Riding a wave of glowing reviews for her performance in To Be or Not to Be, Bancroft continued to evolve professionally, entering into what she jokingly referred to as her “old ladies” phase. Comedic parts came her way more often now, yet increasingly she played supporting roles, older, powerful women, in films that flaunted tasteful pedigrees: a terminally ill social activist who aspires to meet a legendary actress in the sentimental Garbo Talks, directed by Sidney Lumet in 1984; a mother superior in Agnes of God in 1985, for which she earned her fifth Oscar nomination; the filmed play ’night, Mother with Sissy Spacek in 1986; 84 Charing Cross Road, opposite Anthony Hopkins for the third time in her career in 1987; and first billed, though in a small role, as drag queen Harvey Fierstein’s mother in Torch Song Trilogy in 1988.
Only 84 Charing Cross Road, directed by the Englishman David Hugh Jones, was one of Brooksfilms’ “smarties.” The title refers to the mailing address of an antiquarian bookseller in London, whose twenty-year epistolary friendship with a New York writer, Helene Hanff, had inspired a memoir by Hanff and a subsequent Broadway adaptation. Bancroft always said the property had come to her attention when a Fire Island neighbor pressed the memoir on her at the beach; her husband optioned the screen rights as an anniversary present. Hopkins, who had also appeared in Young Winston and The Elephant Man opposite Bancroft, played the bookseller in the mostly two-character drama.
Her husband turned sixty in 1986 without having written, directed, or starred in a Mel Brooks comedy for three years following the anticlimax of To Be or Not to Be.
But Brooks was hardly lying low. Whether in New York or Los Angeles, he made grand entrances, sweeping into the 20th Century–Fox commissary or his favorite deli, shouting “Hiya from Mel Brooks!” to friends and strangers alike. He’d wave at tourist buses passing by on the 20th Century–Fox lot, or as he sat at a sidewalk café in Hollywood. “Hey, here I am, Mel Brooks! A genuine celebrity!” Even at funerals, if a fan dared to approach him, Brooks was likely to scold the person first before launching into rib-tickling patter. “He was consciously his own best publicity hound,” explained Norman Lear. “He’s Mel Brooks all the time. But I can’t say that without saying he’s funny. He delivers.”
Keenly aware of the public interest in him, which he stoked, yet also self-conscious about basking in the limelight, Brooks was known to poke fun at himself among his long-standing circle. One time the Brookses were dining with the Lears and the Reiners on Rodeo Drive. When the group paid the bill and got up to leave, Brooks asked them, “Why don’t you guys walk out in front of me? I don’t want to be bothered by paparazzi or autograph seekers just now.” The others formed a protective cocoon around him, moving outside, only to discover no paparazzi or fans waiting. Brooks looked around and cried out forlornly, “Hey, it’s Mel Brooks! I’m Mel Brooks!! Where is everybody?” It broke everyone up, with Brooks laughing the hardest—at himself.
After To Be or Not to Be Brooks took numerous excursions to New York, especially when Bancroft was filming Garbo Talks in the city, but also visited Quebec, where Bancroft shot Agnes of God. Early every summer the couple went to London, where they shopped for antiques and Brooks bought his silk dressing gowns and custom-made shirts from Turnbull & Asser on Jermyn Street (Joseph Heller and Woody Allen were other American customers). From London there were always side trips to cities and other sites in Europe, sometimes purely for vacation, sometimes to shore up Brooksfilms outposts.
When home in Hollywood, he stayed conspicuous. He kept his 20th Century–Fox offices, ran Brooksfilms, prodded dramatic subjects into films that were usually taut and grim as opposed to light and comedic, and, as before, he often took chances with new or singular directors. This was a productive phase for Brooks the producer. In 1986 he fronted a low-key remake of the schlocky fifties horror film The Fly. The remake starred Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis and was directed by the cult Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg; a succès d’estime, it solidified Cronenberg’s growing artistic reputation.
Three years later, in 1989, Brooksfilms sponsored a sequel, The Fly II, with Eric Stoltz and Daphne Zuniga, which was directed by first-timer Chris Walas, who had designed the creature effects and won an Oscar for his makeup for the remake of The Fly. If the follow-up was not as interesting, still The Fly II made moolah—especially overseas.
