Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  R rated, Loose Shoes proved negligible both as comedy and at the box office. It is noteworthy primarily in retrospect as the first big-screen appearance by a rising Saturday Night Live comedian named Bill Murray. Most Brooks fans have never heard of it.

  One vehicle for Bancroft to direct, one respectable drama (costarring Bancroft), and one unruly mishmash: that was pretty much the way future Brooksfilms productions would divide. Not all of them were Elephant Men. Joseph Merrick’s story became a true sensation in 1980, going on to earn eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Directing, Best Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium), Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, and Best Music (Original Score). The Directors Guild nominated Lynch for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, and the Writers Guild nominated the screenplay for Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium (the script was ultimately credited to De Vore, Bergren, and Lynch).

  Although The Elephant Man lost in all of those disparate races, including in every Oscar category in which it was nominated, even so, Brooks had gambled and won.

  His propensity for ceaseless multitasking and diversifying continued to pay surprising dividends. The once undisciplined writer, who had bristled under Max Liebman’s sovereignty, now waved his scepter over the vast undertakings of others. The bad-taste comedian had successfully transformed himself into the good-taste producer of serious, if not to say—perhaps to underline the point—often exceedingly solemn dramas.

  Using the success of The Elephant Man and high expectations for his next comedy as leverage, Brooks tore up his current deal with 20th Century–Fox and, in effect, delivered an ultimatum to the new management: improve his terms, or he would walk.

  Shortly after signing his initial 20th Century–Fox contract, Brooks had jettisoned his talent agency, Creative Management Associates, over dissatisfaction with the escalations and perks in his 20th Century–Fox deal, which had seemed generous before the release of Young Frankenstein and the two ensuing comedies he made for the studio—all increasingly remunerative to Brooks, despite their gradually declining box office overall. His abrupt severance of CMA led to an agency lawsuit against him for unpaid percentages—a protracted case quietly settled, as was most Brooks litigation, out of court.

  Brooks switched to a personal manager, Howard Rothberg, who had followed David Begelman as his agent at CMA. Rothberg had launched himself as a personal manager with a client list of familiar names: Larry Gelbart, Dom DeLuise, and Sid Caesar, as well as Brooks and Anne Bancroft. Alan U. Schwartz, however, handled Brooks’s renegotiation with an eye to unique clauses that raised Hollywood eyebrows.

  Key to the revised contract was the Belgian-born Emile Buyse, who had resigned as president of 20th Century–Fox International, where he had overseen the foreign marketing and promotion for Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, and High Anxiety. Moving to Los Angeles, the defector joined Brooksfilms to handle non-US territories exclusively.

  People debated whether Brooks or Woody Allen was the king of American comedy, but Brooks was the undisputed king of Hollywood comedy, as far as 20th Century–Fox was concerned. The new studio officials, worried that they might lose him, would take clauses in the agreement for his next film. Brooks agreed to accept only a “nominal fee” for his multiple functions as writer, composer, director, producer, and star—a concession that amounted to “a considerable investment in the negative cost” and a kind of personal “completion guarantee,” according to press accounts. In return, 20th Century–Fox would supply the $10 million–plus budget and reap all the US exhibition profits only. Wary of net theatrical profit points in the United States, Brooks conceded this revenue to the studio. But non-US markets had added $7 million to $10 million gross to each of his previous comedies, so he asked for and received all the foreign monies, including television and home entertainment licensing. He also went after small pockets of earnings previously ceded to the studios, such as airplane play on foreign flights, until then counted as domestic revenue. Another example: from RCA Brooks extracted a six-figure basic minimum on video rentals, that sum to rise in accordance with theatrical earnings. In those early days of video, the market was almost entirely rentals, and in addition to the minimum guarantee, a hefty slice of every rental, running to $75 each in that era, would flow directly to Brooksfilms.

  In order to cinch the deal, Brooks acted out the script in progress for executives, selling it as a shift away from the Nice Mel of Silent Movie and High Anxiety back to the bad-taste excesses that had made Blazing Saddles his biggest moneymaker. As with Blazing Saddles, he promised an R rating. He was calling the new film History of the World, Part I.

