![]() ![]() Nevertheless, they also experienced the frustrations inherent in simply writing jokes and short sketches rather than anything longer or more substantial. Both Brickman and Allen later attributed much of their success as writers to their early “schooling” in television. More than a decade earlier, Woody Allen had begun his own extraordinary career by writing for television shows such as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show, and he too had contributed to Candid Camera. Instead, he abandoned music (at least professionally) in the late 1960s and became a writer for television, specifically a gag and sketch writer for shows such as Candid Camera and The Dick Cavett show. However, despite their dubious nomenclature, The New Journeymen also contained future musical stars, namely John Phillips and Michelle Phillips, who would go on to become half of The Mamas & the Papas.īrickman himself would not attain fame and fortune as a musician. After The Terriers broke up in the mid-1960s, Brickman continued in music, joining a group whose name is worthy of inclusion in the script of Spinal Tap, because “The New Journeymen” is almost as bad as the name used for the first iteration of The Tap, “The New Originals”. ![]() Weissberg was a hugely gifted banjo player who would go on to write the most famous banjo song ever written, “Duelling Banjos”, which would become a gigantic hit a decade later as the soundtrack to Deliverance (1972). ![]() Instead, like so many Western teenagers at that time, he became a musician, singing in a folk group called The Terriers, which was most notable for also featuring Eric Weissberg. However, as the 1960s began, Brickman completed his education and was ready to take his first tentative steps as what would now probably be called a “creative” (an anodyne, almost meaningless term used to refer to anyone working, or trying to work, in the arts). He began his studies there in the late 1950s, at the end of the Eisenhower era, which again was a period of relative peace and prosperity, at least in comparison with war-torn Europe, which was still struggling to recover from the destruction wrought upon it by the Nazis. Indeed, for a brief period (roughly between 19), life in Brazil, at least for the foreign expatriates there, was something of a gilded existence.Īfter his sun-kissed childhood, Brickman attended college in the US, studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although the US was not bombed during World War Two (other than at Pearl Harbor, of course), life in America during wartime was still far more tense and fraught than it would have been in Rio. Given that World War Two broke out soon after his parents’ arrival in South America, there must have been times later in his life when Marshall was grateful that his parents had emigrated. He was born there in 1939, the son of an American couple (Abram and Pauline) who had moved to Brazil to live and work. However, unlike Allen and so many other great screenwriters, he hailed not from New York but from Rio de Janeiro. Like Woody Allen and so many other of the great screenwriters of the 20 th century, Marshall Brickman was Jewish. Nevertheless, like Brackett and Diamond before him, he merits inclusion in any consideration of great cinema writers, principally because his two finest co-writes – Annie Hall and Manhattan – are not only Woody Allen’s two greatest films but two of the greatest films ever made. Diamond (Billy Wilder’s two great writing partners), Marshall Brickman falls into the second category, having achieved far greater success as Woody Allen’s co-screenwriter than he ever did as a screenwriter in his own right. There are great screenwriters and then there are great co-screenwriters. ![]()
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