Marshall Brickman, who has died aged 85, was a successful musician, writer and film director but will be best remembered for his collaborations with Woody Allen in three of Allen’s best films: The Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977 ) and Manhattan (1979). The two won Oscars for Annie Hall’s original screenplay, which also took home Best Picture, Best Director for Allen, and Best Actress for Diane Keaton.
Allen missed the awards ceremony, and when Brickman accepted the statuette for best writer, he said: “Half of this little piece of tin, if not a lot more, belongs to Woody, who is probably the best collaborator anyone could have wish. He is doing a very brilliant job. It takes our script and turns it into what you saw. He’s been taking my lunch check for about five months and today he refuses to leave his apartment.
This apartment was in New York, which played a huge role in these movies. Like Allen, Brickman grew up in Brooklyn, although he was born in Rio de Janeiro, where his father Abram, a refugee from Poland, and his New York-born mother Pauline (née Wolin) were leftists who in 1943. returned to America and settled in Flatbush, where Abram ran an import and export business. They exposed Marshall to the political and music scene in Greenwich Village; he learned to play folk music on 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, influenced by his roommate and fellow New Yorker Eric Weisberg, who was also a banjo virtuoso.
The city was the fermenting cauldron for the arts in post-war America. Weissberg joined a folk group, the Tarriers, an integrated quartet with which he had great success Harry BelafonteThe Banana Boat Song (O-Day). When Bob Kerry left, Weisberg named Brickman as his replacement. The Tarriers were playing at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village when Allen, a budding stand-up act, opened for them.
Brickman initially thought his jokey intros to the band’s songs might lead him to a comedy career, and he landed a job as a writer for Candid Camera, sharing an office with Joan Rivers. He began writing jokes about Rivers and Allen, but remained in the music world, recording an album with Weisberg, New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass (1963), for which he also wrote joke liner notes. He then joined John and Michelle Phillips in New Journeymen, but soon left. Danny Doherty replaced him and with the addition of Cass Elliott they became the Mamas and Papas.
More importantly, Brickman joined Jack Rollins, who represented Allen, and another joke writer, Dick Cavett, who landed him a gig with Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. He became Carson’s head writer, mostly because the other writers wanted to avoid responsibility for the “five points,” the skits Carson performed in addition to the monologue. When Cavett left to host his own talk show, Brickman went with him. But in 1972 the recording he made with Weissberg was used as the soundtrack to the John Boorman film Deliverance (although the famous Dueling Banjos were added by Weissberg and Steve Mandell).
The royalties gave Brickman the chance to relax and join Allen in day-long sessions that, although they never wrote scenes together, produced the script for Sleeper.
The fact that these are Allen films provides a structure for Brickman’s writing. “Pranks are easy,” he said. “Humour comes so easily to me that I am suspicious of it. I crack jokes like the pancreas secretes…whatever the pancreas secretes.” Like Allen and Alvie Singer Annie HallBrickman prefers New York to Hollywood; not least because he was invited to a party at Sharon Tate’s house the night of Manson’s murders, but he had another engagement that night in Santa Monica.
Brickman was the lead writer on The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence (1975), which introduced the Swedish chef. After Manhattan, he turned to writing and directing three films, all of which were edited by his wife, Nina Feinberg, whom he married in 1973.
In Simon (1980), a psychology professor played by Alan Arkinhas been brainwashed in an experiment by bored scientists into believing it comes from outer space. Brickman wrote his most Allen-like film, Lovesick (1983) for Peter Sellers, but after Sellers’ death, Dudley Moore starred as a psychiatrist in love with a patient, Elizabeth McGovern; Alec Guinness plays the ghost of Sigmund 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 TV stalwarts – Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City), Jill Eikenberry (LA Law) and John Mahoney ( Fraser).
“I choose projects where I don’t mind having lunch with people,” quips Brickman, and in the 1990s he wrote two adapted screenplays for director Mark Rydell. For The Boys (1991) is a military adaptation of The Sunshine Boys, in which Bette Midler and the estranged wife James Caan reunite to entertain the soldiers in the Korean War. The character’s resemblance (if not the storyline) to entertainer Martha Raye was noted by many; her case against the film failed.
Intersection (1994) reworks Claude Sotte’s Les Chose de la Vie from 1970, but Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and Lolita Davidovich fail to lift it from melodrama. In 1993 Brickman reunites with Allen, now mired in scandal surrounding his adopted family with Mia Farrow, to write Manhattan Murder Mystery, which began life as a false start to Annie Hall’s screenplay; Diane Keaton replaced Farrow as star.
Brickman’s last directing came in a 2001 TV movie version. of Christopher Durang’s play Sister Mary Explains All, in which Keaton plays a teaching nun in a kind of American version of Miss Brodie. He then switched gears by writing the book about the musical Jersey Boysfor vocal group “The Four Seasons”; it opened on Broadway in 2005, won four Tony Awards and ran for 12 years; Brickman also wrote the screenplay for the 2012 film. His career with the Tarriers helped him understand the dynamics of the quartet, while his musical ability helped his words match the harmonies of the music. He followed the book into the musical The Addams Family in 2010.
Brickman is survived by Nina and their two daughters, Sophie and Jessica.
