Bloom: I’m hysterical! I’m having hysterics! I’m hysterical! (Bialystock throws a glass of water on Bloom.) I’m wet! I’m wet! I’m hysterical and I’m wet! (Bialystock slaps Bloom.) I’m in pain! I’m in pain, and I’m wet! . . . and I’m still hysterical!
Brooks got his electric performance in one perfect take.
Joseph E. Levine wasn’t sure. When the producer saw the first dailies, he was thrown by Wilder’s unstrung persona and offered Brooks $25,000 extra for the budget if he would replace the peculiar performer. “Mel calmed him down and talked him out of having me fired,” Wilder recalled, adding “I was only getting ten thousand dollars.”
The trust between Wilder and Brooks grew, superseding the long-term yet iffier relationship between Mostel and Brooks. Wilder was ready to take any dare; his audacity as an actor impressed everyone. And, seeing Wilder blossom as a foil for his own bluster and extravagance, Mostel’s survival instinct flared and he stepped up his energy.
Still, brusque and snarling in action, Brooks bred tension on the set, and it was inevitable that an outsider would witness it. A few weeks into the schedule a New York Times feature writer visited the set. Brooks was busy guiding the scene where Bialystock and Bloom pour flattery on the cross dresser Roger De Bris, recruiting him to stage their sure-flop Nazi musical. Knowing firsthand the power of the Times to destroy—its reviewers had savaged Shinbone Alley and “All American” and, more than once, his television scripts—Brooks reserved a special animus for the newspaper of record; hence the scene in The Producers where Bialystock attempts to bribe a Times critic to ensure the scribe’s enmity.
Making clear his disdain for “lying interviews,” in his words, after the shot was done Brooks rushed to a cot and sprawled facedown, ignoring the Times’ emissary.
Earlier in her visit, the Times writer, Joan Barthel, had observed Brooks hurling “vivid invective” at his staff, flinging “sarcasm” at a still photographer, and blasting his cameraman. Producer Sidney Glazier told Barthel he had tripled his cigarette intake and added, “Pray for me.” Now she approached the director warily. “What do you want to know, honey?” Brooks asked her with a distinctly unpleasant edge. “Want me to tell you the truth? Want me to give you the real dirt? Want me to tell you what’s in my heart?”
Barthel said yes and then reported verbatim what happened next: “‘What would I tell you, really?’ he snapped, with what has to be called a sneer. ‘That this movie is the worst movie I’ve ever seen?’ It sounded considerably more colorful than it looks, because he threw in some adjectives, or maybe some adverbs—based on four-letter words.” The nearby producer, overhearing, “looked stunned.”
Barthel asked nicely if Brooks had encountered any directing problems.
“No problems at all,” he replied. “I know everything and that’s my problem.”
The press agent, nearby, “looked faint,” Barthel wrote.
The other side of the coin was that most actors were accustomed to strange and autocratic directors. Brooks’s craziness charged the atmosphere, ramped up the excitement on the set. “[Brooks] keeps you on edge,” Dick Shawn told the press. “Mel has great craziness, which is the greatest praise I can have for anybody,” Mostel agreed tactfully.
Some nights, when Brooks and friends wearily repaired to Max’s Kansas City after a hard day of filming, “even Mostel, with his bad leg,” reported Vanity Fair, “would make it to Max’s, where he would greet the drag queens with a sloppy kiss on the lips.”
Over time Brooks had proved himself a creator who was also, often enough to color his reputation, a wrecker; and there were the same two sides to this production: the ugliness and fractiousness that transpired behind the scenes and epitomized the wrecker, and the creative surges and locomotive drive that amped up the power and spontaneity of scenes.
More than once, budget limitations and scenes that had been deliberately left open-ended in his script allowed the tightly wound director to fly by the seat of his pants. Impromptu decisions resulted in some of the fondly remembered highlights of the film.
For example, the handshake that clinches the partnership between Bialystock and Bloom was originally supposed to be a “Top of the world!” climax atop the Parachute Jump in Coney Island, built for the 1939 World’s Fair. Just as the two, belted into a canvas seat, reached the top of the ride, Bloom would shout James Cagney’s immortal last line from White Heat and the pair would plunge sharply before their parachute opened, with their slow descent making a visual pun. But the Parachute Jump had not been operative for several years, and too much money was needed to get it up and running.
