It's Good to Be the King

by James Robert Parish

  Eventually, Brooks had a polished 30-page screen treatment and various drafts of his ever-developing screenplay. He began to peddle it to different movie studios, but almost invariably he was met by rebuffs from executives who were flabbergasted that Mel could expect any Hollywood lot to produce an unorthodox comedy that dared to highlight Adolf Hitler in such a lighthearted manner, let alone include a slimy Broadway producer who seduced elderly women for their life savings.

  The fact that these conservative movie executives had missed the obvious satirical thrust of Mel’s work was all the more infuriating to Brooks. There was, however, one Hollywood top honcho, Universal Pictures’ Lew Wasserman, who said he might actually take a chance on Brooks’s shocking frolic. But Wasserman demanded that the author agree to substituting the “less” odious Benito Mussolini—Hitler’s Italian dictator/ ally—for der Führer in the narrative. Much as Brooks wanted his much sweated-over property to become a film, he could not conceive of his very personal work becoming Springtime for Mussolini.

  A dejected Brooks returned to New York. He wondered if his film would ever become an actuality. Then an associate introduced Mel to producer Sidney Glazier. Glazier, born in Philadelphia of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, had endured a very difficult childhood. After serving in World War II, Glazier relocated to New York City. For a while he was the night manager of a bar. Later, he became an apprentice jeweler, then a salesman of bonds for Israel. Eventually he emerged as the executive director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Foundation. After Mrs. Roosevelt’s death in 1962, Glazier produced a documentary on the late humanitarian. The 1965 film won an Academy Award.

  Mel made an appointment to meet Glazier at Manhattan’s Hello coffee shop. When Brooks walked into the restaurant, Sidney was eating a tuna fish sandwich and drinking a cup of coffee. Brooks immediately launched into his hard-sell pitch, in which he dramatically acted out highlights from Springtime for Hitler. Brooks’s all-out presentation so amused Glazier that soon the producer was choking with laughter—and spitting out bits of tuna and a spray of coffee. When Sidney finally regained his composure, he informed Mel, “I vow to get this movie made. The world must see this picture.”

  True to his promise, Sidney Glazier set to work locating the necessary backing for the unorthodox feature film. He raised over $400,000 himself and then turned to industry sources for the balance of the needed money and the all-important theatrical distribution deal. He took Mel with him to a battery of meetings with industry big shots. At these conferences, Brooks provided a condensed account of Springtime for Hitler, along with copies of the screen treatment. The two enthusiasts met with little success until they visited the New York City offices of Avco Embassy, the filmmaking/distribution corporation run by Joseph E. Levine. (This self-made man had gained his fortune in the movie business with a series of Italian-made cloak-and-sandal features, as well as with such art-house imports as the Oscar-winning foreign film Two Women. Levine was the same powerful moneyman who had been a backer of the 1965 Broadway fiasco Kelly, for which Mel had provided script rewrites.)

  Much to the great surprise of both Brooks and Glazier, who had endured so many rejections on this politically incorrect project, Levine agreed to complete the financing of Springtime for Hitler and to distribute the resultant movie comedy. However, he made a few demands. The film’s budget could not exceed $941,000 on the planned two-month shoot. Also, the picture’s name must be changed because, Levine argued, many theater chains would not exhibit a picture with “Hitler” in its title. After much debate, the men agreed to call the movie The Producers.

  When Levine asked Brooks and Glazier, “Who do we get to direct?” Mel replied brazenly, “Me. I know everything about this picture. I know where every character has to stand.” After some negotiation, it was arranged that Brooks would audition for the director’s assignment by helming a TV commercial with Alfa-Betty Olsen serving as his casting director. If the results proved successful, Mel would be given the green light to direct The Producers. The ad was done for Frito-Lay products and proved to be sufficiently professional. As Levine had promised, Mel got the go-ahead to make his feature film directing debut.

  While the financing arrangements were being completed, Mel further polished his long-in-the-works screenplay. He knew that the story line required an original song for the stage show within the movie, but he kept procrastinating about trying his hand at such an unfamiliar task, and considered finding a real tunesmith to create the number. One day, Brooks’s wife, Anne Bancroft, said to him, “You’re musical, you’re a good singer, and besides, you’ve been talking my head off ever since I met you about how much you want to be a songwriter. So take a pad, a pencil, go into the next room, and I’ll bet within an hour you’ll come out with a nice song.”

