In February 2007, I met with writer-director-musician Marshall Brickman at his Upper West Side apartment overlooking Central Park to interview him for my book And Here’s the Kicker. After we spoke, Brickman went on to co-write the book for the 2010 Broadway production of The Addams Family, co-starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth. The musical, nominated for two Tony Awards and seven Drama Desk Awards (winning for Best Set Design), would run on Broadway for more than 700 performances and continues to tour to this day. On November 29, at the age of 85, Brickman passed away in Manhattan. Below is an excerpted version of our interview.
Fans of writer-director-actor Woody Allen like to refer to the mid-to-late 1970s as his career’s high point, his cinematic heyday. But three of his most critically lauded films during that period — Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan — were co-written by another Jewish kid from New York, the lesser known, but multitalented Marshall Brickman.
Brickman may have looked like an overnight success in 1978 when he walked onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Annie Hall (which he shared with Allen), but he was far from a novice to the comedy-writing game. He was already an accomplished television scribe, a former head writer for The Tonight Show (a job he received at the relatively young age of 27), and a staff writer for Candid Camera and The Dick Cavett Show.
Brickman was also one of the key writers of a little-seen pilot in 1975 called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence. It was a risky venture to combine Sesame Street–type Muppets with adult content, but Marshall somehow managed to make it work, with irreverent yet oddly innocent gags such as the “Seven Deadly Sins Pageant” (appropriately, the character of Sloth arrived just as the end credits began to roll and asked, “Am I late?”). Brickman didn’t stick around when The Muppet Show was picked up for its first season, but he did leave a lasting influence. Without him, the world might never have enjoyed a bushy-eyebrowed Swedish Chef howling, “Bort! Bort! Bort!”
After helping Woody Allen win his first Oscar, Brickman went on to write and direct many of his own projects, including Simon (1980), Lovesick (1983), and The Manhattan Project (1986). He co-wrote Manhattan Murder Mystery with Allen in 1993, directed a TV adaptation of playwright Christopher Durang’s Catholic satire Sister Mary Explains It All (2001), and co-wrote the Broadway hit Jersey Boys (2005), a musical about the popular early rock-and-roll quartet the Four Seasons.
It’s not a coincidence that Brickman would write about a singing group. During the early to mid-’60s, shortly before making a living as a writer, he was a member of the folk trio the Tarriers, then later the New Journeymen, which included a pair of musical visionaries named John Phillips and Michelle Phillips, who would soon go on to form the Mamas and the Papas.
Perhaps Brickman’s biggest hidden talent is his bluegrass roots. He played guitar and banjo (along with banjo virtuoso and Juilliard graduate Eric Weissberg) on the 1963 album New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass, which would find a huge mainstream audience nearly ten years later as the soundtrack to the wildly successful John Boorman–directed movie Deliverance.
It’s almost impossible to ignore the inherent irony that the banjo picking of Deliverance, which so many people associate with the stereotypical Hollywood-created southern rednecks and “mountain folk,” was at least partly created by a future New Yorker comedy writer and Woody Allen cohort. It’s just another example of how Brickman can be so wonderfully and unexpectedly subversive.
What was it about bluegrass that appealed to you growing up?
I first heard it when I was about 11. My friend Eric Weissberg had been playing the banjo for a few years, and he was kind of a genius at it. It was a thrilling sound — it just knocked me out.
But I’ve never been able to satisfactorily answer why this particular music appealed to guys like us, from Brooklyn, urban Jews. Especially back when the idea of doing this type of southern local music was so associated with things that we had a lot of suspicion about — politically, socially, culturally. It was so alien, in a way. Maybe that was part of its appeal. Or maybe it was the type of percussive, masculine sound that preadolescents enjoy so much.
The Deliverance soundtrack has an interesting history.
Eric and I made a record called New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass in 1963 and it sold about 5,000 copies. It was a kind of experimental album — we were developing a style of playing that was a combination of traditional Earl Scruggs–style picking and something more fluid and melodic. Other guys like Bill Keith and, later, Béla Fleck, did much more impressive developing of that kind of playing, but we were among the first. Anyhow, now it’s 1971 or so and John Boorman, the director of
Deliverance, had this idea for the sequence in Deliverance — or maybe it was James Dickey, the author of the book and the screenplay — when one of the characters plays a duet with a little kid. So Eric and Steve Mandell then recorded the “Dueling Banjos” track. I really had nothing to do with it — I was already working on The Tonight Show as a writer. Warner released it as a single and, for some crazy reason, it became a big hit in Detroit. But Warner needed a whole album, so they remastered our old New Dimensions album. They released the record as the “soundtrack from Deliverance,” which it certainly is not, but it took off and it’s been a steady seller for 30 years now.
