Annie Hall - Production

Production

Principal photography began on 19 May 1976 on the South Fork of Long Island with the scene in which Alvy and Annie boil live lobsters; filming continued periodically for the next ten months. The production deviated from the screenplay. There was nothing written about Alvy's childhood home lying under a roller coaster, but when Allen was scouting locations in Brooklyn with Willis and art director Mel Bourne, he "saw this roller-coaster, and... saw the house under it. And I thought, we have to use this." In a similar vein, there is the incident where Alvy scatters a trove of cocaine with an accidental sneeze: although not in the script, the joke emerged from a rehearsal happenstance and stayed in the movie. In audience testing, this laugh was so big that a re-edit had to add a hold so that the following dialogue was not lost.

Rosenblum's first assembly of the film in 1976 left Brickman disappointed. At two hours and twenty minutes, Annie Hall herself was less prominent, and it dwelt "on issues just touched in passing in the version we know", featuring the "surrealistic and abstract adventures of a neurotic Jewish comedian who was reliving his highly flawed life and in the process satirizing much of our culture,... a visual monologue, a more sophisticated and visual version of Take the Money and Run". Brickman found it "nondramatic and ultimately uninteresting, a kind of cerebral exercise." He suggested a more linear narrative.

Fortunately, the shooting schedule was budgeted for two weeks of post-production photography, so even though the first cut had "some of the free-est, funniest and most sophisticated material that Woody had ever created, and it hurt him to lose it", late 1976 saw three separate shoots for the final segment, two of which appear in some form. One featured Annie Hall taking her new boyfriend to The Sorrow and the Pity, which she had reluctantly seen with Alvy; the other, Alvy's monologue featuring the joke about 'we all need the eggs', was conceived during a cab journey to an early preview.

The title sequence of Annie Hall features a black background with white text in the Windsor Light Condensed typeface, a design that Allen would use on his subsequent films and become a trademark of his. Stig Björkman sees some similarity to Ingmar Bergman's simple and consistent title design, although Allen says that his own choice is a cost-saving device.