The casting would be refreshed, for the first time in a Mel Brooks comedy, with young, good-looking goyish leads—a twenty- and thirtysomething—playing the characters evoking Princess Leia and Han Solo from Star Wars. Daphne Zuniga, who’d costarred in The Fly II, would make for an appealing Druish princess Vespa, whose royal father has promised her in marriage to the yawning Prince Valium—Brooks was still adroit with characters’ names. (Zuniga would return for Spaceballs: The Animated Series in 2008.) And Bill Pullman, whose breakout role had been in 1986’s Ruthless People, would serve as the feckless antihero Lone Starr, Spaceball’s stand-in for Harrison Ford.
Rick Moranis and John Candy were Canadian, both graduates of the improvisational Second City Television (SCTV) series, marquee names of the younger generation of comedians already prospering in Hollywood. The pint-sized Moranis would have a field day as the glowering Dark Helmet, the Darth Vader of the saga, while the big, fat Candy was equally entertaining if heavily costumed as Barf, the Chewbacca takeoff, Lone Starr’s faithful Mog—half man, half dog (“I’m my own best friend!”).
Dom DeLuise led the names of yore, although he was squandered as the voice of the grotesque blob Pizza the Hutt. Joan Rivers, who voiced a C-3PO–type robot maid named Dot Matrix, was another example of Brooks’s penchant for casting veteran stand-ups. John Hurt from Alien and The Elephant Man—he had also played Jesus in History of the World, Part I—provided the only celebrity sighting. (Seen at a diner, Hurt parodies his famous scene from Alien by undergoing a tummy ache that spews forth a singing-dancing minimonster.) Other old-school faces from other Mel Brooks comedies included George Wyner, who was rewarded with a large part as Dark Helmet’s toady, Colonel Sandurz; Dick Van Patten as King Roland, the regal father of the spoiled Princess Vespa; and Ronny Graham as the marrying prelate whose scenes echoed It Happened One Night.
The eye-popping $22.7 million budget was twice that of History of the World, Part I, the last comedy Brooks had directed, but it afforded a production design as elaborate as Young Frankenstein’s. The Englishman Terence Marsh, who had art directed for David Lean and Carol Reed and also designed the remake of To Be or Not to Be, created the spaceship mock-ups and interiors that were constructed on Stage 30, one of MGM’s biggest soundstages. (The filming also visited desert locations near Yuma, Arizona.) Donfeld’s witty costume designs might have made unusual demands on the budget, but the costs of everything, including special effects, were steadily rising in Hollywood.
Brooks launched twelve weeks of shooting in late October, with Nick McLean as his first-time (only-time) cameraman. The filmmaker had gotten some bug out of his system by eschewing the responsibility of directing To Be or Not to Be, or maybe he had been tempered by age and experience. Anecdotes about his explosions on the set were increasingly rare. Now, on his sets, he was the nonstop clown as well as ringmaster.
Brooks’s preference for intense close-ups, as witnessed in The Producers, had long since given way to a more conventional visual approach—long shot, medium, close-up, two-shots, inserts. Yet Spaceballs also called for some genuine action sequences, rare in his previous comedies, and his camera work—the later editing, too—was fluid and agile.
The filming went smoothly, and the editing, with Brooks working alongside Conrad Buff, an editor who had done his best to save Solarbabies, stretched into early 1987. The “space adventure” genre wallowed in sound effects, and Brooks could revel in the computers clacking, radar beeping, alarms sounding, hyperjets whooshing, “ludicrous speed,” and so on. There was no real hurry, as MGM was aiming for a summer 1987 release. There was time for nitpicking the length of scenes, moving a few frames around to fine-tune the comedy rhythms, adding in the models, the mattes, the animatronics and animated effects, and finally the score by old faithful John Morris, who simulated Star Wars and quoted from Lawrence of Arabia. According to the master plan of appealing to the youth audience, Morris also assembled the only playlist of pop-rock heard in a Mel Brooks comedy: Jon Bon Jovi, the Pointer Sisters, Van Halen, et al., and a title song by Brooks and others sung by the Spinners and produced by Madonna’s former fiancé Jellybean.
The ninth Mel Brooks big-screen comedy was booked into the maximum number of theaters with the usual hoopla in late June. Brooks doled out interviews around the clock in the United States; he appeared on Today, joined Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, and donned dress and wig to host The Late Show as “Joan Rivers,” who was ailing.