  The deal looked reasonable on paper. Brooks’s reduced up-front fees would lower the above-the-line costs and risk. 20th Century–Fox counted on History proving a tremendous hit in the United States with profits to spare.

  The eighties dawned with Brooks scribbling away on History of the World, Part I. He would be credited as the sole writer for the third and last time in his career. Some friends and associates cannot believe that he wrote the script entirely alone; he always needed sounding boards and people who wrote down and edited what he said. “I heard he had some help on that one,” said one Club Brooks writer, who asked to remain anonymous.

  The help may have come from his collaborator on the film’s only original song: his old friend Ronny Graham, who cowrote the deliberately extravagant, intentionally tasteless (part of the overall R-rated strategy) “The Inquisition.”* With its lyrics mocking the Christian persecution of Jews in the fifteenth century and nuns peeling off their habits and swimming synchronously, “The Inquisition” was patently reminiscent of “Springtime for Hitler.”

  Much of the script was similarly derivative of the past: spoofs trotted out previously on Sid Caesar shows or voiced by the 2000 Year Old Man. This time Brooks’s targets were blockbusters and biblical epics. The story line wove through historical epochs, visiting the dawn of time, the Stone Age, the Roman Empire, the Last Supper, fifteenth-century Spain under the Catholic monarchs, and the French Revolution.

  The through line, “the natural glue,” in his words, was Brooks himself playing five key roles: Moses (delivering Ten Commandments after he drops five of the fifteen stone tablets); Comicus, a Borscht Belt–style stand-up philosopher; the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada; bawdy King Louis XIV of France; and his look-alike Jacques, a pissoir boy.

  The ensemble also referenced his greatest hits: Sid Caesar returned as head caveman (in size and quality his role a demotion from the studio chief in Silent Movie); Howard Morris was the official spokesman for the Roman Empire (a similar downgrade from his meatier part in High Anxiety); Dom DeLuise played the gluttonous Nero with Madeline Kahn as his gum-chewing Empress Nympho; Harvey Korman was the Count de Monet and Cloris Leachman was Madame Defarge, reunited in the French Revolution segment.

  Brooks trumpeted his discovery of Mary-Margaret Humes, whose face on a billboard had caught his fancy and whom he cast in her screen debut as the vestal virgin Miriam, nominally the film’s ingenue; but her role shrank during the filming and editing.

  There were many small parts and gigantic crowd scenes. Sticking to his self-starter philosophy, Brooks cast a veritable Roman legion of stand-ups in fleeting roles, including Sammy Shore, Shecky Greene, Charlie Callas, Henny Youngman, Jackie Mason, and Jack Carter. Recent as well as long-standing members of Club Brooks, writers as well as lawyers, alumni of previous Mel Brooks comedies, and old friends such as actress Bea Arthur, stepped up for cameos. The voice of God speaking to Moses was, uncredited, Carl Reiner. The bigger-than-life maker of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, known for his stentorian voice-overs, was employed to lend pearly tones to the narration.

  The part of Josephus, the Roman slave who tags along after Brooks in the loose-knit plot, was crafted for Richard Pryor, and the inarguably dangerous comedian who helped write Blazing Saddles was announced for
the role. But after freebasing cocaine for days, Pryor drenched himself with rum and set himself on fire on June 9, 1980, right before principal photography was due to begin. He was rushed to the hospital, beginning a long recovery mixed with deterioration. And Brooks had to come up with a quick substitute.

  Madeline Kahn suggested her friend Gregory Hines, then best known for tap-dancing in the Broadway musical Eubie! Hines did not hesitate; he got on a plane to Hollywood, and then did his best to make people forget the legendary name of Richard Pryor.

  Everything had to be more—bigger and louder—including the budget, which swelled to $11 million, the highest price tag yet for a Mel Brooks comedy. And that was not due to the stratospheric salaries of so many self-starters. Even though bona fide stars had appeared in Brooks’s films for scale and the fun of it, the most acclaimed of the self-starters, including Harvey Korman, grouched that Brooks refused to pay their going rate.

