Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Levine backed the film with publicity and advertising. But the unveiling was drawn out and scattershot, partly because Levine had to scrounge for screen availability at independent theaters unaffiliated with the major chains in city centers. In the long run, that accrued to The Producers’ cachet; in the short term, it drove Brooks crazy.

  Never showing on enough screens at the same time, The Producers couldn’t crack Variety’s monthly “50 Top Ten–Grossing Films.” Brooks had “net points” in his contract if the film made a profit, but, as he often told interviewers, up front he had been paid only his $35,000 writing-directing salary for The Producers—“one year of work.” He was convinced that Levine and the system had snookered him. “It’s impossible for a profit participant to make any money on a movie unless it’s a gigantic hit,” he explained later, “because overhead and interest are always being charged to the film.” He’d wait years for his net points; all the decision making, accounting, and oversight rested with Levine.

  Brooks did little grumping in public in the summer of 1968. But he griped privately to friends and his wife. The critical brickbats and modest box office accruing to his first screen comedy weighed heavily on him. He managed to get at least one silver lining in his contract: the clause that gave him future rights to The Producers as a stage property. Levine, still scarred by Kelly, had no interest in another Broadway musical.

  By the fall, Brooks and Alfa-Betty Olsen had completed the shooting script for The Twelve Chairs. Once again, Olsen would continue on as casting director. Brooks made trips to Hollywood and London, interviewing actors and overseeing the preproduction.

  Brooks never ceased to lust after Peter Sellers, this time for the part of Father Fyodor, the rapacious priest seeking the chair with the hidden jewels. But Anne Bancroft urged her husband to consider a loony actor she had been enjoying on television, most recently on his eponymous variety show, which had replaced Dean Martin’s over the summer of 1968. Brooks met Dom DeLuise for the first time in his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel—a distinct upgrade from the Chateau Marmont, where he’d stayed in the 1950s.

  The thirty-six-year-old DeLuise was from Brooklyn, Catholic and Italian, as roly-poly and jolly as Ron Moody was spindly and ascetic. Although he had trained as a serious actor and occasionally performed in dramas with distinction, he had made his mark playing lovable birdbrains in New York revues, on Broadway, and in a couple of motion pictures. Brooks met with DeLuise at the end of a long day spent interviewing actors. DeLuise nervously devoured sweets laid out on the table. Soon the two found themselves talking easily and laughing; after four hours Brooks shook DeLuise’s hand and said they were friends for life. DeLuise gasped at the low salary Brooks offered for months of work in Yugoslavia, but he took the part, and indeed they did become friends for life.

  Although Alfa-Betty Olsen lobbied hard for Alan Arkin as Ostap Bender, Frank Langella hovered in the wings; he had Anne Bancroft’s fervent endorsement. The thirty-year-old all-purpose actor was gorgeous, a sentiment echoed in the film by the shorter Tikon, who looks the strapping Bender up and down with awe. (Playing intimate scenes with Bancroft in A Cry of Players, Langella recalled that the actress had “resolutely never looked into my eyes, rather focused deeply on the second button down of my shirt.” Langella refrained from asking her why until after the show had closed: “Oh, that’s about where Mel comes up to on you.”) Langella would be second billed and also be paid a “ridiculously low” sum, the actor recalled, but Brooks reassured him that the role would make him a star. (Langella didn’t mention that he was already established onstage and as a star of his first film, Diary of a Mad Housewife, made and released before The Twelve Chairs.)

  Andréas Voutsinas, the only holdover from The Producers, was cast as the stage manager and producer of a theatrical troupe that travels with several of the coveted dining chairs among its stock scenery. Although his scenes were less dazzling than Carmen Ghia’s, he did have one of Brooks’s trademark quips: “I hate people I don’t like.”

  Lesser-known supporting players, mostly British or Irish, were cast in England before the filming. Yugoslav professionals and amateurs were rounded up on location.

  Alan Heim, who had inherited the final editing of The Producers from Ralph Rosenblum, would carry on in that capacity; Brooks’s first cameraman Joseph Coffey yielded to a young Yugoslav, Djordje Nikolic, whose background was in documentaries.