  According to Brooks, “I took a pad, a pencil and went into the next room. And lo and behold, one hour and one month later came out with ‘Springtime for Hitler.’ (I had come up with not only the lyrics but also the tune, which I’d heard in my head, picked out on a piano, and then hummed into a tape recorder—a full 32-bar song that a musicologist friend of mine then transcribed into actual notes on actual music paper, a method of composing I’ve since used for all my songs.)” Mel also wrote another number for the upcoming film. He called it “Prisoners of Love” (coincidentally, the final words of a lengthy prison sketch done on Caesar’s Hour years earlier). Later, Brooks said, “I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see the first copies of the sheet music of my songs and the credit in the upper-right-hand corner: ‘Words & Music by Mel Brooks.’”

  • • •

  Over the years, as Brooks was developing his cherished screen project into its final shape, he had one actor in mind to play the seamy Broadway producer, Max Bialystock. That was Zero Mostel, Mel’s larger-than-life compatriot from the Gourmet Club. Like Brooks, Mostel had been born in Brooklyn and was Jewish. Even more so than Mel, Zero had suffered a roller-coaster career. He was an intellect and multitalented artist (including being a painter and a sculptor) who was encased in a strangely shaped body and possessed of an odd-looking face. Mostel was a righteous liberal, and his political affiliations had led to his being blacklisted during the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

  As a result, Mostel’s promising career as a movie character lead fell apart. Thereafter, he struggled to find work in the New York theater. He made a great comeback in the early 1960s starring on Broadway in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Fiddler on the Roof. When Brooks showed “Z” (as he fondly called Mostel) the script to The Producers, the latter said no, it was not right for him. However, Mel was prepared for this reaction and had already sneaked a copy of the screenplay to the actor’s wife, Kate. She convinced her husband that he would be totally crazy to reject this meaty screen assignment.

  Initially, Mel thought of British comedian Peter Sellers to play Leo Bloom, the timid accountant who accidentally provides Max Bialystock with the great scheme to swindle his way to financial success. Brooks contacted Sellers’s representatives. The actor expressed an interest in this film project, and Mel arranged to meet with Peter when the latter next passed through New York City. The day of the meeting Sellers insisted on dragging Brooks to Bloomingdale’s for a shopping excursion. As they went from counter to counter, Mel kept bringing up The Producers. At every available opportunity, Brooks tried to capture Peter’s attention—to explain the role of Leo Bloom and reiterate yet again how excited Brooks was at the prospect of the great Sellers interpreting the part. Brooks recalls, “I’d be in the middle of a very important moment—where Bialystock says to Bloom, ‘Do you want to live in a gray little world, do you want to be confined, don’t you want to fly?’—and he’d say ‘You like this buckle? What do you think of this buckle.’” This was typical of Sellers’s scattered state of mind, in which he would fasten on a particular thing for the moment and “get lost in it” and then, just as quickly, move on to a new passing interest. Event
ually, even the persistent Mel gave up trying to get through to the British comedian. Brooks realized he would have to search elsewhere to find his Leo Bloom.

  While Brooks had been in vain pursuit of the elusive, vague Sellers during 1963, he also was spending many evenings backstage at the Martin Beck Theater on West 45th Street, where Anne Bancroft was starring in Mother Courage and Her Children. One of the supporting players in this serious drama was the young Gene Wilder, in the role of the Chaplain. It was not a funny part, but somehow the actor found comedic elements in the character. Each night, Wilder came offstage bemused as to why his performance had drawn laughs from the audience. Mel took sympathy on this meek, rather neurotic actor and explained to the naive soul that theatergoers were amused because Gene was just naturally funny.

