Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Brooks did most of the talking. Wilder scribbled notes. “Mel is like a shotgun with fifty pellets going, it just spurts out,” Wilder recalled. Some pellets hit the target, such as Brooks’s admonition to ground the Dr. Frankenstein character (earmarked for Wilder) in “scientific things, about the medulla oblongata, and the gray cells,” according to the actor. Brooks urged Wilder to seek out a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. “You’ve got to study it,” explained Brooks, “so that when you give the lecture you’ll know what you’re talking about. Find out all that stuff . . . make it sound good, make it sound scientific.”

  Other pellets went astray. Brooks had one idea he hated to relinquish: when the monster woke for the first time, hands trembling, fingers twitching, eyes fluttering open, chains falling away, his first words should be a famous Cary Grant phrase. That idea gave Brooks the opportunity to perform his Cary Grant imitation for Wilder, which was “not exactly Cary Grant, but like Cary Grant talking about Judy Garland at the Palace,” in Wilder’s words. Judy, Judy, Judy! “I didn’t say anything,” according to the actor. “I just didn’t write. I had my hand moving a little bit but I didn’t write that down.”

  They traded victories. Wilder won one crucial, early disagreement, insisting that he wasn’t going to write any part into the film for Brooks himself to play. Brooks as an actor was always riffing; he wasn’t acting. He always winked at the audience, Wilder said, breaking the fourth wall. Young Frankenstein should be performed with a straight face; no winking. Brooks could concentrate on the directing, as he’d done with The Producers, destined to be the only other Mel Brooks film without Brooks himself on-screen.

  After that single meeting, Brooks went off to Hollywood to shoot “Black Bart.” Wilder got down to brass tacks and launched into the first draft. “In black & white” was stipulated from the first on the title page as part of Wilder’s intended homage to director James Whale’s Frankenstein films, which had been photographed in black and white. Apart from the original, made in 1931, Wilder soaked up 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein (“the most helpful”) and Son of Frankenstein, directed by Rowland V. Lee, not Whale.

  In January in Los Angeles, where Wilder was shooting Rhinoceros at Twentieth Century–Fox, the actor showed the first fifty-eight pages to Brooks, who was preoccupied with “Black Bart.” Brooks said only, “Okay. Now let’s talk about what happens next.”

  “I assumed he liked the pages but I wasn’t sure,” the actor recalled. They spent an hour mulling over the second half of the script, “what could happen, how it could happen,” said Wilder. “Enough that I felt there was a track, that I could start to find my way.”

  Wilder headed back east and developed the second half of the script. Making a little time during the filming of “Black Bart,” he continued working on the draft. And then, after he was done with his role as the Waco Kid, Wilder quickly departed California for London to meet up with director Stanley Donen and shoot his scenes for The Little Prince.

  The trade papers did not learn about Young Frankenstein until September. Brooks was announced as directing the screen comedy “from a Gene Wilder script,” with Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein, Peter Boyle as “the monster,” and Marty Feldman as Igor.

  Surprise: it was now a 20th Century–Fox production. Over the summer, Columbia also had let Young Frankenstein slip away, ordering a budget of $1.75 million, which fell short of the $2.2 million ceiling Brooks wanted. He managed to find trims in the budget, but the last straw was when Columbia balked at the black-and-white photography.

  Another development: “Mel’s boy,” producer Michael Hertzberg, who had worked on The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, and Blazing Saddles, had demanded greater creative input and profit participation. That wasn’t going to happen. So Hertzberg left Brooks to nurture his own projects; the trades also announced Hertzberg’s new company in September.

  Hertzberg’s departure opened the door to another Brooklynite, Michael Gruskoff, who had first crossed paths with Brooks at Charles Kasher’s house parties in the late 1950s. Gruskoff had been a mail room clerk at the William Morris Agency before becoming a top agent at Creative Management Associates with a reputation for handling temperamental clients. He was instrumental behind the scenes of Dennis Hopper’s ill-fated The Last Movie and had produced Douglas Trumbull’s science fiction thriller Silent Running. Mike Medavoy brought the two old acquaintances together. “You pisher you!” Brooks greeted Gruskoff, recognizing him instantly from Fire Island. “Where’s your bathing suit?”

