Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  At that juncture of his career, Mostel had his pick of top Broadway roles. But the big man with outsized talent had not appeared in any motion picture since the rollout of the blacklist in the early 1950s; he was wary of the medium and put off by Bialystock. “What is this?” he bellowed. “A Jewish producer going to bed with old women on the brink of the grave? I can’t play such a part. I’m a Jewish person!” Brooks got Mostel’s wife, Kate, involved. She read the script and convinced the diffident Mostel that he was the very embodiment of the seedy, greedy Bialystock and that The Producers was worth his while.

  Early on, Brooks had tried hard to land Peter Sellers. He couldn’t convince the comedic actor, whom he revered, to play Leo Bloom. One day in the mid-1960s, he spent most of one afternoon at Bloomingdale’s shopping with Sellers, whispering into the actor’s ear about the role of a lifetime that was awaiting him. Leo Bloom also was dangled in front of a young unknown, Dustin Hoffman, a Greenwich Village neighbor of the Brookses, who read the script and said he was more tempted by the part of the Nazi-loving playwright Franz Liebkind. (“But of course that was impossible,” Alfa-Betty Olsen recalled. “Nobody wanted him to be the German.”) As Brooks was in the throes of casting, however, Hoffman was offered the part of the college graduate seduced by mother (Anne Bancroft) and daughter (Katharine Ross) in The Graduate, and suddenly he was on his way to Hollywood with Brooks’s wife. Thus it was that Brooks knocked on the dressing room of another relative newcomer, Gene Wilder, backstage after the final performance of Luv in January 1967. “You didn’t think I forgot, did you?” Wilder broke down in grateful tears.

  Brooks had promised Mostel that he could approve the selection of the actor playing Bloom to his Bialystock. Wilder therefore had to audition for Z. Having a dread of auditions, he felt himself draining away as, in lockstep with Brooks and Sidney Glazier, he climbed apprehensively up the stairs to Mostel’s apartment. However, the big man reached out to shake his fellow actor’s hand, pulled him tight with his arms around his waist, gave him a wet kiss on the lips, “and all my fears dissolved,” Wilder recalled.

  Another one of Brooks’s hired-gun dalliances paid dividends now: Young & Rubicam trusted him, so much so that in early 1967 the agency let him try his directing hand with a couple of advertisements for Frito-Lay corn chips. Wilder gamely accompanied Brooks to a New Jersey location, where they filmed two television spots, one with Wilder as an aviator, which is inexplicably missing from The Incredible Mel Brooks box set. But the other commercial is there, full of verve: a meshuganah debate in a public park among teeter-totterers and bandshell musicians over what tastes best when eaten alongside Fritos. A young boy in the Danny Baker mold settles the argument. Producer Joseph E. Levine watched the two Frito-Lay sales spots, smiling and chuckling, and felt reassured that Brooks knew where to point the camera.

  With Olsen at his side, Brooks’s casting was never more variegated. The veteran Estelle Winwood, in her mideighties, campaigned for the part of the “Hold Me, Touch Me” dowager who is memorably wrestled to the couch by Bialystock in the opening title sequence. Another British-born player, Christopher Hewett, familiar to theatergoers as Zoltan Karpathy (and Rex Harrison’s understudy) in My Fair Lady, became Roger De Bris, the director of stinkers who is drag-dressed for the annual choreographers’ ball when the producers first meet him. (His flamboyant character’s name is a double pun: debris, or garbage, and bris, which is Yiddish for the Jewish ceremony of circumcision.) The Sudanese-born Greek actor Andréas Voutsinas, whom Bancroft knew from the Actors Studio, became De Bris’s black-clad, curly-bearded, swishy adjutant, just as cutely named Carmen Ghia. Brooks told him, “I want you to look like Rasputin and behave like Marilyn Monroe.”

  Kenneth Mars, who had appeared on Get Smart and as “a sort of gay psychiatrist” in The Best Laid Plans (“Mel loved that character,” Mars recalled), arrived to audition for Roger De Bris but asked to read for the Nazi-loving playwright instead. Mel said no; he was still toying with playing Franz Liebkind himself. Mars read for Liebkind several times before Olsen convinced Brooks that Mars would be terrific in the part. From demanding pigeon droppings on his Nazi helmet to wild interpolations in his lines, Mars became Liebkind during the filming to the point that, Gene Wilder later said, “I didn’t know if the character Kenneth Mars was playing was crazy or if Kenneth Mars was crazy.”

