The Story of Woody & Diane: Stars and Hit Patterns in the New Hollywood

This essay uses a range of metrics to establish Annie Hall as the (commercial and critical) high point in Woody Allen's career, and then explores the film's place in Diane Keaton's career, discussing how her performance in the title role relates to her earlier films. The subsequent analysis of the film's marketing, critical reception and general impact reveals her centrality to the film's success, which was however rarely acknowledged by reviewers at the time. Finally, the essay shows that the success of Annie Hall came at the beginning of a (short-lived) revival of the importance of female stars and female genre preferences in American cinema, after a decade of extreme marginalisation of women in Hollywood.