The Associated Press’s Jake Coyle
NEW YORK The Oscar-winning screenwriter Marshall Brickman has away. His extensive career included some of the best movies directed by Woody Allen, the Broadway production of Jersey Boys, and several of Johnny Carson’s most cherished routines. He was eighty-five.
Brickman’s daughter Sophie Brickman told The New York Times that her father passed away in Manhattan on Friday. There was no cause of death mentioned.
Brickman’s most well-known work was his long-term partnership with Allen, which started with the 1973 movie Sleeper. Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) were all co-written by them. In particular, Annie Hall’s loosely organized script has been praised as one of the funniest comedies. Brickman and Allen were awarded an Oscar for best original screenplay for it.
One of the movie’s many frequently repeated lines, “I’ve been out here a week, and I still have guilt when I make a right turn on a red light,” was mentioned by Brickman in his victory speech (Allen did not attend the ceremony).
“The film provides a very specific image of what it was like to be alive in New York at that time in that particular social-economic stratum,” Brickman told Vanity Fairin in 2017.
Allen was only starting out as a stand-up comic in the early 1960s when he first met Brickman. He hired Brickman to compose jokes for him. He had been playing banjo for the Tarriers, a folk ensemble, at the time. Brickman’s career took many unexpected turns, including recording an album with his college friend Eric Weissberg that eventually appeared on the soundtrack of Deliverance (1972), which featured songs like “Dueling Banjos.”
Abram, a Jewish socialist who escaped Poland during World War II, and Pauline (Wolin) Brickman, a New Yorker, were the parents of Brickman, who was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Brickman grew up in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood after they relocated there. After earning degrees in music and physics from the University of Wisconsin, he began his career in show business with the Tarriers. He took Alan Arkinin’s place in the group.
Brickman informed the Writers Guild in 2011 that they needed someone to speak in front of the group while everyone was getting ready, which was one of the reasons they invited me to join. As a result, I began to establish small gags, routines, and such.
Brickman was the head writer for Carson’s The Tonight Show by the late 1960s. The Carnac the Magnificent sketches, in which Carson portrayed an Eastern mystic who could predict solutions to questions that could not be seen, are among his most enduring works. Brickman also worked on The Dick Cavett Show, The Muppet Show, and Candid Camera.
There was a natural connection between Brickman and Allen when they started working together, with Brickman backing Allen’s semi-autobiographical writing.
We didn’t collaborate on any scene writing. According to Brickman, that is the end of any collaboration, he told the Writers Guild. I don’t believe that an equal collaboration actually exists. One individual, one personality, and one point of view must, in my opinion, predominate in any collaboration.
The 1980 film Simon, written and produced by Brickman, starred Arkin as a psychology professor who has been indoctrinated into thinking he is extraterrestrial. In addition, he directed the films Lovesick (1983), in which Alec Guinness plays Sigmund Freud’s ghost, and The Manhattan Project (1986), in which a high school student constructs a nuclear bomb as part of a class assignment.
Brickman penned the Broadway musical Jersey Boys, which is based on the rock group The Four Seasons from the 1960s, with Rick Elice writing the music. Starting in 2005, it ran on Broadway for 12 years. The Addams Family, a 2010 musical, was also written by him and Elice.
Brickman’s five grandchildren, his wife Nina, and daughters Sophie and Jessica survive him.
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