Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Greggio had also starred in a series of comic feature films, usually writing the scripts and sometimes directing them. He revered Brooks, who had appeared on Striscia la Notizia over the years, initially for Italian publicity purposes. Their bonds of friendship strengthened when Greggio spent several months in Hollywood in 1992 and 1993, directing his first made-in-America film, The Silence of the Hams, with Greggio as a Norman Bates–type motel owner, Dom DeLuise as a serial killer, and Brooks in a cameo. Later, Greggio could be glimpsed as a panicky coachman in Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

  Brooks was preoccupied with Life Stinks during the making of The Silence of the Hams, and the Italian comedian got to know Rudy DeLuca and Steve Haberman. DeLuca and Haberman cooked up a script for Greggio to star in and direct, this time with a pivotal role for Brooks. Their story involved a dying Italian industrialist whose last wish is that his son, the oppressed heir to his fortune, find the American soldier who had saved his life during World War II. The son goes in search of the soldier, who, ever since the war, has been confined to an Italian mental asylum. And he’s still crazy after all those years . . .

  The appeal of Screw Loose, for Brooks, was spending two months in Europe over the summer of 1998. He spent part of every summer in Europe regardless, but this way he could escape Hollywood and star in someone else’s movie without worrying about all the headaches. The story line found the inept industrialist’s son (Greggio) chasing the fugitive mental patient (Brooks) across Italy and France, with picture-postcard locations that included Monte Carlo and Nice. Although her roles were steadily dwindling, Anne Bancroft was still working regularly in television and movies, and she came over to visit for a few weeks; otherwise the comedian was on his own. The filming was a carefree experience.

  “Mel, as usual during the filming,” Greggio said, “came up of course with new ideas, gags, lines.” Only DeLuca and Haberman were credited for the script, which nonetheless bore the Brooks imprint: fart jokes and song snippets for him to sing.

  “[The production] gave him an opportunity to reflect, [to] just be out of the normal life that he had and maybe to take a look at things from a distance,” recalled Whitney R. Hunter, the producer of Screw Loose. “And he had fun. He had a blast.”

  “He knows how to make people laugh,” agreed Greggio. “Even on the road, at a restaurant, on the phone, he is wonderfully funny.”

  Besides being the life of the party, Brooks used those carefree months, shooting a picture away from Hollywood and out of the limelight, to refocus his ambitions on the future. During breaks in the filming, he could be heard tinkering with new songs, singing snatches into a tape recorder. “He would bounce some of the lyrics off me,” said Hunter. “That’s what he was doing, writing the lyrics and songs to The Producers.”

  Building a film around Brooks’s persona was a labor of love for Greggio, who said that his idol took them all to acting school during the production. However, Screw Loose did not become an instant classic. On-screen almost continually once the plot introduces his character, Brooks displays amazing energy in his performance, literally leaping and dashing through his scenes. But he is also unbridled to the point of being frenetic, and his comic touch is shrill.

  “It’s a cute film,” insisted producer Hunter.

  US film critics could not disagree. No reviews, unkind or otherwise, appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, or Variety. It wasn’t easy for American audiences to catch, either, because Screw Loose was not shown in US theaters. One appeal of the project for Brooks was the all-foreign strategy. Emile Buyse put together a partnership with Columbia TriStar and French film companies that sent Screw Loose straight to video in the United States while maximizing the bookings in Europe and other parts of the world. Brooks took modest money up front in order to earn disproportionately on the back end. “No complaints about the deal,” said Hunter. “They made money.”

  After Dracula: Dead and Loving It, the producer David Geffen had phoned Brooks one day and put a bug in his ear about a stage musical version of The Producers, reminding him that with “Springtime for Hitler” and “Prisoners of Love” he had a great start on the score. Geffen may not have known that the original script had been launched forty years earlier as a prospective novel or Broadway musical and that Brooks had kept the latter hope alive with separation of rights in his contract with the original producer, Joseph E. Levine.

