This is such an incredible story. How the movie Annie Hall was really made:

The main plot of Annie Hall — the love story between Alvy Singer, played by Allen, and Annie, played by Keaton — was originally only one of many subplots in Anhedonia, an exploration of Singer’s midlife, Ingmar-Bergman-esque search for meaning after turning 40. Allen himself had just turned 40 when he and Marshall Brickman wrote the script in 1975.

The movie was a philosophical odyssey not just through Singer’s entire life — from a girl-obsessed 6-year-old living under a roller coaster to a neurotic 40-year-old comedian — but through his detailed, hilarious assessment of that life. This version made room for a murder mystery, a sci-fi spoof, a basketball match between Singer and philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, a trip to Nazi Germany, another to the Garden of Eden and an elevator tour through all nine layers of hell (and much more).

According to Ralph Rosenblum, who edited the film from sprawling pilgrimage to its final rom-com incarnation, you’d be hard-pressed to see a love story as the original’s primary focus. Annie didn’t even show up on screen until halfway through.

Rosenblum divulges the entire cutting process in his memoir, When the Shooting Stops. Of the first cut, which took six weeks, he says, “I felt that the film was running off in nine different directions … The film never got going.” He calls the first cut “nondramatic and ultimately uninteresting, a kind of cerebral exercise.”