Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  The network, however, tempered the wackiness. Prince John, for example, was going to be depicted as a “flaming faggot,” in Brooks’s words, until ABC raised a red flag. The title, When Things Were Rotten, was Brooks’s formulation, and he was also deeply engaged in the casting, starting with the actor signed to portray Robin Hood, Dick Gautier, who had been the original Conrad Birdie on Broadway—not to mention, just as famously, Hymie the Robot on Get Smart. Brooks recruited “the Birdie boys”—his old friends from “All American”, Charles Strouse and Lee Adams—to pen the theme song.

  From the weekly ensemble (his tennis-playing friend Dick Van Patten was cast as the abbot) to the episode writers (Thomas Meehan), directors (first-timer Marty Feldman), and single-episode guest stars (Sid Caesar), When Things Were Rotten became a mingling of past Brooks friends and associates and a tryout for future Club Brooks card holders.

  With Brooks’s name emblazoned on its advertising and publicity, When Things Were Rotten easily became one of the season’s most highly anticipated shows. Many critics found it frenetic with its excruciating wordplay (“Does a willow weep? Does a Forrest Tucker?”), however, while often, at the same time, very funny. Brooks’s usual percentage of jokes hit the bull’s-eye in the pilot. “The comic bits are not uniformly successful,” John J. O’Connor wrote in the New York Times. “Only about one in six is on target. But as they are being flung at the audience every fifteen seconds the final total is still impressive . . . .

  “Much will depend on the extent of Brooks’ participation.”

  Yet Brooks did not participate much beyond the template. His agreement with Steinberg guaranteed that he would be listed first in the “created by” credits. Steinberg had to forfeit his credit, because the Writers Guild had a rarely breached rule that limited television script names to only three. So it was just Brooks, Boni, and Stiles, with Steinberg as the producer.

  Brooks’s top billing made it all the more galling when Paramount killed the series after just thirteen episodes. The ratings had been solid. The cast, many of them personally picked by Brooks, was first rate, and the scripts were finding a rhythm; the show had a demented flavor, like a Brooks comedy, yet with its own peculiar spice. Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of Paramount, personally pulled the plug one day, summoning Steinberg’s boss, Bud Austin, the head of the studio’s TV division, and telling him he didn’t want to produce any more episodes. Diller said he detested silly humor and preferred more sophisticated comedy such as Barney Miller, another Paramount series.

  Steinberg was as flabbergasted as he was crushed. As for Brooks, he was furious when, in October, the producer relayed the news to him in his 20th Century–Fox office. “They canceled the show! What, they’re telling me I’m not funny! Get the fuck out of here!”

  Throughout the film industry people wondered: What would Brooks do to top Young Frankenstein? By October, he had made several bold decisions, the most important of which he had been gradually preparing himself for ever since the first 2000 Year Old Man recording: not only would he write and direct his next comedy; he’d star in it.

  Brooks’s post–Young Frankenstein thinking had revolved around Gene Wilder—or, more accurately, the lack of Gene Wilder. After his glowing reviews and Best Screenplay Oscar nomination for Young Frankenstein, Wilder had signed a three-picture pact with 20th Century–Fox and in short order had notched his first film as a triple hyphenate: writer-director-star. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother borrowed Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, and Dom DeLuise from Brooks’s stable and producer Michael Gruskoff, too.

  Though Wilder’s films as writer-director would never match the artistic and commercial double whammy of Young Frankenstein, his vehicles did perform reliably at the box office in the 1970s, many becoming substantial hits. Often enough his costars were veterans of Brooks’s films, and he would have an especially fruitful chemistry on-screen with one actor who never quite made it into a Brooks picture: Richard Pryor.

  Wilder was not the world’s most easygoing or most likable personality. (His costar and onetime girlfriend Teri Garr described him succinctly in one interview: “He was a jerk.”) Neither, manifestly, was Brooks. They had had creative differences on both The Producers and Young Frankenstein. It didn’t help their professional relationship that Wilder had had to surrender control and percentages to Crossbow Productions in his Frankenstein contract, nor that studio advertising and publicity had elevated Brooks’s name over his.