How did you get involved with your first folk group, the Tarriers? Was this after college?
I graduated from the University of Wisconsin with degrees in music and science. Eric had already been with the Tarriers, but he felt they needed something else. They were a trio at that point. And he asked me, “Why don’t you join the group? We’ll become a quartet.”
What did you bring to the group?
I played a bunch of instruments — bass and country fiddle, and guitar and banjo. Since I could tune up pretty fast and had a little background in comedy, it defaulted to me to do the between-song patter — de rigueur for folk groups of that era. I was the guy who stood up in front of the group and told jokes.
Do you remember any of the specific patter?
Thankfully, no. I would guess that the material, while appropriate for a coffeehouse audience of 1966, might suffer and die from exposure to print — even if I could remember any of it.
Who else was in the group besides you and Eric Weissberg?
Bob Carey and Clarence Cooper. Two Black guys and two Jews.
An integrated group — that must have been a rarity.
We couldn’t play south of Washington, D.C. We couldn’t get booking for the same hotels.
What year was this?
1964 or so.
This was around the time of the British Invasion.
Yes, but as folk purists, we never felt we were in the same world as the Brits — or the Roger & Roger groups that were vying with the Brits for space on Billboard’s Top 10.
How did you end up joining forces with John Phillips?
“Join forces” — that’s an interesting way of putting it. It was more like John ingested me whole, like a python. John had a group called the Journeymen. In the early ’60s he met a spectacular-looking young woman named Michelle Gilliam and promptly fell in love. We all became friends, and we formed the New Journeymen. A clever name, no? John, Michelle, and me.
Were you ever in the running to become a member of the Mamas and the Papas?
On the contrary. Leaving the group — which I did after an eight-month wild ride — was, for me, the equivalent of escaping from a burning building. John was into drugs of all kinds; experimental, over- and under-the-counter. John was wonderfully talented and charming, but I was this kid from Brooklyn and really couldn’t tolerate that lifestyle. It was madness.
We’d come into some town to perform, and I’d keep saying, “We have to rehearse! We have to do a sound check!” And John would say, “Chill out.” And he and Michelle would take off and do interesting things like buy two motorcycles and ride around town. Whereas I would stay back at the hotel and write bass charts. [Laughs]
Did you keep in touch with John after you left the music scene?
We did remain friends. Later, I quit the music business and went to write for Candid Camera and later for The Tonight Show. By this time, John and Michelle had hit it really big, and they were living in Bel Air in [’30s and ’40s film actress] Jeanette MacDonald’s old house, a spectacular chalet with a giant pool and peacocks strutting around the grounds — like a drugged-out Versailles. It was quite a scene. I used to work all day at NBC in Burbank and then, at the end of the day, I’d switch gears and call John and ask, “Okay, what have you got for me tonight? What’s going on?”
One Friday in 1969, I called John to see what the plan was, and he said, “We have a choice. There’s a party over in Malibu. Or we could go over to Benedict Canyon.”
You have to understand that as head writer for a daily show like The Tonight Show, one is always looking for material. I used to read every magazine and newspaper I could get my hands on, in a never-ending, desperate attempt to find material for the show. I had read earlier that day, in the science section of the Los Angeles Times, that there was a colony of phosphorescent plankton that had drifted into Malibu from the Pacific, and that every time a wave crashed, it looked like a big neon tube lighting up the entire beach. So I opted to go see the plankton. That’s the kind of fun guy I was. I told John: “Let’s go to Malibu.”
We show up at this party — hosted by this Brit director Michael Sarne, who had gotten a little heat from a 1968 film called Joanna and who later directed a train wreck called Myra Breckenridge. Anyhow, we showed up, and it was like Caligula’s Rome. There was a big pile of white powder on a table, which turned out to be mescaline. People would casually stroll by, lick a finger, dip it into the power, and lick it off. Who was I not to do this also? Out on the beach was a huge bonfire, and everyone was singing and playing and doing other things not suitable to mention in a family publication, and at one point my hand started to strobe in front of my face. Understand that up to that time I was, pharmaceutically speaking, pretty much a virgin. Maybe a little grass in the dressing room. So, as a Jewish control freak now out of control, I started to panic. I said to John, “My hand is strobing.” He looked at me for a full 20 seconds, his pupils teeny little black dots, and finally said, “What?” And I yelled, “My hand is strobing in front of my face!” And he said, “God gave you a gift, man. Why don’t you enjoy it?” So I immediately called a friend of mine and told her, “Get me the fuck out of here.”
