The sun hung over the Pacific, throwing light across the rooftop terrace of a rented beach house that had been, through the careful application of set dressing and camera angles, transformed into a Manhattan balcony.
The trick was all in what you chose not to show.
Point the camera east and you saw the iron railing, the potted plants, the skyline of rooftop water towers and fire escapes that the art department had constructed from plywood and paint against a backdrop of hazy evening sky.
Point the camera west and you saw the Pacific Ocean, a row of palm trees, and a surfer in a wetsuit paddling out to catch his last wave of the day.
You showed the audience what you wanted them to see and trusted them to fill in the rest with their own imagination.
Duke trusted audiences more than most directors did.
He felt, it was one of his defining qualities, and one that separated him from the majority of filmmakers working in Hollywood in the early 1970s.
The prevailing instinct in American cinema at the time was to show everything, explain everything, underline the theme and then underline the underlining.
The New Hollywood generation, brilliant as they were, had a tendency toward excess.
More footage. More coverage. More takes. More options in the editing room.
The philosophy was shoot everything, figure it out later.
Duke's philosophy was the opposite, know what you need, get what you need, move on. Of course not everyone had memories of the future to compare.
Today's design was deceptively simple. Two people on a balcony. A first date.
Polite conversation about photography, art, the kind of subjects that educated New Yorkers talk about, when what they really want to talk about is whether the other person finds them attractive.
On the surface, the scene was nothing, pleasant, forgettable, the kind of exchange you'd overhear at any gallery.
But underneath the surface, beneath the carefully constructed sentences and the casual, studied body language, a completely different conversation was happening.
And that conversation, the real one, the one that neither character had the courage to say out loud was the entire point.
Gene Wilder stood at the railing in a tweed jacket perfect for Manhattan. His hands were in his pockets, then out of his pockets, then one hand on the railing and the other making a vague gesture toward the horizon that was meant to look spontaneous.
"I'm thinking about what she looks like with the lights off," Wilder said to Duke during a break between setups, sitting in his canvas chair with a bottle of water. "That's what you want, right? That's the subtext?"
"That's a subtext," Duke said. He was standing beside the camera, watching the gaffer adjust a reflector to catch the last usable minutes of golden light.
"The deeper one is simpler. He wants her to like him. That's it. He wants her to think he's smart and funny and worth her time. Everything he says about her photographs is really him saying, 'Please find me interesting.' And he's terrified that she won't."
"So the confidence is fake."
"The confidence is always fake. That's what makes it charming."
Wilder nodded slowly, processing this. Duke could see the gears turning behind his eyes.
To play a character like Singer, the trick was in invisible adjustments, the micro-expressions, maybe the way a hand moves to a pocket a half-second too quickly because the character doesn't know what else to do with it.
Diane Keaton, meanwhile, for her part, required almost no direction at all.
This was both a gift and a mild source of professional envy for Duke, who had spent hours preparing detailed notes on Annie's emotional state in every scene, only to discover that Keaton arrived on set each morning having already figured it out.
She had a great instinct for the character, the nervous laugh, the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was trying to seem casual.
"The subtitles," Duke said to his cinematographer, a lean man named Gordon Willis, who had been the cinematographer of the Godfather and Klute, and he managed to hire him in a spur of the moment.
"When we add them in post, they need to feel like intrusions. Like the audience is eavesdropping on thoughts that were never meant to be public. The frame should feel slightly violated by them."
Gordon nodded. He understood. The plan was unconventional, during the polite rooftop conversation, text would appear at the bottom of the screen revealing what each character was actually thinking.
While Alvy talked about Annie's photographs with studied admiration, the subtitle would read, 'I wonder what she looks like naked'.
While Annie responded with a self-deprecating comment about her artistic ambitions, the subtitle would read, 'He probably thinks I'm a yo-yo.'
The device was simple, almost gimmicky in concept, but the audience would know what the characters couldn't say. They would hold the secret of each character's vulnerability and watch, as two people tried to connect.
But the sutitles only worked if the performances sold the surface. If Wilder and Keaton played the scene with even a hint of winking self-awareness, even the faintest suggestion that they knew the subtitles were coming, the whole thing would collapse.
"Again," Duke called, and they rolled.
Take one. Wilder leaned against the railing, launched into his monologue about Annie's eye for composition, and halfway through, touched the bridge of his nose in a gesture so natural and unconsciously nervous that Duke felt his chest tighten.
Keaton responded with a self-effacing laugh, waved her hand dismissively, and said, "Oh, you really think so? They're just... you know... photographs."
The way she said "photographs", as if it was embarrassing, was perfect but there was some awareness on her body language.
Take two was better. Duke gave a single note to Wilder, "Slower. You don't want the conversation to end.", and Gene incorporated it seamlessly, stretching out his pauses, letting the silences breathe, creating space for the audience to project their own feelings.
Keaton matched him beat for beat, the moment was so real, so achingly familiar to anyone who had ever stood on a balcony with someone they wanted to impress and felt the desperate inadequacy of words.
Take three was insurance. It was good. But take two was the one.
"That's a wrap on the balcony," Duke said, and the crew began breaking down the setup.
The whole scene, from first setup to final take, had consumed a single day. One location, two cameras, three takes per angle, minimal coverage.