  The Writers Guild formally complained, pointing out that Wilder’s name had been omitted from the end credits (which listed Brooks only as director and producer). “Guild beefed that the writing credit must appear whenever the ‘directed by’ credit appears,” Variety reported. The Guild objected to Young Frankenstein advertisements and press books that privileged Brooks while sometimes forgetting Wilder. An eighty-foot-high billboard on the Playboy Building on Sunset Boulevard touted “A Mel Brooks Film,” for example. An arbitrator fined the studio ten thousand dollars, the bulk of that sum going directly to Wilder.

  “I can’t find other people to be vehicles of my passion,” Brooks began telling interviewers, because his preferred star “Gene Wilder is making his own films” now.

  Tellingly, despite incentives and a friendship that endured, Wilder—a leading man like no other in three Mel Brooks films—never worked with him again in any capacity.

  Shortly after taking over Young Frankenstein from Columbia Pictures and soon after approving Brooks’s multipicture contract with 20th Century–Fox, Gordon Stulberg was forced out of the studio leadership. It became the privilege of Dennis Stanfill, the new president and chairman of the 20th Century–Fox board, to announce the fifth Mel Brooks film, a spoof of silent-picture making, to the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) convention in New Orleans in the first week of October 1975. The exhibitors cheered.

  Curiously, though he’d been spoofing silent pictures since the 1950s, the film was not Brooks’s idea to begin with, as had also been true of his hits Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

  One day in mid-1975, as publicity told the story, Ron Clark phoned Brooks with a pitch. A Canadian and graduate of McGill University, Clark was a successful television writer who regularly took time off from well-paid Hollywood jobs to write stage plays, often with a collaborator, Sam Bobrick. Their comedy Norman, Is That You?, about a father who discovers that his son is gay, had been produced on Broadway in 1970. Clark wrote for TV performers that Brooks followed (Steve Allen, Danny Kaye, Tim Conway, Marlo Thomas, Paul Lynde), and he had won Emmy and Writers Guild awards while on the Smothers Brothers’ staff. He also mingled socially with Brooks and Bancroft at dinner parties and tennis matches.

  While shaving one morning, Clark had the sudden inspiration of a washed-up movie director in contemporary Hollywood, desperately plotting his comeback by making the first silent picture in decades. The film itself would be entirely silent except for music, sound effects, and a single declarative word of dialogue, which was Clark’s idea from the get-go, to be uttered by Marcel Marceau when the famous French mime declines a role in the proposed silent picture.

  Everyone knew that Brooks was looking for a vehicle for himself as the star of a Mel Brooks comedy. Brooks could play the washed-up director, Clark felt. Although Brooks immediately told Clark, “I don’t need ideas, I’ve got plenty of ideas already,” the two agreed to meet for lunch, where Brooks quickly decided on Silent Movie as his follow-up to Young Frankenstein. The project seemed doubly daring: no one had made a soundless film in Hollywood since the early 1930s, and Brooks was primarily a verbal comic.

  Right away, after lunch, Clark phoned his friends Barry Levinson and Rudy DeLuca as they logged hours at their jobs on The Carol Burnett Show. Levinson and DeLuca had won an Emmy in 1974 as part of Carol Burnett’s staff (which included Gary Belkin) along with a Writers Guild award for the comedienne’s television series in 1975. The two also shared writing credits on Tim Conway’s TV series and
Marty Feldman’s Comedy Machine. Levinson and DeLuca had started out with an improvisational troupe in Los Angeles in the early 1960s (another member of the troupe was actor Craig T. Nelson) and had a knack for the kind of physical comedy that would have to carry Silent Movie. Moreover, DeLuca co-owned, with Sammy Shore, the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard.

  Marty Feldman’s Comedy Machine rang the right bells because already Brooks and Clark had brainstormed Feldman and Dom DeLuise as sidekicks to the lead character, whom Brooks had named faster than you could say “Mel Funn.” Funn and the two other zany men would march through scenes in antic lockstep à la the Ritz Brothers. Brooks had never met Levinson or DeLuca. “Will I like them?” he asked. “You’ll love them,” said Clark. The new Club Brooks was at work on the script by midsummer.

