Marshall Brickman, a low-key writer whose show business career ranged across movies, late-night television comedy and Broadway, with the hit musical “Jersey Boys,” but who may be best remembered for collaborating on three of Woody Allen’s most enthusiastically praised films, including the Oscar-winning “Annie Hall,” died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 85.
His daughter Sophie Brickman confirmed the death on Saturday. She did not cite a cause.
Mr. Brickman and Mr. Allen first teamed up on the script for “Sleeper” (1973), a science fiction comedy set in a totalitarian 22nd-century America whose protagonist, a cryogenically unfrozen 20th-century man, poses as a robot servant to save his life and then sets out to overthrow the government.
“Annie Hall” (1977), the Oscar-winning romance about urban neurotics, was their second project. Two smart, insecure, witty singles meet at a Manhattan tennis club, consciously couple, measure their lives in psychotherapy sessions, find lobster humor in the Hamptons and disagree about whether Los Angeles is beyond redemption. It won four Academy Awards: for best picture, best actress (Diane Keaton), best director (Mr. Allen) and best screenplay.
The two men then wrote the screenplay of “Manhattan” (1979), a contemporary black-and-white romantic comedy hailed at the time as a love letter to New York. It is now most often remembered because of its central relationship: a middle-aged man’s affair with a high school girl (Mariel Hemingway), mirroring Mr. Allen’s own scandal-tarnished later years.
“Manhattan” won BAFTAs, the British film and television awards, for best film and best screenplay. At the Césars, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, it was named best foreign film.
In a Writers Guild Foundation interview in 2011, Mr. Brickman described his collaboration with Mr. Allen as “a pleasure and a life changer.” And if Mr. Allen, who directed and starred in all three films, dominated the process, he said, that was for the best.
“There’s always a little bit of therapy involved in writing,” Mr. Brickman said in the same interview. “There’s a little bit of ‘I want my life up there, I’ve got to work something out in this.’ And you can’t have two people working at cross-purposes.”
Marshall Michael Brickman was born on Aug. 25, 1939, in Rio de Janeiro. His parents, Abram Brickman, who was born in Poland, and Pauline (Wolin) Brickman, who was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, were devoted socialists who lived and worked in Brazil. When World War II reached the United States, the couple moved to New York, where Abram Brickman ran an import-export business.
Marshall grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and attended the University of Wisconsin, a school he chose casually because a friend was going there and seemed to like it. He graduated with degrees in science and music, which he once described to The New York Times as “two worthless pieces of paper instead of one.” He had considered becoming a doctor but changed his mind after working at a hospital for a semester.
Music was a serious career option, and as a young man Mr. Brickman played guitar as part of a folk group, the Tarriers. Its other members included Eric Weissberg, who would gain fame for the hit single “Dueling Banjos,” heard on the soundtrack of the 1972 movie “Deliverance.” (That’s Mr. Brickman with him on the soundtrack album, which is mostly made up of songs originally released in 1963 on the album “New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass.”)
In 1964, Mr. Brickman played banjo as a member of the New Journeymen, a trio with John Phillips and Michelle Phillips. When Mr. Brickman left the group, the couple took on two new partners and created the Mamas & the Papas. That may have seemed like bad timing, but a few years later he and a friend were invited to Sharon Tate’s house in Beverly Hills and decided at the last minute to go to Malibu instead. It was the night of the Manson family murders.
Mr. Brickman had already begun his writing career, working on the first season of “Candid Camera” (1960), Alan Funt’s pre-reality-show reality show. By 1969, he had become head writer for “The Tonight Show” during Johnny Carson’s glory days as host.
His contribution to pop culture, Mr. Brickman said, was Carnac the Magnificent, a recurring sketch in which Mr. Carson donned a black cape and a bejeweled wine-red turban, held a sealed envelope to his forehead and appeared to intuit the contents. “A budget cut,” he might say. Then he’d open the envelope and clarify: “What do you get from a discount rabbi?” Or “The winners,” followed by “Who are the Dodgers playing tonight?”
When a fellow “Tonight Show” writer, Dick Cavett, left to host his own competing late-night talk show, Mr. Brickman became his creative consultant and producer in the early 1970s. His managers suggested that Mr. Brickman try writing something with another of their clients: Mr. Allen.