In Woody Allen version of this production, this scene had been shot and reshot over the course of weeks, buried inside a mountain of additional footage that included fantasy sequences, documentary-style interviews, and long, improvised monologues that were fascinating individually but collectively turned the film into something sprawling and undisciplined.
The subtitles had been added in post-production almost as an afterthought, a last-ditch attempt to impose structure on chaos.
And they'd worked, but the path to that had been paved with hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted film stock and months of editing.
Duke didn't waste film stock nor time.
He told the cinematographer, as they walked away from the set toward the parking area, "If the lighting is right and the costume is wool, the audience will feel the cold."
Gordon looked at him quizzically. "It's seventy-two degrees."
"I know what the temperature is. I also know that Gene is wearing a wool overcoat and Diane is in that vest-and-tie combination that makes her look like she went to a thrift store in the Village."
"The costumes tell the audience it's autumn in New York. The golden light tells them it's late afternoon. Their breath won't fog, but if we keep the shots tight enough, it won't matter. The audience isn't looking for fog."
This was the calculation Duke had made early in pre-production.
Shooting in New York would have been the obvious choice, the authentic choice, the choice that film school professors would praise and critics would approve of.
And Duke would get to New York eventually. He already had a producer on the ground in Manhattan, negotiating permits for Central Park, for the streets of the Upper West Side, for the specific block where Alvy Singer's childhood home was supposed to stand.
Those locations were necessary. You couldn't make a film about New York without eventually filming in New York.
But you could make a film about New York while being very selective about which scenes actually required New York.
The balcony scene didn't require New York. It required a railing, a sunset, and two actors who could make you believe they were anywhere in the world.
The interiors, the apartments, the restaurants, the movie theater lobby didn't require New York. They required good set design and good lighting.
So Duke was shooting the bulk of the film in California, where the permits were cheaper, the unions were less combative, the weather was controllable, and his crew could sleep in their own beds at night.
When the time came for the exteriors, the walks through Central Park, the street-level shots that established the city as a character, he would fly a skeleton crew to Manhattan for a concentrated burst of location work.
His trailer was quiet at midnight.
The kind of quiet that doesn't exist in Los Angeles during daylight hours ,no traffic, no distant construction, just the soft electrical hum of the flatbed editor.
Duke sat alone in front of the small screen, watching the subtitle scene play back, just the performances, the angles, the light.
He watched Wilder's face as the actor talked about photography and thought about desire.
He denoted that Wilder was way more atractive than Woody Allen, a man who was for a lack of a better expression, difficult to look at even in the 1977 version.
He watched Keaton's hands as she fidgeted with her wine glass and pretended not to notice that she was being admired.
It was a good take.
He stopped the film and leaned back in his chair, staring at the frozen frame. Wilder's face, caught mid-sentence, his eyes soft and slightly unfocused.
Duke closed his eyes.
He remembered how in 1977 in The Academy Awards.
A small, romantic comedy called Annie Hall went up against a massive space opera called Star Wars.
And the romance won. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress.
It sweeps, and the science fiction epic, the one that redefined cinema, that invented the modern blockbuster, that changed the way human beings thought about the sheer possibility of what a movie could be, went home with the technical awards and the box office records.
He had mixed feelings on that award.
On one side, if you were someone who believed that cinema's highest purpose was the examination of human relationships then the decision seemed good.
On the other side, the people who believed that cinema's highest purpose was the expansion of imagination, the creation of worlds that didn't exist, and entertaiment of the masses, then Star Wars seems like the clear winner.
Duke cared too much about movies, box office and awards. He knew this about himself and it was not a flaw he was interested in correcting.
He opened his eyes and looked at the frozen frame again.
Here was the thing that kept Duke up at night. He loved Annie Hall. The film was, in a way he couldn't fully articulate without sounding like a lunatic, a person's soul on screen.
But he also knew what Star Wars would be and he had already taken strategic steps to position himself in the galaxy's path. He had written the novel. Secured the copyright.
By releasing Annie Hall now in 1972, with a theatrical rollout in early 1973, he was doing something that the original timeline hadn't done.
He was giving the film its own era. Its own moment.
It would premiere in a landscape that didn't include Star Wars, that didn't include the blockbuster revolution, that didn't include any of the seismic shifts that would reshape Hollywood later in the decade.
(I fully believe Annie Hall would have a higher box office if not for Star Wars presence.)
It would be judged on its own terms, received by an audience that wasn't yet divided, celebrated in a cultural moment that still had room for a small heartbreaking comedy about two people who loved each other and couldn't make it work.
It was, Duke thought, the most elegant solution he had. And nobody would ever know about it, oh and also he always disliked Woody Allen in his past life for several different reasons like being bald or marrying his step-daughter.
He turned off the flatbed, stood up, and stretched.
He looked at the production board pinned to the wall of the trailer, covered in index cards and colored tape and the neat handwriting of his first AD.
They were ahead of schedule. Not by much two days, maybe three ut in a production that was designed to be completed in a month, two days ahead was already great.
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I ate a gumbo in Houston(beyonce's mom is selling them) and now im close to vomiting, i can feel it
Also, it didnt taste good and it was a more of a soup than gumbo