In September 1976, Susan Morse, a 25-year-old Yale graduate, had a decision to make: attend a second year at N.Y.U.’s film school or accept a position as an apprentice film editor with Ralph Rosenblum on the new Woody Allen movie, then untitled, later known as Annie Hall.
Rosenblum’s résumé was formidable—he’d edited Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Thousand Clowns, and The Producers, along with four of Allen’s previous movies, beginning with Take the Money and Run. “I’ve always said the two turning points of my career were working with Ralph Rosenblum and Gordon Willis,” Allen tells me. This would be his penultimate collaboration with Rosenblum, and the first of seven with Willis, the exceptionally talented cinematographer of The Godfather, Klute, and All the President’s Men.
Getting paid for an education rather than carrying a student loan sounded right to Morse, who took the job with no inkling of how it would change her life.
“It Wasn’t the Film He Set Out to Make,” announces the Annie Hall chapter in When the Shooting Stops … the Cutting Begins, Rosenblum’s esteemed if at times self-aggrandizing 1979 account. It’s an invaluable case study of how certain movies are brought to life in postproduction—an opportunity afforded Allen in large part because he delivered on schedule and didn’t go over-budget.
Annie Hall was shot in New York City and Amagansett in the summer of 1976. Morse and assistant film editor Wendy Greene Bricmont, 27, then spent six weeks helping Rosenblum assemble a first pass. They worked out of Rosenblum’s Upper West Side brownstone, on 84th Street, in a cozy editing room just down the hall from where he slept.
After Allen and his co-writer and frequent collaborator, Marshall Brickman, saw the initial edit, running two hours and 20 minutes, they were stumped. Allen remembers Brickman telling him, “Look, I wrote this, and I can’t really follow it.”
“The original story, more stream of consciousness when Marshall and I wrote the script, didn’t work,” says Allen. “Although it does work on the printed page, when you have people sitting in an audience wanting to see what happens next, impatiently wanting the story to progress, this was too abstract. Marshall and I got together and said, What have we got here? And we thought the most attractive material was the Alvy-Annie story. The coming-of-age for [Diane] Keaton.
“I kept saying to the people around me, I’d like to make a movie that’s not just joke-joke-joke, sketch-sketch-sketch. I’d like to make a movie where I sacrifice laughs for story and involvement,” Allen continues. “They will laugh less, perhaps, but hopefully they will be involved in the story, and it will pay off.”
“We thought the most attractive material was the Alvy-Annie story. The coming-of-age for [Diane] Keaton.”
And so, Allen plays Alvy Singer, a stand-up comedian who, like Allen, had recently turned 40. In the shooting script, childhood memories and extensive musings on contemporary culture dominate—far more than his relationship with Annie Hall (Keaton), though the Alvy and Annie characters existed from the start.
Early drafts were first conceived as a period piece set in Boston at the turn of the century, according to Patrick McGilligan’s new Allen biography, Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham, then as a contemporary whodunit—an idea Allen revisited with Keaton in 1993’s Manhattan Murder Mystery—that included a wizened philosopher (a discarded character who later appeared in 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors).
Allen and Keaton, who had previously been in a relationship and remained friends, had shared the screen three times before Annie Hall came along, and they enjoyed an easy, natural chemistry. “The scene when Alvy and Annie meet at the tennis courts is where the movie suddenly took off,” says Morse, who would go on to edit 20 movies for Allen. “And the scene immediately after they come off the courts when she asks to give him a lift—that’s when you gave a damn about what was happening.”
How Allen and his team turned the first cut into one of the few comedies to ever win the Academy Award for best picture—and certainly the first fourth-wall-breaking, meta, stream-of-consciousness movie to ever nab the top prize—came not through any forethought or Kubrickian design, but through a faith in editing. Which boils down to a faith in problem-solving.
“Woody was not afraid of silence,” says Bricmont. “There was a lot of thinking that went on. We would sit quietly and just think without anybody talking. People tend to fill up the air; they’re uncomfortable with silence. I remember Woody saying, ‘We’re smart people; we can figure this out.’ It takes time to solve a problem. Silence helps.”
The first impulse, according to Morse, was to get to Annie as quickly as possible. Which meant losing choice sequences such as “The Invasion of the Element!,” a 1950s science-fiction spoof about a Black family moving into a white middle-class neighborhood, and a dream where Alvy is interrogated by the Gestapo.
But Allen didn’t hesitate to shred—including most of Colleen Dewhurst’s performance. “No matter how funny I thought the thing was or expensive it was when we shot or tedious it was to shoot it, I had no problems throwing it right out,” says Allen. “Between Love and Death and Bananas and Take the Money and Run and Annie Hall, I must have cut a million funny scenes. You cut and the story takes on a momentum, and you want to keep the story going. Then you put in a scene that is genuinely funny, but suddenly the picture stops, and you can’t survive the stopping of the momentum.”