My friend picked me up and deposited me back at the hotel on Sunset Boulevard where The Tonight Show put up their staff, and I put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door and went to sleep. When I awoke, there were about six dozen messages waiting for me. You’re probably ahead of me, but that was the night of the Manson murders. The horrible events took place at the other party I could have gone to — the one in Benedict Canyon. The first victim they had discovered was a young man about my age who was shot numerous times. All my friends thought it was me.
My God, it could have easily been you.
Absolutely. Then again, maybe if I had been there, the murders wouldn’t have taken place. But, most likely, I would be dead. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
What can we learn from this? Perhaps: Stay out of Los Angeles. The music scene was just never for me. There used to be a mirror on 57th Street in New York, a little distorted, like a fun-house mirror. One day, as I was carrying my banjo and my guitar, I looked at this strangely shaped person in the reflection, and I thought, Is this why my father escaped from Poland? So I could become an itinerant musician with a squished head and spindly legs?
So I gave up the music scene entirely and eventually got a job as a writer for Candid Camera. This was before writing for The Tonight Show.
How did you get the job for Candid Camera?
I auditioned for Allen Funt, the creator of Candid Camera, by writing a couple of pages with ideas for those hostile, hateful little stunts he used to do. I guess you could say that Candid Camera was one of the first reality shows.
Compared with what goes on today, those stunts were very sweet.
I know. Nobody had to eat tarantulas.
What was Allen Funt like to work for?
Kind of eccentric, and when he walked into the room there was an aura of tension around him. I was fired after about seven months, which was par for the course. Pretty much every writer was fired from that show at one point or another.
What sort of ideas did you come up with for the show?
One of the ideas — I think it was mine, but it’s been a long time — concerned a dry-cleaning establishment. A guy would drop off his suit to be dry-cleaned — this took a little planning, of course — and we would manufacture an identical suit but in a tiny size, like for a chimpanzee. When the guy returned for his suit, the clerk would bring out the tiny version and explain that it had shrunk, and he was really sorry, but the customer should have read the warning on the back of the ticket. And some people accepted it and some people became very angry, and so on. I recall one customer didn’t respond very well. It turns out this guy was caught once before by Candid Camera. He was in a city he wasn’t supposed to be in, with someone he wasn’t supposed to be with. So after he was caught for the second time, and after he was told, “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!,” instead of smiling, he went berserk. He spotted the hidden camera and picked up a glass ashtray weighing about six pounds and hurled it at the camera operator and broke the two-way mirror the camera was hidden behind. Then he decked the clerk, who was, of course, an actor working for the show. Lots of good, wholesome fun. Needless to say, he didn’t sign the release. But the footage was a big hit at the show’s Christmas party.
Did this happen often?
Not as violently, but the ratio of filmed segments to segments that actually aired was something like 20 to one.
It must have been tough to pull off those stunts. The cameras were huge compared with the ones today, and I assume you needed a tremendous amount of lighting.
You’re absolutely right. One of the crises on the show was the phasing out of anything that was in black-and-white. They had to start using color film, which needed about five times the amount of light as black-and-white film. So they had to put these 2,000-watt bulbs in the lamps in the fake offices or other places we used. Most of our “locations” were more like movie sets than offices. The walls didn’t even go up to the ceiling. And there would be some poor person earning $4.10 an hour, hired as a temp, sitting at a desk. The “manager” would tell this temp, “Look, I’m going out for 20 minutes, so just answer the phone and take messages.” And then a man in a gorilla suit would run through. And then the “manager” would return and say, “I’m back from lunch. Did anything happen?”
And the temp would often say, “No, nothing.”
People don’t notice what they don’t want to notice — either that, or they don’t trust their own senses. More likely, they were afraid that if they were the only one to have seen the gorilla, they might be locked up. It was like that famous experiment conceived by the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, detailed in Obedience to Authority [Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963; HarperCollins, 1974]. If a person in a white lab coat tells someone it’s okay to hurt someone else, then it becomes accepted. Someone in a position of authority can remove all rationality from a person’s responses.
That’s especially true when you’re a temp.
You don’t want to rock the boat.
How did you get the job writing for The Tonight Show?
My friend Dick Cavett, who was a writer on the show at this time, the early ’60s, was leaving to try his hand at stand-up. And I was bouncing around after Candid Camera. So I said to Dick, “Let me see what your stuff looks like when you hand it in to Johnny.” I had this idea that if Carson saw material submitted to him in the form that he was used to, he would think I had already worked for him. Or deserved to work for him. Anyhow, he hired me.