  Ron Clark’s story had Funn, Dom Bell (DeLuise), and Marty Eggs (Feldman) struggling to launch a silent picture in modern-day Hollywood. Funn has convinced the head of Big Picture Studios that a novelty silent movie with marquee names could save the slumping studio. Lurking in the background is a soulless New York conglomerate called Engulf & Devour—a name echoing Gulf & Western, the parent company of Paramount, which was among the film’s stinging Hollywood in-jokes. Engulf & Devour schemes to ruin Funn’s plans in order to take over Big Picture Studios at a bargain price.

  The writing team met informally most mornings for coffee and bagels at a Hollywood deli before migrating to Brooks’s suite of offices at 20th Century–Fox in Century City. No writer was the designated typist; in fact, there was not always a typist in the room with them, sometimes just a tape recorder rolling with the secretary coming in later as a transcriber.

  There were other differences between the ad hoc group that had written Blazing Saddles and the team that was now shaping Silent Movie. For one thing, there was no raging iconoclast in the room, no truly dangerous comedian like Richard Pryor. That dovetailed with another decision Brooks made that would have long-term repercussions in his career.

  Even though Blazing Saddles was, dollar for dollar, his outstanding success, his new film would take pains to be PG rated. The industry was veering from the R-rated content maverick filmmakers briefly made commercial in the early 1970s. The R rating was retreating to art houses and by now was anathema to the major studios and big exhibitors.

  The one-upmanship and argument that had swirled around every scene of Blazing Saddles was also conspicuously missing from the new Club Brooks. The group sought “consensus,” in Levinson’s words. Their work sessions were surprisingly amicable and friction free. The three writers formed “a great working relationship” with Brooks, according to Levinson. “You’d say something, somebody would laugh, if you said it and somebody didn’t laugh, then it didn’t hold up. It was no more and no less than that.”

  Another clear difference was that most of the scenes revolved around Mel Funn—a character name that translated into the Nice Mel. Brooks usually pranced around, performing his part in the work sessions, as it was being crafted to please him. Although it was adventurous for Brooks, who was a physical comedian mainly from the neck up, to be making a silent movie, the writers constantly moderated the challenge by aiming for his comfort zone. “You’re writing towards who’s going to be in it,” Levinson recalled, “so it’s going to shift in some ways, subtly perhaps, and maybe without even thinking about it you’re writing for Mel Brooks. You’re going to make those adjustments.”

  Just as it would have been done for a Sid Caesar show, the script created slots for celebrities in the stars who are being courted by Mel Funn to appear in the silent film-within-the-film. Their names would be good for publicity and advertising and take some of the pressure off first-time star Brooks. The only suspense surrounding the script, as it gradually coalesced during the second half of 1976, was who those celebrities might be.

  Brooks approached Steve McQueen, but the serious-minded actor rejected any comedy role, and the good-humored Paul Newman took over his car-racing scenes. James Caan and Liza Minnelli proved to be amenable. So did Burt Reynolds, who had bonded with Brooks and Bancroft over their shared friendship with Dom DeLuise. When Marcel Marceau gave an opportune performance at UCLA, Clark went backstage to meet with the French mime and coax him into his first and only screen appearance. (Marceau would speak only one word—“Non!”—rejecting an appearance in Mel Funn’s silent picture.)

  “It was amazing to see Mel talk people like James Caan into being in [Silent Movie],” Marty Feldman recalled. “Caan was in preparation for his next film and needed to be in good shape. Mel convinced him to move his mobile workout trailer onto our set—he would pay for it—and told him he could take advantage of our nutritious catering.” Caan “bought” Brooks’s sales pitch, Feldman said, “and was in the film before he knew it.”

  Anne Bancroft was a natural thought, although no one recalls who first proposed the writer-director-star’s wife. (Bancroft, in one interview, said she read the script and recommended herself as the diva drawn into a wild flamenco by Brooks, DeLuise, and Feldman.) Her television tryout with Brooks earlier in the decade had paved the way.

  In interviews Brooks propounded his theory of casting as it had now become fixed: “self-starters who don’t have to have every nuance of behavior explained.” In effect: no Zero Mostel or Gene Wilder, who might take thespianism too seriously. With Brooks more established and their lives centered on Hollywood, Bancroft was also less involved in making whispered suggestions of actors with Broadway or stage credentials. More and more Brooks turned to seasoned comics who could be counted on to tweak their roles.

