Found In The Edit

The film Allen shot was a sprawl about a comedian's consciousness, complete with a murder plot and fantasy sequences, provisionally titled Anhedonia. In the cutting room with Ralph Rosenblum it became clear that every section involving the relationship worked and most of the rest did not, so they threw out the plot and rebuilt the picture around Alvy and Annie. What survives of the original ambition is the freedom of the form: direct address to camera, split screens of two families eating dinner, subtitles printing what the characters actually mean, an animated sequence, a queue of strangers asked to settle an argument, and a man pulling Marshall McLuhan out of frame to win a point about Fellini.