As the project revved up at Twentieth Century-Fox, Mel expounded to the media on his personal guidelines for creating a commercially successful feature. “You don’t want to make a picture just for the smarties. That’s no good. You want all the people. You want a potato salad picture. You know what I mean by a potato salad picture. You’re in the deli and there’s this guy with a little piece of potato salad stuck in the corner of his mouth, and he’s talking about your picture to his cronies. He’s saying, all the time with the potato salad hanging, ‘You gotta see this Mel Brooks pitcha, you’ll laugh so hard you’ll pish yourself.’”
Mel’s ambition in his new venture was to create a narrative that would be understood by anyone—including those not familiar with Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre. However, for aficionados of Hitchcock there would be an extra layer of fun in witnessing Brooks’s farcical twists on famous sequences and setups from various of the master’s classic screen thrillers, including Spellbound, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, and North by Northwest. Fearful of possibly offending the great Sir Alfred, Brooks visited Hitchcock at his Los Angeles home to gain his seal of approval for High Anxiety. Mel relished detailing his meeting with Hitchcock: “He’s a very emotional man. I told him that where other people take saunas to relax, I run The Lady Vanishes for the sheer pleasure of it. He had tears in his eyes. I think he understood that I wasn’t going to make fun of him. If the picture is a send up, it’s also an act of homage to a great artist. I’m glad I met him, because I love him.”
• • •
In devising his “dapper” alter ego for High Anxiety, Brooks allowed his flight of fancy to run loose. Here was an opportunity for a short, average-looking man to transform himself into a romantic leading man. At least in the make-believe of this cinema excursion, he could compensate for the many years of being the mug who envied the handsome men who made easy conquests of the opposite sex. “In my heart of hearts, I always wanted to be Errol Flynn.… Yeah, I was heartbroken. And I always wanted the most beautiful, long-waisted, long-legged women in the world to fall on their knees and pray to me. But as life and God would have it, it was the other way around. Every time I see a tall, beautiful woman, I just crash to my knees and I pray to her. I say, ‘Please, just give me a slap in the face, something. Show me that you know I’m alive, too.’”
Another impetus for Brooks to make High Anxiety was to provide an on-screen forum in which he could imitate Frank Sinatra singing in a club. (For years, Mel had been doing his impersonation of the crooner at parties and on TV.) To that end, Mel wrote the song “High Anxiety,” which John Morris scored for the new movie.
In assembling his cast, Mel chose Howard Morris to play his mentor, Professor Vicktor Lilloman. It was the first time Brooks and Morris had worked together in a decade, and the first movie ever in which the two old friends acted together. The occasion prompted Mel to say, “I look into Howie’s eyes and I see my life there! We hug each other and laugh and cry a lot.… He’s as funny as you want him to be and yet he’s very moving and warm.” In turn, Howard said of Mel, “He has always had the ability to cut through the shit. The way he has changed is that when you are eighteen or nineteen and you have that instinct, people think you’re crazy. You think you’re crazy. Now he has the confidence, having proven himself economically.”
Brooks again asked Cloris Leachman to take on the role of another celluloid villain. (Mel enthused about her, “Cloris’ genius is that she never plays comedy for laughs. She’s deadly serious as the character.”) To make her new screen character (Nurse Charlotte Diesel) unique, Leachman chose not to reprise the ridiculous Eastern European accent and stern countenance she had used to play Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein. To heighten her sinister portrayal, she took the initiative to pencil in a light mustache, add additional shoulder padding to her outfits, and raise the costume’s torpedo-shaped breasts to just below her chin, and she decided to talk out of the side of the mouth. Her exaggerated appearance gave even the notoriously screwball Brooks pause. However, she stood her ground, saying, “My intention is not to do something I’ve done before.” Mel finally went along with Leachman’s suggestions for her character.
