Marshall Brickman, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter on ‘Annie Hall,’ Dies at 85
Marshall Brickman, the banjo-playing writer and director who shared an Academy Award with his frequent collaborator Woody Allen for their Annie Hall screenplay, has died. He was 85.
Brickman died Friday in Manhattan, his daughter Sophie Brickman told The New York Times.
On his own, Brickman wrote and directed Simon (1980), a quirky comedy about a psychology professor (Alan Arkin) brainwashed into believing he’s from outer space; Lovesick (1983), featuring Alec Guinness as the ghost of Sigmund Freud who offers relationship advice to a psychiatrist (Dudley Moore); and The Manhattan Project (1986), about a high school student (Christopher Collet) who builds a nuclear weapon for a science fair project.
And in 2001, he helmed an adaptation of Christopher Durang’s play Sister Mary Explains It All, starring Annie Hall herself, Diane Keaton, for Showtime.
Brickman also teamed with Rick Elice to pen the Tony-nominated book for the Broadway musical Jersey Boys, and they wrote the screenplay for the 2014 film adaptation. They joined forces again for the 2010 stage musical The Addams Family.
In the early 1960s, as Allen was making his mark as a stand-up comedian, Brickman was playing banjo for The Tarriers, a folk group that had scored a hit with “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” back when Arkin was a member.
“The Tarriers were a headline act and Woody was an opening act. Woody was coming up pretty quickly and using material quickly,” Brickman said during a 2016 interview for the Classic Television Showbiz blog. “The plan was to give him maximum exposure on television as quickly as possible, so [producer] Charlie Joffe got us to collaborate.
“We would work on jokes. After a couple of hours, his housekeeper would bring a plate of tuna fish sandwiches and we’d take a break. I don’t even know what we talked about during the break. Together we wrote a lot of his early stand-up act, which he ultimately recorded. When he got a couple of specials on television, he did one for Monsanto, one for Libby’s, these one-off variety shows, we wrote those together. And then we started to write movies.”
Brickman had left the music world behind to build a solid career in television, with a stint as head writer for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, when he agreed to work with Allen on a futuristic comedy that eventually became Sleeper (1973). The job was totally on spec. As luck would have it, an album Brickman had recorded years earlier with his college roommate Eric Weissberg was chosen as the soundtrack for the 1972 Burt Reynolds film Deliverance. It included the song “Dueling Banjos.”
“I was in therapy back then, and my analyst said, ‘Things don’t just come from the sky, you have to work to make things better and make yourself happy,’ ” Brickman said. “That very week I got a call from my accountant who said, ‘I have a check on my desk from Warner Bros. for $170,000. What did you do?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.’ I didn’t. Warner Bros. had taken this old banjo album of ours on the Elektra label called New Dimensions and renamed it the soundtrack from Deliverance — which it was not. It sold over a million units. So there.”
Sleeper was originally conceived as an homage to silent comedy, and Allen didn’t want any dialogue. But as they developed its concept of a jazz musician frozen without his consent and thawed 200 years in the future, it only made sense to play to the strengths of the neurotic character Allen had spent years developing. Dialogue was the only way to make that happen.
“We didn’t write scenes together. I think that’s the death for any collaboration,” Brickman said during a 2011 interview for the Writers Guild Foundation. “I don’t think there’s any such thing really as an equal collaboration. I think that in any collaboration, one person, one personality, one point of view has to dominate.
“Obviously within the collaboration with Woody, he was the dominant part. Which doesn’t mean that I was not a contributor. [But] first of all, he was writing for himself, so he was the best choice to do that. And I think it’s important for one person to kind of control it because there’s always a little bit of therapy involved in writing — there’s a little bit of, ‘I want my life up there. I’ve got to work something out.’ And you can’t have two people working at cross-purposes.”
According to Brickman, he and Allen wanted their next script to be a loosely structured narrative with a literary feel. Annie Hall (1977) began as a story of a man turning 40 who is trying to get a handle on his life. The first draft didn’t even have a Annie in it. Brickman takes credit for suggesting that to build tension, they needed to create someone the opposite of Allen. Writing specifically with Keaton in mind, they came up with one of the most endearing characters in the history of film.