  The exception to that rule on the Silent Movie roster was Bernadette Peters, a noted Broadway actress and singer who had not yet broken out in Hollywood. Madeline Kahn reportedly declined the role of the sexpot who seduces Mel Funn on assignment from Engulf & Devour, only to fall in love with the washed-up director; she didn’t find the character as substantial as the ones she’d played in Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Peters was arguably better qualified for the dream dance, one of the nougats of the film, with Brooks reimagining himself as his boyhood idol Fred Astaire.

  The chief self-starter was the man who had long before mastered silent-picture spoofery: Sid Caesar. He accepted the fourth-billed role, which had been tailored for him all along, as the “Current Studio Chief” of Big Pictures Studio. The Club Caesar writers stayed close to Caesar, who lived in Beverly Hills nowadays, rooting for their mentor and helping him out as they followed his seesaw fortunes. Most of Caesar’s contemporary appearances were in theater and telefilms. If younger audiences knew the former king of TV comedy at all—as Brooks learned to his dismay when mentioning Caesar in later publicity interviews—it was from his ensemble role in Airport 1975. His part in Silent Movie was “almost the first since the high old days of television,” Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin would write, “which allows something like full display of his gifts as a clown.”

  The rest of the cast was filled with stand-ups and comedic personalities, including Ron Carey (the first of several roles he’d play in Brooks’s films), Henny Youngman, Charlie Callas, Fritz Feld, and Harry Ritz, the youngest Ritz brother, in his seventies, whom Brooks lured out of retirement. The other familiar faces included Lee Meredith, Ulla from The Producers, performing a nurse bit (“Mel gave me no direction at all,” she recalled. “He explained the scene and I don’t know what possessed me but I started hitting Marty Feldman over the head with my purse and Mel loved it”), and Liam Dunn, the director’s boyhood acquaintance, appearing in his third and last Brooks comedy (Dunn died shortly after the filming).

  After failing in his attempt to launch his own company, Michael Hertzberg returned to the fold as Brooks’s producer. Also back were John C. Howard as the editor (with Stanford C. Allen, his first assistant on Young Frankenstein, sharing the credit); John Morris would pick a few oldies for the soundtrack and also write the score; Alan Johnson would choreograph the dance moves. The easygoing New Yorker Pa
ul Lohmann, who had distinguished himself on Robert Altman’s Nashville, became the cameraman for this and the next Mel Brooks film, the first cameraman to work on consecutive Brooks pictures.

  When filming started in the first week of 1976, Barry Levinson and Rudy DeLuca stuck around the set to consult on the script and staging. The writers on the set—Brooks’s writers gathered around him as he directed, just as Sid Caesar’s writers had gathered around Caesar—became one of the filmmaker’s publicity points over the next decade. The writers helped critique the video playbacks (another shift in Brooks’s directing regimen, a method that had begun to spread in Hollywood after Jerry Lewis introduced the practice). And as onetime improv comics, Levinson and DeLuca also played cameos.

  The filming, achieved mostly on 20th Century–Fox soundstages and studio acreage, ran a crisp ten weeks on a $4.4 million budget. Even Brooks’s editing was unusually quick, as the continuity relied heavily on sound effects, music, intertitles, and sight gags. (Some of the film’s funnier sight gags—the “Our Toilets Are Nicer than Most People’s Homes” placard in the men’s room of Engulf & Devour—were akin to verbal one-liners.)

  Silent Movie was in the can in time for a June 1976 release.

  Brooks could do no wrong with summer audiences in the 1970s, and this was his silliest, most carefree movie yet: the PG-rated Nice Mel, without any rudeness, crudeness, or subversion. Whereas Blazing Saddles had alluded to hard truths and Young Frankenstein was made twice as funny by the slightest familiarity with Mary Shelley or James Whale, Silent Movie was a spoof of silent-picture making that offered pure escapism to American moviegoers weary of chaos, division, and the Vietnam War.

  The critics were on the same wavelength. They liked Silent Movie almost as much as the ticket holders did, praising the sunny, heartfelt comedy. Their majority opinion belied Brooks’s stubborn canard that critics never admired him. What he really meant was that they did not admire him enough as a comic and filmmaker, or without adding qualms.