Madeline Kahn returned to Brooks’s fold for the third time, this go-round cast as the very blond, glamorous heroine, Victoria Brisbane, whose father is being forcibly detained at the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. Harvey Korman came aboard as the murderous Dr. Charles Montague, who is putty in the hands of his sadomasochistic lover, Nurse Diesel. Ron Carey, who had had a small role as a corporate miscreant in Silent Movie, had a far more vocal role in High Anxiety, as the hero’s hyperactive chauffeur/helper. Dick Van Patten, another member of Mel’s stock company, joined the ensemble as a nervous clinic staffer who knows far too many dastardly secrets to remain alive. Since Brooks made a policy of having his collaborators on the set during filming, he decided to give each of them (Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, and Barry Levinson) a small role in the proceedings. Even Mel’s lawyer, Alan Schwartz, had a bit role (as a psychiatrist).
Filming on High Anxiety began on April 25, 1977, on location in San Francisco, with scenes lensed at the ultramodern Hyatt Regency Hotel (which boasted futuristic glass cylinder elevators that were a critical plot point in the picture), Fisherman’s Wharf, and historic Fort Point (the latter under the Golden Gate Bridge on the exact spot where Hitchcock had shot an important sequence for Vertigo). Back in Los Angeles, the production shot at Fox and at such area locales as Mount St. Mary’s College, the Bonaventure Hotel, and Los Angeles International Airport. The shoot ended on July 14, 1977, four days ahead of schedule. The final sequence, in which the leading man is seen fleeing from a flock of attacking pigeons, was shot in a park in Pasadena, California.
Later, Brooks acknowledged that in High Anxiety, “One of the cliches I nearly used was, I was going to open with a small Swiss village and you see a train that is obviously a toy train. And I was going to have a big foot crush the village and say, ‘Oops I’m sorry.’ But I thought that was a little too exquisite and a little too subtle and I never did it.” In the same picture, Mel also had a notion of having his hero come out of George Washington’s nose on Mount Rushmore wearing a green jumpsuit. His script collaborators talked him out of it. (On the other hand, Brooks couldn’t resist the prankish gimmick of having the movie camera shooting the movie crash through a set wall as it dollied in and out of the action.)
In contrast to his earlier films (The Producers and The Twelve Chairs), Brooks now worked quite rapidly on the sound stages. (By this point, Mel kept graphs in his office, delineating “dialogue, dialogue … laugh.”) Typically, Brooks maintained an open set on his productions so friends (and even studio executives) could drop by to say hello and watch the progress of the shoot. It was Mel’s goal to have a happy and silly ambiance during the shoot so the cast and crew would feel relaxed and be comfortable about offering suggestions.
Having deliberately chosen “self-starters who don’t have to have every nuance of behavior explained,” Brooks encouraged them to improvise on their physical movements but not to vary from the dialogue of the final script. (Mel had also come to realize, “You can’t make up the movie as you go along. It’s too expensive.”) An example of giving cast members freedom to devise funny bits was the clinic sequence in which Mel’s character is making his rounds of the facilities. One of the more deranged patients (played by Charles Callas), who thinks he is a cocker spaniel, comes up on all fours to the hero, begins sniffing the newcomer, and then starts to hump the man’s leg. As Callas told this author, he thought up much of his business for this sequence.
When it came to interacting with the extras, the filmmaker was very much in his element, thriving on having a large audience eager to do his bidding. During a medical convention scene, he briefed the banquet hall full of extras: “You are all supposed to be psychiatrists at a convention so you’re allowed to have a lot of nervous ticks. You can mumble a lot, but don’t laugh till you get home.
” When a tourist mistakenly barged into the room, Brooks quipped, “Lady, you’re in a shot! If you can act, stick around.”
On the other hand, the hyperactive, highly focused Brooks could, on occasion, be a bit too much for his cast. Madeline Kahn said, “Sometimes he gets very high-powered.” Harvey Korman observed, “You must be very careful he doesn’t engulf you.” And Howard Morris noted, “He has a hysterical kind of energy that causes some people to call him the Monkey because he sometimes appears to be climbing the walls.”
