There’s an old joke: someone asks the artist Rodin how you sculpt an elephant, and Rodin says, “You take a very big block of marble, and you remove everything that isn’t an elephant.” That’s essentially how Marshall Brickman feels about Annie Hall, a 95-minute “nervous romance” (the film’s original tagline) that was culled from a two-and-a-half hour rough cut of a more radically conceived, free-associative project originally titled Anhedonia, a word for the inability to feel pleasure.

Brickman co-wrote what became Annie Hall with Woody Allen, their first collaboration after Sleeper. While Allen is on record as being “quite disappointed” with the end result, Brickman, not a morose type or depressive character, has a somewhat more upbeat opinion. “I was thrilled,” he tells Vanity Fair. “I thought it was funny and original, especially the change between the rough cut and what I saw in the theater.”

This is the prevailing opinion of Annie Hall, which went on to earn four of the five top Academy Awards: best picture (the first comedy to win Hollywood’s most coveted prize since Tom Jones in 1963), director, actress, and original screenplay. In 1998, the American Film Institute rated Annie Hall No. 31 on its list of the 100 greatest American movies; in 2000, it was ranked No. 4 on the AFI’s list of the 100 greatest comedies; and two years later, it got No. 11 on its list of the 100 greatest screen romances. In 2015, it topped the Writers Guild of America’s list of the 101 funniest screenplays. (“Awards! They always give out awards!”)

Annie Hall just turned 40, the same age as Alvy Singer—the comedian, played of course by Allen, who examines his life to determine what went wrong following the breakup with its eponymous lost love. It was the first of Allen’s films to earn serious critical cred (Vincent Canby crowed in The New York Times that the movie had “finally establishe[d] Woody as one of our most audacious filmmakers”) and established Allen’s reputation as a serious filmmaker, setting off a mid-career run that produced many very good and several truly great films. (Allen’s personal life in the intervening years, which saw his marriage to longtime partner Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, and allegations that he sexually abused his own adopted daughter, Dylan, has, of course, marred that legacy. Allen has denied those allegations.)

In 1977, as Brickman recalls, Annie Hall was just one of two scripts with which he and Allen wrestled at the time. “One was a standard comedy,” he says. “I think it was a period piece, like a Victorian comedy with costumes. Then there was this other odd idea that was Woody’s, a new form [for which] the structure would be based on associations the main character would have to the things in his life. A phrase or a word or an image would remind him of this and that.”

In Anhedonia, as originally conceived, Alvy’s relationship with Annie was just one of three strands, according to When the Shooting Stops…the Cutting Begins by Ralph Rosenblum, who edited the film. The others, he wrote, were Alvy’s “concern with the banality of the life that we all live and … an obsession with proving himself and testing himself to find out what kind of character he had.”

“We worked on that odd idea for a while, and then the [other] comedy,” Brickman said. “It was like being in the desert between two mirages. You walk toward one and it looks great from a distance, and then as you get closer it starts to disintegrate, so you start walking toward the other one. Finally, Woody said the thing that has a chance of getting a little notice is the thing that had never been done, the thing with the greater risk. So clearly that meant we would try to do the one that turned into Annie Hall. And he was right.”

Seen today, the film gets an extra collateral kick from the time-capsule glimpse it gives of future stars in the first blush of their careers, including Christopher Walken (“Can I confess something?”), Jeff Goldblum (“I forgot my mantra”), Shelley Hack (“I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say”), Beverly D’Angelo (a co-star in Tony “Max” Roberts’s hit sitcom) and, and, in her first screen credit, Sigourney Weaver, seen in long shot as Allen’s date in the film’s poignant finale. (Shelley Duvall, who plays a reporter for Rolling Stone, had made several films with Robert Altman before making Annie Hall).

Carol Kane was also fairly established when Allen’s casting director, Juliet Taylor, sought her out for the crucial role of Alvy Singer’s first wife, Allison Porchnik (“I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype”). Kane’s role as an unassimilated immigrant wife in Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street had already earned her an Oscar nomination; she’d worked with the pantheon of 1970s New Hollywood directors, including Mike Nichols, Hal Ashby, and Sidney Lumet. The 1970s, Kane says, were “a very rich time in movies and a rich time for me. My first movie was with Mike Nichols. That’s so crazy. From there I got to work with Sidney and Hal and Joan and Woody.” Even before she was cast, Allen was certainly on her radar: “I don’t think you could be a New Yorker and not be aware of Woody,” she says.