This issue dovetailed with another financial problem. The Hitler audition scene had originally been written for actors lined up onstage, in Hitler mustaches, singing a sequence of lyrics from “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady—a nod to Brooks’s friend Moss Hart, the original director of the Broadway stage production. But the film’s low budget, it turned out, could not afford the steep rights to the famous song.
As Brooks shot interiors on West 26th Street, Alfa-Betty Olsen journeyed to the Lincoln Center library to hunt for a public domain show tune that might be substituted. As Olsen passed the Lincoln Center fountain, its waters changed height, as they were timed to do intermittently, soaring high above her and giving her the idea for a location that could stand in for the Parachute Jump. After learning that the waters could shoot as high as forty feet, Brooks embraced the notion. The handshake scene had its “Top of the world!” moment.
In the end the Hitler auditions had to make do without Lerner and Loewe. Actors were rounded up, many straight from the choruses of Broadway musicals (“the tenor from The Most Happy Fella came in with a guy from Fiddler on the Roof,” recalled Olsen). A man who liked winging it, Brooks gave each actor instructions for his or her vignette, while also encouraging free-form tomfoolery. The Hitler audition sequence turned out wonderfully, as did another scene left blank in the script—the intermission in the tavern near the theater, where Bialystock and Bloom gloomily observe the well-heeled throng as they jostle for drinks and gaily extol the merits of the “Springtime for Hitler” musical. After coaching from Brooks, all the action and dialogue was improvised. No other Mel Brooks comedy would have crowd scenes that pulsed with such immediacy.
From Dick Shawn’s “Love Power” to Kenneth Mars’s weird emendations, the actors were encouraged to add their own bits and touches. Mostel remained “heaven and hell” to deal with throughout the production, in Brooks’s words. And no—Mostel would tell people forever after whenever they told him how much they loved The Producers—it was his film, not Mel Brooks’s. Incorrigibly, many times he brought production to a standstill with his complaints, yet somehow under Brooks’s handling he made Max Bialystock indelible. It remains one of Mostel’s few consequential lead roles in films.
“Mel thinks of himself as a star maker,” says Kenneth Mars half sarcastically in the documentary “The Making of The Producers,” included as a DVD “extra.” Because of course people like Mars—or Mostel or Dick Shawn—considered themselves to be known quantities. But star making did apply in the case of Gene Wilder, who was a New York secret before Brooks took a chance on him as Leo Bloom, and whose screen debut in Bonnie and Clyde was yet to be released as the shooting of The Producers wound down.
“With Gene I was simple and kind and nice and gentle,” Brooks explained. “With Zero, I’d scream at him, ‘You’re a genius!’” By the time of the courtroom sequence—after “Springtime for Hitler” has become a hit and Bloom and Bialystock have been arrested—Wilder had become emboldened to the point where he found fault with Brooks’s most carefully scripted dialogue. The actor asked permission to rewrite Bloom’s final plea to the judge, touchingly explaining his friendship with Bialystock (“No one ever called me Leo before . . .”). The warmth of Wilder’s last-minute rewrite made the speech stand out, and it rounded out Bloom with shadings the other characters lacked.
The pressures and t
ensions, the long days inevitably followed by sleepless nights, and the whole “on-time” nature of picture making transformed the director into a pale, shuffling zombie by the end—the last day of filming—which was Saturday, July 15.
After hours spent coordinating the lighting with the height of the waters of the Lincoln Center fountain, Brooks and Mostel faced off heatedly on the final day and Mostel threatened to walk off the set. Sidney Glazier was summoned to pacify the two men. Brooks canned the last shot around 5:30 a.m. Bloom pranced around the fountain, shouting joyfully “By God, I’ll do it!” Bialystock, surrounded by geysering water, chorused, “He’ll do it! He’ll do it!” For some, that would be the iconic image of The Producers. “It’s the ‘I want everything I’ve ever seen in the movies!’ scene,” Vanity Fair observed, “the cri de coeur straight from Mel Brooks through his alter ego Leo Bloom.”
