All Time Best Pictures--#6

As we look at the top 10 screenplays according to the WGA, we come to the second of two comedies that made the list—Annie Hall [1977] by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman—a film that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, which is almost unheard of for a comedy.

So what made it so special? Why did it so click with audiences as well as critics?

Annie Hall came about, in large part, because Woody Allen wanted not to be stereotyped as the guy that could write crazy, funny films. He said, on writing Annie Hall: 'I've always been able to get laughs. I wanted to move on. This is not a quantum leap, but at least it's a couple of inches in the right direction.'

And that was something that made Annie Hall special. It was a comedy, yes, but it was also a love story that looked at how relationships come to be, how they are sustained, and how they can fall apart.

As Allen himself said, the idea wasn’t groundbreaking and he used things from his own life: 'Details are picked from life. I'm a comedian. Diane sings, and I'm friends with Tony Roberts, and almost everybody I know has moved out to California.'

Take a look at a bit of this terrific film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqVgCfZX-yE and you can see the humor, the insight into relationships, and even a bit of the sadness.

About a decade after the film came out, Marshall Brickman, Allen’s co-writer said in an interview: 'The first script of Annie Hall was much more episodic, tangential, and novelistic. We started to become interested in the love story between Woody and the Keaton character, which was all over the place. We cut and pasted to make the love story more important, and the structure emerged. The material was telling us what to do.'

I love stuff like that: “The material was telling us what to do.”

To someone who isn’t a writer or, perhaps, hasn’t been writing for very long, that can seem ridiculous—you’re the writer, you write the words, how can they tell you what to do?! But I promise you—it is absolutely true.

When you are stuck in your script, when you just can’t figure out what comes next, or you can’t figure out how to get a character from point A to point B, which is what your story needs… well, your story is telling you there’s a problem.

Maybe what comes next is impossible to see because what’s already happened doesn’t move the story forward so that you can see the next step.

Or maybe you can’t get your heroine from point A to point B because point A is wrong.

One of the disadvantages of writing with too detailed an outline is that you can blindly follow along and write each subsequent scene. But the truth is, if you’re really into your story, you’ll start writing things that weren’t in your outline because the story is moving in a direction you couldn’t have anticipated months ago when you wrote that outline!

Your material CAN tell you what to do. So as you write, learn to listen.

Copyright © Diane Lake

29Mar20

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