Then Again - Diane Keaton [47]
I throw on some Diane’s Tuberose lipstick by L’Oreal. I think about walking barefoot in Central Park at nine P.M. last night, looking at fireflies while Duke and Dexter laughed themselves down the stainless-steel slide. Will this be the last year Dex allows herself to play like a kid? I think about Duke dressed up in a box seat, watching Billy Elliot tap-dance his way across the Broadway stage. It makes me wish I could live in New York again. I think about waiting in line on Fifth Avenue outside Abercrombie & Fitch with Dex, as she dreamed of boys, and suntans, and love, and kisses. I think about the morning we rode bikes over the Brooklyn Bridge, one of our country’s greatest engineering feats in the greatest city of them all. I think of the 59th Street Bridge in Manhattan and the block of brownstones Woody and I walked past in the East 70s from Annie Hall. I don’t want to leave this city. I want to stay. I want to go back to another day, not unlike today, where I also found myself up at three-thirty A.M., only then I was waiting to be picked up for my first day of shooting the Untitled Woody Allen Project in the spring of 1976.
Annie Hall
ALVY: You want a lift?
ANNIE: Oh, why? Uh, you got a car?
ALVY: No, um … I was going to take a cab.
ANNIE: Oh, no. I have a car.
ALVY: You have a car? I don’t understand why … If you have a car, so then why did you say, “Do you have a car?” like you wanted a lift?
ANNIE: I don’t, I don’t, geez, I don’t know. I wasn’t … I got this VW out there. (To herself) What a jerk, yeah. (To Alvy) Would you like a lift?
ALVY: Sure. Which way you goin’?
ANNIE: Me? Oh, downtown.
ALVY: Down … I’m going uptown.
ANNIE: Oh, well, you know, I’m going uptown too.
ALVY: You just said you were going downtown.
ANNIE: Yeah, well, but I can …
Make Work Play
Filming Annie Hall was effortless. During breaks, Woody would carry around a pack of Camels, take one out of his shirt pocket à la George Raft, flip it into his mouth, blow smoke rings, and never inhale. No one had any serious expectations. We were just having a good time moving through New York’s landmark locations. As always, Woody concerned himself with worries about the script. Was it too much like an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show? I told him he was nuts. Relax.
If a scene wasn’t working, Woody would do what he always did: rewrite it while Gordon Willis was setting up the shot. Rewrite frequently meant re-edit. Woody didn’t hold his words in high regard; as a result, there was no excess fat in Annie Hall. The choice of Gordon Willis as cinematographer was a turning point and an unerring example of Woody breaking the rules. Like many funny men, he had a borderline contempt for comedy. But, unlike others, he used that attitude to invent a host of witty visual approaches that gave Annie Hall weight. With Gordon at his side, Woody stopped being afraid of the dark. He learned how to shoot split screens and flashbacks with style. Gordon helped teach him to choreograph the master shot so it could be used to deliver the variety and impact an audience needed without cutting to close-ups. These innovations were new for comedy. Annie Hall, all dressed up in shadow and light, moving through time without a lot of arbitrary coverage, was seamless.
Woody’s direction was the same. Loosen up the dialogue. Forget the marks. Move around like a real person. Don’t make too much of the words, and wear what you want to wear. Wear what you want to wear? That was a first. So I did what Woody said: I wore what I wanted to wear, or, rather, I stole what I wanted to wear from cool-looking women on the streets of New York. Annie’s khaki pants, vest, and tie came from them. I stole the hat from Aurore Clément, Dean Tavoularis’s future wife, who showed up on the set of The Godfather: Part II one day wearing a man’s slouchy bolero pulled down low over her forehead. Aurore’s hat put the finishing touch on the so-called Annie Hall look. Aurore had style, but so did all the street-chic women livening up SoHo in the mid-seventies.