Trivia / Annie (1982)

• All-Star Cast: Albert Finney as Warbucks, Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan, Tim Curry as Rooster, Bernadette Peters as Lily, and so on.
• Award Category Fraud: Aileen Quinn won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actress despite playing the titular role.
• Better Export for You: The 2004 Special Anniversary Edition DVD^note seemingly timed with the 80th anniversary of the Little Orphan Annie comic strip boasts pan-and-scan picture in the US, but the UK uses a widescreen transfer instead.
• Billing Displacement: The actors mentioned above received top billing in most posters, with the lead actress listed as "and introducing AILEEN QUINN as 'Annie'". This was due to the fact that the role of Annie was one of the most coveted roles in film history, with months to search for a child actress to play her.
• Cast the Runner-Up: The actresses who played Annie's friends (Duffy, Pepper, et. al.) were the runners-up for the role of Annie herself. Rosanne Sorrentino, who played Pepper, had actually played Annie on National Tour a few years before, but by the time of the film, she was too tall and too old for the role.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the Japanese dub of the 1982 film, Oliver Warbucks is voiced by actor/singer Tsunehiko Kamijo, Grace Farrell is voiced by former Pinky & Killers lead vocalist Yoko Kon, Rooster Hannigan is voiced by actor/juggler Isao Bido and Bert Healy is voiced by singer Masato Shimon.
• Channel Hop: Paramount Pictures was among the many studios that tried to get the film rights to the stage show. When Columbia Pictures beat them out, they decided to Follow the Leader and make a movie musical about a comic strip character they already had the rights to — the result was Popeye^note Which predates Annie by two years.. Unfortunately, Popeye was written off as a flop.
• Creator Backlash: Carol Burnett admitted that the film was over-produced.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: The Japanese dub had Annie's singing voice provided by boy soprano Tomoya Takayama, though child actress Mie Katakoa did her speaking voice.
• Cut Song: "You Won't Be an Orphan for Long", "N.Y.C." (which is replaced by "Let's Go to the Movies"), "Something Was Missing", and "A New Deal for Christmas" (a given, since this version is set during the 4th of July), to name a few.
• Deleted Scene:
  • The first verse of "Easy Street" was recorded and presumably filmed, but cut from the final version to keep the running time down. See What Could Have Been for a missing chunk that would have taken the number out onto the street.
  • One in which Annie confronts Miss Hannigan in her room, appeared in promotional lobby cards for the film and the box of the video release.
  • A scene featuring a reprise of "Maybe", where Annie sings that she anticipates Grace visiting her and her parents in New Jersey, was recorded and shot, but didn't make it into the final cut.
• Disowned Adaptation: The musical's lyricist and director, Martin Charnin, stated in a 1996 article that he refused to acknowledge the film. However, unlike other instances of this trope, Charnin admitted his responsibility for why the film turned out as it did, as, in his own words, he and his co-creators, composer Charles Strouse and librettist Thomas Meehan, failed to secure any degree of creative control over the film when they signed away the film rights.
• Dueling Movies: Alongside TRON and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in summer 1982. E.T. wins, but Annie and TRON were eventually Vindicated by Cable as well as by history and got sequels.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Finney shaved his hair to play Warbucks. Aileen Quinn, a natural brunette, had to dye her hair and wear a carrot-top wig for the title role.
• Fake Nationality: Trinidadian actor/choreographer Geoffrey Holder played Warbucks's Indian bodyguard Punjab.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Burnett played the role of a drunk orphanage matron, which is a little chilling considering her experiences with her parents who were alcoholics.
• The Merch: In a similar vein to E.T. and other children's films of the time, a flood of tie-in items, namely toys, dolls, costumes and various memorabilia were made, continuing on the existing themed merchandise since the original comic strip series came out.
• Playing Against Type: This was John Huston's only musical.
• Posthumous Credit: Despite dying of a heart attack on July 20, 1981, production designer Dale Hennesy was still given credit for his work.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The temporal setting was moved from Christmas time to shortly before the Fourth of July because the filming was scheduled for summer.
• Stillborn Franchise: It was originally planned to be the start of a series. The reason Aileen Quinn never had a successful child-acting career was because she spent years contracted to appear in sequels that never happened. So much time passed that after Anna Paquin won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Piano in 1994, producer Ray Stark approached her over playing Annie in a sequel. That didn't pan out, but after thirteen years of Development Hell, the Made-for-TV Movie Annie: A Royal Adventure! emerged.
• Vindicated by Cable: Or, more accurately, Vindicated by VHS. Many a child would have their Annie tapes played over and over until the reels wore out.
• Wag the Director: In the play, Grace brought the adoption papers to the orphanage. After the film script had Warbucks do it, Carol Burnett and Albert Finney lobbied the songwriters for a song to sing together to flesh out the only meeting between Warbucks and Hannigan. Their duet, "Sign", was written in two days.
• What Could Have Been:
  • David Begelman was supposed to produce, as he had brought it to the attention of Columbia Pictures in the first place. Unfortunately, however, Begelman later became embroiled in an embezzlement scandal in which he forged Cliff Robertson's signature on a check. As a result, Martin Charnin, Charles Strouse, and Thomas Meehan refused to sell the rights to Columbia unless a new producer was hired, so Ray Stark took the job even though he wasn't a fan of the original Broadway show.
  • Kristin Chenoweth originally auditioned for Annie, but she was turned down due to her thick Oklahoma accent. Chenoweth would later be cast as Lily in the 1999 television adaptation. Drew Barrymore and Elizabeth Berkley also auditioned.
  • Jack Nicholson was originally cast as Daddy Warbucks, but he dropped out after Ray Stark replaced David Begelman as producer. Huston originally wanted Sean Connery for the role, but Connery turned it down because he didn't want to appear bald. Cary Grant was also considered.
  • Steve Martin was offered the role of Rooster, but he declined because Bernadette Peters was already cast as Lily. At the time, Martin and Peters were going through a nasty breakup and Martin felt it would be too painful to work with Peters for several months. Mick Jagger reportedly sought the role.
  • Bette Midler was offered the role of Miss Hannigan, but she declined.
  • "Easy Street" was originally going to have the three villains dancing into the streets, with a huge ensemble of dancers joining them for the number. While the original scene was fully shot, the crew felt that it was too big of a sequence and distracted from Burnett's, Curry's, and Peters's performances (Burnett herself felt that the entire scene was "overkill"). They eventually reshot the number indoors, simplifying the choreography so that the focus could remain solely on the three actors.
  • The opening scene in the orphans' dormitory was originally longer and differently scripted, one of the main differences being that "Maybe" was sung by all the orphans, not just a solo for Annie. This scene was eventually cut for being too long and replaced with a shortened version. The later scene of Annie's friends reprising "Maybe" in their beds while Annie is at the Warbucks mansion is actually an excerpt from the original opening. The original version of the scene also introduced Sandy from the beginning, showing that he'd been hanging around the orphanage and Annie had been secretly feeding him; this was cut from the finished film, but appears in the movie storybook.
  • In the 1980 screenplay draft and the novelization, when the orphans are locked in the closet, they escape through the trapdoor in the roof by forming a Human Ladder, with each girl being lifted out by the others until only Pepper is left and has to climb up a hot water pipe. In the finished film, probably to make the scene less dangerous for the child actresses, they use a shelving unit as a ladder.
  • Aileen Quinn was one of three final candidates to play Annie: the other two were Robin Ignico and Angela Lee Sloan. Ignico plays Duffy in the finished film, while Sloan is the girl falling asleep on her feet at the beginning of "It's the Hard-Knock Life."

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