and Kalish continued their collaboration with Allen on Bananas (1971), which represented an advance in ambition for the director. "To me, Take the Money and Run was visual comedy — perfect Woody Allen-type stuff," Kalish comments. "Bananas was also visual comedy, but it was more structured. It leaned more on the script rather than having to use our imagination: 'How do we put this together?'" Even so, Rosenblum wrote that the film required careful pruning in post-production: "Because Woody's comedies are based on a continuous stream of jokes and skits, a larger than usual portion of our editing work entails a search for the moments that work, and a careful weeding out of the ones that do not." A scheduling conflict prevented Rosenblum from cutting Allen's next film, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask (1972) — edited by Eric Albertson, ACE (1937-2009), with Heckert serving as supervising film editor — but he rejoined the director for Sleeper (1973), a sci-fi comedy in which Allen appears as an emigre from 1970s Greenwich Village adjusting to the 22nd century. "Technically, Sleeper was more creative," says Kalish, who returned to work on the film (sharing credit with Rosenblum and O. Nicholas Brown). "It wasn't just joke, joke, with two people." More ambitious still was Love and Death (1975), which manages to spoof Russia at the time of the czars, the fiction of Leo Tolstoy and the cinema of Ingmar Bergman. "Once we got to Love Ron Kalish. Photo by Sarah Shatz Below left: Take the Money and Run. Cinerama Releasing Corporation/ Photofest Below right: Love and Death. United Artists/ Photofest

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