That’s the key to life, isn’t it? Acting as if you belong where you want to end up.
“Assume a virtue if you have it not,” as Shakespeare wrote.
How did you become the head writer for the show?
I didn’t have an office when I started, just a rolling typewriter stand with an old Royal on it. And I would push my stand to an empty part of the office and write my jokes. Walter Kempley, who later wrote for Happy Days, was then the head writer. He had a disagreement with the producer over a raise, and he left. Walter called me into his office and said, “Congratulations, kid. You’re the head writer.” He gave me half a box of cigars and his joke file. I got his office — a nice office with a window — and a backlog of four or five years of jokes.
How long had you been on the show?
A month or two.
You skipped over all the other writers to become head writer?
The other writers didn’t want the job. They were smart. The monologue writers, like David Lloyd, who later wrote for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Cheers and Frasier, merely had to deliver a monologue to Carson every day by three o’clock. I shouldn’t say “merely,” because writing a daily monologue can be a terrifying task. But the head writer, in addition to running the writing department, had to write all the sketches, the little interview pieces, the comedy spots.
Such as Carnac the Magnificent, Aunt Blabby, and “The Tea Time Movie”?
All that shit. I have piles of it, cubic feet of it, stored somewhere.
They were very vaudevillian, those sketches.
Johnny loved to do characters. And the advantage we had was, as a nightly show, the material didn’t have to be timeless — or even very funny. But if you had timely references, it usually worked. And Johnny was quite skillful. The audiences loved him.
TV’s a monster. It just eats up material.
It’s impossible to be continuously good. That’s why I’m amazed when I see a TV show that’s good consistently, night after night, week after week. One of the things that I’ll go to my grave having to apologize for is having invented the “Carnac Saver.”
Which was what?
Every time Johnny’s character Carnac the Magnificent told a joke that bombed, he would have a line that would save him. Like a “hecklerstopper.” And we would give Johnny a page of these jokes: “May the Great Camel of Giza leave you a present in your undershorts.” I can’t believe we were paid for this.
Was there a lot of pressure for you on The Tonight Show?
I didn’t experience it as pressure. It was a good stress. I was young, had a lot of energy. I was what — 26, 27?
What are your feelings about Carson? What was he like to work with?
He was an avuncular figure to me, even though he was probably only 40 when I started on the show.
He had a reputation for being difficult to write for, very aloof.
Aloof, I guess. He wasn’t a touchy-feely type of guy. But appreciative and loyal. And a good boss.
What were his strengths, from a writer’s standpoint?
He knew how to deliver a joke. He was a good reactor. He was perfect for television. He never gave a whole lot away. But in terms of delivering comic material, he had that glint.
He knew exactly what would work for him.
He had a good arena instinct, a solid sense of what the audience would accept from him. Not only in terms of the kinds of jokes, but how far he was willing to push it politically. He was a kind of barometer. When he finally did a joke about Johnson or Nixon or whomever, then it became okay to think about those things in a different way. I’ve always thought that television exists for the audience as a kind of parental entity. If it’s on TV, then it’s been certified by someone, somewhere. And if Johnny did a joke about Nixon or the mayor or whomever — then it became okay to do jokes about that person.
We were constantly trying to push Johnny — by we, I mean Jewish, liberal-left-wing writers. We would always try to have him do jokes that were a little stronger than what he wanted to do. But every once in a while he’d sense when the time was right. That was his strength, really. He was like a tuning fork. He would vibrate with what he perceived was the mood of the country.
So he could sense when the time was right to tell a certain joke?
Yes. Without losing his constituency.
I think of Carson as representing this gentile, Middle America persona. Did you have trouble tailoring your humor to that world, being a Jewish writer from Brooklyn?
No, it’s easy to write for someone who’s already established a persona. It’s easy to write for a Bob Hope or a Jack Benny or a Groucho Marx. Those characters have already been developed.
It’s the hardest thing to develop a persona. That’s why movies and plays about fictional comedians are almost never truly convincing. Because it takes years for the audience to help a comedian shape a comedic persona. A case in point: Woody Allen’s act was all over the map at first. I remember, early on, he had one of those “What if?” premises. For instance: “What if Russia launched a missile and it was going to hit New York? And Khrushchev had to call Mayor Lindsay and warn him about it?” And then Woody would get on the phone like Bob Newhart and be Mayor Lindsay’s half of the phone conversation. It was funny, of course — because he can make anything he touches funny. But then he eventually started to explore more personal things — subjects about his psychiatrist or his marriage. Initially, people were kind of shocked that he was willing to be so intimate onstage — it’s hard to believe this now in the current environment of public confessionals — but they didn’t know what to think. And a lot of times they didn’t laugh. Woody would say his jokes for 20 minutes, and the audience would just stare at him, as if he were an oil painting.
