Marshall Brickman

Like that bunny on TV, it just keeps going and going and going. Chasing the music. Trying to find our way home.

They ask you "what was the high point?" Hall of Fame, selling all those records, pulling Sherry out of the hat, it was all great. But four guys under a street lamp, when it was all still ahead of us, the first time we made that sound, our sound. When everything dropped away and all there was was the music. That was the best.

Tommy you don't give a shit about the group, you never have. It's always been whatever it is you got going and then there's the group. You never want to rehearse, you drop Nicky to drink, you put Bob through the ringer, and forget about trying to mess with my head, which you've done from day one. You know the shame of it is you're not a bad musician if you give a little time, but no. You're too busy shooting your mouth off or buying apartments to keep your girlfriends in. But no more. All that bullshit is over.

Friends, right. Not one Christmas present, not one Christmas card. The one time we go for a mean and you pick up the cheque. The one time you ask me how my kids are doing, how I'm doing! God help me Tommy, part of me would really like to see you hurt.

They ask you "what was the high point?" Hall of Fame, selling all those records, pulling Sherry out of the hat, it was all great. But four guys under a streetlamp, when it was all still ahead of us, the first time we made that sound, our sound. When everything dropped away and all there was was the music. That was the best.

Like that bunny on TV with the battery, I just keep going and going and going. Chasing the music. Trying to get home.

They ask you what was the high point? Hall of Fame? Selling all those records? Pulling "Sherry" out of the hat? It was all great. But four guys under a streetlamp, when it was all still ahead of us, first time we made that sound - our sound - when everything dropped away and all there was was the music, that was the best.

I mean, this woman - People turn into something.

Oh, by the way, if you're ever in Vegas, go to a casino. Say the name, "Tommy DeVito". My hand to God, you'll be outta there in about 12 seconds.

Forget sense. Forget sense. I got a couple of things I could… I could work something out.

Alright Nicky, shut your trap alright, and drink your wine! DeCarlo's not running this group, I am. I don't even know what we're doing here, begging Gyp for help. You make me look like an asshole, all of ya's.

You know what'd be nice, since I was here before any of you? A little respect.

You know something? At least I tried, huh? You think it's easy running the group? Dealing with the club owners, the managers, the record companies? Everybody trying to fuck you five ways from Sunday? You don't care how it gets done Nicky, I took care of it! Me!

There's two types of women. There's Type A and Type B. Type A: They're real easy. They jump right into bed with you. Boom, boom, boom. Then later on, they break your balls.

You wanna hear the real story? I'm the one you wanna talk to: Tommy DeVito. Wasn't for me, we would have wound up in the trunk with a bullet in our head. There's even a street named after me. Of course, it don't come easy. You gotta have talent and skill and vision. And luck.

You know what I do now? I work for Joe Pesci. Little Joey Fishes, same kid I used to smack around. A couple of months ago, we were driving through the old neighborhood. He says "Hey Tommy, how do you remember yourself back then?" I says "I think I was a pretty stand up guy." He says "I gotta be honest with you. You were total prick. Nobody would have put up with your shit except we all needed something. Everybody remembers it the way they need to, right?

By the way, if you're ever in Vegas go to down a casino, say the name Tommy DeVito. My hand to god, you'll be out of there in about 12 seconds.

Love? I'll be honest with you. I never knew what that was. Marriage? Marriage is not love. Marriage is you take a shave while your wife sits on the can and clips her toenails.

Between you and me - and don't print this because he doesn't want it out there - I taught him everything he knows.

Excuse me, with all due respect, he opened it up, I'm gonna say something. I've been rooming with this guy on and off for what is it, ten years? This was not a walk in a park, this was a sentence. A ten year sentence. The man is a personal nightmare. He wears the same underwear 3 days running. He takes no pride in his appearance in the simple amenities of life. You wanna talk about towels? The man cannot be in a hotel without using all the towels. I'm talking face towels, bath towels, the bathmat, the little washcloths like he's living alone. You need a towel, you know where it is? In a wet pile on the floor. I come back to the room one time, the man is pissing in the sink.

Right in the sink, right in the fucking sink! I say "Tommy, what's wrong with you? There's a toilet over there." He says "This was closer." This is what I'm dealing with! The man is not properly socialized. Frankie doesn't have to deal with it, Gaudio doesn't, I've had to deal with it. TEN YEARS!

Alright, I'll be honest with you. It could have been an ego thing, everybody wants to be up front. But if there is four guys, and you're Ringo? Better I should spend some time with my kids.