  Gruskoff sent the Young Frankenstein script over to Gordon Stulberg and Alan Ladd, Jr., the president and vice president of 20th Century–Fox. They were the new leadership at 20th Century–Fox, and Stulberg and Ladd were anxious to build up the studio roster. The son of the famed actor Alan Ladd, “Laddie,” as everyone called him, had started out as a talent representative with Creative Management Associates in Hollywood before moving to London and putting in a stint with the Lew Grade Organization. Longtime friends, Laddie and Gruskoff had worked together closely on projects in Hollywood and London.

  Accompanied by Gruskoff, Brooks made an in-person pitch, doing most of the talking, his usual supersales job. Between Brooks and Laddie it was love at first sight. Laddie’s Golden Age connection was as important to Brooks as his European business outlook was. Laddie loved The Producers and thought that “Gene and Mel were brilliant together.” He was not keen on the planned retro look, but Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show—a Columbia picture, ironically—had demonstrated that black-and-white cinematography was no hindrance at the box office. 20th Century–Fox agreed to buy Young Frankenstein from Columbia and provide Brooks with a budget of $2.8 million. Ladd’s considerable mystique in the Hollywood of the 1970s was greatly owed to the fact that, after stealing Brooks from Columbia, he signed the writer-director to a multipicture contract (three films over the next five years with first pick of all of Brooks’s “original concepts”). The contract gave the funnyman a decade-long haven at 20th Century–Fox.

  There was interesting fine print in the contract between Brooks and Wilder. On “Black Bart,” Brooks had no choice but to forfeit the story rights to the originating author, Andrew Bergman. There was nothing he could do about Warner Bros.’s attempt, in 1975, to turn Blazing Saddles into a television series; the studio produced a pilot episode, written by Michael Elias and Frank Shaw, with Bergman credited for the story. The pilot garnered a damning review in Variety, and the series idea died. Brooks had no say about any of it and didn’t get a penny. He hated that.

  Even though Wilder had conceived of Young Frankenstein, in most ways he would be Brooks’s junior partner in the contract. As the film’s star and cowriter, he received the equivalent of Brooks’s $100,000 writing-directing fee. But as a first-time scenarist, compared to Brooks—an Emmy and Oscar winner—he was obliged to share the story credit. But Wilder’s name would be listed before Brooks’s in both the story and the script credits, the first and last time that would happen on a Mel Brooks film.

  Wilder’s star salary was secondary to his long-term writer’s share of profit percentages. However, the apportioned writing credits did not translate into equally divided revenue, nor into equal control over the story property unto perpetuity. All the contractees belonged to a joint venture, with Crossbow Productions the principal entity in a limited partnership with companies formed by Gruskoff (officiating the joint venture) and Wilder (Jouer Limited). The joint venture managed the financing and distribution deal with 20th Century–Fox, which paid out 20 percent of all net profits according to this formula: joint venture, 14.28 percent; Jouer Limited, 28.57 percent; Crossbow Productions, 57.15 percent.

  Among the proprietary advantages that accrued to Crossbow in the overall arrangement was one unusual clause that Alan U. Schwartz extracted for the future. That clause took note of the rights of original authorship, as the Writers Guild defined the term. Those rights did not apply strictly to Young Frankenstein, as they had to Blazing Saddles, beca
use the script was manifestly an adaptation of a previously existing novel and several earlier films. “Notwithstanding that you are not entitled to separation of rights, as that term is defined in the WGA Minimum Basic Agreement of 1970,” the 20th Century–Fox contract stated, Brooks and Wilder—with Brooks the controlling partner under the aegis of Crossbow—would retain the “dramatic live stage rights” for Young Frankenstein.

  Over the summer of 1973, Brooks began the assembly of what, around the studio, was still being called “Black Bart,” a temporary title that did not satisfy anyone. Not until later in time did he experience a brainstorm one morning in the shower. He first tried out Blazing Saddles—another fart allusion—on Anne Bancroft, then told John Calley, who exclaimed, “That’s a great fucking title! I’m sending out a press release immediately.” Later Brooks added an equally mirthsome subtitle: “Never Give a Saga an Even Break.”

  Taking over Warner’s postproduction facilities, the filmmaker worked closely with editors Danford B. Greene and John C. Howard. Brooks was his usual obsessive-compulsive self during editing, moving around a few frames here, a few there, insisting “I know where the laughs are!” Often it was true, and the scene got funnier. Other times, after days of shuffling a few frames around, they’d end up back where they’d started.