Less coherent and successful were The Doctor and the Devils in 1985 and Solarbabies in 1986. The former was the long-elusive adaptation of the only motion picture scenario written, in the 1940s, by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Thomas’s scenario told the tale of a real-life surgeon in nineteenth-century Edinburgh who paid two Irish immigrants to rob graves and kill people in order to obtain corpses for his anatomy classes. Freddie Francis, the cameraman who had photographed The Elephant Man so strikingly in black and white, mentioned the property to producer Jonathan Sanger, and Brooksfilms optioned the scenario. Brooks agreed to let Francis direct, with Sanger producing. (It was hardly Francis’s first directing job; the Englishman with distinguished camera credits dating from the 1950s had also directed cult horror pictures.)
Over the years many efforts to convert Thomas’s scenario into a film had defeated better men than Gunga Din (Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray was one of those who had labored fruitlessly on a screen version in the 1960s). Thomas’s language, right down to the staging directions, was poetic but unfilmable. Brooks turned to a gold-medal name, Londoner Ronald Harwood, to rework the Thomas scenario, “because he had just been nominated for an Oscar” for his script for The Dresser in 1983, according to Francis.
Francis envisioned the movie-to-be as “a straight gothic story about historical characters,” in his words, “a reflection of the Victorian life, the poverty and crime that gripped Edinburgh as it did all cities in the nineteenth century.” But the head of Brooksfilms, looking to build on the genre success of The Fly and The Fly II, saw The Doctor and the Devils as more of a highbrow horror flick about body snatchers. “I remember on one occasion that [Brooks] called me from Los Angeles,” Francis recalled, “and I spent an hour trying to persuade him that it was a psychological story, not a horror story.”
As was his wont, Brooks focused most of his preproduction time on the script, supervising Harwood. “Mel bullied Ron to do what he wanted, which was to turn it into an out-and-out horror script. The original screenplay by Thomas had been beautifully written but the rewrite was somewhat less so.” (Harwood declined to comment for this book and in his authorized biography does not even mention the film or Brooks.)
Francis organized a superb ensemble, led by actors Timothy Dalton, Jonathan Pryce, and Stephen Rea, and during the shooting he also tried to amend and repair the Harwood script. “Day by day I was pushing more of the Dylan Thomas stuff back in,” he said.
Francis filmed scenes that he hoped would enable audiences to understand how the two Irish immigrants, who were altogether unscrupulous and villainous, corrupted the surgeon’s decent intentions and humanity. Brooks took control during the editing, however, and deleted ruminative scenes about science versus morality, and “in the end, a five-minute section that recounted the doctor’s remorse was cut by Mel without my approval,” Francis said. “It was that scene that gave the story credibility and a conclusion, but no matter how I fought to retain that scene, Mel was adamant that it be cut.”
Sometimes the ultra-serious Brooksfilms films were just botches. Released in late 1985, The Doctor and the Devils might qualify as the worst of them (“unredeemed, dreary, boring, gloomy dreck,” Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times) if not for close competition, the next year, from Solarbabies, which was Brooks’s gift to Alan Johnson after the duress of To Be or Not to Be. Far from being a musical, Solarbabies was a futuristic parable set in a parched landscape inhabited by a bunch of young orphaned “Solarbabies,” or skateball players (a hybrid of hockey/roller skating). Their water is rationed by a draconian regime. The skateballers discover a glowing ball named Bodhi that could lead to a wate
r paradise.
Dreaming of a science fantasy franchise of the type that was suddenly the nirvana of Hollywood (all the major studios had at least one prototype in the hopper), Brooks broke his own rules, giving a green light to the production after 20th Century–Fox passed on any involvement without nailing down another studio as his financial partner.
The photography had been planned in Spain to exploit natural locations and save on below-the-line costs. Trying to get started before the rainy season, Brooks dispatched Johnson and his cast and crew to Madrid and rugged Almería. Elaborate sets were constructed to the specifications of Englishman Anthony Pratt, known for the otherworldly visual design of John Boorman films such as Zardoz and Excalibur. The cast was mostly youthful unknowns (including Dom DeLuise’s son Peter), but sprinkled among them was a handful of veterans including Charles Durning. The project had a sensible minder in Irene Walzer, who had risen up the Brooksfilms ladder from publicist to producer.