  At first Brooks thought he himself might play Max Bialystock (“a FORCE!”) in the musical, but that idea evanesced because of his age and the rigors of stage performing. At first also, Brooks felt nervous about writing the needed additional songs, because every musical boasted a dozen or more numbers, which would require a lot of fresh material.

  John Morris was out of the running to help. The arranger and composer of the original Producers, who had been vital to nine of Brooks’s twelve screen comedies, was permanently estranged from him and now worked almost exclusively in television.

  Brooks courted other music men, including Jerry Herman, the composer-lyricist of Hello, Dolly!, whom Brooks had known since his first Broadway musical, Milk and Honey, for which, in 1961, Don Appell had written the book. Brooks called on Herman in Beverly Hills. “‘Springtime for Hitler’ and ‘Prisoners of Love’ are such wonderful songs,” Herman supposedly told him, “I’d have to be crazy to try to write something that could stand up to them in the same show.” Privately, he fretted a little about being too closely identified with a show with a dancing Hitler and a chorus line of goose-stepping Nazis.

  Both Ronny Graham, who had agreed to assist with the stage adaptation, and Anne Bancroft massaged Brooks, encouraging him to write the new songs on his own.

  Back in Hollywood by the fall of 1998, Brooks forged ahead with drive and determination. He had to go forward without Graham, whose ill health forced him to drop out of the collaboration. In his stead Brooks lured Thomas Meehan back to Hollywood. Before teaming up with Graham on To Be or Not to Be and Spaceballs, Meehan had won a Tony for his book for Annie, and now he would attempt to do the same with The Producers, turning it into the Broadway show it was always meant to be. Meehan’s credentials for the job included the fact that, like Graham, he was a clever man with lyrics and played piano well enough to accompany Brooks’s lusty singing during writing sessions.

  The two men went to work without fanfare in office space at MGM, where privileged friends and visitors were invited to hear scenes in the work in progress as they evolved, and the songs, too, as the project gradually consolidated over the next two years.

  “At the end of a day with Mel,” Meehan would say in later interviews, “I have to go back to the hotel, lay down, and put cold compresses on my head. I’m only half-joking . . . . Mel’s a fountain of genius. Remarkable things no one would think of pop out of his head, one hundred ideas a day. Many are wonderful. Many aren’t. And he wants you to tell him which ones.”

  Another time, Meehan explained, “My main job in collaborating with Mel is to say, ‘That idea really stinks. You’re Mel Brooks!’ Mel knows where the laughs are . . . but also, oddly, he doesn’t.”

  Brooks and Meehan would share the book credit. The changes from the film revolved mostly around the music: where to fit the songs in, what characters would sing them. A journeyman Broadway composer and arranger, Glen Kelly, was brought in to fill John Morris’s shoes and help develop the songs with orchestration.

  Early on, Brooks decided to drop “Love Power,” and that led to dropping Lorenzo St. DuBois (L.S.D.), the character Dick Shawn had played in the original film. Shawn’s wacky rendition was a highlight of the film, but Shawn had passed away in 1987 and, more to the point, Norman Blagman (lyrics) and Herbert Hartig (music) had composed the song. Hearing of the impending musical, Blagman wrote Brooks, offering “Love Power” inexpensively, but Brooks replied politely that he was going to write the entire score himself.

  To make up for the loss of L.S.D. and “Love Power,” Brooks and Meehan expanded the “fag”
humor from the original film, just as they had opened up To Be or Not to Be to a gay character with a camp sensibility. Their script made room for a retinue of swishy assistants to the effeminate Roger De Bris, who became (in their stage script) not only the director but the Führer-star of “Springtime for Hitler.” The Village People lineup of boys (and one rare lesbian) sang “Keep it Gay!,” which would become a showstopper.

  Other supporting characters from the film were handed ditties. Ulla, a small part immortalized by Lee Meredith, was enlarged into the third lead behind Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom. The sexy stenographer develops a crush on Bloom, which blossoms in the third act, and her “If You’ve Got It, Flaunt It” solo derived from a memorable line in the original film. More of Brooks’s greatest hits were reprised with “Walk this way!” from Young Frankenstein and “It’s good to be the king!” from History of the World, Part I.