  In the long months between the end of shooting and the release of the film, Howard was the editor with the patience of Job. A big, jolly man attuned to Brooks’s sense of humor, Howard was willing to try cuts, music, and sound effects with endless permutations. His iron butt would make him Brooks’s editor for the foreseeable future.

  Especially with music and sound effects, the editing gave Brooks a way to top off scenes the way, as a writer, he topped off comedy sketches with his zingers. The campfire farting scene received the full Brooks spritzing. “The sound editors got their friends together and then put soap under their armpits,” the director explained in one interview. “Wet soap. And they slapped at it and made air pockets and did the noises that way. I came in to do some with my voice, a few high ones that they couldn’t do under their arms. Y’know, bvrrrrrvt. But nobody put an actual fart on the soundtrack.”

  After a summer break, as the editing of Blazing Saddles progressed, Gene Wilder returned to Hollywood to work on the rewrite of Young Frankenstein. “Think you’re pretty good, huh?” Brooks greeted the actor after Wilder had checked in to the Hotel Bel-Air in West Los Angeles. “Well, I got news for you, Jew boy—now the work begins!”

  Brooks spent most days in the editing room in Burbank, while Wilder holed up writing at the Hotel Bel-Air. Brooks rendezvoused with the actor in the evenings, beginning their meetings with a “coffee ritual,” according to Wilder—“Earl Grey Tea and digestive English wheat biscuits,” according to Brooks, which better facilitated “an Old English feeling”—before the filmmaker delivered his notes on Wilder’s latest pages.

  Even in tête-à-têtes Brooks’s customary mode was shouting. Wilder, in his memoir, renders some of Brooks’s criticisms in caps: “YOU DON’T HAVE A VILLAIN! You understand what I’m saying? WE’VE GOT TO HAVE A VILLAIN! Otherwise there’s no story tension.” One time, during a fierce argument about something or other, Brooks really yelled at him. “I can’t even remember what it was about,” Wilder said, but Brooks stormed out and ten minutes later phoned Wilder from his house: “WHO WAS THAT MADMAN IN YOUR HOUSE? I COULD HEAR THE YELLING ALL THE WAY OVER HERE. YOU SHOULD NEVER LET CRAZY PEOPLE INTO YOUR HOUSE—DON’T YOU KNOW THAT? THEY COULD BE DANGEROUS.”

  “That was Mel’s way of apologizing,” Wilder explained.

  The script evolved into a series of well-knit blackouts. The sequencing of the blackouts builds the story. You can almost spot Brooks’s toppers, which are sprinkled into the lead-ins or -outs of scenes, and his throwaways about penises or breast size. (Brooks always insisted, however, that Wilder had come up with Dr. Frankenstein’s “What knockers!” followed by Inga’s “Thank you, Doctor!”) The Monster’s schwanzstucker, a riff that became the film’s punch line, could only be Brooks’s. Ditto the Blind Hermit’s reaching for the top of the Monster’s head: “You must have been the tallest one in your class!”

  One prolonged argument was prompted by Wilder’s brainstorm for the scene in which Dr. Frankenstein and the Monster sing and dance to Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” a scene that couldn’t help but evoke one of Brooks’s boyhood favorites, the Ritz Brothers vamping “The Horror Boys from Hollywood” with Al as the dancing Boris Karloff. “I said to myself, now Mel’s going to smile,” Wilder recalled thinking, because everyone knew Brooks loved iconic songs, which at the slightest cue he belted out to audiences of one. Brooks went into his contrarian mode, however, exploding “Are you crazy? It’s frivolous! It’s self-indulgent! You can’t just suddenly burst into Irving Berlin . . .”

  First Wilder “argued softly,” leaving Brooks unmoved; then he started “arguing vehemently,” until finally “my face started to turn from red to blue.” Almost half an hour passed with Brooks standing firm in his opposition. As Wilder began to sag in defeat, Brooks suddenly switched. “Okay—it’s in!” Wilder was stunned. “How can you argue with me for twenty-five minutes and then just casually say, ‘Okay—it’s in!’”

  “Because I wasn’t sure—do you understand?” Brooks replied. “I wanted to see how hard you’d fight for it. If you gave up right away, I’d know it was wrong.”

  Brooks unleashed his spray of pellets: big, small, good, bad. Sometimes Wilder wrote the ideas down, sometimes he let his pen glide over the page. Still, Brooks had never had a better typist or amanuensis. “I had to tone Mel down,” Wilder summarized, “and he had to keep me from being too subtle.” Several drafts were stacked up over the next six months, with a few of the film’s unforgettable moments not in any of them.

