Marshall Brickman, who died aged 85, was a successful musician, writer and film director, but will be best remembered for his collaborations with Allen Woody in three of Allen’s best films: Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979). The pair won an Oscar for the original screenplay Annie Hall, which also won awards for best picture, best director for Allen and best actress. Diane Keaton.
Allen skipped the awards ceremony, and when Brickman received the statue of the best writer, he said: “The middle of this coin pool, if not much more, belongs to Woody, who is perhaps the greatest supporter anyone could ever wish for. He does a lot of excellent work. It removes our script and returns what you saw. He’s been collecting my lunch check for almost five months, and today he refuses to leave the room.
That apartment in New York that played a big part in those movies. Like Allen, Brickman grew up in Brooklyn, but was born in Rio de Janeiro, where his father Abram, a refugee from Poland, and his New York-born mother Paulina (nee Wolin), who returned to America in 1943, remained. and settled in Flatbush, where Abram ran an import business. Marshall laid out the political and musical scene in Greenwich Village; he learned to play folk music on the banjo and guitar.
After high school at Brooklyn Tech, he went to the University of Wisconsin, intending to study medicine, but majored in science and music, from his roommate and fellow New Yorker Eric Weissberg, who was also a banjo virtuoso.
The city was the cradle of the arts in postwar America. Weissberg joined a folk group, the Tarriers, sop Harry Belafonte‘s Banana Boat Song (Day-O). When Bob Carey left, Weissberg Brickman took his place. The Tarriers were playing at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village when Allen, stopping for an injection, opened for them.
Brickman initially thought his witty intros to the group’s songs would lead him into a career in comedy, and a writing job for Candide Camera, sharing the office with the role. John Rivers. He began writing jokes for Rivers and Allen, but kept his foot in the music world with an album with Weissberg, New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass (1963), for which he also wrote the humorous notes. He joins John and Michelle Phillips on a new tour, but soon leaves. Denny Doherty replaced him, and with the addition of Cass Elliot became the Mamas and the Papas.
More importantly, Brickman joined Jack Rollins, who represented Allen, and another joke writer, Dick Cavett, who got him a gig with Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Carson became the head writer, mainly because the other writers wanted to avoid the responsibility of the “five spots”, examples of which Carson made in addition to the monologue. When Cavett left to host his interview, Brickman went with him. But in 1972, a record he had made with Weissberg used John Boorman’s traditional film soundtrack (although the famous Dueling Banjos were added by Weissberg and Steve Mandell).
The Royals gave Brickman a chance to relax and join Allen in long sessions that, although they never wrote scenes together, produced the script in his sleep.
It was Allen’s films that provided the structure for Brickman’s writing. “They are easy jokes,” he said. “Humor comes to me as easily as I think. Hidden jokes like pancreas secrets…whatever the pancreas mysteries are. Like Allen, and Alvy Singer in Annie HallBrickman preferred Hollywood to New York; not least because he was invited to a party at Sharon Tate’s house on the night of the Manson murders, but he had an engagement the other night in Santa Monica.
Brickman was the lead in The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence (1975), which introduced the Swedish Chef. After Manhattan, he went on to write and direct three films, all of which were produced by his wife, Nina Feinberg, whom he married in 1973.
In Simone (1980), a professor of psychology, he was delusional Alan Arkinbrainwashed in an experimental drill by scientists into believing it came from outer space. Brickman wrote his Allen-like film, Lovesick (1983) for Peter Sellers, but after Sellers’ death it starred Dudley Moore as the psychiatrist’s love patient, Elizabeth McGovern; Alec Guinness died Sigismund Freud. In The Manhattan Project (1986), about a high school student who builds his own atomic bomb, John Lithgow stars alongside actors who have become strong on TV – Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City), Jill Eikenberry (LA Law) and John Mahoney (Frasier).
“I read projects where I don’t think about having lunch with people,” Brickman quips, and in the 90s he wrote two adapted screenplays for director Mark Rydell. For Boys (1991) is a variant on Boys of the Sun, in which Bette Midler and her estranged husband. James Caan to join forces in the Korean War. The similarity of the character (except for the story line) to Martha Raye’s guest has been noticed by many; that case against the film was lacking.
The Intersection (1994) remade Claude Sautet’s 1970 Les Chose de la Vie, but Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and Lolita Davidovich lifted it from melodrama. In 1993 Brickman teamed up with Allen, now embroiled in a scandal surrounding Mia Farrow’s adoptive family, to write Manhattan Murder Mystery, which began life as a fake project for Annie Hall’s script; Diane Keaton stars as Farrow.
Brickman’s last direction came in the 2001 TV movie version of Christopher Durang’s story Sister Mary Explains It All, which starred Keaton as a teaching nun in American Miss Brodie. He therefore spent years writing a book for . in the musical Jersey Boysabout four vowels; opened on Broadway in 2005, won four Tony Awards and ran for 12 years; Brickman also wrote the screenplay for the 2012 film. His Tarriers background helped him understand quartet dynamics, while his ability with musical words helped him match the harmonies of the music. He followed up with a book about the Addams Family musical in 2010.
Brickman is survived by Nina and two daughters, Sophia and Jessica.