Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/790371
19 Q1 2017 / CINEMONTAGE "homey." As recounted in Rosenblum's 1979 memoir, When the Shooting Stops…the Cutting Begins, in 1975 the editor had installed editing equipment on the second floor of the Manhattan brownstone in which he resided. "It is a large room, lined with two Moviolas, a teak desk and five tables," he wrote, "all topped with synchronizers, film winders and other little pieces of equipment." "He would just come downstairs and we'd start work," Bricmont says. "It was such a collaborative and peaceful place. No one needed to fill it up with dialogue or talk through the whole thing. I remember Woody saying, 'We're smart. We should be able to figure this out.' And you sat there with your head on your hands and thought about what to do." In between editing (and thinking), time was made each day to go out to lunch. "We never ate over our Moviola the way people often do," Bricmont recalls. "We would walk over to Broadway. People would shout out to Woody, because he was so recognizable and very popular within New York: 'Hey, Woody!' He was very shy until he got to know you really well." The hours were predictable, she says, with work routinely wrapping up by 5:00 or 5:30 in the afternoon. "Woody always had an appointment," she remembers. "It was so civilized." In this environment, Anhedonia — the title to the screenplay by Allen and Brickman, an allusion to a condition in which a person is in a state of perpetual discontent — was rearranged and reworked into Annie Hall. Despite the amenable working conditions, the birth of the film was lengthy and labor-intensive. According to Rosenblum, the first cut ran about two- and-a-half hours. Instead of accenting the relationship between (and eventual separation of ) Alvy and Annie, this version branched out every which way. "The movie was like a visual monologue, a more sophisticated and more philosophical version of Take the Money and Run," Rosenblum wrote. "Its stream-of- consciousness continuity, rambling commentary and bizarre gags completely obscured the skeletal plot." Of course, a number of digressions were retained in the film (such as scenes set during Alvy's childhood in Coney Island or several fantasy set pieces), but they had overtaken the original cut. And supporting actors whose presence is only fleetingly felt in the film as it was released — including Carol Kane as Allison, Alvy's first wife; Shelley Duvall as Pam, a Rolling Stone journalist who is one of Alvy's post-Annie dates; and Colleen Dewhurst as Mom Hall, the matriarch of Annie's clan — figured much more prominently in the first cut. "It was just filled with so many wonderful, wonderful bits that were protracted and long but hilarious in and of themselves," Bricmont recalls. "It had so many elements of surreal thinking and fantasy, but it was too much; it was overload. It wasn't focused in a way that a movie needs to be." Among the ultimately omitted segments was a dream sequence elaborating on Alvy's perennial interest in Marcel Ophuls' documentary on the French Resistance, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969). "Woody is a Resistance fighter and he's being interviewed by the Nazis," Bricmont says of the deleted scene. "He absolutely refuses to name names, but he pulls out this finger puppet. He says, 'I cannot name names…however, he can.' It was hysterical." Another dream sequence reimagined Alvy and Pam as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as they engage in a risqué dialogue with God. Yet, to function as a film rather than a smorgasbord of subplots and spoofs, Annie Hall needed focus. "I'm not sure that we came upon this Annie Hall. United Artists/ Photofest