"Originally as the scene was written
by Rick, who has a much bigger heart
[than I], it was a very wet, very emo-
tional kind of scene." Brickman made
some minor changes. He has Valli say-
ing,"What happens if they don't like
me as a single?" Gaudio replies: "What
makes you think they liked you
before?"
"To me that is a very typical Jewish
kind of exchange. What it is is affec-
tion, but it's disguised as a kind of
hostility. It's emotion buried under the
lightness of humor. It gets a warm
kind of laugh."
Making 'Em Laugh
Brickman, 64, was born in Rio de
Janeiro. His father emigrated there
from Poland to establish residency.
His ultimate goal was to get into the
United States, and South America had
higher quotas than Eastern Europe.
Brickman's mother, born and raised
on Essex Street on the Lower East
Side, met her husband at a Catskills
resort. "When my parents died, I was
looking through some ancient corre-
spondence, where my father wrote he
was doing stretching exercises so he
would become taller and she would
love him. My mother was taller than
my father, but my father was louder.
He thought women belonged [at] the
stove."
Marshall Brickman: The unlikely co-
creator of Broadway hit Jersey Boys
co-wrote Annie Hall but never lis-
tened to the Four Seasons.
The family moved to the Flatbush
section of Brooklyn when Brickman
was 2. His father, with whom
Brickman had a strained relationship,
was a union organizer. He wasn't reli-
gious, though he did insist his son
learn Yiddish.
After graduating with a degree in
music from the University of
Wisconsin, Brickman hung around
the New York folk scene, playing for
STAN'S
DELI
free in Washington Square Park on
weekends. He and Eric Weissberg, a
friend from a Red Diaper camp,
recorded an album for Electra
Records called New Dimensions in
Banjo and Bluegrass. It sold, by
Brickman's account, 35 copies. (More
on that later.)
He also took a number of show
business jobs. He became a writer for
Candid Camera, where he shared an
office with Joan Rivers and Fannie
Flagg and dreamed up embarrassing
scenarios. He also sold jokes to comics
and joined the Tarriers group.
Because, he claims, he tuned his
instrument faster than the others, he
was the frontman who delivered the
comic patter. "To make people laugh, I
guess, was a little bit of a drug!'
.
Meeting Woody
One night when the group was play-
ing the Bitter End, Brickman met
Woody Allen, who was the group's
opening act. They shared manage-
ment, style and, people suggested, a
sensibility.
"I started to work with Woody on
his standup act. As he got more popu-
lar and began to appear on television,
that began to eat up material. Then we
drifted into television." Ultimately
their collaboration yielded Sleeper,
Manhattan and Manhattan Murder
Mystery (which Brickman directed) in
addition to the Oscar-winning Annie
Hall.
Is there no end to Brickman's good
fortune? Apparently not. When
Deliverance was released, the promo-
tion people used "Dueling Banjos" as
part of the film's marketing cam-
paign. The public was so taken by the
song, the studio released it as a single;
it shot to No. 1.
The next step was to release a
soundtrack album, but there was no
soundtrack — just that one song. So
Warner Bros., which purchased
Elektra Records, looked in the cata-
logue and saw the albuin New
Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass,
which no one had ever heard, substi-
tuted "Dueling Banjos" for one exist-
ing track and released it as the sound-
track album. It went on to sell more
than a million copies and continues to
sell well today. 1-1
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February 2 • 2006
51