  Then there was the all-around entertainer and comedian Dick Shawn. Shawn had made an initial splash in the Max Liebman TV specials that followed Your Show of Shows. He had performed a wild Elvis impersonation in his act and was penciled in as the original Conrad Birdie before complications arose. Lately Shawn had appeared in the big-screen It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and replaced Zero Mostel on Broadway as the lead of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Brooks had written jokes for Shawn in the past, and Anne Bancroft heartily endorsed the screwball comedian from their two-person musical I’m Getting Married. Shawn got the part of the wiggy Lorenzo St. DuBois (aka L.S.D.), whom the producers cast as Hitler because he is so repellant.

  Lore Noto told Alfa-Betty Olsen about a shapely former dancer with the Manhattan Rockets whom he had noticed in Academy of Dramatic Arts classes. She had never acted professionally before and wasn’t quite twenty years of age, but Judi Lee Sauls looked the part of Ulla, the Swedish blond bombshell, Bialystock and Bloom’s receptionist. Told the director was searching for an innocent but sexy type, Sauls wore clothes to the audition that had belonged to her grandmother: a long boxy yellow suit that fell below her knees with matching gloves. “Now, take off the jacket and pull in the blouse so we can see what is underneath all that,” Brooks instructed her. Then Brooks put on a recording of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels’ “Sock It to Me, Baby!”

  “I danced like crazy,” recalled Sauls, who later, for the film, adopted the stage name Lee Meredith. “They really liked it. I had to come back to read again and on my last audition I wore a tight Chinese dress with slits up the side. I think [Brooks] chose me because I was a challenge in a way because it was like making somebody over.”

  Among the joys of The Producers are all the New York eccentrics and personalities seen for the first, or only, time on the screen. The list included the nightclub comedienne Renée Taylor, who was in the cast of Luv when Brooks saw the show starring Gene Wilder; she portrays Eva Braun. The acting coach William Hickey, well known in theater circles, plays a drunk in the barroom intermission scene. The producer Lore Noto is among the packed audience looking aghast at the goose-stepping musical.

  Many Brooks acquaintances were grabbed for wee parts, including Michael Elias and his writing partner Frank Shaw from the Max’s Kansas City crowd. Elias’s bit was left on the cutting room floor, although Brooks called him first to apologize. Shaw was pivotal as the guy in a gold tux in the bar between acts who is loving the Hitler musical “so far.” People were grabbed wherever Brooks spotted them. Gretchen Kanne was a friend of Olsen’s, living in the same building in a back room apartment. One day Kanne knocked on Olsen’s door just as she and Brooks were ending a day of work on the script. Kanne asked for the phone number of a radiator repairman. Minutes later, Brooks knocked on Kanne’s door with a strange object in his hand, introducing himself as the repairman; he spent five minutes entertaining her and a visiting friend by walking around the place, banging on things, and diagnosing the radiator noises he himself made out of the side of his mouth. Brooks remembered the young, striking actress and through Olsen asked if she wanted to join the crowd in the barroom scene. “I say something like ‘Best show on Broadway!’” Kanne, who later became a university theater professor, remembered.

  Brooks made equally shrewd choices behind the camera. Although Joseph Coffey had spent years as an operator, he had just shot Up the Down Staircase, his first feature as cinematographer. The production designer, Charles Rosen, was new to motion pictures. (Brooks told him to use a lot of yellow, which the director regarded as a “funny color” and which did help to give the fil
m an uncommon look.) Brooks needed a patient and resourceful assistant director, and he found one in Michael Hertzberg, whose list of credits included the film version of Act One and The World of Henry Orient starring Peter Sellers.

  The editor, Ralph Rosenblum, had experience working on several Sidney Lumet dramas but recently he had cut the screen version of A Thousand Clowns, which had been a giant hit as a stage comedy; he had also supervised the editing of Inside Danny Baker.

