Love, Death and La - De - Dah

What's a nice girl like Annie Hall doingin a film like Mr. Goodbar?

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Keaton regularly does acting exercises, one of which involves finding a way to key her concentration so that she feels completely alone. If she has kept herself fit with the exercises, she finds she can program and hold an emotion through the endless technical annoyances of film making. Most of the time this worked in Goodbar, but not always. Once, Brooks remembers, he wanted a look of pleasurable anticipation to cross her face as she came out of a bathroom and approached a man who lay in bed. Keaton tried it a couple of times, but came up empty. She could not find the emotion by herself, and since the bed was off-camera, there was no actor there for her to respond to.

Brooks told her to go back and try it again. Then he pulled off his shirt, and as Keaton opened the bathroom door, was busy removing his pants. She came apart in shrieks of laughter. Pulling herself together, she did the scene again, says Brooks, and "it was perfect. When she opened that door, she really didn't know what she was going to see."

The effort that went into Goodbar was exhausting. "We all got so sick of me, day after day," Keaton remembers. A residue of Theresa stayed with Keaton after each day's shooting. "The parts where I had to be bitchy were hard to dismiss. I would go home feeling really rotten."

There was a sour moment one day when a crew member made the inevitable crack to Keaton: "Hey, I didn't recognize you with your clothes on." Brooks reduced the cur to slag, and Keaton survived. "The lady is tough," he says. "I think she must have a lot of anger in there somewhere."

Brooks and Keaton changed the character of Theresa perceptibly. Author Rossner described a chilly, rather unpleasant woman, and Keaton's Theresa is likable and warm, especially in her relationship with her sister, played by Tuesday Weld. So questions arise. Is Theresa too solid to be believable later as the victim of her own alienation? Does the humor she shows reflect too much sanity? Worse, does it reflect too much Annie Hall?

After a movie is shot, it takes a long ime for the dice to stop rolling. A lot rests on the gamble of Goodbar. Keaton's career, Brooks' bank account and, to a certain degree, the immediate future of serious films about women. Meanwhile, Keaton is back in Manhattan, renewing acquaintances with her cats and her analyst, thinking lazily about changing apartments, studying a new Woody Allen script. The film has no title yet, but rehearsals begin next week. Allen himself will direct the picture, but not act in it. He reports with much satisfaction that the film is very gloomy, in no sense a comedy, and that Keaton's role is "far more heavy and tortured and difficult than the girl in Goodbar." He's worried about the film, she's insecure, they're happy. A dark night of the soul lies ahead, and what's more, room service is closed.

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