Mr. Brickman died in Manhattan on Friday, his daughter Sophie Brickman told The New York Times.
Brickman wrote and directed independently Simon (1980), an offbeat comedy about a psychology professor (Alan Arkin) who is brainwashed into thinking he's from outer space; Lovesick (1983), in which Alec Guinness plays the ghost of Sigmund Freud giving love advice to a psychiatrist (Dudley Moore); and The Manhattan Project (1986), about a high-school student (Christopher Collett) who builds a nuclear weapon for a science project.
Mr. Brickman died on Friday in Manhattan, his daughter Sophie Brickman told The New York Times.
Brickman wrote and directed Simon (1980), an offbeat comedy about a psychology professor (Alan Arkin) who is brainwashed into thinking he is from outer space. Lovesick (1983), starring Alec Guinness as the ghost of Sigmund Freud giving love advice to a psychiatrist (Dudley Moore); and The Manhattan Project (1986), about a high-school student (Christopher Collett) who builds a nuclear weapon for a science project.
And in 2001, she directed an adaptation of Christopher Duran's play Sister Mary Explains It All for Showtime, starring Annie Hall herself and Diane Keaton. Similar videos
Brickman also worked with Rick Elice on the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Jersey Boys, wrote the screenplay for the 2014 film adaptation, and reteamed with him on the 2010 stage musical The Addams Family.
In the early 1960s, when Allen was making a name for himself as a stand-up comedian, Brickman played banjo in the folk group The Tullys, who had a hit with "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)." He's still a member.
"The Tullys were the headliners, and Woody was the opening act. Woody had a very quick idea and he had a quick way with the material," Brickman told the blog Classic Television Showbiz in a 2016 interview. "The plan was to give him maximum exposure on TV as quickly as possible, so (producer) Charlie Joff convinced us to work together," he says.
"We worked on jokes, and after a few hours, his housekeeper brought in a plate of tuna sandwiches and we took a break. I don't even know what we said during the break. Together we wrote many of his early stand-up performances, which he eventually recorded. When he had some specials on TV, he did the Monsanto show, the Libby's show, a one-off variety show that we wrote together. Then we started writing movies. ”
Brickman left music to build a solid career in television, and made a guest appearance as head writer on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, when he agreed to collaborate with Allen on the futuristic comedy Sleeper (1973). The job came completely by chance. As luck would have it, an album Brickman had recorded years earlier with his college roommate Eric Weisberg was chosen for the soundtrack to the 1972 Burt Reynolds movie Everyone Is First to Die. It featured a song called "Dueling Banjos."
“I was in therapy at the time, and my analyst said, ‘Things don’t fall from the sky. You have to work to improve your situation and make yourself happy,’” Brickman said. "The same week my accountant called me and said, 'There's a check on your desk from Warner Bros. for $170,000.' I said, 'What did you do?' And he said, 'I don't know.' I didn't know that either. Warner Bros. had retitled an old banjo album that had been released on the Elektra label called New Dimensions as the Deliverance soundtrack, even though it wasn't. More than a million copies sold. That's how it is."
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Sleeper was originally conceived as a homage to silent comedy, and Allen didn't want any dialogue. But when he came up with the concept of a jazz musician frozen without his consent and then thawed 200 years later, it made sense to take advantage of the neurotic character Allen had developed over the years. Dialogue was the only way to make this happen.
"We didn't write the scenes together. "I think that's the end of any collaboration," Brickman said in an interview with the Writers Guild Foundation in 2011. "I don't think there's any such thing as equal collaboration. I believe that in any collaboration, one person, one personality, one perspective has to dominate."
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