  Before long, the two men became friends, and Mel told him about Springtime for Hitler. Brooks confided that the screenplay had a perfect role for Wilder and that when the time came for the film to be made, the role was definitely Gene’s. Wilder was thrilled at the opportunity. After Mother Courage ended its run, Gene heard nothing further from Mel. Thereafter, Wilder undertook more Broadway work and went to Hollywood for his first movie job, a supporting part in Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde. After completing that period gangster film, Wilder went back to Manhattan and worked on the stage. One day, out of the blue, Mel appeared at Gene’s dressing room and announced excitedly that he had the backing for The Producers and Wilder was now needed for the role. Gene quickly accepted the assignment.

  One of the key supporting roles in The Producers was that of Franz Liebkind, the wacko Nazi zealot living in Greenwich Village who has written an awful play about Adolf Hitler. It is this play that Max and Leo acquire to be their hoped-for overnight Broadway flop. Originally, Mel thought that one of his neighbors on West 11th Street might be ideal for the offbeat part of Liebkind. He was Dustin Hoffman, then a struggling off-Broadway actor. Hoffman read for Brooks and agreed to play the oddball character. However, at the last minute Dustin was offered the young male lead in Mike Nichols’s new screen project, The Graduate. (Coincidentally, Anne Bancroft had already accepted the role of Mrs. Robinson in that picture, which was to be shot in Hollywood.) With Hoffman now out of the running, Mel thought he might take on the role himself. Then he realized that such a chore would distract him from focusing his attentions on the consuming task of directing the movie. He held open auditions and chose Kenneth Mars, an intense young actor, to play the nutty German. Comedian Dick Shawn, whom Bancroft knew, agreed to appear as L.S.D., the drugged-out hippie singer who is cast as Der Führer in the musical within the movie.

  Other auditions turned up Christopher Hewett (to play Roger De Bris, the untalented Broadway director who has a penchant for dressing in drag) and Lee Meredith (as Ulla, the shapely Swede who comes to work for Max and Leo). Anne Bancroft recommended Andreas Voutsinas, a fellow performer at the Actors Studio, for the role of the waspish Carmen Ghia, De Bris’s swishy assistant and possessive lover. Joe Bologna, an actor acquaintance of Mel’s, proposed that his stage actress girlfriend, Renee Taylor, would be just right for the small part of Eva Braun, Hitler’s consort.

  Filming on The Producers began on May 22, 1967, at the Production Center at 221 West 26th Street. The first day of the shoot Mel was so keyed up by his overwhelming responsibilities as director that when it came time for the first scene to be filmed he yelled “Cut” rather than “Action.” The novice moviemaker had much more to learn about moviemaking. According to Ralph Rosenblum, the movie’s veteran film editor, who suffered a stormy working relationship with Brooks through much of this production, Mel seemed to be in well over his head on his debut directing assignment.

  In his book, When the Shooting Stops, the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story, Rosenblum remarked of Brooks, “Did he know that in the movies you could shoot only about five minutes of usable film in a day? … Brooks couldn’t stand the waiting, and his impatience quickly extended to the cast. He soon found himself in a head-on conflict with the mountainous Mostel. The first time the star couldn’t perform with just the inflection Brooks wanted, the entire project seemed to be slipping from the director’s grasp. After several faulty takes, he started to shout, ‘Goddamn it, why can’t you …’ but Mostel turned his head like a roving artillery gun and barked, ‘One more tone like that and I’m leaving.’”

  Soon it became a case of Mel Brooks asking assistants about his truculent star: “Is that fat pig ready yet?” with Zero Mostel remarking, “The director? What director? There’s a director here?” (In fairness, part of Mostel’s enormous bursts of temperament on the project could be attributed to the fact that some months before filming began he had been in a bus accident and suffered a severe leg injury. During the making of The Producers, the damaged limb was still causing Zero a great deal of pain and required him to limit the length of his workday. As for Brooks, he said later of Mostel, who died in 1977, “He could be wicked and cruel and he could be almost sweet, loving, kind, generous. The great thing about Zero was that he was uniquely gifted. He was really, truly talented, more talented than any actor except for Sid Caesar that I have ever worked with.”)