  The above-the-line costs went principally to the sixteen weeks of filming, Brooks’s longest schedule yet, the costumes and grandiose sets in London (where scenes were shot) and on the 20th Century–Fox lot, and the lavish “The Inquisition” staged by Alan Johnson.

  The photography took most of the summer, after which came the shuffling of the footage, whose challenges included the melding and continuity of disparate story lines. In the fall Brooks worked closely with his patient editor, John C. Howard, moving scenes around with sometimes just a few frames added or subtracted for comic timing. History was fated to be Howard’s last editing assignment for Brooks, however, as the big, good-humored man, who lived with heart problems, passed away before Brooks’s next feature.

  With corporate optimism, 20th Century–Fox launched History into hundreds of theaters in the summer of 1981. At first, as usual, the audiences were decidedly enthusiastic. The jokes stampeded across the screen, and if one historical episode happened to flag, the next one quickly made up for it. The familiar faces were comforting, and the biggest names had moments to shine. There was always gold among the dross in a Mel Brooks comedy.

  For many reviewers, however, History crossed a line. The familiarity of the jokes and sketches bred contempt. They were bothered when Brooks’s script brazenly recycled “Walk this way!” And Robert Altman had already done the Last Supper in M*A*S*H. Dom DeLuise burped and farted as the cowboys had in Blazing Saddles. And the writer, director, and star, falling back on his adolescent sense of humor, piled on the vomit, masturbation, shit, piss, “faggot,” and mammary jokes. He boasted in interviews of being “at the height of my vulgarity.” He got his R rating and was proud of it—“I put an enormous R on this picture,” he said—the only R in his career besides Blazing Saddles.

  But many critics in major American cities trashed the film. Janet Maslin in the New York Times said History of the World, Part I was too often crude, sour, or “crashingly unfunny,” its jokes “so tired that the cheerful outrageousness of Mr. Brooks’ earlier films has become waxen.” Gary Arnold in the Washington Post concurred: “The lapses in taste go beyond the pale and it becomes hard to recall a more offensive Mel Brooks movie.” Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert thought that History was “a rambling, undisciplined, sometimes embarrassing failure.” Sheila Benson, in Brooks’s hometown Los Angeles Times, described his latest offering as a sorry “self-indulgence” relying on “in joke and old joke and no joke and mostly gone off to bathroom humor.”*

  The film claimed some surprising defenders, though, including Vincent Canby of the New York Times, who wrote separately to dispute Maslin, championing Brooks’s “spirit” and “vision” in his piece entitled “In Defense of Bad Jokes.” Though not everything Brooks’s former bête noire said could have pleased the comedian (History “is essentially a sketch film, which may be the best format for a filmmaker whose attention span is sometimes too limited to sustain easily an entire movie on a single subject,” Canby wrote), the critic admitted that he had come around to applauding the funny filmmaker. “I’m no longer as concerned as I was earlier about whether or not he finds the end-laugh,” he explained. “The pursuit and the madly irreverent mind behind it are worth the price of admission [for History], which is something I didn’t fully appreciate when I first saw ‘Blazing Saddles.’ Now I’m prepared to take the Brooks films at their own face value and not at the value that we—that is, most critics—would impose on him.”

  However, word of mouth was another medium of criticism, and the audience dropped by 35 percent after the opening weekend. By September, History had bottomed out in the United States, with Aljean Harmetz, the Hollywood correspondent for the New York Times, reporting it as “a considerable disappointment” to 20th Century–Fox. The final US grosses, tallying somewhere in the vicinity of $24 million, continued the downward trending of Brooks’s comedies, especially in light of History’s steep $11 million budget.

  Once again, however, just as Brooks had foreseen, Europe—where Emile Buyse supervised the film’s promotion and distribution under the auspices of Columbia Pictures—proved the salvation. Brooks touted History on television shows in London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Rome, and Paris. He spent a full week in France, where the director is “more important than the stars,” in Buyse’s words, giving interviews. The foreign exhibitors’ rentals and box-office grosses ultimately surpassed the US total.