When did you first meet Woody?
He opened for the Tarriers at the Bitter End in the early 1960s, and we were represented by the same manager, Charles Joffe. He thought Woody and I might be able to write together, and as I said, I was the one in the Tarriers who was the front man and told jokes. It turned out Mr. Joffe was right.
You once said that Woody is very intuitive, while you’re much more analytical and logical.
I would always try to back into something logically. And he would always make an intuitive leap.
How would you write together?
Just like you and I are doing now. A dialogue. Then he’d go off and write a scene and give it to me, and we’d trade it back and forth. Or we would play “What if this?” or “What if that?” like Woody used to do when he first started in stand-up.
One of us would say something and someone would say something else. You know, if you’re loose enough, you can make it work. That’s the trick. It’s hard to do. It’s like an actor who’s in the part but who’s also looking at his own performance at the same time. Then you can come up with the right material. A lot of it is intuitive, and it’s hard to get your internal editor out of the way. The editor is always sitting there and editing before you say it.
Collaborations can often be tricky, though. In the end, who ultimately decides what’s funny and what’s not?
I don’t think there’s ever a totally equal collaboration. There has to be one dominant intelligence or creative force that informs the process. You have to have one person who is making those decisions, so that you wind up with something that has a little consistency and integrity.
Can you give me a specific example of your creative process with Woody?
Our first movie was Sleeper. We first wanted to do the movie with an intermission. Talk about arrogance! We wanted the beginning of the film to take place in contemporary New York, where a guy who owns a health-food store goes in for an operation. And then there would be an intermission, and you would come back and this character would be defrosted and in the future. We thought there would be no speaking whatsoever in our version of the future. We wanted to do a purely visual comedy. And we tried to figure out why in the future there would be no speaking. We decided that in the future it was a privilege to speak, that only certain classes of society had the right to speak, that everyone else had to be quiet.
So we wrote a whole scenario in which none of the things that we were good at as writers, like dialogue and jokes, were in the second half of the movie. Fortunately, we soon came to the conclusion that this was a bad idea. It eventually became what it became, the movie that everyone knows, but it had to go through that exploratory process first.
What are some specific jokes that didn’t make the final cut of Sleeper?
One early joke was that the president of the future exploded and Woody had to reconstruct him. But the only thing left was his penis. That was later changed to a nose.
When you’re loose and intuitive, you’re vulnerable to a variety of peripheral influences. We were working on the screenplay during the 1972 Fischer- Spassky chess match, in Reykjavík. We were both chess fans, and we were watching a lot of it on TV. So we wrote a chess sequence in which the pieces were played by actual human beings — knights on horses, the whole deal. Woody filmed the scene out in the desert on a giant chessboard. He was a white pawn, and he was trembling. One of the other players, who was the voice of God, muses, “Hmmm … should I sacrifice that pawn?” Woody starts to argue with God and then finally breaks all the rules of chess by running off the board, with the other chess pieces chasing after him.
That scene never made the final cut. It was like what later happened with Annie Hall. A lot of material was taken out because the audience just doesn’t care how clever the authors are. They only want a good story. And they’re right.
Are there jokes in Sleeper that you now regret? Any that you feel are too dated?
I try never to regret anything. But the Albert Shanker joke is one that might need some explanation to current viewers. At the time of the movie’s release in 1973, Albert Shanker was the very powerful president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York.
The joke was that Shanker had somehow gotten his hands on a nuclear bomb and destroyed civilization. How do you feel about that joke now?
I love that type of stuff. I think it really grounds it in its time and place. If people don’t get it now, too bad. I think you always have to be as specific as possible; that’s the only way you can achieve the universal. But that’s the problem with TV — it tries for the universal and gets nothing.
It’s like E.B. White’s advice about writing: Don’t write about Man, write about a man.
Exactly.
Let’s talk about Annie Hall. From what I understand, it started as a book.
Woody might have started it as a book. I’m not sure. After Sleeper, we decided to do something else. We were working on two ideas for movies simultaneously: One was this kind of weird literary piece, which turned out to be Annie Hall. The other was a more conventional period comedy. For me, trying to decide which one to finally do was like being in a desert between two mirages. As you got closer to one idea, it would start to break up, and you’d turn around, and the other idea would look very nice from a distance, and you’d approach that one, but then that one would start to disintegrate. We went back and forth for a while, until, one morning, Woody said, “You know what? The movie that could really be a breakthrough hit is the kind that nobody’s tried before. So let’s do the crazy one, the literary one.” Which was Annie Hall.