What could go wrong? Location vagaries, logistical problems, and overruns quickly devoured the initial $5 million allowance, and there was a surge of panic and turmoil in Spain. Brooks flew to Spain for a lordly walk-through, assessing the crisis. He flew back, rattled, as he exaggerated in later interviews. He needed another $18 million or so to finish Solarbabies. “I’m getting a second mortgage on the house,” he said in one interview. “I had two cars, I put them up. I mean, I’m practically ready to jump off a roof.”
Almost straight from the airport he headed over to Culver City to see his old friend Alan Ladd, Jr. After running 20th Century–Fox during Brooks’s glory decade at the studio in the 1970s, Laddie had fired up the Ladd Company and run it for several years, until that noble enterprise began to hemorrhage losses. Not long before Brooks’s visit, Laddie had wound up as the first production head of the MGM half of the newly merged MGM/United Artists Entertainment Company. Although MGM/UA, under the ownership of the Las Vegas wheeler-dealer Kirk Kerkorian, was from the outset in a state of constant flux and anxiety, Laddie had a brief window of opportunity to do anything he wanted.
More than any other studio boss, Brooks liked and admired Laddie, a former agent with whom he could talk dollars and cents and who was also the son of a Golden Age movie star. Laddie was honest; he didn’t say bullshit things. He was “a dry martini,” in Brooks’s words, more of a joke getter than joke teller but dryly humorous all the same.
According to insiders, Brooks wept actual tears as he pleaded with Laddie to pledge the necessary dough and guarantee the completion of Solarbabies, making MGM the senior partner on the fantasy film. That was the easy part of the conversation. Laddie was happy to announce the pickup a month later, the first authorization of the Ladd regime, as Brooks liked to boast. (Ladd’s later MGM/UA go-aheads would include Moonstruck and A Fish Called Wanda.) MGM ended up taking a bath on Solarbabies when the misbegotten film was released to yawns and groans in late 1986. “A hilariously bad movie,” wrote Paul Attanasio in the Washington Post. Newsday’s Stephen Williams called it “garbage.” Vincent Canby in the New York Times scoffed, “An embarrassment.”
But the ledger loss didn’t matter to the Brooks-Ladd friendship. As much as Brooks mocked “suits” in interviews, he meant the “new” suits of the successive regimes at 20th Century–Fox and other studios with whom he had to ingratiate himself. He had been compatible with the first generation of “suits,” the post-1960s generation with whom he had come up as agents.
Laddie was the best of them all: soft spoken but hard hitting; canny. Unlike Brooks, with whom he sometimes played tennis, Laddie could return any serve. Why, Ladd asked him, was the ultimate funnyman, Brooks, fooling around with a mirthless existentialist science fantasy epic, a “slumgullion,” as one critic later described it, that was part Road Warrior, E.T., Rollerball, and Dune mingled with profundities borrowed from Carlos Castaneda and Buddhism? Ladd knew the joys and perils of the fantasy genre as well as anyone in Hollywood. As the boss of 20th Century–Fox back in the day, he and his retinue had traipsed dutifully into the first preview of Star Wars in Westwood, not really expecting much, only to have their hair blown back by the whoosh of the opening credits and the roar of the packed crowd, the vast majority in their teens and twenties. The phenomenon of Star Wars, low-expectation genre filmmaking, had not been foreseen.
Brooks was restless at 20th Century–Fox, Laddie understood, and his future there was cloudy. Since To Be or Not to Be, Brooks had brought the studio into partnerships with Brooksfilms on a couple of his noncomedies, and a couple of the pictures had been profitable. Then along had come The Doctor and the Devils, a 20th Century–Fox coproduction. The studio had declined to gamble on Solarbabies. Brooks had outlived his time at 20th Century–Fox, and Laddie, attuned to the growing home entertainment bonanza, could make MGM/UA attractive to Brooks with the new pay television and video percentages.
What Brooks should be doing, instead of Solarbabies, Ladd felt, was a comedy spoofing pablum like Solarbabies—spoofing films like Star Wars. If Brooks tamed the comedy a little, even the kids and families who loved Star Wars would be teased into a Mel Brooks science fantasy spoof. Laddie volunteered to act the diplomat with Star Wars creator George Lucas, who owed him a favor or two and who kept tight reins on his franchise.