  Ancillary earnings improved on the overall US revenue, but still History “didn’t live up to Brooks’ usual commercial standards” in the homeland, reported the Washington Post. The foreign profits went straight to Brooksfilms, however, with Brooks later telling Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune that his aggregate earnings for a picture that was “generally perceived to be a failure” had been around $18 million. “Mr. Brooks made more money from History than any other film,” the New York Times reported.

  The Hollywood studio that had made a one-sided deal for History felt a distinct letdown that was not purely financial. Ironically, according to the Washington Post’s account, “Insiders say lots of 20th Century–Fox executives—definitely including the studio’s new owner, Marvin Davis—weren’t very pleased with the movie’s lowbrow comedy.”

  “It’s good to be the king!” the egoistic King Louis XIV (Brooks) proclaims in History of the World, Part I. Repeated several times for emphasis in the film, that phrase—more so later than noticed at the time—became one of the iconic lines associated with Brooks.

  Though he publicly saluted himself as the king of Hollywood comedy from the 1970s on (“I am the funniest man America has ever produced,” he declared in one interview*), the public bluster was not always congruent with the private Brooks.

  The public experienced the antic and funny, warm and fuzzy Mel on talk shows; they saw the Nice Mel. His public ire was reserved for “crickets” and the Hollywood awards organizations that overlooked him, but mainly that anger flashed in print interviews. As time went on, the press was less eager to compare him to Woody Allen, since their differences as filmmakers and comedians was increasingly manifest. But in the 1980s, interviewers began to mention younger comics, often Jewish, who had grown up in awe of Brooks and were now making their own comedies that raked in millions of dollars.

  Often Brooks gave double-edged kudos to the new generation. “I enjoyed Airplane!,” he said. “I laughed my sides out. But it didn’t dare much.” On other occasions, he might slag Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers—David and Jerry—the Airplane! filmmakers. “I don’t think they have the other side of it. I think they rush to the joke without an overview or structure. They’re not from the school I grew up in. I grew up under the boardwalk in Brooklyn. Our mandate was to learn what this whole world was about, who was in it, and why it happened. And we were well read.”

  Not all the younger avatars saw him as a guiding light. Michael Palin, one of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy troupe that became a worldwide phenomenon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, encountered Brooks at 20th Century–Fox around the time of History of t
he World, Part I. “Chunky, rack-like, barrel chest, with a firm, no-nonsense light paunch,” Palin described the moment, “he grabs my hand a lot—shakes it probably five or six times.”

  Brooks then took Palin further aback. “I forgive you guys everything,” he told Palin. “. . . I want you to know . . . you’re so good, I forgive you for all those ideas you used.”

  (“Is he joking?” Palin thought.)

  “Spanish Inquisition?” Brooks inquired knowingly, referencing the celebrated Monty Python sketch that had been commandeered for the water ballet in History.

  “Not sure what’s going on,” Palin scribbled in bafflement in his journal. Later, Christopher Guest—actor, musician, and soon to be writer-director of This Is Spinal Tap and other comedy “mockumentaries”—“tells me that Brooks has an almost pathological inability to accept competition—it’s all a reduction of his own world.”

  Palin politely did not inform Brooks that he had recently seen History at its gala Los Angeles opening. “The film is dreadful,” he wrote in his journal, “it’s like a huge, expensive, grotesquely-inflated stand-up act. A night club act with elephantiasis.”

  One difference between Woody Allen and Mel Brooks comedies was that Allen invited audiences into his semiautobiographical fictions, in which his lead characters often behaved as variants of himself. Brooks’s films had little or nothing to do with his private self.

  High gates and sturdy walls insulated Mr. and Mrs. Brooks on Foothill Road and in Malibu. Other Hollywood personalities invited journalists into their homes for soul-baring talks. Never Brooks, nor Bancroft. They lived on the other side of a Maginot Line of privacy. “Only close friends are invited to visit the Brookses’ house,” observed Brad Darrach in Playboy in 1975. (All of Playboy’s tape-recorded sessions were arranged at Brooks’s 20th Century–Fox offices.) “Nothing about my wife, nothing about my kids, and nothing about money,” Brooks warned, opening another interview appointment ten years later—rules he himself occasionally waived, especially if the topic was money.