Mickey Rose, a television writer perhaps best known for collaborating with Woody Allen on some of his early films, died at his home in Beverly Hills at age 77. The cause was colon cancer, according to his daughter Jennifer.

Rose and Allen were high school friends who initially had less ambitious goals than working in Hollywood. In fact, they thought they would open a pharmacy together. They both attended New York University to study film. Rose graduated, Allen did not.

As Allen spent much of the 1960s performing stand-up in clubs and on television, he branched into feature films in 1966 with “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” in which Allen took a campy Japanese spy movie and dubbed a new soundtrack to make it a story about the quest for the world’s best egg salad recipe. Rose was one of several writers who worked on the script.

In 1969 Allen made “Take the Money and Run,” which he and Rose both wrote. A broad comedy about a nebbish bank robber, it is still considered something of a cult classic, as is their other collaboration, “Bananas” (1971).

As Allen would go on to write nearly all of his screenplays on his own, Rose wrote for some of the most popular television shows of the 1970s and 1980s, such as “The Dean Martin Comedy Hour,” “All in the Family,” “The Odd Couple,” “Happy Days,” “The Love Boat,” and “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” Despite no longer writing together, Rose and Allen remained good friends through the years.

Rose’s wife Judith died in 2003. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a son, Quincy and two grandchildren.