Or maybe Brooks met with Laddie with the idea already swirling in his mind, having been inspired by his teenage son, Max Brooks, who had a mania for the Star Wars series. Hadn’t Brooks himself pointed the way with the mock trailer that ran at the end of History of the World, Part I, the coming-attraction teaser for “Jews in Space” that Janet Maslin in the New York Times said she thought was probably the funniest single thing in that film? Later Brooks would tell the press he had quietly been working on the Spaceballs script, under its original title, “The Planet Moron,” for close to two years.
Either way, the trade-off benefited both men: take Solarbabies, and I’ll give you Spaceballs. By midsummer, the contract had followed the handshake, and the script had made headway, with the To Be or Not to Be unit, writers Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan, back collaborating with Brooks. The July 20, 1986, announcement in Variety mentioned Star Wars along with Star Trek, Alien, and Planet of the Apes as among the “futuristic films” to be lampooned by Spaceballs. (There would also be distinct allusions to The Wizard of Oz.) “Princess Druish . . . as in Jewish” (Brooks’s words), the lead female character, would boast matching luggage and a nose job the Evil Empire threatens to reverse. His own roles were already sketched out: Brooks would portray “the pic’s most evil character, President Skroob [an anagram of “Brooks”], and its most benign sage, Yogurt (a takeoff of Yoda from George Lucas’s The Empire Strikes Back).”
The Variety announcement summarized the forthcoming Mel Brooks comedy as a parody of the “space adventure” genre to rival the Western satire of Blazing Saddles, only “less vulgar.” The once self-styled dangerous comedian promised a PG-rated Spaceballs.
Chapter 15
1986
Frolics and Detours
That summer the Brookses moved into their spacious mansion and estate on La Mesa Drive in Santa Monica, where Bancroft swam daily in the indoor pool, relieving back pain that had persisted after a horse-riding mishap on the set of The Last Hunt in 1956, while devoting herself to the organic horticulture that increasingly preoccupied her free time after her cancer scare. A terraced garden was sculpted into their backyard. She and her husband took Pritikin training to eliminate fat and eat less animal protein and more fruits and vegetables and to lower their cholesterol levels. Together they took long walks and jogged.
Max commuted to the nearby Crossroads School. His parents volunteered for benefits and for the safety council that was formed after school incidents raised security concerns.
Brooks worked a short drive away at 20th Century–Fox, where he maintained offices for daily meetings on the Spaceballs script. Brooks, Ronny Graham, and Thomas Meehan—three men who had first voted in the Truman era—felt emancipate
d by their shared lack of respect and affection for the youth-oriented spaceship genre. To Be or Not to Be, the first coming together of this particular Club Brooks, had been more hallowed ground.
Their screenplay for Spaceballs would be positively effervescent, the scenes almost as chock full of intertextual and extratextual references, lowbrow and worldly, as Blazing Saddles: nods to Kentucky Fried Chicken, Perrier, and Afro hair picks, among other things, and a feast of film industry jibes, from the gliding camera that smashes into Dark Helmet (a joke reworked from High Anxiety) to the vicissitudes of videotape. Surprisingly, however, their script offered no musical numbers for Alan Johnson. The choreographer was still embroiled in the headache postproduction of Solarbabies.
Some of Brooks’s methods hadn’t changed in the thirty years Ronny Graham had known him, over which time they had written diverse and sundry scripts together. Brooks has the “overview,” Graham informed the Los Angeles Times. “Mel’s very vehement. If he doesn’t like a line you write, he’ll shout and stomp and holler. He’ll bellow, ‘You’re totally wrong. You don’t know anything about comedy!’ But here’s what really happens. He’ll fight ferociously against something Ezra [Spaceballs producer Ezra Swerdlow] or I suggest, but all the while he’ll be rolling that idea around in his head. And if the idea has any merit at all, he won’t necessarily admit it. But he’ll find a way to use it in the scene.”
Of course there was also, embedded in the script, a surfeit of penis jokes, bimbo ladies whose main job it was to flash cleavage, and no limit to the expletives, especially with an entire evil regiment carrying the last name of “Asshole.” Graham defended the “healthy vulgarity” (in his words) of Brooks’s comedy. “I have friends that love his work, and many who loathe it,” he said. “But that’s OK. As George Bernard Shaw once put it: ‘Better half of them love you and half of them hate you than everyone think you’re nice.’”
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