Bricmont, who later edited I Think I Love My Wife for Chris Rock, chalks it up to Allen’s background as a stand-up comedian, and Allen agrees. “It’s your survival instinct,” he says. “When you’re onstage as a comic, you practice the routine, so you memorize for an audience, and you’re doing your act, sailing along, and your instinct says, ‘I’m gonna die with this joke. I thought it was great, but it’s not gonna work.’ And you go right past it. With a film, you have the decision: Do you want to indulge yourself with the scene, or survive the movie? And you cut for survival.”
Three re-shoots—in October, November, and December of 1976—focused on scenes that were largely transitions or emotional beats, salient among them the cocaine sneeze, the biggest laugh in the movie, a scene whose sole purpose was to set up Alvy and Annie going to California.
Also: Alvy by the pier at dusk, missing Annie; Alvy sitting on his bed phoning Annie about coming back to New York; the re-enactment of their meeting at the L.A. restaurant as a play with a happy ending; and the shot outside the Thalia featuring Sigourney Weaver and screenwriter Walter Bernstein, who wrote The Front, the McCarthy-era blacklist drama in which Allen had just starred.
“The scene at the Thalia originally took place at a flower shop,” says Morse, as did the final scene of the movie—eventually filmed inside O’Neals’ Balloon. “The button on that scene was a callback to the scene where Tony Roberts is adding laughs to his TV show: That is to say, as Annie walks away from the flower shop, Alvy is supposed to look up to the camera and say, ‘Charlie, can you give me a big laugh on this?’ Cut to black. I don’t now remember if that was ever shot.”
“I thought this was the way they do movies,” says Bricmont. “Bring the crew back and shoot one ending. You cut it, it doesn’t work, he writes something else, they shoot the next week, write something else, shoot the next week until you get it right.”
Unsettled on an ending, Allen held a few screenings for small audiences to assess their reaction (a practice he did not continue). Back in the cutting room, Morse recalls, Rosenblum suggested the tone mirror the old Groucho Marx joke that started the movie (“I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”). After swapping ideas back and forth, Rosenblum brought up a memory montage he’d cut in 1969’s Goodbye, Columbus, in which a scene of Richard Benjamin, dejected at the end of his friend’s wedding, flashes back to a highlight reel of scenes with Ali MacGraw. “That seemed to resonate with Woody,” says Morse.
She pulled clips from 15 or 20 key sequences—cooking with lobsters on Long Island; meeting in the lobby of the gym after playing tennis; kissing at dusk with the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges in the background—and the memory montage was cut minutes later, with only Allen’s final voice-over remaining.
Allen recorded the final monologue, an old joke about a man whose brother thinks he’s a chicken, at Magno Sound, at 49th Street and Seventh Avenue. “He didn’t tip his hand to any of us as to what he had in mind,” says Morse. “He simply stepped into the isolation booth where he watched the final scene of the film unspool and delivered the perfect ending. No rehearsal. One take.”
“With a film, you have the decision: Do you want to indulge yourself with the scene, or survive the movie? And you cut for survival.”
The title proved the last business that needed tending. Allen adored Anhedonia, drawn from a clinical term that means the inability to enjoy oneself, a sentiment unshared by United Artists. Brickman suggested It Had to Be Jew and Me and My Goy. Anne and Alvy eventually gave way to Annie Hall.
“We looked at it when it was finally finished and thought it was a nice picture,” says Allen. “Then it took off. Everybody seemed to like it—critics liked it, the public liked it. In addition to its humor, it had, apparently, a warming feeling to people. It hooked [them] in some way. Out of all of the guesses I’ve made, that was a right one. I’ve made many bad [movies], but that was one of the good ones.”
At the 1978 Oscars, Allen became the first man to be nominated for best actor, best original screenplay, best director, and best picture since Orson Welles did it with Citizen Kane in 1941. Allen, who did not attend the ceremony but played clarinet at Michael’s Pub in New York instead, won in every category save best actor. The night, however, belonged to Keaton, who did attend and walked off with the best-actress statuette, her charmed performance now a part of movie lore.
Things turned out well for the young editing team, too, who made the almost unheard-of leap from underlings to editors in short order. Bricmont received a film-editor credit on Annie Hall, soon left New York for L.A., and has enjoyed a long, successful editing career that includes My Girl, Mean Girls, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
Morse never regretted not going back to N.Y.U. Rosenblum, who went on to direct a handful of TV movies and died at the age of 69 in 1995, pitched to Allen that he and Morse cut alternative scenes on 1978’s Interiors, also starring Keaton. Allen agreed. Then Morse edited Allen’s next movie, 1979’s Manhattan, completing a remarkable, unlikely ascent.
Well, la-di-da.
Alex Belth is the editor of Esquire Classic and the curator of the Stacks Reader. He has worked in film editing for Ken Burns, Woody Allen, and the Coen brothers