The French had tried it a little bit, talking to the camera, breaking the frame. Very Brechtian, always reminding the audience that they were watching a movie, with split screens and cartoons. Nobody had really tried anything like that in American cinema, however, and we really couldn’t have done it anywhere but at United Artists. They were enthralled with Woody, and they gave him carte blanche.
What was the first version of Annie Hall like? Was it different from what eventually ended up onscreen?
It was full of brilliance. It was very long — about two hours and 40 minutes — and it really didn’t have Annie as a significant character. She was just one of the women in his life, among the others. If I remember correctly, she didn’t come from Wisconsin; she came from New York. But that was just in the first draft of the screenplay. By the time the movie was shot, she was from Wisconsin.
When we saw the initial screening, we thought, There’s no story here. In the first scene of the original version, Woody came out and looked at the camera and said something to the effect of, “Well, I just turned 40 and I’ve been examining my life. How did I become who I am?” And it went on from there, in a ruminative and associative fashion.
After watching it, we thought, Where’s the relationship? When people come to me with ideas, sometimes they say, “I want to do a story about a war” or “I want to do a story about a hospital.” And I’ll always say, “Tell me the story in terms of a relationship.” So, with Annie Hall, we knew what was missing. It didn’t focus on a relationship.
Audiences don’t really care how bright you are as writers and how many literary associations you make and how brilliant you come off. When you’re showing off, it becomes a little exclusionary to the audience. You’re just being precocious.
That’s why the movie was called Annie Hall and not Anhedonia or The Second Lobster Scene, which were two working titles.
Didn’t the movie have a few working titles, such as Roller Coaster Named Desire, Me and My Goy, and Me and My Jew?
Not to my recollection. Those sound like jokes, not titles.
What were your thoughts upon first seeing that two-hour-and-40-minute cut?
I was very inexperienced. I didn’t realize that a rough cut is exactly that — rough. There’s a Yiddish phrase: “Never show a fool something half-finished.” Well, I was the fool in that situation. And I don’t even know why they bothered to show it to me. I thought, Uh-oh. It was like a nightclub act, like a riff.
Later, after the drastic edit, were you upset that a lot of the brilliant material never made it to the screen?
Oh, no, no, no. Because when I saw the final cut, I thought, That’s it.
It went through a lot of reshoots, didn’t it?
A few. The ending took a while to get right. But who knows why that film works? I have no idea. It’s a film where you can learn nothing as a screen-writer or as a director, because it’s so eccentric. It’s such an odd, idiosyncratic, personal thing, and that’s probably part of its appeal. And, not to take anything away from Woody’s performance, which is very skillful, but I think that a lot of the success and charm of the film is due to Diane Keaton, with her endearing eccentricity and the way she appreciates Woody and grows as a character. She was — and is — a delight. She sort of inhabits the whole movie. And I think that’s what you leave with, that glow from her performance. But again, who knows, really, why it works? It’s a mistake to think that what you’re seeing up on the stage or on the screen is what the author intended. It isn’t. It’s always the result of a hundred compromises and accidents, both good and bad, and if you’re lucky, you get lucky.
People feel such a strong attachment to Annie Hall.
It was, among other things, a reasonably accurate record of what it might have been like to live in New York at that time. In a way, it’s an anthropological document. It was sort of at the tail end of the new Hollywood, the revolution that started, I guess, with Easy Rider, when the Young Turks from USC film school took over Old Hollywood — those years when Elliott Gould was in every other movie. There was an air of promise, an aura of possibility. It was sort of like the cultural equivalent of what happened socially in the ’60s, when you felt that there was a possibility for something new and exciting. And I’m not sure that exists anymore. I think there’s a kind of nostalgia for that now, when everything’s become so corporate, so homogenized and controlled. That generation in the ’70s used movies as their way of defining themselves culturally, the way kids now use music. Film for us was really a very important cultural experience. We loved foreign films by Bergman, Truffaut, Resnais, Fellini.
What were your thoughts when you saw the first cut of Manhattan? The same as Annie Hall?
I never saw the first cut. I just saw the final film. I thought it was fine. And it looked wonderful. I did have one discussion with Woody about a scene. It was the only time we ever had a real disagreement. In this particular scene, Woody lists Groucho Marx, Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues,” Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, and a few other things that make life worth living.