If there was ever a Mel Brooks film that proved that reviewers were out of touch with his devotees and validated some of Brooks’s griping about the “crickets,” it was Spaceballs.
After a long, worrying hiatus, Brooks had gone back to the well and against expectations delivered his most boyish and buoyant film in years. Brooks the actor was essential to the fun as President Skroob, interrupted during coitus and at the urinal, a variation on Governor Le Pétomane, the boob he had played in Blazing Saddles. (“Skroob the People!” is his slogan.) He was even more inspired as the sawed-off, elfin-eared Yogurt, possessor of the power of the Schwartz and the wisdom of merchandising, “where the real money from the movie is made.” Yogurt was not far from the 2000 Year Old Man, but Brooks had stepped back from starring, and Spaceballs benefited from more of an ensemble feeling.
The critics didn’t really get it. The Washington Post thought the new Mel Brooks comedy was embarrassing and unfunny, “the worst” offering yet from the filmmaker. “Sometimes it’s painfully juvenile,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic said his opinion of Spaceballs echoed one of its oft-repeated lines: “Shit.” In Brooks’s backyard, the Los Angeles Times diagnosed the film as a lumbering burlesque, pointing to the less grandiose Woody Allen as the real paragon of Jewish comedy. Variety said that Spaceballs was unoriginal and burdened with a script “dismal on a story level,” the whole production suggesting a home movie displaying a “colossal ego.”
The gags about the motion picture industry were “extremely funny,” conceded Julie Salamon in the Wall Street Journal: the Spaceballs T-shirts and toilet paper; Dark Helmet popping the video into his VCR to catch up with the plot; the “Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money” sequel promised in the end credits. Salamon confessed to having laughed a lot during the film, but summarized Spaceballs as “icky adolescent humor.”
Yet icky adolescent humor was also the argument in favor of Spaceballs that lured millions of people into theaters, much of the audience in the target age group, including many younger first-time Mel Brooks comedy attendees holding the hands of their parents because, in the end, Spaceballs did get its G rating despite all the leering and vulgarity.
The money poured in from overseas, too. (“‘Spaceballs’ A Comer in Paris,” Variety headlined.) Spaceballs would ultimately gross more than $38 million, ranking the space adventure spoof in the middle of Brooks’s top ten hits—behind Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, and History of the World, Part I.
True, the grosses of those comedies declined in the chronological order of their release, and the $22.7 million budget of Spaceballs cut into the actual profits. But Brooks and Laddie counted on the new video and ancillary markets kicking in big, and they did; Spaceballs’s posttheatrical life coincided with the historical peak of cable/video buying. In time the film would take in enough extra proceeds from rentals, sales, and television and cable airings to rank as Brooks’s third highest moneymaker overall. “Do you know it’s my greatest income?” the filmmaker told an interviewer in 1993. “These kids never stop renting this video.” And ever after, wherever Brooks went, if he was dining out or shopping at a mall, people shouted, “Hey, Yogurt!” or “May the Schwartz be with you!”
Brooks and Alan Ladd, Jr., had done well together again. Although Laddie squirmed under Kirk Kerkorian and resigned from MGM/UA the next year, the studio boasted a winner on its summer books. And Spaceballs proved that Brooks still had his mojo.
A pis
tol to the end of her life, Kate “Kitty” Kaminsky died of heart failure on August 19, 1989. The ninety-three-year-old mother of Brooks had resided for twenty years in Hollywood, Florida, an East Coast city situated between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, in an apartment with a porch overlooking Biscayne Bay. Her sister Sadie, who had helped Kitty raise her boys, lived with Kitty, who had never remarried after her husband’s death in 1929.
In her circle of mostly older retirees, Kitty was known for the best homemade gefilte fish, her devotion to the card game Kalooki (a variation on gin rummy), and her participation in a Zionist women’s organization called Hadassah. Brooks had supported his mother financially for many years, and he helped his brothers out on occasion, too.
The Brookses flew in from Barcelona, where they were taking a post-Spaceballs vacation, and the clan of Brookmans and Kaminskys gathered for a memorial to the matriarch in Florida that would be followed by a funeral and burial on Long Island.