People always ask the same question, why'd you do it Nicky? Why'd you walk away? Well let me clear that up. It wasn't the signed deal, it wasn't the touring, it wasn't the bad food or rooming with Tommy, it just came out of my mouth. Once I said it, I knew it was what I wanted. I wanted to go home.

Bob will tell you it was all smooth sailing right up until we hit the iceberg with Tommy and the $150 thousand. That's Bob. Who was always looking so far into the future he never saw what was going on under his nose. Fact is, the trouble didn't start at the Sullivan Show. It started long before that.

You'd think after everything that went down, Frankie would have cut Tommy loose right then. If that's what you think, you're not from Jersey.

Everybody wants to be up front. But if there's four guys, and you're Ringo? Better I should spend some time with my kids.

Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh... Like what... okay... um... For me, uh... ooh... I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh... um... and Wilie Mays... and um... the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues... um... Swedish movies, naturally... Sentimental Education by Flaubert... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... um... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne... uh... the crabs at Sam Wo's... uh... Tracy's face...

I don't get angry. Okay? I mean, I have a tendency to internalize. I can't express anger. That's one of the problems I have. I grow a tumor instead.

I'm old fashioned. I don't believe in extra-marital relationships. I think people should mate for life - like pigeons or Catholics.

Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Eh uh, no, make that he, he romanticized it all out of proportion. Better. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Uh, no, let me start this over.

Chapter One: He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street smart guys who seemed to know all the angles. Ah, corny, too corny for, you know, my taste. Let me, let me try and make it more profound.

Chapter One: He adored New York City. To him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in - no, it's gonna be too preachy, I mean, you know, let's face it, I wanna sell some books here.

Chapter One: He adored New York City. Although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage - too angry. I don't want to be angry.

Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. Oh, I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be.

I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion.

Oh really, he was a genius, Helen's a genius and Dennis is a genius. You know a lot of geniuses, y'know. You should meet some stupid people once in a while, y'know, you could learn something.

You know what you are? You're God's answer to Job, y'know? You would have ended all argument between them. I mean, He would have pointed to you and said, y'know, "I do a lot of terrible things, but I can still make one of these." You know? And then Job would have said, "Eh. Yeah, well, you win."

That's right, and they don't mean a thing, right? Because nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind. Everything really valuable has to enter you through a different opening, if you'll forgive the disgusting imagery.

Hey, don't be so mature, okay? I mean, six months is a long time! Six months, you know you're gonna be, you'll be in, in, in, in the th - working in a theater there, you'll be with actors and directors, you kno w you're, you know, you go to rehearsal, and you, you hang out with those people, you have lunch a lot, and, and, before you even know it attachments form and, and, you know, I mean, you, you don't want to be get into that kind a, I mean, you, you'll change. You know, you'll be, you'll be, in six months you'll be a completely different person.

Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Y'know, I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.

My book is about decaying values. It's about, you see, years ago I wrote a short story about my mother called, 'The Castrating Zionist,' and I want to expand it into a novel.

Plus I'll probably have to give my parents less money. It'll kill my father. He's not gonna be able to get as good a seat in the synagogue. He'll be in the back, away from God, far from the action.

But, you're too easy on yourself! Don't you see that? That's your problem, that's your whole problem. You rationalize everything, you're not honest with yourself. You talk about, you want to write a book, but in the end you'd rather buy the Porsche, you know. Or, you cheat a little bit on Emily and you play around the truth a little with me, and next thing you know, you're in front of a Senate committee and you're naming names, you're informing on your friends!

This is so antiseptic. It's empty. Why do you think this is funny? You're going by audience reaction? This is an audience that's raised on television, their standards have been systematically lowered over the years. These guys sit in front of their sets and the gamma rays eat the white cells of their brains out!

I dunno, I was just thinking. There must be something wrong with me, because I've never had a relationship with a woman that's lasted longer than the one between Hitler and Eva Braun.

What are future generations gonna say about us? My god, you know someday we're gonna

we're gonna be like him! I mean, he was probably one of the BEAUTIFUL people. He was probably dancing and playing tennis and everything. And now look: this is what happens to us. You know, it's very important to have some kind of personal integrity, you know? I'll be hanging in a classroom one day, and I want to make sure when I thin out, that I'm... well-thought of.

You don't wanna get hung up with one person at your age. It's - charming, you know. Erotic. No question about that. As long as the cops don't burst in, we're - I think we're gonna break a couple of records.

We're having a great time and all that, but you're a kid and I never want you to forget that. You know, you're gonna meet a lot of terrific men in your life and, you know, I want you to enjoy me. My - my wry sense of humor and astonishing sexual technique, but never forget that, you know, you've got your whole life ahead of you.