  John Morris, who had been vital to The Producers, returned to compose the score and cowrite the film’s main theme with Brooks. Morris admittedly borrowed phrases from Johannes Brahms’s Hungarian Dance no. 4 in F-sharp Minor for the melody of “Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst”—whose fatalistic title and lyrics were otherwise quintessential Brooks: “Hope for the best/Expect the worst/You could be Tolstoy/Or Fannie Hurst . . .”

  Joseph E. Levine invested heavily in trade paper advertisements encouraging Academy Award voters to consider The Producers, with full-page displays targeting Brooks’s “incomparable original screenplay” and Best Actor in a Supporting Role candidate Gene Wilder. The preproduction of The Twelve Chairs halted on February 24, 1969, when the 1968 nominations were unveiled. Both Brooks and Wilder drew nominations, and as frosting on the cake Ron Moody, the future star of Twelve Chairs, was in the running for Best Actor for portraying Fagin in the film version of Oliver!

  Earlier in the month the Writers Guild of America, whose award categories were titled differently, had nominated The Producers as Best Written Comedy.

  Brooks traveled alone to Hollywood for the April 10 Oscar ceremony, which had to be delayed two days following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Thinking her husband’s chances were slim—Brooks was up against Faces (John Cassavetes), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick), The Battle of Algiers (Franco Solinas and Gillo Pontecorvo), and Hot Millions (Ira Wallach and Peter Ustinov)—Anne Bancroft stayed behind. Brooks had already lost at the Writers Guild, where in late March Neil Simon won the comedy prize for the film script of his Broadway hit The Odd Couple.

  At the Oscars the Best Writing (Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) presenters were Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles, who traded barbs as they read out the list of nominees. It may have helped that The Producers was the only out-and-out comedy among the contenders, and Brooks certainly acted surprised when his name was announced. He raced to the podium to accept the trophy for the script he had worked on for so long, the most personal film he’d ever write. “I didn’t trust myself in case I won so I wrote a couple of things here,” the tuxedo-clad writer told the crowd. “I want to thank the Academy of Arts, Sciences and Money for this wonderful award.” To loud laughter, he mimed searching his pockets for his nonexistent prepared speech. “Well, I’ll just say what’s in my heart. Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump . . .”

  “But seriously,” he continued, “I’d like to thank Sidney Glazier, the producer of The Producers, for producing The Producers. Joseph E. Levine and his wife Rosalie, for distributing the film. I’d also like to thank Zero Mostel. I’d also like to thank Gene Wilder. I’d also like to thank Gene Wilder. I’d also like to thank Gene Wilder . . .” Levine, in the audience, beamed with pride; he had promoted The Producers as a sophisticated niche comedy, and his long-range strategy had paid off with one of the industry’s highest honors for Brooks.

  Not for Gene Wilder, who lost in his category to Jack Albertson in The Subject Was Roses. Although Brooks had thanked Wilder three times in his speech, he didn’t so much as whisper the name of Alfa-Betty Olsen. Although happy for Brooks, the woman who had worked closely with him on “All American”, Get Smart, The Producers, and The Twelve Chairs felt slighted. Brooks genuinely liked Olsen besides genuinely needing her; he belatedly took space in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, expressing “My heartfelt thanks to Alfa-Betty Olsen for both her creative contribution to the script and brilliant casting. Mel Brooks.” But that was small potatoes compared to praise on national televis
ion; and the “heartfelt” emotion didn’t translate into official credit or monetary compensation. Olsen felt hurt and broke off contact with Brooks for years to come. Besides being such a valuable collaborator (by any WGA standard, she would have been entitled to a writing credit), her casting acumen—along with pillow talk from Anne Bancroft—enriched the ensembles of the first two Mel Brooks comedies.

  Brooks spent the first weeks of the summer in London, finalizing the casting, overseeing the production design, and presiding over initial read-throughs for The Twelve Chairs. He hired as his assistant a young American living in London with a background in Yugoslavian film. She knew enough Serbian to get by and had previously worked for the Avala Film company, which was going to be Brooks’s headquarters in Belgrade.