  The old-lady investors, a montage in the film, became a lavish old-lady tap dance with crutches and walkers. Thinly characterized before, Bloom got a “backstory” explaining his lifelong Broadway itch. A visit to his accounting office (never glimpsed in the film) provided the excuse for another chorus extravaganza. Bloom’s coupling with Ulla also allowed for the show to escape briefly to Rio de Janeiro (with appropriate song), from which he’d return at the eleventh hour to vouch for Bialystock at his trial. That, and Bialystock’s “Betrayed” solo in a holding cell, filled the film’s void of a third act.

  Over the course of two years, Brooks and Meehan worked the script out in Culver City sessions. In the end theirs was a faithful adaptation, with a number of scenes and substantial dialogue carried over virtually intact from the film. It took so long because Brooks never seemed to be in any particular hurry. Also, he “doesn’t like to do Scene II until Scene I has been rewritten 85 times,” Meehan said later. “Mel Brooks is a fountain of comedy and smarts,” he explained another time, “but he’s not necessarily good on structure. He doesn’t really write; he talks. I would take notes, then go away and write.”

  Meehan took time off for other projects, then returned refreshed. Brooks made trips back east, setting up the financial end, the Broadway connections, the scheduling.

  All that happened with scant notice in the press. Brooks and Meehan rarely met on Fridays, allowing for long weekends and flights as needed back and forth from New York. Fridays in Los Angeles were also organized around Brooks’s regular lunch date with old 20th Century–Fox friends at Orso’s, a restaurant in West Hollywood, close to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The lunch group included Alan Ladd, Jr.; Laddie’s longtime lieutenant, Jay Kanter; former agent and producer Freddie Fields; producer Michael Gruskoff; and writer-director Paul Mazursky. The friends had known one another, in most instances, dating back to the late 1950s. At one moment in the 1970s, they had all occupied adjacent offices on the third floor of the main executive building at 20th Century–Fox.

  Brooks always signed autographs for fans who drifted over to their table in Orso’s courtyard, not recognizing the face of anyone else at the power lunch, unless the group had a famous guest, such as Peter O’Toole one day. Leaving the restaurant, Brooks might shout out his name to tourist buses as they passed. He made everyone laugh, especially Laddie.

  Their careers were winding down. Mazursky, for example, celebrated as an auteur filmmaker in the 1970s, now eked out small parts as an actor; acting had been his first love. Brooks could not claim any genuine hit since early in the decade. He was done with directing films, although he never said “done.” The others knew about the embryonic stage musical. Brooks talked about how The Producers would fulfill his dreams and rock Broadway. Nobody doubted it, least of all him. He had the confidence, the belief.

  Most Saturdays Brooks visited Santa Anita Park, where he indulged in small bets on horses, his one vice. People at the racetrack recognized him, yelling “Say harrumph!”—one of the governor’s lines from Blazing Saddles. “Harrumph!” he’d yell back.

  By the year 2000, the Brooks family had effectively moved their household to New York.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Max prepared for his first real writing job, from 2001 to 2003, as a staff writer for Saturday Night Live, television’s long-established comedy series.

  Anne Bancroft was a staunch New Yorker and happy to be back in the orbit of the Russian Tea Room, Elaine’s, the Carnegie Deli, and the Four Seasons. Approaching seventy, she acted less frequently and appeared in only a handful of telefilms and independent features after 1999. Together she and her husband made openings and galas and sneaked off to their new weekend and summer sanctuary in Southhampton.

  In the late 1990s, Brooks and his wife finally surrendered their beloved Lonelyville house on the now overcrowded Fire Island and purchased a beachfront home in the hamlet of Water Mill in Southampton, which is located east and north of Fire Island but still verging on the Atlantic. Over time the Hamptons had become the exclusive preserve of wealthy celebrities. The Brookses’ $3 million, 2,000-square-foot cottage on Flying Point Road sat on seventy acres with sunrise and sunset views. Former supermodel Christie Brinkley was one neighbor. Their longtime friends Alan and Arlene Alda lived nearby.