Anne Bancroft finished her work on The Graduate in Hollywood in time for a summer visit to her husband’s set, then August on Fire Island, then rehearsals for a revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, in which she’d portray Regina, the Tallulah Bankhead part from the original stage production, which Bette Davis re-created in the film. Her director for The Little Foxes was Mike Nichols, who had also directed The Graduate.
As Bancroft began Little Foxes rehearsals, in cutting rooms at Eighth Avenue and 54th, conveniently near the Carnegie Deli, Brooks launched the assembly of The Producers. Regardless of all his experience in television and on Broadway, he couldn’t pretend to any expertise in camerawork or editing. That gave him all the more reason to assert his dominance, fiercely clashing with cameramen and editors early in his directing career.
The Producers’ cinematographer and editor both got to know the “two Mels,” in Ralph Rosenblum’s words. One was the Mel who “did five minutes of ad-lib routines in the morning for the grips and electricians until fifteen people had put their coffees down for fear of spilling them.” That was the same Mel who would jump out of the car in the middle of a traffic jam on the way to a location shoot, run over to a stranger’s car, knock on the window, point to himself and say, “Mel Brooks. The 2000 Year Old Man. Recognize me?” This Mel also took Chock Full o’Nuts orders with pencil and paper and then bumped his way up to the front of the queue, “as the crew watched in hysteria” telling everyone he was Mel Brooks, “famous comedian, Hollywood director.”
“Then there was the other Mel,” wrote Rosenblum in his memoir, “the Mel who seemed to feel he was being ganged up on by the pros, who felt exposed and isolated, who with barely a transition would become angry and tyrannical, whose neck would stretch and tighten and eyes bulge until . . . you were sure he would attack you.”
Rosenblum said that there was also a “before” and “after” Mel. Before filming, the novice filmmaker behaved in a flattering and deferential fashion to the key technical artists, whose help he dearly needed. “Those of us who were meeting him for the first time found him a very funny, very eager man,” Rosenblum recalled. “He spoke at length about the contribution I had made to A Thousand Clowns, and he said he wanted a relationship with me similar to the one I had had with [Herb] Gardner [the original playwright of the film directed by Fred Coe]. He touched just the right note when he suggested a collaboration of equals, and like Joe Coffey, I was immediately impressed.”
Later, watching Brooks on the set—and early on at dailies, where they reviewed the latest footage every morning—Rosenblum and producer Sidney Glazier learned “to refrain from mentioning any flaws” they happened to notice. “There were certain things you just couldn’t say to him,” Glazier remembered. “Mike Hertzberg said more to him than anybody, because Mike worked for him. Mike was his boy, his assistant, and more often than not Mel would listen to him. But everybody else was a threat. Everybody else was the enemy. There was always a moment when you felt he would kill you. His face would turn white, his jaw would come out—and it was not so much a question of physical fear; how could you fear him? He was a little guy. But he terrified me, because I always felt he was going to do something that would blow the picture.”
Quickly finding Brooks’s tirades during the filming tiresome (“but none of them had involved me, so I was still relatively balanced”), Rosenblum asked permission to vacate the set and spend two weeks assembling a rough cut of the first twenty minutes. “Since this was a very primitive film in which everything depended on the words and acting, the editing was very basic and uncomplicated. Choices were few; in most cases the scene was funniest with full shots of both characters, and I think almost any editor would have cut it the same way. Indeed, when the movie was finished, 90 percent of the first two reels remained just as I’d put them together in the initial assembly.”
Rosenblum screened the twenty-minute rough cut for Brooks and Glazier at Movielab. “In addition to revealing the inherent shortcomings of the picture,” Rosenblum recalled, not unsympathetically, “the first rough cut lacks the refinements—the sound editing, the opticals, the finishing touches—that do so much to make a movie come alive . . . . for the beginning director, watching this first assembly is even more painful, because he can’t allow for the enormous difference that the refinements will make—he’s never had the experience of dragging a first cut into a dazzling finished film.”