By August 31, 1977, Mel was screening a work print of High Anxiety for a gathering of 200 executives and workers at Twentieth Century-Fox. Before the showing, the convivial host said, “My beloved, you are guinea pigs.” Mel ended his welcoming speech with: “Finally, let me say that I wish you well, but I wish myself better.” Further on in postproduction, Brooks invited Hitchcock to a prerelease screening of the picture. When it was over, the master of suspense walked out without saying a word. Brooks thought, “Oh, boy, he hates it.” However, soon thereafter, Sir Alfred, knowing Mel was a wine connoisseur, sent Brooks a case of 1961 Haut-Brion (an expensive vintage) with a note that read, “A small token of my pleasure, have no anxiety about this.”
High Anxiety premiered in New York City on Christmas Day, 1977. Vincent Canby (of the New York Times) weighed in that it was “as witty and as disciplined as Young Frankenstein, though it has one built-in problem: Hitchcock himself is a very funny man. His films, even at their most terrifying and most suspenseful, are full of jokes shared with the audience. Being so self-aware, Hitchcock’s films deny an easy purchase to the parodist, especially one who admires his subject the way Mr. Brooks does.” Canby pointed out, “As the afflicted Dr. Thorndyke, Mr. Brooks plays it so very, very straight that just the memory of one of his famous leers is funny.” Variety applauded Brooks as a “chance taker” who reveled here in “toying with the technical references” to Hitchcock’s canon of classic films and decided that “nearly all of these gags… score.” However, the trade paper alerted, “Where the film becomes uneven is the individual scenes which sway from the movie’s larger design.”
Roger Ebert (of the Chicago Sun-Times), long a fan of Brooks’s, had many reservations about Mel’s newest movie release and gave it a rating of only two and a half stars (out of a possible four). “Almost all of Hitchcock’s fifty-three or so films have their great moments of wit. And wit—the ability to share a sense of subtle fun with an audience—is not exactly Mel Brooks’s strong point. He takes such key Hitchcock moments as the shower scene from Psycho, the climbing scene from Vertigo, and the shooting in North by Northwest and he clobbers them. It’s not satire; it’s overkill.” Ebert observed that, in the process of affectionately spoofing Hitchcock, Brooks almost buries “his own comic talent in the attempt to fit things into his satirical formula. The best moments in High Anxiety come not when Brooks is being assaulted in the shower with a rolled-up newspaper, but when Brooks leaves Hitchcock altogether and does his own crazy, brilliant stuff.”
The film’s finest moments of inspired lunacy include scenes depicting the hero coping with his fear of heights aboard an airplane and in the hotel’s glass-enclosed outdoor elevators, which scale the heights of the skyscraper; the sequence in which the would-be cool and sophisticated psychiatrist croons a song in the hotel saloon; and the broadly played episode in which the fleeing hero and heroine escape police detection by passing through an airport security station dressed as an elderly Jewish couple engaged in a loud screaming match.
Made at an estimated cost of $3.4 million, High Anxiety earned $19.16 million in domestic theater rentals. Once again, while the picture enjoyed relatively healthy profits from its U.S. and foreign distribution and subsequent ancillary sales, it represented a growing trend with Brooks’s pictures since Young Frankenstein: moviegoers were not making Mel’s movies such a must-see event as just a few years ago and, thus, the number of tickets sold to Brooks’s latest theatrical entries was slackening off.
Adding to the filmmaker’s concern about his industry status and future, High Anxiety failed to win any nominations from either the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or the Writers Guild of America. (The picture was up for two Golden Globes but lost out in both instances.) When High Anxiety did not receive any nomination from the academy or from the Writers Guild, Mel Brooks fell into great despair. According to Anne Bancroft, he was “as low as I’ve ever known him.” Despite—or because of—the disappointment that tore at his self-confidence, Mel vowed, “I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself. I want to go on making the loudest noise to the most people. If I can’t do that, I’m not going to make a quiet, exquisite noise for a cabal of cognoscenti.”
27
Stretching His Career Horizons
Sometimes, if people are staring at me; they see it’s Mel Brooks, and I’m at a traffic light. I will pretend to have a heart attack and fall over my steering wheel. The horn will blow very loudly for a long time, and everybody will get out of their cars and start to run over—and then I’ll drive away. Sometimes I’m really Meshuginah. Once, I was on a bus with a friend of mine and I put a lot of hard, white candies in my mouth. I just kept spitting them out. And I said: “I can’t go on like this. My teeth are literally falling out of my mouth.” And I kept spitting out these candies that looked like teeth as I talked. Hysterical. I just loved doing it.