Annie Hall opened in April 1977 to critical acclaim and went on to win four Academy Awards — for best picture, actress (Keaton), director (Allen) and original screenplay. Notorious for his disdain of award shows, Allen didn’t attend the ceremony, so Brickman accepted their Oscar.
“Half of this little piece of tin, if not much more, belongs to Woody, who is probably the greatest collaborator anyone could ever wish for,” Brickman said during his acceptance speech. “He does a lot of brilliant work. He takes our script and makes it into what you saw. He picks up my lunch check for about five months, and [today] he refuses to come out of his apartment.”
Brickman then partnered with Allen on the scripts for Manhattan (1979) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).
Marshall Michael Brickman was born on Aug. 25, 1939, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His father, Abram, was a Jewish import/export expert who had fled Poland during the rise of Nazi Germany. His mother, Pauline, was born in New York.
In 1943, the family moved to Brooklyn, and as he grew up, his parents emphasized music. On Sundays, the Brickmans would attend folk festivals in Washington Square Park, and he learned to play banjo, guitar and mandolin.
After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, Brickman enrolled at the University of Wisconsin with the goal of becoming a doctor. But after a stint at Wisconsin General Hospital assisting a pathologist, he switched his major to music.
Also factoring into Brickman’s decision was his friendship with his college roommate. The Tarriers wanted Weissberg to replace Arkin, who was leaving to pursue improv comedy and acting, and Weissberg convinced Brickman to come along.
“One of the reasons I was asked to join was because they needed somebody to front the group and talk while everybody was tuning up,” Brickman said. “And so I started to develop little jokes and routines and stuff like that.”
Brickman heard that it was easy to get hired on CBS’ Candid Camera because the show’s creator-producer, Allen Funt, was a taskmaster that few could tolerate. He was right; Brickman landed the gig in 1960 and shared an office with Fannie Flagg and Joan Rivers. (Allen also wrote for the program and appeared in several segments.)
Represented by legendary manager Jack Rollins, Brickman took a stab at stand-up but quickly realized his talent lay in writing jokes rather than telling them. Among those he wrote for were Rivers and Allen. Keeping a foot in the music world, he played for a time with John and Michelle Phillips in The New Journeymen — a forerunner of The Mamas and the Papas.
Through Rollins, Brickman became friendly with Dick Cavett, then another up-and-coming joke writer. Cavett got Brickman in the door at The Tonight Show. When head writer Walter Kempley quit over a salary dispute, Brickman replaced him.
“I realized soon after that nobody wanted the job of the head writer,” Brickman said. “The monologue writers had it great. You could come in almost any time you liked. If you submitted the jokes and Johnny did them, you were fine. But the head writer had to do a shitload of stuff. You had to write what we called five spots — the Aunt Blabbys and The Carnacs and the Tea Time Movies. It was a lot of work. It was great, it was absolutely great. But I didn’t know enough not to want to do it.”
During his sketch-writing days, Brickman claimed to have invented what he called the “Carnac Saver.” Some Carnac the Magnificent punchlines failed to get a laugh, so he devised a follow-up joke to give Carson a second chance at a laugh. Examples included, “May your Perrier water be secretly bottled in Tijuana” and “May a love-starved fruit fly molest your sister’s nectarines.”
“One of the things that I’ll go to my grave having to apologize for is having invented the Carnac Saver,” Brickman said in an interview for Mike Sacks’ 2009 book, And Here’s the Kicker.
Brickman left The Tonight Show in 1971 to become a producer on The Dick Cavett Show. In 1975, he penned the ABC special The Muppets Show: Sex and Violence, a satire on the declining quality of television. He later shared screenwriting credit on the features For the Boys (1991) and Intersection (1994), both directed by Mark Rydell.
He and Allen remained lifelong friends. They would often get together just to walk, talk and vent their frustrations about show business.
“In a sense, I went to school with Woody. He was like a couple of beats ahead of me,” Brickman said. “And I would watch him navigate not only the work, but also dealing with the studios and how to try and preserve what it is that you have that’s special.”
In addition to his daughter Sophie, survivors include another daughter, Jessica; his wife, Nina Feinberg; and five grandchildren. Feinberg, whom he married in 1973, was a TV producer who also edited the three features her husband directed.
