Oscar-winning screenwriter Marshall Brickman, including his extensive career Woody Allen best movies, Broadway musical “Jersey Boys” and Johnny Carson’s most beloved sketches are dead. He was 85 years old.
Brickman died Friday in Manhattan, his daughter Sophie Brickman said The New York Times. No cause of death was given.
Brickman was best known for his extensive collaborations with Allen, beginning with 1973’s “Sleeper.” Together they wrote “Annie Hall” (1977), “Manhattan” (1979) and “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993). In particular, the loosely structured script of “Annie Hall” has been one of the most honest comedies. Brickman and Allen won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
In his acceptance speech (Allen skipped the event), Brickman referenced one of the film’s oft-quoted lines, saying, “I’ve been out here for a week, and I’m still guilty when I turn right at a red light.”
“If the movie is worth anything,” Brickman said Vanity Fair In 2017, “it gives a very accurate picture of being alive in New York at that time in that particular socio-economic layer”.
Brickman and Allen met in the early 1960s, when Allen was performing as a comedian. Brickman was brought in to write jokes for him. At the time, he was playing banjo in the folk band The Tarriers. In one of Brickman’s many career tours, it was the album he and his college roommate Eric Weissberg recorded that later made the soundtrack to 1972’s “Deliverance,” including “Dueling Banjos.”
Brickman, born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was the son of socialites Abram (who fled Poland during World War II) and Pauline (Wolin) Brickman of New York. They later moved to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where Brickman grew up. He started in show business, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin with degrees in science and music, he came with Tarrie. He replaced Alan Arkin in the group
“One of the reasons they asked me to join was because they needed someone to face the group and talk to them while they were all tuning in,” Brickman told Writers. brotherhood in 2011 “And so I started developing little jokes and routines and things like that.”
In the late ’60s, Brickman was the head writer for Carson’s “The Tonight Show.” There, one of his most enduring contributions were the Carnac the Magnificent sketches, in which Carson played an “Oriental mystic” who divined answers to unseen questions. Brickman’s other television credits included “Candid Camera,” “The Dick Cavett Show” and “The Muppet Show.”
When Brickman and Allen began writing together, they found a natural chemistry, with Brickman playing a supporting role in Allen’s semi-autobiographical material.
“We didn’t write a scene together. I think that’s the death of any partnership,” Brickman told the Writers Guild. “I don’t think there is an equal partnership. I think that in any collaboration, one person, one personality, one point of view must dominate.”
Brickman wrote and directed the 1980 film “Simon,” in which Arkin brainwashed the psychology professor into believing he came from space. He also directed 1983’s Lovesick, in which Alec Guinness was the ghost of Sigmund Freud, and 1986’s The Manhattan Project, about a high school student who builds a nuclear weapon for a school project.
With Rick Elice writing the music, Brickman wrote the Broadway musical “Jersey Boys,” about the 1960s rock group The Four Seasons. It was on Broadway for 12 years starting in 2005. He and Elice also wrote the musical “The Addams Family” in 2010.
Brickman is survived by his wife, daughters Nina, Sophie and Jessica, and five grandchildren.