And I thought, Why Sentimental Education? Why not Madame Bovary? And how do you pick the “Jupiter” Symphony over another Mozart symphony? Woody was doing the same thing he accuses Diane’s character of doing in the movie — ranking works of art. Plus, isn’t that a tad myopic? How about things that really make life worth living? Kids. Family. Love. Sacrifice. Yes, it can be argued that this is the character’s view of the world, but I thought it was dangerous — the line between who Woody was in life and the characters he was playing in his movies was pretty fuzzy. And I said, “The critics are going to kill us! It’s a pretentious, narcissistic, solipsistic view of the world that you’re offering up.” And he said, “Nah, you’re crazy, nobody’s going to say anything, it’s going to be fine.”
And he was right. The only person who criticized us was Joan Didion in The New York Review of Books. She said something to the effect of: “Who in the hell do they think they are with their things worth living for?”
I’ve always felt that that particular speech was essential to the broader theme of the movie — that an obsession with minutiae takes our minds off the bigger issues.
Maybe you can extract a theme from that dialogue, but, honestly, we were not writing to proselytize a point of view like that, although I guess it’s sort of inherent in the movie. None of that was really in the air when we were writing the screenplay. Most of what we talked about was conversation and plot.
When you look at Manhattan, can you tell who wrote what? What scene or joke you came up with and what Woody came up with?
Sometimes, but the great rule I learned from Woody is that when you get in a room with another person, you’re both responsible for the result — assuming that there’s a reasonably equal level of talent. This is not as coy an answer as it might appear. Even though a great line or idea might be uttered by one person, it may have been triggered or stimulated by what the other party said. This happens all the time in collaborations, so the safest and fairest way of attributing ownership — though probably less satisfying to the curious — is to attribute everything to both parties.
How did you eventually write for the Muppets?
I was an enormous fan of Jim Henson’s; I really thought he was a genius. I was finally introduced to him by a mutual friend, and when Jim was given the green light to develop a pilot for ABC, he asked me to work with him. This was the 1975 TV special called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence. The Muppets were making fun of sex and violence on television, complete with a beauty pageant featuring the Seven Deadly Sins. The humor was somewhat mature for a show featuring puppets.
As evidenced by the following two jokes: “What’s black and white and red all over? The Federalist Papers!” Also: “Knock knock. Who’s there? Roosevelt. Roosevelt who? Roosevelt nice, but Gladys felt nicer.” Did you write either of those jokes?
I don’t remember, truthfully. But I did create, or help to create, a few of the Muppet characters, like the two old men in the balcony, Statler and Waldorf, and the Swedish Chef. Somewhere out there, there’s a cassette of me speaking in a mock Swedish accent that Jim Henson listened to in order to capture the mood for that character. Maybe it’ll show up one day on eBay.
You wrote and directed a movie called Simon, released in 1980. The plot involved a think tank that performed a social experiment on a character played by Alan Arkin. The purpose of this experiment was to convince Arkin’s character that he was an alien.
I always looked at Simon as being a film for the ’70s. It was satirical of the culture at the time — especially TV and faith in science. All of that seemed to be in the air then.
In one scene, a group of believers pray before a giant TV set. I take it you’re not such a fan of television?
TV is just a medium. What I’m not a fan of is how TV has replaced more meaningful cultural values and experiences — like reading and group activities. Watching TV is an isolating, rather than a socializing, experience. It creates passivity in the viewer. Most of TV is a sales tool; the culture and entertainment aspects are just a means of delivering markets to merchandisers.
Do you have any interest in writing more humor for the page? You’ve written a few pieces for The New Yorker but not in a long while. It’s been more than 30 years.
I’d love to. In college I was introduced to the writings of S.J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, and the whole New Yorker bunch. What they were able to do with the written word had an effect on me similar to when, at the age of 11, I first heard Eric Weissberg play Scruggs-style five-string banjo. It was like watching someone levitate.
The first thing I ever wrote for The New Yorker was actually published. It was called “What, Another Legend?” It involved a fake press release for a fictitious, 112-year-old Black clarinet player. But those pieces are not so easy. They take some time to get right. I am forever indebted to my editor at The New Yorker, Roger Angell, who led me through my overwritten stuff and edited it down to what finally appeared in print. At one point, many years ago, someone from the New York Times took me to lunch and asked me if I would be interested in taking over for the columnist Russell Baker. And I said, “You’re crazy. I could never do that each week!” Baker, as I recall, did two columns a week. I couldn’t imagine doing that. Besides, I didn’t really have a voice then.
How would you describe your voice now?
I don’t know. If it’s anything, I suppose, it’s anti-sentimental.
Can you give me a specific example?