  • • •

  Because Mel was a novice in helming a movie, his learning curve occurred on the actual shoot. The pressures of all the creative demands placed on Brooks made him out of sorts. The heavy organizational requirements thrust on this man—a person who thrived on spontaneity and found comfort in disorganization—made him frantic. Sometimes Mel hid his crushing concerns beneath a synthetic air of jauntiness in which he was overly solicitous to everyone in sight and put on an impromptu comedy routine to amuse and distract onlookers. At other times, he buried his mounting insecurities behind a bluster of authority. On several occasions, this caused problems on the set when a technician stepped in to suggest that what Brooks was demanding be done for a particular scene had hidden (negative) consequences. One day, cinematographer Joseph Coffey screamed at Mel, “You can’t do that; it’s even not cinematic!” This did not sit right with the fledgling filmmaker, and, typically, he became more insistent on having his way. Said Coffey, “That was the end of our romance.”

  One morning, at the end of screening the dailies on The Producers, Mel agitatedly rushed up to the front of the room and snarled at film editor Ralph Rosenblum, “You just listen to me. I don’t want you to touch this fuckin’ film again! You understand? I just finished with Coffey this afternoon—I told him I don’t need his help, and I don’t need your help either! I’ll do it all myself. Don’t you touch this film, you hear?! Don’t touch it, until I finish shooting!” Such flare-ups led producer Sidney Glazier to shake his head in wonderment as he mumbled, “I don’t know why Mel has to do this. Why does he have to make it so difficult?”

  On a particularly unfortunate occasion, a harassed Brooks completely lost his cool with Joan Barthel, a reporter who had been invited onto the film set to write an important feature story on the making of this offbeat comedy. The director was in an especially foul mood that crucial day. He demanded of the visitor, “What the fuck do you want? … What do you want to know, honey? Want me to tell you the truth? Want me to give you the real dirt? Want me to tell you what’s in my heart?” A nearapoplectic Glazier rushed over to make amends to the badly shaken Barthel. He told her, “They call me the producer. Pray for me.” Barthel’s New York Times article ran with an uncomplimentary photo of Mel Brooks in mid-tirade. It was captioned “A man losing his grip.”

  As Mel proceeded by trial and error, the production staggered toward completion. Often Brooks would leave the studio late at night and arrive home unable to fall asleep from the many tensions of the day. His face took on a gray, pallid look. The next morning the dailies from the previous day’s shoot would be screened. With that out of the way, Brooks would launch into a short bit of shtick as he walked among the crew and cast preparing for the morning’s shoot. Then it was back to the ultraserious Mel the film director.

 
At last, after an eight-week shoot, it came time, on July 15, 1967, to film the sequence set at the circular fountain at Lincoln Center. The footage of Leo, now a convert to Max’s devious plan, running giddily around the edge of the fountain (as the water sprayed heavenward) took hours to execute properly. As dawn broke, the scene was finally completed. It was the end of principal photography on The Producers. Thereafter, an exhausted Brooks, Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, and some of the others on hand repaired to the Brasserie for breakfast. For the next several months, Brooks and Ralph Rosenblum labored over the editing of the film. Brooks hated losing any of his precious footage but conceded that some bits were extraneous to the plot. In poring over the “Springtime for Hitler” number, he was unhappy with the way one of the performers sang his solo line. So Mel dubbed in the words “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty. Come and join the Nazi Party.” It was his contribution as an actor to the picture.

  • • •

  In late November 1967, Avco Embassy arranged for a test playdate of The Producers in Philadelphia at a small suburban theater, as well as one in Washington, D.C.—without giving the movie any real advertising support. (By this point, Levine and Avco Embassy were deeply involved in releasing The Graduate—which proved to be a tremendous critical and commercial hit—and had little time, interest, or spare funds to promote the unconventional The Producers.) Mel Brooks and his faithful helper, Alfa-Betty Olsen, as well as Joseph E. Levine and a few executives from the film company, attended the “opening” in Philadelphia. When the small contingent entered the huge theater, it was nearly empty. The picture started and the only one of the few attendees to respond with gales of laughter was a bag lady seated way down in front. When the film ended, Levine and his associates glumly marched up the aisle, said nothing to Brooks or Olsen, and departed in their limousine. Mel and Alfa-Betty returned to Manhattan by train convinced that Avco Embassy would now shelve The Producers. When he reached home, a grim Mel gave his wife the full account of that evening’s disaster. He and Anne then began reading to each other passages from various books to help them get through what Brooks termed “the worst night of my life.”