“I first met Woody when he was the opening act for the Tarriers at the Bitter End in Manhattan,” Mr. Brickman recalled in a 2011 interview with The East Hampton Press on Long Island. “It was one of his first stand-up gigs.”
At that point, as Mr. Brickman remembered in another interview, audiences seemed puzzled to hear a comedian talk about his psychiatrist. “They were looking at him like something had just moved in a wastebasket,” he said. But he realized Mr. Allen’s brilliance.
Vincent Canby, then the chief film critic of The New York Times, compared their film “Sleeper” to “the best of Laurel and Hardy.” “Annie Hall,” he wrote, established Mr. Allen as “one of our most audacious filmmakers.” And with “Manhattan,” he observed, “Mr. Allen’s progress as one of our major filmmakers is proceeding so rapidly that we who watch him have to pause occasionally to catch our breath.”
During the 1970s, Mr. Brickman was one of four writers of a television pilot, “The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence,” which after considerable revision became “The Muppet Show,” the syndicated half-hour series created by Jim Henson that ran from 1976 to 1981. And he had begun writing parodies for The New Yorker magazine, like “The New York Review of Gossip” and “The Recipes of Chairman Mao.”
In the 1980s, Mr. Brickman branched out into directing film comedies himself, notably “Simon” (1980), about brilliant but bored scientists who, just for kicks, convinces a psychology professor (played by Alan Arkin) that he’s from another planet. Then came “Lovesick” (1983), about a psychiatrist (Dudley Moore) who falls in love with a patient (Elizabeth McGovern), and “The Manhattan Project” (1986), about a teenager who makes his own atomic bomb. He was also those films’ writer or co-writer.
Mr. Brickman was one of the screenwriters of “For the Boys” (1991), a period romance with Bette Midler and James Caan, before being called back into the Woody Allen fold in the midst of controversies involving Mr. Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn and allegations that Mr. Allen had sexually abused Dylan Farrow — both the daughters of Mia Farrow, his companion. (Mr. Allen denied the allegations.)
Last-minute changes were being made in Mr. Allen’s next film, “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” including replacing Ms. Farrow as the female lead with Diane Keaton. The movie, from an Allen-Brickman script that had been set aside decades before, was released in 1993.
Mr. Brickman’s last film script was “Intersection” (1994), a romantic-triangle thriller starring Richard Gere and Sharon Stone. But a new career chapter lay ahead.
Broadway producers were planning a musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the 1960s pop stars with roots in the Newark area. The show, “Jersey Boys,” didn’t interest Mr. Brickman until he learned more about the group’s back story — in neighborhoods where the Mafia was just another bit of local color — and was drawn to the brink-of-manhood perspective of their hit songs.
“The songs the Four Seasons did were guys singing to each other about girls,” he told The Capital Times of Madison, Wis., in 2012.
When he did sign on to write the “Jersey Boys” book with Rick Elice, his music degree came in handy. “It allows me to talk to composers in their own language,” Mr. Brickman said in the same interview. “I understand how to achieve certain effects harmonically. There’s no decoding necessary.”
The show, which opened in November 2005, won four Tony Awards, including best musical. The book lost to “The Drowsy Chaperone.”
Mr. Brickman’s second Broadway musical was “The Addams Family” (2010), based on Charles Addams’s ghoulish cartoon characters and the TV show of the same name. He and Mr. Elice wrote the book, and the production, starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, had a 20-month run at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. It was not as huge a success as the first show, but very few productions were. “Jersey Boys” ran on Broadway for more than 11 years before moving to an Off Broadway stage. (The show has since left New York and is on tour.)
Mr. Brickman also directed “Sister Mary Explains It All,” a 2001 Showtime movie written by Christopher Durang and based on his play, which starred Ms. Keaton as an authoritarian nun.
In addition to his daughter Sophie, Mr. Brickman is survived by his wife, Nina Feinberg, a film editor and television producer, whom he married in 1973; another daughter, Jessica Brickman; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Brickman never had a career master plan. In his 20s, he told The New York Times in 1986, “I made a lot of decisions based on how late I could sleep in the morning.”
In his early 30s, he got a call one day from his accountant, who said he had a $180,000 check for him: The banjo album had been released again. And although Mr. Brickman believed that fortune favored the well prepared, he had to admit, “It’s important to be lucky.”
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