In Jersey Boys, there’s a scene in the second act when the two members of the Four Seasons who are left, Frankie and Bob, are sitting and having a cup of coffee. And Bob says, “Look, I think you need to go out on the road.” And Frankie replies, “You want me to go out by myself? What if they don’t like me as a solo singer?”
Originally, the next line was: “Frankie, this is your time.” And it never sat right for me. So I changed it to: “Frankie, what makes you think they liked you before?”
It’s a nice little change, because it defines the relationship between these characters very quickly, that they’re able to deal with each other like that. Also, it’s funny and it’s not sentimental. What I like to do is to turn 90 degrees from something that’s headed towards sentimental and undercut it.
That’s a very Jewish sensibility.
The Jews have always had something amusing to say while they’re getting the shit kicked out of them.
I can attest to that.
Right. So it’s the abhorrence of unearned sentiment, I guess. Which is defined as asking the audience to feel more for the characters than God does. By the way, I still can’t believe I wrote Jersey Boys.
Why did you? What was it about the story that appealed to you?
When I heard that the Four Seasons had sold about 175 million records here and abroad, I blinked. And then, when I finally met with Bob Gaudio and Frankie Valli and they told me the story of their rise from blue-collar New Jersey — with their involvement with the mob, with being poor, to finally making it, the whole arc of success and failure — I realized that this was not only a true story but it was a very good story.
Are you a fan of musicals in general?
Some, like Guys and Dolls. But not a fervent aficionado. I’m more of a movie guy. That’s where I was for 20 years. But when musical theater works, there’s really nothing like it. You almost never get a movie audience to stand up and cheer, because they realize on some level — not a very deep level, actually — that what they’re seeing onscreen has already happened. In a very real sense, movies are dead. In live theater, the audience gets to bond through the live event with live actors and singers. It’s all happening in real time in front of their eyes, and it can be a deeply moving and socializing experience.
How is writing for the stage different than writing for the screen?
It follows the same general rules about character and action, of course, but in many ways writing for the stage is a totally different animal. For instance, initially, I’d write a scene and then end it with, “Then we cut to …” And I would have to be reminded that in live theater you don’t “cut” to anything. So it’s a different set of rules — how to get people on and off the stage, how to make smooth transitions, remembering that there are no close-ups or reaction shots. The audience looks where it wants to look, and it’s the job of the author and director to make you, in the audience, look where you need to look. Because of the fluidity and freedom of theater, you can do many things without apology — and without being necessarily naturalistic. Great productions of the classics have been done with minimal sets and props — a table, a drop, some lighting. You couldn’t get away with that in a movie, in which the “contract” with the audience is different. Movies are, on a certain level, documentary.
It’s time to end the interview, so I’m going to pull out one of my stock, yet extremely popular, questions. Do you have any advice to the aspiring comedy writer on how to discover their voice?
Search your roots and your heritage, your ethnic background, the way people speak. Most great comedy comes from minorities — ethnic, social, economic. If you think about it, most comedy ought to function as a corrective — against one or another social or cultural or economic inequity. Perhaps I should modify that to read “real or imagined” social or cultural or economic inequity.
Then there’s the issue of language and style, which gets into the equation somehow. But even that definition doesn’t cover the entire waterfront, as it doesn’t exactly include parody or other literary forms, such as with Benchley and Perelman and others. And yet, it’s a good start.
So, by searching your own roots and using what you have at your disposal, does this make the comedy more authentic and true, and thus more real and funny?
I really have no idea as to why something is funny. I know it has something to do with the correct matching of performer and material, or some set of commonly held assumptions about the world, or an attitude. I get dizzy trying to deconstruct it. I do know that when I can match a comic performer or writer with some sociological turf, then the comedy has, for me, a better chance of landing: Jonathan Winters and his characters from the Midwest. Or Woody Allen, from a Jewish-urban landscape. Or Chris Rock, from the upwardly mobile, urban-Black perspective. And so on. I do know that those performers who seem to come from the Land of Media have a more difficult time making me laugh — the exception is David Letterman, much of whose humor is deconstructionist and exhibits, or tries to conceal, a hilarious rage against the various forms of media, like advertising, political doublespeak, and so on. So there are exceptions.
Any advice for the comedy writer on how to succeed in the movie or TV business?
My feeling is that there are already too many comedy writers. What we need is people in health care. Learn CPR and how to fill out a certificate of death.
And if you’re not into CPR and still want to pursue humor writing?
Have an uncle who runs the New York office of the William Morris Agency.
And if you’re not lucky enough to have an uncle who runs the New York office of William Morris?
Then you must go into health care.