  The film’s choreographer and composer were permanent acquisitions. Brooks tried to engage Ronald Field, the choreographer of Nowhere to Go but Up, before Field was diverted to Cabaret. Martin Charnin recommended his friend Alan Johnson, who had started out as a dancer in the chorus with Charnin, understudying one of the Sharks in the original Broadway production of West Side Story in 1957. Johnson was toiling in television, trying to make the transition to choreographer. “Mel threw out every crazy idea he could think of” for the big “Springtime for Hitler” number, according to Johnson, including an overhead shot of black-uniformed Nazi dancers forming a swirling swastika. “Oh my God,” Johnson exclaimed, “are we allowed to show this? . . . can we show this anywhere?”

  Johnson would learn that Brooks’s “theory of filmmaking” included giving the audience a zetz (Yiddish for smacking an individual upside the head) with a musical number three-quarters of the way through the story. Johnson’s staging of “Springtime for Hitler,” in which the effete male dancers made reference to his own open homosexuality, couldn’t have been more in sync with Brooks’s sense of humor, and the number became the bravura template for the best song-and-dance zetzes of future Brooks comedies.

  Composer John Morris and Brooks went way back. Born in New Jersey in 1926, the son of British parents, the composer was Juilliard trained and had started out as an accompanist for performers such as Judy Garland. A self-described “complete eclectic” in his knowledge and influences, Morris had arranged the music for dances and sketches on Your Show of Shows, Shinbone Alley, and “All American”. He had even arranged the dance music for the hit that was everybody’s lucky charm, Bye Bye Birdie. A Time for Singing, a musical based on the novel How Green Was My Valley, with Morris’s score—his co-lyrics and co-libretto, too—had just closed on Broadway after forty-one performances.

  Brooks did not pretend to know how to choreograph a dance, although he knew what he wanted and liked in dance routines. Yet, taking his cue from the Caesar years, when all the writers had dabbled in music and lyrics, he did fancy himself a songwriter.

  Technically, Brooks could not write music. He worked with a pencil and pad, writing down snatches of lyrics. Then he sang variations of the melodies into a whirring tape recorder. In the end he’d bring in Morris, “soft spoken, gentle, very bright and incredibly gifted,” in Brooks’s words, who worked closely with him first on The Producers and then on most of the screen comedies Brooks would create in the years ahead. Morris picked out the notes as Brooks hummed his ideas and adjusted the lyrics.

  It was Morris who gave the “Springtime for Hitler” anthem its surge and lift, its buoyancy. “He suggested that the first eight notes be the theme,” Brooks recalled. “He showed me what he could do with just eight or ten notes and I got very excited. I said, ‘Have you ever scored a motion picture before?’ He said no. ‘Well, I never have directed one. If I get to direct this, would you be the composer? The only thing I insist on is having the numbers that I write in the movie.’ He said, ‘Sure! I think I can do it.’”

  As happened with most of Brooks’s scripts, there were other silent helpers behind the “Words and Music by Mel Brooks” credit. For example, “Look out, here comes the Master Race!” in the “Springtime for Hitler” song was Alfa-Betty Olsen’s line, she said.

  One of the best musical numbers in The Producers owed little to either Morris or Brooks: Dick Shawn’s Hitler audition. The songwriter Norman Blagman ran into Shawn in the theater district one day, and Shawn told him he needed an offbeat tune for his character to sing in the movie he was doing. Blagman wrote regularly for Mad magazine but had also contributed dance tunes to Shawn’s celebrated Las Vegas act, called “The Cockamamie.” Shawn brought Blagman together with lyricist Herbert Hartig for a sixties peace-and-love ode called “Love Power,” which Brooks approved. Shawn and Blagman went into a studio with an orchestra and recorded the song. Later, Shawn, in turtleneck, striped pants, hip boots, a soup can amulet, and a sparkly earring, lip-synched it for the camera, behind him a trio of foxy hippies faking it on instruments. His absolute weirdness and extraordinary oomph would make it one of the film’s cherished highlights.

  Chapter 9

  1967

  Auteur, Auteur!

  Brooks had made it past the age of his father at the time of Max Kaminsky’s death. But he was a late bloomer as a filmmaker, just shy of forty-one when he called action on the first take of The Producers on May 22, 1967. He’d spent almost a decade thinking about the script, years writing drafts, months planning the production. To be successful now, he would have to achieve, over eight weeks of photography and more in postproduction, a balance in his personality between the man who could be rigid, controlling, and combative, especially in private, and the comic who was loose, antic, and funny in public.