Brooks had not written any letters to his mother in years, Kitty had earlier told a reporter; he was always too busy. But her youngest son had stayed close, phoning her weekly, sending her flowers on Valentine’s Day, taking her to his Hollywood and to Las Vegas, proudly introducing her to all the celebrities she wanted to meet. Their half-hour phone talks weren’t rushed. “He talks a lot. That’s his main thing. But he doesn’t tell jokes.”
The eldest Kaminsky brother, Irving Kaye, as he was now known, was in his early seventies. A former chemist, Irving was the brother living closest to the old neighborhood, and he ran a hospital supply company on Long Island, where he was also known as a keen amateur fencer. War hero Leonard Kaminsky had worked for years for the US Post Office and was living off his pension and savings in Tamarac, Florida, a short drive from his mother and Aunt Sadie. Bernard was itinerant professionally and moved around; for a while he had lived in Encino, California, running a bookstore, and later he’d reside in Las Vegas, where he met up most often with the brother closest to him in age.
Time and distance had separated the brothers, who had grown up sleeping in the same bed sprawled across one another. Kitty’s death reunited them. “We all spent three or four days together,” Leonard told the Miami Herald, “like we’d never done since we were kids.”
Leonard would die the following year. Irving Kaye made it to almost ninety-one, passing away in 2007. Bernard went to his grave not long after attending, with his younger brother, the 2007 after-party in Las Vegas for the road show musical of The Producers.
Phobic about illnesses and hospitals, Brooks was a stalwart at funerals, weepy but also cheering people up with his jokes. He was conspicuous among the mourners at Marty Feldman’s service, Buddy Rich’s, Mel Tormé’s, Artie Shaw’s, and those of many other friends and luminaries whose career paths had crossed his own. But Kitty Kaminsky’s death, and those of other family members to come, struck painfully close to home.
Brooks kept up a punishing travel schedule, but his geographic home was in Los Angeles, which increasingly was the home of his heart. New York City had become a “paranoid maze of apartment blocks,” he told The Independent in England. Broadway and the Village—most of his old haunts—were gone or changed utterly. He had an abiding nostalgia for Brooklyn, but it was the Brooklyn of his boyhood, the warmth of the community. In Los Angeles he frequented favorite delis and restaurants and places where he counted on seeing familiar faces (many displaced New Yorkers with ties to his own past). Nowadays, he said, he found Los Angeles “a great deal more gemütlich.”
Despite the tease in the ending credits of Spaceballs, a tease that was repeated for years in Brooks interviews, there would never be a “Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money.” Instead, for the next few years after his surprise hit, Brooks returned to his longtime dream of creating a television series under his own name, one whose popularity would outdo that of Get Smart. He’d tried before with the ill-starred When Things Were Rotten.
As before, someone else came to him with the concept, and that person did much of the grunt work and supervised the episodes. In exchange for trading on Brooks’s name, Alan Spencer shared the credit of cocreator and co–executive producer. (He and Brooks would also share writing credit on the pilot and second episode.) Spencer was a Whittier, California, native, an unabashed Brooks fan who had begun penning letters to the Los Angeles Times as a fifteen-year-old, saying “I consider Mel Brooks a genius.” He had written in his high school yearbook of his dream to work with Brooks and later sneaked onto the set of Young Frankenstein and befriended Marty Feldman. In time he became the writer-creator of offbeat TV series such as Sledge Hammer! and The Ghost Writer.
With Spencer as his collaborator, Brooks concocted a Fawlty Towers–like sitcom that took place in the once fancy, now disreputable Nutt Hotel, presided over by a suave and contemptuous hotel manager who holds a buxom Prussian housekeeper in his thrall.
Together the partners drove to Burbank for an appointment at Walt Disney Studios, with Brooks doing “non-stop routines” in the car and most of the pitching to executives. “Talk a lot and make ’em laugh, then leave. You’re on the air,” Brooks coached Spencer. Disney’s Touchstone division agreed to produce the half-hour series for NBC, Brooks’s lucky old network. The sitcom boasted two stars with cachet from previous Brooks hits: Harvey Korman as the disdainful hotel manager and Cloris Leachman as the Prussian sexpot. Also in the mix was Ronny Graham in a recurring role as a hotel doorman.
