Born four years apart, the pair had met a decade earlier, when the bespectacled, soft-featured Brickman was working as head writer on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (1962-92), the late-night chatshow Allen often guest-hosted. Both had Jewish roots and musical inclinations; both were frustrated at being typecast as gagmen.
Accordingly, Allen recruited Brickman to expand the scope of his hitherto skittish movie endeavours. Razzing the largely mirthless science fiction that followed Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), their first collaboration Sleeper (1973) merely gestured towards comedy’s outer limits, scattering sight gags as it went. The pair’s next, however, emerged as a vastly more pointed and profound exploration.
Born of multiple rewrites and a free-ranging shoot, Annie Hall assumed haphazard shape in the edit suite, as Brickman later recalled: “When I saw the rough cut, I thought it terrible, completely unsalvageable. It rambled and was tangential and just… endless.”
Yet the more incisive 93-minute release version expanded comedy’s horizons, principally by allowing for the prospect of romantic failure and disillusionment. Critics were wowed; cinemagoers stirred to the extent it remained Allen’s biggest hit for the next 34 years. With the director-star a no-show at the 1978 Oscars, Brickman duly collected a screenplay gong, one of four wins on the night, including Best Picture.
Manhattan drew from a comparable well of personal experience, its protagonist a gagman who’s quit television to try and pen the great American novel. Even in 1979, the relationship between the 42-year-old hero and a 17-year-old schoolgirl raised eyebrows – Pauline Kael wondered “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?” – but the movie’s lustrous look seduced critics, audiences and awards voters alike.
The pair parted professionally thereafter, although Allen later afforded Brickman co-writer credit on Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), a goofy whodunnit that reworked material arrived at in early drafts of Annie Hall. Cheery critics noted the film restored an element increasingly lacking from Allen’s solo projects of the 1980s and early 1990s: big, uncomplicated laughs.
Marshall Jacob Brickman was born in Rio de Janeiro on August 25, 1939 to Polish immigrant Abram Brickman and his wife Pauline (née Wolin); asked why he was born in Rio, the adult Brickman once quipped “I wanted to be near my mother.” The family relocated to Brooklyn in 1943, where the young Marshall attended Brooklyn Technical High School before studying medicine and music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Music initially presented as Brickman’s chosen path. In 1962, he joined folk trio The Tarriers, whose 1963 album New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass later provided Deliverance (1972) with unforgettable soundtrack cues. A subsequent Brickman ensemble, The New Journeymen, featured John and Michelle Phillips before The Mamas and the Papas.
Brickman started writing on 1960’s first season of Candid Camera and began a seven-year stint on The Tonight Show in 1963, surviving a close shave in August 1969, when he turned down an invitation to Sharon Tate’s house on the night of the Manson Family murders. A creative consultant on The Dick Cavett Show (1969-1975), he also contributed to Sex and Violence (1975), the second of two pilots for The Muppet Show (1976-1981).
Post-Manhattan, Brickman began directing with Simon (1980), in which psychology professor Alan Arkin claims he’s been abducted by aliens; the Allenesque Lovesick (1983) saw psychiatrist Dudley Moore dogged by the spectre of Sigmund Freud (Alec Guinness). Yet after teen pic The Manhattan Project (1986) bombed, he reverted to screenwriting, penning the Bette Midler vehicle For the Boys (1991), and enjoyed a lucrative stage hit as co-creator of the Tony-winning Jersey Boys.
In 2017, two years after the Writers Guild of America voted Annie Hall the funniest screenplay of all time, Brickman reflected on his relationship with Allen, to whom – throughout all the trials and tribulations – he’d remained loyal: “When we were younger… we’d see these two old guys sitting munching on a pretzel with their pains, and we’d make remarks about them. And now we are them. We can’t believe it.”
He is survived by his wife, the producer Nina Feinberg, and their two daughters.
Marshall Brickman, born August 25, 1939, died November 29, 2024.
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