  His idiosyncratic work habits and methodology were deeply ingrained. With so much riding on his shoulders, in fact, Brooks did not actually call “Action!” on the first take of his first film as director. Instead he nervously shouted, “Cut!” Assistant director Michael Hertzberg took him aside, not for the last time. “No, wait a minute—” Hertzberg advised sotto voce, “first you say ‘Action’ and when you’re done you say ‘Cut.’” Brooks was tentative out of the gate, Hertzberg recalled. “It was that rudimentary. We all just stood around waiting for him to say something.” And perhaps for that reason Brooks began his custom of saying “Go!” instead of “Action!”

  The production team had moved into the Hy Brown Studios on West 26th Street. The initial meeting of Bialystock and Bloom, which forms the extended opening sequence of The Producers, was the first to be photographed. Brooks said later that he had absorbed the barest concept of camera coverage or inserts for editing purposes and so was initially uncertain about how to frame his shots. He blocked Mostel and Wilder, but mostly for close-ups. “When the cameraman Joe Coffey gave Mel a lot of crap, because Coffey didn’t understand the comedy, I was able to interpret,” Hertzberg recalled. When early rushes showed the actors “standing on stumps . . . cut off at the ankles,” in Hertzberg’s words, Coffey exploded. “You can’t do that! It’s not cinematic!” Brooks agreed to do some reshooting, but “that was the end of our romance,” in the cameraman’s words.

  He fared little better under his editor’s scrutiny. “By the end of the first morning on the set, Mel was already becoming jittery,” Ralph Rosenblum recalled. “Did he know that in the movies you could shoot only about five minutes of usable film in a day? . . . Brooks couldn’t stand the waiting, and his impatience quickly extended to the cast.”

  The jittery novice provoked “a head-on conflict with the mountainous Mostel,” Rosenblum said. “The first time the star couldn’t perform with just the inflection Brooks wanted, the entire project seemed to be slipping from the director’s grasp. After several faulty takes, he started to shout, ‘Goddamn it, why can’t you . . . .’ But Mostel turned his head like a roving artillery gun and barked, ‘One more tone like that, and I’m leaving.’”

  Their on-the-set relationship was aggravated by the fact that Brooks did not criticize actors gently or sensitively. Indeed, he could behave like a “tyrant,” even Dom DeLuise admitted later. He’d speak rudely or harshly. No shrinking violet, Mostel would roar back.

  Not a mingler, Mostel camped out in his trailer between takes, nursing a bad leg from a 1960 bus accident that had never stopped aching, along with other lifelong grievances. “Is that fat pig ready yet?” Rosenbaum recalled Brooks sputtering. Mostel retorted, “The director? What dire
ctor? There’s no director here!”

  Gene Wilder was treated differently. Wilder had just returned from Hollywood and his screen debut in Bonnie and Clyde, where he had milked his first laughs from his overwrought persona, playing an undertaker abducted by the notorious bank robbers who is taken along on the lam. The Producers was just his second picture, and he was still nervous; one of his strengths as a comedic actor was his manifest nervousness. He was susceptible to Brooks. He was Anne Bancroft’s friend. Brooks didn’t berate him.

  But Wilder confided to Bancroft that Brooks worried him. She was among the very few visitors to the closed set, along with Carl Reiner, Joseph Stein, and playwright Arthur Miller, whose son was an assistant on the set. Bancroft reassured Wilder, “Just go with him!”

  One late afternoon during the first week of photography, Wilder finished a demanding rehearsal for the introductory scene between Bialystock and Bloom, in which Bloom freaks out over Bialystock’s lack of scruples, breaks down into hysterics, and demands the comforting blue blankie Bialystock has snatched from him. Wilder was weary and relieved after the long rehearsal was over and thought they would shoot the scene the next day. Brooks said no, he wanted to shoot right away, while the ideas were fresh. Wilder tried not to panic, just go with the flow, as Bancroft had advised. He thought back to his long-ago fencing classes at Bristol Old Vic, where his teacher had taught him to grab a handful of raw sugar if he ever needed a surge of energy in a scene. Wilder asked Brooks for Hershey’s bars, someone ran to get them, and the actor gobbled two of the candy bars, gulping water with them.

  Bialystock: What’s the matter with you?