RIP: Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall and Manhattan co-writer who helped reinvent Woody Allen.

Born of multiple rewrites and a free-ranging shoot, Annie Hall assumed haphazard shape in the edit suite, as Brickman later recalled: “When I saw the rough cut, I thought it terrible, completely unsalvageable. It rambled and was tangential and just… endless.”

Yet the more incisive 93-minute release version expanded comedy’s horizons, principally by allowing for the prospect of romantic failure and disillusionment. Critics were wowed; cinemagoers stirred to the extent that it remained Allen’s biggest hit for the next 34 years. With the director-star a no-show at the 1978 Oscars, Brickman duly collected a screenplay gong, one of four wins on the night, including Best Picture.

Manhattan drew from a comparable well of personal experience, its protagonist a gagman who has quit television to try and pen the great American novel. Even in 1979, the relationship between the 42-year-old hero and a 17-year-old schoolgirl raised eyebrows – Pauline Kael wondered: “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?” – but the movie’s lustrous look seduced critics, audiences and awards voters alike.

As John Podhoretz wrote in the Weekly Standard in his 2006 review of Allen’s Match Point, “‘The heart wants what it wants,’ Allen notoriously said after his girlfriend Mia Farrow found nude pictures of her 17-year-old daughter–the same girl who was a sister to the two children he had with Farrow–in his dresser drawer in 1992. Nobody, not even Farrow, had any right to be surprised by Allen’s shrugging dismissal of the moral opprobrium that greeted his conduct. He had already made it clear through his art that he did not believe that there were any consequences for engaging in immoral behavior.”