That will never cease to mystify me. I mean, he's got a wonderful wife and he prefers to - to diddle this yo-yo. You know, but he was always a sucker for those kind of women. You know, the kind that would involve him in discussions of existential reality, you know. They probably sit around on the floor with wine and cheese, and mispronounce "allegorical" and "didacticism".

Nervous? She was overbearing. She was, you know, terrible! She was all cerebral. You know, where the hell does a little Radcliffe tootsie come off rating F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gustav Mahler and then Heinrich Böll?

I'm mad because I don't like that pseudo-intellectual garbage. "Van Goch!" Did you hear that? She said "Van Goch." Like an Arab she spoke. If she had made one more remark about Bergman, I would have knocked her other contact lens out.

Hey, what? You're so sensitive, Jesus! I never said that. I think you're - I think you're terrific. Really, you know. I - I - you're very insecure. I think you're wonderful, really.

You can't be in love with me. We've been over this. You're a kid. You don't know what love means. I don't know what it means. Nobody out there knows what the hell's going on.

You see, to me a great movie is with W.C. Fields. That's what I like. Or "Grand Illusion". That's - I see that every time it's on television, if I'm aware of it.

An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about - the universe.

I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.

After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I… I realized what a terrific person she was, and… and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I… I, I thought of that old joke, y'know, the, this… this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and… but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us… need the eggs.

Hey listen, gimme a kiss.

Yeah, why not, because we're just gonna go home later, right, and then there's gonna be all that tension, we've never kissed before and I'll never know when to make the right move or anything. So we'll kiss now and get it over with, and then we'll go eat. We'll digest our food better.

That sex was the most fun I've ever had without laughing.

Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes I have to invent, of course I - I do, don't you think I do?

There's an old joke - um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly. The… the other important joke, for me, is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud's "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious," and it goes like this - I'm paraphrasing - um, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.

Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat… college.

I remember the staff at our public school. You know, we had a saying, uh, that those who can't do teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym. And, uh, those who couldn't do anything, I think, were assigned to our school.

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.

Awards! They always give out awards! I can't believe it. Greatest Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler.

Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.

Honey, there's a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick.

I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. When I was thrown out, my mother, who was an emotionally high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles. I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss.

Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.

Annie, there's a big lobster behind the refrigerator. I can't get it out. This thing's heavy. Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side.

You, you, you're like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y'know, strike-oriented kind of, red diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself.

You know, I don't think I could take a mellow evening because I - I don't respond well to mellow. You know what I mean? I have a tendency to - if I get too mellow, I - I ripen and then rot, you know.

Oh my God, she's right. Why did I turn off Allison Portchnik? She was beautiful, she was willing. She was real intelligent. Is it the old Groucho Marx joke that I'm - I just don't want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member?

Well, how am I a para-? I pick up on those kind of things. You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said, uh, "Did you eat yet or what?" and Tom Christie said, "No, didjew?" Not, "did you", "didjew eat?" Jew? No, not "did you eat", but "Jew eat"? Jew. You get it? Jew eat?

I - I don't know why they would have me at this kind of rally 'cause, excuse me, I'm not essentially a political comedian at all. I interestingly had, uh, dated a woman in the Eisenhower Administration, briefly, and, uh, it was ironic to me 'cause, uh, 'cause I was trying to - do to her what Eisenhower has been doing to the country for the last eight years.

Lately the strangest things have been going through my mind, 'cause I turned forty, and I guess I'm going through a life crisis or something, I don't know. I - and I'm not worried about aging. I'm not one of those characters, you know. Although I'm balding slightly on top, that's about the worst you can say about me. I, uh, I think I'm gonna get better as I get older, you know? I think I'm gonna be the - the balding virile type, you know, as opposed to say the, uh, distinguished gray, for instance, you know? Unless I'm neither of those two. Unless I'm one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism.

Annie and I broke up and I - I still can't get my mind around that. You know, I - I keep sifting the pieces of the relationship through my mind and - and examining my life and tryin' to figure out where did the screw-up come, you know, and a year ago we were in love.

Probably on their first date, right? Probably met by answering an ad in the New York Review of Books. "Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who's interested in Mozart, James Joyce, and sodomy."

It's always some kind of an excuse. You know, you used to think that I was very sexy. What - when we first started going out, we had sex constantly. We're - we're probably listed in the "Guinness Book of World Records".

I can't believe this family. Annie's mother is so beautiful, and they're talking about swap meets and boat basins, and that old lady at the end of the table is a classic Jew-hater.