With publicity trumpeting the Brooks name, The Nutt House was the most anticipated new series of the season approaching its September 1990 premiere. The show was slotted at 9:30 p.m. on Wednesdays opposite Doogie Howser (ABC) and Jake and the Fatman (CBS). Some critics loved it. “Rude, crude and very, very broad,” Andrew J. Edelstein exclaimed in Newsday. Many did not. “A major disappointment,” reported Variety, marred by creaky “shtick” and “the absence of real lunatic humor.”
Either way, the Spaceballs audience did not crowd around the TV set to watch The Nutt House. By late October the show rested in 46th place in the weekly Nielsens. Although ten episodes were produced, NBC yanked the ballyhooed series after just five airings. At least When Things Were Rotten had made it to thirteen.
Dead now forever was Brooks’s dream of having his own hit TV series.
A harbinger of worse things to come was the announcement, in late 1989, of the first public offering of stock in Brooksfilms Inc. In an attempt to carve out greater profit participation and autonomy without personally investing any more of his money, Brooks proposed to divest one-third of his privately held company shares. He would retain the remaining shares and majority ownership of Brooksfilms. The stock offering was intended to raise $27.5 million for future Brooksfilms productions. The extra money would give him more leverage in his partnerships with the Hollywood studios. His Malibu neighbor, producer Aaron Spelling, had tried a similar gambit with some success five years before.
A high-profile investment banking firm, Oppenheimer & Co. in New York City, handled the Brooksfilms venture and suggested an unusual “road show,” with Brooks himself giving in-person presentations to brokers in Seattle, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Boston, Seattle, and Portland. To accompany Brooks on those trips, aiding and advising him, Oppenheimer recommended Mallory Factor, a public relations specialist who had performed similar duties for the Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis.
Factor flew out from New York to meet Brooks at his studio offices. Although Factor had an appointment, he was made to wait an hour and a half before Brooks finally made a grand entrance. Factor confronted Brooks with his rudeness, saying that he had been kept waiting too long and was heading back to New York straightaway. Brooks dropped the pretense, apologizing profusely. “He’s a bully if you can be bullied,” said Factor.
Together they went on the road, often accompanied by another Oppenheimer representative, Joel Reader, traveling intermittently for weeks in late 1989 and early ’90. Brooks wore sober Wall Street suits into his meetings with
brokers, but he also took his showbiz shtick. He’d open up his jacket to display a rack of watches he was selling or reel off joke after joke, until the potential investors began to stir uncomfortably.
When, sooner or later, Brooks switched to business talk, however, he could really talk the talk about options and leverages. He impressed everyone with the scope of his financial acumen. “Brooks is first and foremost a businessman,” Oppenheimer executive Robert Manning informed American Film magazine. “He’s a serious man who is also very funny. But life is not a joke to Mel Brooks. That’s been borne out in the meetings.”
He was a celebrity to the businessmen, and most thought he was the funniest man they had ever met, in a boardroom or anywhere else. After the boardroom meetings, at a restaurant with a handful of the moneymen, he could be just as winning and funny (he’d bring out his old waiter routine, sauntering around the room with a napkin draped over his arm asking about “les vins”). Anywhere in public or with a third party present, he was gold.
After an investor or restaurant meeting, however, after he had performed for the businessmen, he and Factor would jump into a taxi, and Brooks would go blank, saying very little—just as Sid Caesar had used to do after a show. “In private,” recalled Factor, “Mel turned off. No personality, deadpan, sullen. It wasn’t rude. But without an audience, he just turned miserably blank, which no one who saw him publicly would believe.”
It didn’t help when Factor told Brooks that he sometimes ran on too long with the jokes and shtick and crowing about himself until investors’ eyelids drooped. “Why the hell didn’t you get me out of there?” Brooks would snap. “Mel, Christ, I tried,” said Factor, “but I couldn’t without actually tackling you and pulling you away.”
Factor thought that Brooks was least happy when he was alone, or alone with just one other person. The comedian had massive insecurities and “needed an ego boost all the time.” One time, trying to cheer him up, Factor mentioned a close relative who was a big fan of his work. Brooks perked up. “Let’s phone her!” Factor dialed the relative, handed the phone to Brooks, and Brooks came alive. He rattled off jokes and snatches of songs, as though he were on a stage in a bright spotlight performing before a sold-out crowd.
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