  Brooks enjoyed precious little downtime. Somehow, raising money for the stage version of The Producers proved easier than convincing a Hollywood studio to underwrite another one of his films, however, perhaps because the show’s estimated $10.5 million budget, though steep for Broadway, was one-third the cost of Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

  One of the early major investors was Robert F. X. Sillerman, a New York friend and Hamptons neighbor of Brooks’s. Sillerman owned a string of radio and TV stations that he’d parlayed into a show business empire including SFX Broadcasting, later expanded and renamed SFX Entertainment (music rights, concerts, and all types of venues, including being the “owner of most of Chi’s [Chicago’s] theater district,” according to Variety). Sillerman could boast deep pockets, especially after 2000, when the multibillion-dollar sale of SFX Entertainment to Clear Channel, the number two US radio broadcaster, was finalized.

  The other bankrollers included the veteran Broadway producers Rocco Landesman and Rick Steiner; the Frankel-Baruch-Viertel-Routh Group of stage producer-investors; Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the brothers behind Miramax Films; and Brooks himself.

  On one excursion to New York to plan the musical, Brooks had penciled in his director: the London-born Mike Ockrent, who was best known for Crazy for You, a variation on George and Ira Gershwin’s 1930 musical, Girl Crazy, which had won the Tony for Best Musical in 1992. Brooks cast a spell over Ockrent and his wife, the choreographer Susan Stroman, who had collaborated with her husband on Crazy for You (also winning a Tony for Best Choreography), by bursting into their apartment for his appointment with them, tapping and twirling up and down their hallway, as he belted out “That Face!”—and timing his close with a plop onto their sofa, exclaiming grandly, “Hi, I’m Mel Brooks!”

  After Ockrent died of leukemia in 1999, Brooks persuaded Stroman to assume the reins. He told Stroman that she might cry all night but he’d keep her laughing all day. A ponytailed blonde whom everyone called “Stro”—she had the look and pep of a cheerleader—Stroman had begun to direct as well as choreograph Broadway shows and in 2000 made her debut as a choreographer-director with two musicals: the critically acclaimed Contact, her coconceived “dance play,” which ran a thousand performances and won the Best Direction of a Musical Tony; and that year’s heralded revival of The Music Man.

  Nathan Lane’s casting was cemented, early on, when the roly-poly actor said a serendipitous hello to Brooks, swimming up next to him in the swimming pool of the Hotel Ritz in Paris. They bonded easily. “Mel was a hero to me, growing up,” Lane said later. Everyone knew Lane as the voice of the meerkat Timon in the Disney animated feature The Lion King, but he was also a growing force on Broadway. He had played the Sid Caesar role in Laughter on the 23rd Floor and then evoked Zero Mostel’s bigness of personality in the lauded revival of A
Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Now, as the new Max Bialystock, he would again try to make people forget Mostel.

  The veteran actor Matthew Broderick (also in the voice cast of The Lion King) was not quite Gene Wilder. But for almost twenty years he had balanced expert stage roles (winning a Tony for the lead originated by Robert Morse in the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) with pinpoint performances in motion pictures (including Torch Song Trilogy, with Anne Bancroft in the cast). In his early twenties he had played the teenage lead in the iconic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and fifteen years later remained perpetually boyish.

  Cady Huffman had been admired in three Broadway shows: as a replacement in the long-running La Cage aux Folles; as Dancer in Bob Fosse’s final musical, Big Deal; and as Florenz Ziegfeld’s favorite chorine in her Tony-nominated performance in The Will Rogers Follies. She became Ulla. The seasoned performers Brad Oscar and Gary Beach became Franz Liebkind and Roger De Bris, respectively. Roger Bart, who had just won a Tony as Snoopy in the revival of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, was cast as Carmen Ghia.

  Partly to win over potential investors, the first read-through, led by Nathan Lane, with piano accompaniment but sans scenery, costumes, props, or lights, took place in April 2000 in studio space on West 54th Street in New York. The handpicked audience of friends and family included Anne Bancroft and Brooks’s longtime lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz. The “producers and moneymen,” recalled Thomas Meehan, “laughed all afternoon long.”