After viewing the assemblage, however, Brooks stomped to the front of the room and “with hideous intensity” pointed a finger at the editor. “You just listen to me,” he growled. “I don’t want you to touch this fuckin’ film again! You understand? I just finished with Coffey this afternoon—I told him I don’t need his help, and I don’t need your help either! I’ll do it all by myself. Don’t you touch this film—you hear—don’t touch it, until I finish shooting!” Shaken, Rosenblum said nothing. Glazier, on the drive home, apologized abjectly for Brooks. Though angry and resentful, the editor didn’t quit.
Every morning during the editing, Rosenblum waited past ten o’clock for Brooks, who’d arrive late with coffee and crullers for the editor and his team of assistants, elaborately serving them with sugar, napkins, and stirrers. “Mornings were slow because Mel had a hard time waking up,” Rosenblum said. “He’d free associate, improvise little skits, tell jokes, do word games and generally carry on” as he fueled up with coffee.
Then “he’d become manic,” said Rosenblum, “fly around the room with his arms waving and eyes bulging, suddenly become a little old man again, a vendor on Orchard Street, a weaseling schemer, a pontificating rabbi, a sleazy seducer, or Super-Jew with J on his pajamas. He would carry on this way for about an hour, and as far as I could tell, he had no memory whatever of the tongue-lashing he’d given me two months earlier . . . .
“Once he paused in the middle of one of his routines and looked intensely at the ashtray sitting beside him on an end table. I was at my desk, drinking my coffee and expecting another funny line. Suddenly Mel’s hand tightened around the ashtray, his face got very tense, and he looked up and screamed, ‘Next time it’s going to be my ashtray, goddamn it! It’s going to be my desk, my telephone, my couch, my Movieola, my equipment, my supplies! Next time you’re going to be in my office GODDAMN IT!’ Then his face relaxed, he glanced casually about the room, and went back to drinking his coffee and thinking up jokes.”
By eleven o’clock Brooks would have psyched himself up to look at footage but “he could not find the proper distance” and spent hours griping about how Coffey had “screwed him here by taking too damn long,” in Rosenblum’s words, “or how Zero never did get that line right,” and so on. (“Those goddamned sons of bitches,” Rosenblum quoted Brooks as saying after they’d watched the scene with Mostel, Wilder, and Kenneth Mars on the rooftop of Franz Liebkind’s tenement. “They ruined it. That fat pig! He had to play it his way. If I ever get ahold of him I’ll kick his head in!”) The mornings were generally wasted with little real work getting done, Rosenblum said. Brooks perked up at lunch, schmoozing with other writers at the Carnegie Deli, flirting with waitresse
s, “bursting with playfulness, competitiveness, aggression, and a lusty satisfaction at being recognized by one and all”—albeit it helped to have his name proclaimed loudly at every opportunity.
Fully alert after lunch, “awake enough to realize he had some very boring hours and weeks of work ahead,” in Rosenblum’s words, and “awake enough to remember and resent his dependence on me,” the fun and games ceased. Arguments about deleting “superfluous” glances, lines, or entire scenes became “angry, raucous, combative,” in Rosenblum’s words, with Brooks taking any such suggestions as “a direct attack,” digging in his heels while aggressively blaming others. “Although his belligerence was rarely aimed directly at me,” Rosenblum said, “I felt sullied by it and withdrew into a tighter, colder, more severe professional stance that could only have increased his resentment.”
Brooks’s “clutching and resistance” dragged out what should have been a simple eight-week task, Rosenblum wrote. With glazed eyes Brooks watched and rewatched the footage of “Springtime for Hitler,” until he finally decided that what bothered him was one singer’s solo line. He dubbed in his own voice “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty! Come and join the Nazi Party!”—the only glimpse of Brooks the performer in his first screen comedy.
“No matter what portion of the film had to come out—and ultimately everything that needed to came out—he was neither appreciative nor cooperative,” recalled Rosenblum. The close-ups seemed piled on top of each other; the editing team badly needed inserts for transition purposes. When, one day, the editor found “a piece of visual humor” to solve a transition problem, Brooks was appeased only for a moment before realizing whose solution it was. “Who wants a joke by a fuckin’ editor?” he sniped.
“He always seemed ready to explode,” Rosenblum wrote in his memoir. “Once he erupted by throwing every object within reach across my two rooms—grease pencils, film cannisters, tape dispensers, the ashtray that would one day be his ashtray.” The editor’s assistants cowered behind draperies.
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