–Mel Brooks, 1978
In a relatively short period in the mid-1970s, Mel Brooks had turned out four Hollywood feature films and a TV series. Each venture had demanded a good deal of his energy, creative input, and time, as Brooks wore so many hats on each project. In 1978, Mel had no new film project ready for release because he couldn’t decide which project under consideration might be the best one to bolster his faltering box-office standing.
Now in his early 50s, he was still a man of youthful vitality and many enthusiasms. These interests—which helped to distract him from career pressures—included being a wine connoisseur with a well-stocked wine cellar, an avid tennis player, a book collector, a real estate investor, and a man who loved to host gatherings of friends. Most of all, after 14 years of marriage to Anne Bancroft, Brooks was still a devoted husband and continued to remain in awe of her. (Brooks commented of his spouse, “She is a remarkable woman. Every year I see her grow more as a person and as an artist. I really like her, you know? As well as love her.… I think that that’s really what a good relationship is based on—liking each other. If someone tried to pin me down on what makes a relationship work—‘Is it having enough money?’ ‘Is it sex?’—I would say, ‘It’s good company.’”)
The Brooks family now resided in Beverly Hills at 915 North Foothill Road. The expansive estate boasted a swimming pool and a guesthouse. One visitor to the house during that time recalled recently, “The interior was very classy: decorated by Anne in shades of beige and brown; natural-colors. I found the furniture magnificent and perfectly matching the colors. I remember well a huge ‘early American’ cupboard in the living room. It looked great.”
Mel remained in contact with his three children from his first marriage. He saw them when he was on the East Coast promoting his latest projects or when vacationing at Fire Island, or sometimes they visited him in Los Angeles. His eldest, Stefanie, now 23, had attended Brandeis University and, thereafter, for a time, was a production assistant within the film industry working on such features as Going in Style, The First Deadly Sin, The Cotton Club, and 84 Charing Cross Road. However, most of Mel’s quality time was spent with his and Anne’s child, Max, now six.
In 2003, when Max Brooks was promoting the publication of the first book (The Zombie Survival Guide) he had written, he recalled his childhood spent in Southern California. “I was always an outsider. The kids I went to school with were far richer than we were, but I was singled out as the rich kid because everybody knew who my dad was.… We lived in the hills, so for me it meant trees and wild shrubbery and every Sun
day walking the dog to the top of the hill with my dad and looking out over LA. Dad didn’t like living there, though—I think it offended his sense of morality. He was always uncomfortable with being flashy.… He used to drive me to school every day and his car was a 1982 Honda Accord, which I thought was the coolest car in the world.
“In his mind, money is not a status symbol—it’s a defense against medication. When he was a kid, his four back teeth were rotting, and they said to his immigrant Russian Jewish mother, ‘We can pull them for 50 cents or we can fill them for a dollar.’ She thought, ‘What a bargain—pull them!’ So for him, money is something to protect you from the dangers of the world.”
Mel had his own recollection of his last-born’s formative years: “Max was such a terrific kid. He was like one of those science-fiction children who know more than their parents. He was very bright and very good-natured. When he was only about nine, we went traveling around Europe with friends and we ended up in Venice. There were these rows of cabanas on the beach and we were next to a French couple. The woman was saying, ‘You are paying for the sun—why isn’t your child on the beach?’ So I decided to find out, and had a look in the changing area in the back, and there he was… writing his first story. I never encouraged it, though. I don’t know where he got it from. I guess life was hard, living with his mother and me, and he liked make-believe a lot better.”
Brooks also noted of his son, “He couldn’t understand why a stranger would come over to our table in a restaurant and tell us how much they adored us and wanted a picture or an autograph.… I think I was a bad father in that way too; I was always kind to fans at his expense. Not spending enough precious moments with him.… I was afraid to go to a lot of places. I never took him to a lot of baseball games because … you can get surrounded by a lot of crazy people. There’s a brush stroke of paranoia there, which kept me from a normal father and son thing.”
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