Annie Hall

I've fantasized for a good twenty years now about Anhedonia, the 140-minute workprint of what eventually became Annie Hall. The original title of the project--which seems in its reflexive analysis of Allen's public persona to have been intended as something akin to an essay film--referred to an inability to experience pleasure. As unseen movies go, it has a lower pedigree than Tod Browning's London After Midnight, Hitchcock's The Mountain Eagle, or Orson Welles's cut of The Magnificent Ambersons; the few who have seen it would agree that the released version was infinitely superior. But it's tantalizing, because Woody Allen in 1976 and 1977 was such a formidable comic.