  “The only time we actually sat down and wrote together,” Wilder credibly claimed, “was on the creation scenes: ‘From this stinking bit of slime! . . .’”

  They finalized the scenes with the luxury of knowing the actors who were going to play many of the roles, not only Wilder, Peter Boyle, and Marty Feldman but also Madeline Kahn. While filming “Black Bart,” Wilder had been bowled over by Kahn; he talked with Brooks about the actress playing Inga, Dr. Frankenstein’s sexy assistant. But after Kahn read a draft, she said she’d rather play the ingenue, Elizabeth, Dr. Frankenstein’s coy fiancée—done! Wilder also knew Teri Garr, a perky former dancer who had been glimpsed in Elvis movies and who had just finished a small picture for Francis Ford Coppola called The Conversation. And just like that, Garr became Inga.

  Early on, the third important female role—more than in any other Brooks film—was set aside for Cloris Leachman. She’d play Frau Blücher, “a really frightening woman,” in Wilder’s words, a Mrs. Danvers–type keeper of the household à la Rebecca. Leachman had won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in The Last Picture Show and twice been Emmy nominated for her recurring role on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

  Another alumnus of The Conversation and a top box-office name of the era, Gene Hackman, heard about the project while playing tennis with Gene Wilder and wanted to get in on the fun. Hackman volunteered to play the lonely Blind Hermit, yearning to befriend the Monster: free of charge—four days of shooting for about four minutes of running time. Kenneth Mars, Franz Liebkind from The Producers, returned for good luck as the comical villain, Inspector Kemp—one of the roles Brooks had thought he might play until Gene Wilder said no—a policeman straight out of Son of Frankenstein, which had had Lionel Atwill similarly dressed and coping with a false arm torn off by the monster.

  Brooks had worked with a different cameraman for each of his previous three films. Now he met with a New Yorker with credits dating from the late 1940s. Gerald Hirschfeld was thrown when Brooks scolded him about “errors” in pictures he’d lensed, such as Diary of a Mad Housewife. Didn’t Hirschfeld think the white tub in the bathroom was too bright? Didn’t the gels shimmer too muc
h? “At first, I took him seriously and was more than a little upset,” the cameraman recalled, “until I realized he was doing his ‘thing’ and pulling my leg, because there was no tub and the bedroom was an interior set that didn’t require window gels. So I pulled his leg, and said, ‘One more derogatory remark about my work, and I’ll leave.’ We understood each other and laughed.”

  Brooks learned that Kenneth Strickfaden, who helped create the special effects for Frankenstein in 1931, had kept parts of the laboratory set from the classic horror film in his Santa Monica garage. Dale Hennesy, a production designer and art director whose previous credits included Dirty Harry and Sleeper, retrieved the parts and reproduced the laboratory, adding it to his atmospheric production design. Dorothy Jeakins created costumes faithful to James Whale’s oeuvre, and Alan Johnson stopped by for “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” There were no new songs for John Morris to orchestrate, but he did compose the background score, “one of his masterpieces,” according to Brooks, who asked for a full, rich score, nothing “tinny scary.” So Morris “went way back into Transylvania folk music and came up with this incredible gypsy song” that became the picture’s main theme.

  Putting the postproduction finishing touches on Blazing Saddles while cowriting and preparing Young Frankenstein, Brooks was never more on top of his game. If the Western comedy was anarchic, the Frankenstein spoof became his most controlled work. 20th Century–Fox approved the Young Frankenstein script, and the first day of photography was slated for February 11, 1974. That was the Monday following the weekend opening of Blazing Saddles in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Vancouver.

  One piece of footage Brooks always regretted leaving on the Blazing Saddles cutting room floor was the penis joke in the scene between Lili Von Shtupp and Black Bart in her dressing room, where she puts the moves on the sheriff. Von Shtupp blows out the candles and asks in her German-accented lisp, “Tell me, Schatzi, is it twue what they say about the way your people are gifted?” The studio did not want to provoke censors with the sheriff’s punch line—“I hate to disappoint you, ma’am, but you’re sucking on my arm”—so the director snipped it out. However, what Lili said next was preserved—“It’s twue! It’s twue!” rising in pleasure—which pretty much said the same thing just as well.