Top Movie Quotes 55 - 52

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Continuing the countdown of the American Film Institute’s top 100 movie lines.

The list dates from 2005, hence a lot of famous lines won’t be included. I will add to the list once we reach Number 1.

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55

"La-dee-da, la-dee-da."

Spoken by Diane Keaton as Annie Hall in Annie Hall (1977)

Trivia:

• Diane Keaton's real name is Diane Hall and her nickname is Annie.

• The film's working title was "Anhedonia" - the inability to feel pleasure. United Artists fought against it (among other things, they were unable to come up with an ad campaign that explained the meaning of the word) and Woody Allen compromised on naming the film after the central character three weeks before the film's premiere. Other titles suggested were "It Had to Be Jew", "A Rollercoaster Named Desire", and "Me and My Goy".

• Alvy makes a joke about the political magazines Dissent and Commentary merging to form "Dysentery." Dissent is a famous liberal magazine and Commentary is a famous conservative magazine.

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54

“There's no crying in baseball!”

Spoken by Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own (1992)

Trivia:

• The storyline was inspired by the career of baseball legend Dottie Collins. During WWII, Collins played for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and pitched 17 shutouts during her six-year career.

• The film portrays the league as initially unpopular and unprofitable, until demeaning gimmicks are used to attract male audiences. In reality, the league was popular and profitable from the start, largely because it played in towns in the upper Midwest that had no way of watching a live baseball game. Eventually, the league grew into a ten-team two-division league. The advent of televised baseball games in the early fifties, however, would lead to the demise in the popularity of the league.

• When Rosie O'Donnell's character, Doris, asks "What are you, a genius?" to Dottie, Geena Davis actually has an IQ of 140. Having an IQ of 140 is actually considered the starting point for the "Genius" level.

• The famous line, "There's no crying in baseball" has some basis in fact. According to author Daniel Okrent, Rogers Hornsby (to whom Tom Hanks refers) was chewing out a line of minor league hitters he was instructing, when Ron Santo (toward the end of the line) was quoted as saying, "If he says that to me, I'll cry."

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53

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”

Spoken by Groucho Marx as Captain Jerry Spaulding in Animal Crackers (1930)

Trivia:

• For this film, Harpo Marx switched to a lighter red wig which actually photographed as blonde. In the film, he is referred to as a redhead. He would use the lighter wig in all future The Marx Brothers movies. He went back to the darker red wig for The Story of Mankind (1957) which was filmed in color.

• The 1929 stock market crash occurred during the stage run of "Animal Crackers." Groucho Marx lost a lot of money in the crash and responded by throwing out much of the play's original dialogue and improvising bitter jokes about the stock market. At least one of these survives in the film: the quotes of stock prices at the end of the "Strange Interlude" spoof.

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52

“You had me at ‘hello’.”

Tom Cruise as Jerry Maguire in Jerry Maguire (1996)

Trivia:

• Renée Zellweger admitted that the day she was cast in this film, it had been so long since she had worked that when she went to an ATM, she did not have enough of a balance to make a withdrawal.

• Renée Zellweger's famous line "You had me at 'hello'" served as the inspiration behind Kenny Chesney's 1999 single with the similar name "You Had Me From Hello." In 2005, Zellwegger married Chesney, only to have it annulled after four months.

• The film's now iconic line "You had me at hello" made no sense to Renée Zellweger when she first read the screenplay, initially thinking it was a typo.