Despite all that talent before and behind the camera, the first rough cut screening of Anhedonia was not auspicious, Brickman recalls. “It was very off. As little as I knew at that time about film, I knew it needed work. It had wonderful, brilliant moments and a great performance by Diane [Keaton]. I didn’t realize to what extent you could take a cut of two-and-a-half hours that is like an albatross running down the beach trying to achieve airspeed, and try to turn it into a hawk.”

Brickman credits Rosenblum and Allen with removing everything in the film that didn’t pertain “to what you were really interested in.” Namely, he says, “they just took everything out that wasn’t an elephant. The elephant in this case was Woody and Diane.”

Sacrificed was some fondly remembered material—“some of the freest, funniest, most sophisticated material Woody had ever created,” Rosenblum wrote. The only remnants of these high-concept deleted scenes are images preserved on lobby cards that were produced at the time to be displayed in movie theaters. One was a basketball game between the New York Knicks and history’s great philosophers, including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

Brickman’s most lamented loss is the Devil’s own guided tour of the nine layers of Hell. Level 5, for instance, was comprised of organized crime, dictators, and people who don’t appreciate oral sex, according to Rosenblum’s book. Kane, who only saw script pages of her own scenes, also had a big one that didn’t make the final cut: “I played the cello in the living room,” she recalls. “I worked very hard to perfect the fingering. Then it came [time] to shoot the scene, and I started to play the cello—and I had forgotten, of course, this not being silent movie days, the fingering was not the only thing. There would be sound coming out of the cello. It was so horrendous. The crew was laughing. I don’t recall why the scene wasn’t in the final film, but that could have something to do with it.”

In its final incarnation, Annie Hall remains a classic. If Bananas is Allen’s Duck Soup, then Annie Hall is his A Night at the Opera—and still his biggest box office hit to date, with a $38.3 million take, not adjusted for inflation. (Brickman has no doubt that the period comedy he and Allen didn’t make “would have made much more money.”)

“If the film is worth anything,” Brickman offers, “it gives a very particular specific image of what it was like to be alive in New York at that time in that particular social-economic stratum.”

The night Allen and Brickman were up for their first original screenplay Oscar, Allen, as he was wont to do, spent the evening in New York, playing with his Dixieland jazz band at Michael’s Pub. Soon, his Oscar night decision would become a 25-year tradition. Brickman, however, attended the ceremony with his wife. “I thought we had a good chance,” he allows.

And the script for Annie Hall won out, over the scripts for The Goodbye Girl, Star Wars, The Turning Point and The Late Show. In his acceptance speech, Brickman made a callback to one of the film’s most quoted lines. “I’ve been out here a week,” he said, “and I still have guilt when I make a right turn on a red light.”

Kane revisited the film the day of our interview. “I hadn’t seen it in a long time,” she says. “I thought it was so wonderful and so rich. [Woody’s] technique of revealing his self-realizations directly into the camera with such un-defensive honesty was powerful. And everyone—Diane, Christopher, Colleen [Dewhurst, as Annie’s mother] were wonderful. I found it thrilling to watch and visually very beautiful. That’s [cinematographer] Gordon Willis. I can’t get over how lucky I am to have been a part of such an extraordinary project. I think it’s timeless.”

For his part, Brickman says that he and Allen still keep in touch and take the occasional walk in the park. “When we were younger,” Brickman recalls with a laugh, “we would talk about the business and women. We’d see these two old guys sitting munching on a pretzel with their pains, and we’d make remarks about them. And now we are them. We can’t believe it. We talk about exactly the same things; the business and women, and which of our faculties are fading.”

After Annie Hall, they collaborated on two more films: Manhattan in 1979, and Manhattan Murder Mystery in 1993, which also reunited Allen and Keaton onscreen for the first time in 14 years. Both of them are still prolific—as is Brickman, who went on to co-write the books for the Broadway musicals Jersey Boys and The Addams Family. Which begs the question: Where’s Annie Hall 2? Don’t we still need the eggs?

A sequel, Brickman ponders, before making a tentative pitch: “Sort of like Robin and Marian in Manhattan?’” He’s referencing the elegiac Richard Lester revisionist drama about Robin Hood and Maid Marian reunited in middle age. Then he snaps out of it: “Well, I think that’s a terrible idea. It’s certainly not an artistic idea. You can’t go home again. Isn’t it better to remember those two people they way they were?”