3. Annie Hall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBzHphcc2Jw It's a relatively well-known piece of movie trivia that Annie Hall underwent some radical changes during production. The film, so the trivia goes, was originally a murder mystery with a romantic subplot. During post-production (like Malick, Woody Allen enjoys tinkering after the cameras have stopped rolling), the decision was made to trim the film down to just the romantic sub-plot. The murder mystery, the story concludes, was later utilised by Allen in his appropriately-titled 1994 film, Manhattan Murder Mystery. Good trivia, and pretty mind-blowing. One of the great romantic comedies was originally a murder mystery? Remarkably, though, the changes undergone by Annie Hall during its production went beyond the pruning of a single storyline. The film we now call Annie Hall started its life as an
ambitious project called Anhedonia, intending to portray protagonist Alvy Singer's stream of consciousness. The film's structure was to be amorphous and dreamlike, interspersed with pieces of Allen's stand up and other digressions. The Annie Hall character was a component of this stream, but not a large one. As Allen himself remarks,
it was just one small part of another big canvas that I had". It's said that "Anhedonia" was rejected as a title because that marketing department couldn't find a way of implementing a definition of the term (the inability to feel happiness) into a promotional campaign. Given how non-commercial the film attached to it sounds, the title should have been the least of the marketing department's problems.