  Wherever Brooks went in life, he took Brooklyn with him, and so, when he met with actress Rachel Kempson, now Lady Redgrave, in his Claridge’s suite, for example, he put his feet up on the table facing her and asked nonchalantly, “Whaddaya got?”

  For a while he pretended to vet actors for the role of Tikon, making an elaborate charade of finding fault with each candidate. Soon it became clear to everyone that Brooks himself wanted to play the part, and he did, liberally spritzing his scenes in a manner not unlike the 2000 Year Old Man. When Ostap Bender asks Tikon what goes on at the Home for the Aged, for example, Tikon replies, “The old ladies, they tippy-toe in. They have a bowl of porridge and then they—” This line, as one critic subsequently noted, is followed by “an abrupt, nasty Bronx cheer that, in Mr. Brooks’ elastic vocabulary, may be either an insult or a euphemism—for death and lesser failures.”

  Before departing for Yugoslavia, Brooks gathered the production team together. He gave them a pep talk, saying that now they were all ambassadorial representatives of America and should behave responsibly as guests who were privileged to work in a foreign nation. But he forgot his own advice when encountering his first snafu at the Zagreb airport. The team’s plane connection was unexpectedly delayed. Brooks stormed down the airport corridors, waving his arms and shouting “So, what is all this SHIT?”

  Avala Film, situated in Belgrade’s Filmski Grad studio complex, boasted reasonably up-to-date soundstages with the standard lofty ceilings and slate walls. In a smoky café across the street from Avala Film sat drably dressed denizens, drinking plum brandy and strong Turkish coffee from tiny cups. Portraits of Vladimir Lenin and Tito decorated the café walls.

  Though the interiors would be shot at Avala Film, Brooks and his cast and crew also traveled to beautiful Dubrovnik on the Adriatic coast, the lakes region of Subotica, and the stone city of Novi Sad, all of which substituted for parts of the Soviet Union. For the first time Brooks used multiple cameras during the filming, which translated into fewer close-ups—the prevalence of which had given an extra charge to The Producers. The natural scenery of the locations lent a pictorial beauty to the photography, even if Brooks himself took some of the credit over the Yugoslav cameraman Djordje Nikolic, later telling one journalist, “I shot a lot of it myself on my belly in the fields of Yugoslavia. One incredible shot was the ghost train where I used an Arri[flex] with a long lens.”

  No other Mel Brooks film would be photographed outside the United States. On location the cast and crew were often housed in small red-roofed houses owned by local citizens, while Brooks typically stayed in luxury hotels where the water and electricity did not always function. The locations were spectacular but also more demanding and stressful than the interiors; the sun could be blinding during the beach scenes, with the night shoots long and exhausting. Spells of drenching rain caused unforeseen delays and wreaked havoc with the schedule.

  Brooks was forced into making constant adjustments. He moderated his on-set behavior after The Producers, but only gradually, not all at once. In Yugoslavia, he still did not radiate happiness or confidence. After Frank Langella and Dom DeLuise performed their first scene between Ostap Bender and Father Fyodor, the actors thought they had done well—they had been word perfect, following the script. Brooks exploded, “Garbage! Why are you giving me garbage!” “He could be difficult,” DeLuise recalled years later. “He could scare you.” Langella and DeLuise conferred, and for the next few takes they overlapped the dialogue and tossed in their own bits. Then Brooks was pleased.

  He’d ask for repeated takes, sometimes giving his own line readings that kept changing inflection. One time, DeLuise said, he had a single word of dialogue—“Maybe”—that Brooks shot more than a dozen times. Finally DeLuise was heard to murmur plaintively, “I don’t really care about this anymore . . . ,” breaking everyone up—including Brooks.

  The director suffered black moods, especially if the day’s log was rained out and he had to cool his heels, sulking inside his trailer. The foreign members of the crew (some British, many Yugoslav) and the stringencies of totalitarian society hampered their pace. Brooks seemed especially rude to the Yugoslav crew and to the native secondary actors. He bellowed repeatedly at a young clapper boy who didn’t always get his task right.

  Brooks lived and breathed the film; his mood darkened if his oxygen was threatened. He liked to joke, “It’s only a film,” invariably followed by “It’s my WHOLE LIFE!” And it was his whole life: he did not take exercise during filming, he drank bottomless mugs of coffee, and he let his guard down only at night, when everyone gathered family style at a local restaurant and he entertained effusively from the head of the table.

