Russell Horton, credited as "Man in Theatre Line" in the 1977 Woody Allen classic Annie Hall, brought mansplaining to a new level during his brief but unforgettably pedantic appearance. Forty years later, he's spoken up some more, this time about his role in the film, telling EW, "Part of the reason the scene works is because I am such an asshole and I actually believe what I’m doing, you know? It’s very human. There really are people like that.”
"[Allen] never let anybody see the whole script. I got the scene, but I had no idea where it fit in or how it related to anything that was going on. I didn’t even have the ending. It was a two-and-a-half-minute take. It was one of the longest, uncut, comedy sequences, up to that time. We did like 17 or 18 takes, and if you look at it carefully in the movie, Marshall McLuhan says, ‘You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.' Which makes no sense. How can you have your fallacy wrong?”
McLuhan wasn't originally supposed to make the cameo, it was going to be Federico Fellini—“If you look at the scene, [my dialogue] is essentially all about Fellini, and there’s only one last thing about McLuhan because they suddenly had him."
Horton, who has since been cast in a number of other Allen films, says he didn't get a lot of direction, and was free to improv a little. "Some of the stuff I came up with on my own, like there was the word weltanschauung, you know, which means a worldview. That wasn’t in the script, but they had stopped talking. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to do something,’ so I said, ‘It’s a weltanschauung!”
Our weltanschauung on talking in movie theater lines is that you can do what you want, this is New York! But you better shut the hell up once you're in your seat.
