NEW YORK -- A bright blue 1929 Deusenberg swept up to the entrance of Radio City Music Hall, past posters from "The Gay Divorcee," "March of the Wooden Soldiers" and "Camille," the film listed on the Art Deco marquee. In the passenger's seat, behind the second windshield, sat a bald-headed Albert Finney, who was playing Daddy Warbucks, a graceful Ann Reinking, who was playing his secretary, and 10-year-old Aileen Quinn who was playing the title role of Annie. Aileen gazed starry-eyed at a life-size portrait of Norma Shearer.
          The painstaking attention to detail evidenced in New York locations for "Annie" was outmatched only by the painful pressures of making a big movie musical under the threat of a strike by the Directors Guild.
          "We've got to get out of here!" was a common cry on the set each of three recent nights the production shot here. The Rastar/Columbia film version of the Broadway musical originally was scheduled to shoot in New York for an entire week. But work was held up on New Jersey locations where most of the East Coast filming was set before the production moved to the Burbank studios. Time was pressing toward the Wednesday strike deadline, which potentially would remove director John Huston from the scene. Producer Ray Stark literally knocked on wood that the cast and crew would be out of town by the end of the third night's shooting.
          Activity on any set can be frantic, but there was a sense of panic on this one.
          The creative talent appeared composed (Huston, who sat glued to the TV monitor he has learned to love on this film, seemed hardly perturbed at all), but the pressures surrounding them were equally apparent: from controlling Bingo, the temperamental dog playing Sandy, to controlling the crowds and traffic congesting New York streets. Then, there were the added pressures caused by rumor.
          "We've had so much negative publicity on this film," said one person in production, who prefered not to be named. "We can't afford to look as though we're behind schedule."
          The sequence being shot at Radio City, two blocks away from where "Annie" is in its fourth year at the Alvin theatre, actually was being re-shot. Rumors have circulated that most of the film shot here last April when Richard Kline was cinematographer now was being re-shot by Kline's replacement Richard Moore, who worked with Huston on "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean." A nervous spokesperson for the film acknowledged only that exteriors were being re-shot, and that if interiors of the hall and of Reinking's big musical number "Let's Go to the Movies" were to be re-shot they would be shot at Burbank (the production company rented out the Music Hall, including the Rockettes, last April for $1 million to shoot the production number).
          Although "Annie" was set in New York City, most of the major musical numbers -- most of New York for that matter -- were being shot under Joe Layton's direction on the back lots at Burbank.
          But the producers apparently felt that the real-life spectacle of the city at night was crucial as visual support for the story line.
          They wanted the audience to spot New York landmarks as six orphan escapees from a Lower East Side orphanage (the orphanage also was to be shot at the California studios) ran up Fifth Avenue on their way to refuge at Warbucks' mansion (shot at Monmouth College in New Jersey). The orphans were to pass such familiar sights as the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Then as the Warbucks' entourage in the Duesenberg headed down Fifth Avenue to the Music Hall they were to pass the Met as well as the Plaza.
          All the landmarks, bathed in light for filming, looked more spectacular than usual. Of course, they all were provided free. Because of the city's water shortage, the production tanked in water so that the fountains at the Met once again could do their dramatic dance. But as production designer Gene Callahan sat on the great steps at the Met surveying the set -- the great building and the natural backdrop of the city's skyscrapers -- he bemoaned the fact that far less of the city than he envisioned could be shot due to the shortage of time.
          Callahan, whose period film credits include "The Last Tycoon," was hired as a consultant on New York locations in the first place because of time pressures.
          The beauty of expanding "Annie" from the stage to the screen, explained Callahan, was that the story could be expanded out into the city, which provided the revelation for the little orphan in the first place. "But we've not been able to do nearly what we'd have liked to do for this film."