Marshall Brickman: Creator of Annie Hall and ‘Jersey Boys,’ Player of the Banjo
Marshall Brickman, not alone, accepted the hard truth that being known primarily as a banjo player rarely takes you to the top of the entertainment world.
Fortunately, playing the banjo does not disqualify the player from success in other areas of the arts, and Marshall Brickman, a banjo picker who died Friday at the age of 85, became one of the most successful least-known entertainment writers of his generation.
For the stage he co-wrote Jersey Boys, which told the origin story of the Four Seasons — the singing group, not the restaurant — and ran for 11 years on Broadway.
Jersey Boys loosely falls into the category of jukebox musicals, meaning its primary selling point is well-known songs written and/or recorded by the artist or artists the show is about. That poses a deceptively tough task for the show’s writer, because the script must mesh with songs that were not written to further a biographical narrative. If you’re creating My Fair Lady, you write songs to enhance, enrich and advance the story. If you’re tracking the musical life of Tina Turner, Carole King, Queen, Michael Jackson or Cher, you got what you got.
That’s one reason the “books” for most jukebox musicals are laughable, and one reason it’s so impressive that Brickman’s script for Jersey Boys was not. If it wasn’t King Lear, it made the show into more than just four actors singing “Walk Like a Man.”
Brickman was in his 60s when he wrote Jersey Boys, making it kind of the third act in his writing life.
The first act came when he was less than half that age and working as the head writer for Johnny Carson at the time when The Tonight Show was a meeting hall for American culture.
While Brickman created reams of material for Carson, he most famously wrote the recurring segment “Carnac The Magnificent.” Dressed in garish swami attire, Carson would solemnly divine an “answer” before the question was revealed to the audience and viewers.
Samples:
Carnac: Dustin Hoffman. Question: Describe someone cleaning his Hoffman. Carnac: An unmarried woman. Question: What was Elizabeth Taylor between 3 and 5 p.m. on June 1, 1952?
Being that Carson’s show aired late at night, it was even allowed mild adult humor. Carnac: Ben Gay. Question: Why didn’t Mrs. Franklin have any kids?
If that might not electrify audiences today, it got the laughs, and writing it a couple of times a week wasn’t as easy as Carson made it sound.
But Brickman’s best work was longer form: the scripts for what are arguably Woody Allen’s two best movies, Annie Hall and Manhattan.
Annie Hall, in particular, remains one of the most enjoyable movies of its generation — an assertion that might remain true if it had been a one-woman production employing only Diane Keaton as Annie. She’s a totally endearing neurotic from Wisconsin, an aspiring nightclub singer who moves to New York and meets Allen’s equally neurotic Alvy Singer. It’s a familiar setup that often rolls into a charming rom-com or even a Hallmark movie. This being Woody Allen, that’s not what he wanted and not what Brickman wrote. The Annie-and-Alvy relationship manages to be wistful, fulfilling, sad, funny and satisfying all at the same time.
About all that’s missing is Annie in the bathtub singing “If I Fell” — which Keaton does, but in Shoot the Moon, not Annie Hall.
Woody Allen films vary widely in quality and watchability. Annie Hall tops both lists, and let’s call it no accident that Marshall Brickman wrote it.
For Brickman’s part, he didn’t seem to mind working in the shadows of Allen, Carson or the Four Seasons. There’s something to be said for getting a share of the rewards while not having to endure the challenge of celebrity. Nor were Broadway, television and movies the only arts areas in which he performed well.
He was also quite a good banjo player.
He was kicking around the New York folk scene of the late 1950s, playing the banjo in Washington Square Park, when his college roomie Eric Weissberg asked him to join the Tarriers, a folk trio that had scored hits with “Cindy Oh Cindy” and their version of “The Banana Boat Song,” a Jamaican folk tune reworked into the defining song of Harry Belafonte.
In 1963 Brickman teamed up with Weissberg for an instrumental album called New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass. While it sold modestly at the time, it earned them the long-term admiration of the picking community.
Civilians know it, too, because the track “Dueling Banjos” became the indelible theme from the 1972 movie Deliverance and rose to №2 on the national Billboard chart.
Brickman didn’t play on what we hear in the movie, though he shared the rewards when the original album was re-released as the Deliverance soundtrack and sold a million copies. Nor was that the only valuable souvenir he took from his Tarriers years. On one of the Tarriers’s many performances at New York’s Bitter End, their opening act was the young Woody Allen. Brickman and the new kid hit it off well enough to work together on Allen’s standup material, which led to their eventual movie collaborations.
In any case, Brickman was a skilled banjo player and had he not left the Tarriers in 1965 to find work as a TV writer he very likely would have become a well-established banjo player. He also would have had a smaller bank balance.
That’s been the case for a number of other performers who play the banjo, but are better known for other work. We’re talking here about George Segal, Steve Martin, Ed Helms, Kevin Bacon, Eddie Vedder and some aspiring pop singer named Taylor Swift.
Marshall Brickman’s life filled out in a number of ways. When he was a kid, his parents brought Paul Robeson into the house for a lefty benefit. He worked for Dick Cavett, among other TV personalities, and he collaborated on multiple Broadway shows. As for the banjo, he told The Guardian that the first time he heard it, “It made me levitate. There was something compelling to it.”
Nothing rounds out a successful show biz life like a little twang.
