Marshall Brickman: Master of Film, TV, Music and Broadway
By Roger Paradiso
I read the news today, oh boy. One of my mentors and an amazing talent died. I read in a Times obit that Marshall Brickman had passed on and left an amazing body of work in film, TV, music and Broadway. I worked closely with Brickman on two of his films, Lovesick and The Manhattan Project.
In Lovesick, Dudley Moore played a shrink who had his office on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. He was falling in love with his patient, a young Elizabeth McGovern. Also in the film was Julian Beck, formerly of the Village and co-founder of The Living Theater. Brickman always tried to sneak some of his fellow Villagers (like Beck and Alan Arkin) in his movies.
Both Arkin and Brickman had been in the folk band, the Tarriers. Arkin left the band to do standup comedy and became one of our great actors. He starred in Brickman’s first film called Simon. I could see the smile on Brickman’s face when we scouted for Lovesick. It was a fun shoot in the Village back in 1982.
At the time, I did not know all the connections he had to the Village. But now I understand them after going back 40 years to piece together his career. Brickman wasn’t the kind of guy who would talk about his past. He was always moving forward.
Brickman was an important part of the Village in the sixties working with the Tarriers and then, for a brief period, with John and Michelle Phillips in a group called The New Journeymen. John and Michelle found fame later when two new members came onboard another version of the band called The Mamas & the Papas. Brickman would tell me he was working on a script for one of the great folk bands of the time. Like many things in the film business, that script never got made.
He started writing jokes and bits for Woody Allen and other comedians. Woody and he became friends and collaborated on two iconic films, Annie Hall and Manhattan. Annie Hall won an Oscar for both of them. Manhattan was nominated for an Oscar a few years later. They also collaborated on Sleeper and Manhattan Murder Mystery.
Brickman wrote Jersey Boys (which ran for 12 years on Broadway) and the screen play for the film version.
“In his Madison (college) days, Brickman focused on folk music. His apartment served as the unofficial headquarters for the campus folk scene (and a then-unknown Bob Dylan crashed there on his way to New York City, fame, and fortune). Shortly after graduating with a double major in music and science, Brickman and Eric Weissberg ’61 recorded the New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass album that provided most of the soundtrack for the 1972 movie Deliverance, including the hit Dueling Banjos. Not long after that, Brickman was back in New York, where he found himself crafting Johnny Carson’s “Carnac the Magnificent” bits as head writer for The Tonight Show.”
—On Wisconsin Alumni Magazine
