ANNIE HALL - Trivia and Other Fun Stuff

While he was making Annie Hall, Woody Allen became a fixture in the funny papers. In 1976, Inside Woody Allen, drawn by Stuart Hample and based on Woody's comedy material, premiered in 180 newspapers in sixty countries. The strip ran for eight years.

We swear we're not making this up, but Diane Keaton was born with the surname Hall. She later changed it by adopting her mother's maiden name in order to avoid confusion with another actress named Diane Hall.

Everyone knows that Keaton made quite an impression on women's clothing with her Annie Hall wardrobe. But not many know that Keaton also made an impression on Broadway when, as a cast member in Hair, she refused to remove her clothing for the final 'au naturel' number.

When Alvy runs into Annie in New York after their final break-up, the meeting takes place at a theater showing The Sorrow and the Pity (1971). The landmark, four-hour documentary from director Marcel Ophuls happens to be Woody Allen's favorite film.

Walter Matthau was one of the co-presenters of Diane Keaton's Best Actress Academy Award® on Oscar® night on March 29, 1978. Matthau made his final film appearance in Hanging Up (2000), directed by and co-starring Diane Keaton.

In the first draft of Annie Hall, Alvy and Annie played amateur sleuths investigating the supposed suicide of one of Alvy's college philosophy professors named Dr. Levy, only to learn later that he was actually murdered. While Dr. Levy was eliminated from the final script, along with the mystery aspects of the story altogether, Dr. Levy did show up in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), only this time it was an actual suicide. The "Nick and Nora" plot, a la The Thin Man movies, was eventually abandoned as well, but Allen adapted the murder mystery scenario for his reunion with Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).

When Woody Allen won the Director's Guild Award, everyone wondered if the homegrown New Yorker would leave the Big Apple long enough to travel to Los Angeles to claim an Oscar®. Allen, who refused to allow his name to appear in United Artists' Oscar® advertisements for Annie Hall, said that he'd be at his usual place on Oscar night - playing clarinet with the New Orleans Marching and Funeral Band at Michael's Pub on Manhattan's East Side. "I couldn't let down the guys," Allen said. Indeed, Allen didn't let the guys down, and he concluded the evening by reading himself to sleep with the book Conversations with Carl Jung. Allen awoke the next morning to learn from the New York Times that Annie Hall won big at the Academy Award® ceremonies. Allen later said of his film's sweep, "I was very surprised. I felt good for Diane because she wanted to win. My friend Marshall and my producers Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe had a very nice time. But I'm anhedonic."

A year later, Woody had a bit more to say on the subject of the Academy Awards®. "I know it sounds horrible," he said, "but winning that Oscar® for Annie Hall didn't mean anything to me. I have no regard for that kind of ceremony. I just don't think they know what they're doing. When you see who wins those things - or doesn't win them - you can see how meaningless this Oscar thing is."

Famous Quotes from ANNIE HALL:

Alvy Singer: I really wanted to be an anarchist, but I didn't know where to register.

Alvy Singer (to Annie): Where did you grow up, in a Norman Rockwell painting?

Alvy Singer: You're always trying to get things to come out perfectly in art because it's real different in life.

Alvy Singer: They give awards for everything. For the World's Biggest Fascist - Adolf Hitler!

Alvy Singer: Whose Catcher in the Rye is this? You know, you wrote your name in all my books because you knew this day was gonna come. Annie Hall: Now look, all the books on death and dying are yours and all the poetry books are mine. You only gave me books with the word "death" in the title.

Alvy Singer: I was thrown out of NYU my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

Pam (to Alvy): Sex with you is a Kafkaesque experience. I mean that as a compliment.

Alvy Singer: Right, well I have to go now, Duane, because I'm due back on planet Earth.

Alvy Singer (to Annie after sex): That was the most fun I've had without laughing.

Alvy Singer: I heard that "Commentary" and "Dissent" had merged and formed "Dysentery."

Alvy Singer: Yeah, grass, right? The illusion that it will make a white woman more like Billie Holiday.

Alvy Singer: That's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

Alvy Singer: Love is too weak a word for what I feel. I lurve you. I luff you.

Alvy Singer: Popular? Nixon was popular. Hula-hoops were popular. An epidemic of typhus is popular. Quantity doesn't imply quality.

Alvy Singer: You know, even as a kid, I always went for the wrong woman. I think that's my problem. When my mother took me to see Snow White, everybody fell in love with Snow White. I immediately fell for the Wicked Queen.

Alvy Singer: A relationship, I think, is-is like a shark. You know, it has to constantly move forward or it dies, and I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

Alvy Singer: It's all mental masturbation.
Annie Hall: Oh, well, now we're finally getting to a subject you know something about.
Alvy Singer: Hey, don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I love.

Alvy Singer (mocking Los Angeles culture): They don't throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.

Compiled by Scott McGee