  On The Twelve Chairs, there were no enormous egos for him to wrestle with, no looming Zero Mostel monster. He was respectful to Ron Moody and helpful to Langella, who never laughed so hard as when Brooks and DeLuise teamed up for shtick one time at a Belgrade restaurant, marching into the kitchen, stealing the non-English-speaking chef’s toque, loudly stirring pots, banging spoons, and twirling rolling pins, shouting “Slavic” gibberish until the chef, kitchen staff, and other restaurant guests dissolved in tears and laughter. Brooks and DeLuise would be each other’s best audience for decades to come.

  “We were a very tight, happy family,” Langella, for one, recalled. “That’s an overused phrase, but it’s true. I was twenty-some-odd years old, waking up every morning in the presence of Mel and Dom, two of the truly funniest men on Earth.”

  Juggling work on a television project back in the United States, Anne Bancroft made several trips to Yugoslavia, delighting people with her cheerful enthusiasm and her invariable support for her husband. “She was a great and loving pal,” Frank Langella remembered, “warming my feet in the dressing room when I’d come in from the cold, watching dailies, giving great notes to Dom DeLuise and me and generally keeping everybody’s spirits up.”

  Spending time apart was one secret of the success of the Brooks-Bancroft marriage. Although they laughed a lot when they were together, they also frequently grated on each other. “I’m a moody person,” Bancroft told the press. “I’m hard to live with and so is Mel hard to live with. But my husband is one of the funniest men who ever lived. Sometimes I laugh at him until the tears roll out of my eyes.” The Brookses were “as well mated as any couple I’ve ever seen,” Carl Reiner said, “quick to anger, quick to forgive.” If Brooks went too far, with his wife or anyone else, the actress could silence her husband with a glance, but she also knew when to back away and give him center stage if he was on his high horse.

  With her multiple Tony and Oscar recognitions, Bancroft was arguably the actress of the decade in the 1960s. Although she did not win the Academy Award for her role in The Graduate, still she was at the peak of her reputation when Brooks started his directing career. “What would Anne Bancroft the movie star do in her film career over the next five years [after The Graduate]? The answer was surprising,” wrote her biographer Douglass K. Daniel, “almost nothing.” Nor, for nearly a decade, would she star again on Broadway.

  Stage and screen scripts came her way, but she was nearing forty; the parts were less attractive, perhaps, and she was picky. Over time she’d get “a r
eputation for turning down acting offers,” according to Daniel. One reason: the demanding roles took a toll on her physically and emotionally. “After each role,” she told the press, “I always take a rest, six months to a year.” Slowing down also helped the balance in her marriage.

  Bancroft continued her summer appearances at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, but for the wider public she preferred television and its lighter responsibilities, including the TV special she was working on between her trips to Yugoslavia.

  “Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man” was the brainchild of Martin Charnin, their Greenwich Village neighbor and Brooks’s onetime collaborator on “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud.” Charnin produced the one-hour show, shot in the fall of 1969 and aired on CBS in February 1970. The format, which amounted to a one-woman show, allowed Bancroft to declaim poetic monologues, sing (“acceptably in a throaty voice” according to Variety), dance (“looking at ease”), and perform light comedy in disparate sketches, including one boasting “additional material” by her husband.

  Hailed as clever and entertaining, “truly a tour de force,” in the words of New York Times critic Jack Gould, the Bancroft special drew on the talents of past and future members of Club Brooks, which had emerged to gradually supersede Club Caesar: Dick Shawn (playing Bancroft’s groom, as he’d done in I’m Getting Married), baritone Robert Merrill (who similarly guested on Your Show of Shows), and David Susskind (playing himself) made appearances. Alan Johnson choreographed the show. The auspicious writing credits included Peter Bellwood, Thomas Meehan, Herb Sargent, Judith Viorst, and Gary Belkin, with four “additional” ones listed (Brooks, Reginald Rose, Jacqueline Susann, and William Gibson, playwright of Two for the Seesaw and The Miracle Worker).