• • •
By the late 1970s, Mel Brooks was still riding the crest of his Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein successes. Based on their box-office returns, and to a lesser degree his next two pictures, he enjoyed real power within the Hollywood film industry and liked to talk about his enviable position in the community. (If some of Brooks’s statements at the time smacked of self-serving remarks geared to bolster his ego and to remind the business of how important he was, so be it. Tinseltown was used to such pronouncements and took them with a grain of salt.) Mel allowed, “It’s an achievement of a kind to know that I can walk into any studio—any one in town—and just say my name, and the president will fly out from behind his desk and open his door. It’s terrific, it’s a great feeling. My worst critic is my wife. She keeps me straight. She says, ‘Are you pleasing that mythical public of yours again, or is this really funny and heartfelt?’” Despite his string of recent successes, Brooks remained very much a product of his childhood. “I’m a Brooklyn boy who was brought up in a materialistic society. And I know that money makes right. Not might but money. Money is everything.”
The successful entertainer acknowledged, “All kinds of things make me laugh. I like ‘life’ things better than I like made-up things. People don’t know how wonderfully funny they are.… I like to really see characters like that [e.g., a fat woman in a bakery arguing over calories].… And I miss that in Los Angeles. In New York you see a lot more of it—a lot more crazies on the street, a lot more action in the little retail stores, and a lot more give and take ‘twixt and ‘tween the public.… And it’s hard for me to observe life now, because even if I try, say in a restaurant, a place where people congregate, they’re looking at me. So being famous is not a good idea for being a writer.”
When Mel was asked to reveal his upcoming career plans, he somewhat dodged the question with his response: “I’ll wait to be thoroughly moved, rocked by an idea. Just remarkably insane, I hope, and a joy to work on. You have to surround the insanity with a great deal of logic and sense. Let me get a great, insane idea and then house it in a good, logical structure and I’m very happy. I’ll write it for a year, and then if it’s no good, I’ll tear it up and go on to another one. But if it’s good, we’ll make it. Usually we know when it’s going well. When it writes itself, we know it’s good.”
One of the topics Brooks was increasingly being asked to comment on were the career parallels and dissimilarities between him and the nearly 10-years-younger Woody Allen, his chief rival as the contemporary king of American film comedy. (At the time, Allen was riding his own crest, having won two Oscars, for directing and coscripting 1977’s Annie Hall, and was soon to release Manhattan.) Mel noted of his competitor and himself, “Woody will feel something and then disguise it skillfully and issue it. I know what I do best and I am theatrical. Woody is not theatrical. He’s shy and very private, almost academic.… I chose not to be philosophical or intellectual. I choose to tap dance as much as I can. I think of it as a job, not a mission and not an artistic endeavor.”
• • •
In 1979, Mel’s only big-screen output was a cameo appearance in Jim Henson’s The Muppet Movie. He was on camera briefly as the mad Professor Max Krassman, one of the live characters who encounters Kermit the Frog when the latter is convinced by his talent agent (played by Dom DeLuise) to try his luck in Hollywood. The family-fare entry was a huge commercial success.
Meanwhile, Brooks had been quietly laying the groundwork for new show business ventures of his own. He had formed a new production company, Brooksfilms, to take the place of Crossbow Productions (whose final project was High Anxiety). Mel intended for the new entity to produce serious films beyond his own comedic projects. In forming the organization, he was motivated by the conviction that “somewhere in the Talmud, it tells you that you must return a portion of your gain in this world. You must give back.” In addition, he had been prompted into this new business venture because he had thought, “I’m just becoming a crowd-pleaser. What have I got to say? ... I couldn’t use my art just to make a living.” (There also must have been a part of Brooks that sensed he should cover his options in the film business, in case his screen comedies continued to dip in popularity at the box office.)
According to the moviemaker, “I very skillfully hid my name when I created Brooksfilms. I very assiduously kept the name Mel Brooks away from [these projects].” Brooks understood that if the public at large associated his brand of humor with the output of Brooksfilms it would set up wrong expectations for the company’s releases.
It was Mel’s belief that he could best express his decades-old love of the (international) cinema by encouraging new filmmakers to make creative and ambitious projects. (There was also a practical reason to Brooks’s giving a helping hand to relatively new talent: “I’m not really that benevolent, loving and giving a human being. I’m really being much more selfish. I think that first-time people doing a big first-time job in any field will give you 110 percent. If you find the right people and you give them an opportunity, you know the bread you cast upon the water will not come back soggy. You’re going to get something good there.”)
One of the first individuals to benefit from Mel’s new production banner was his wife, Anne. She had been coping with the longtime film industry problem of diminishing career opportunities available to leading ladies once they passed the age of 40. Recently, Bancroft had suffered through a thankless role in the 1976 potboiler Lipstick, while giving an Oscar-nominated performance in the next year’s The Turning Point. Thereafter, challenging movie role offers had dried up for her, and she turned to TV (playing Mary Magdalene in the miniseries Jesus of Nazareth) and returned to the Broadway stage (in William Gibson’s Golda, a short-lived drama about Israel’s premier, Golda Meir).
Meanwhile, Bancroft had attended the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women in Los Angeles. There, she directed two shorts, The August (starring Hope Lange, which was never released) and Fatso. Both were shot in black and white in a video format. She chose not to ask Brooks for advice. When asked why she made this decision, she told an associate, “I don’t want to direct a Mel Brooks film. I want to direct an Anne Bancroft film! This is a matter of identity! And Mel agrees with this!”
Nevertheless, Mel did provide his spouse with the encouragement to turn Fatso into a full-length feature. It was to be released by Brooksfilms through Twentieth Century-Fox. Stuart Cornfeld, who had been an assistant to the producer on High Anxiety, served as producer of the new venture, for which Anne was the costar, director, and scenarist. Dom DeLuise, Candy Azzara, and Estelle Reiner (the wife of Carl Reiner) repeated their roles from the short subject in this drama about an Italian American man (DeLuise) who is seriously overweight, causing his concerned sister (Bancroft) great stress. The hefty, good-natured hero only abandons his devotion to food when he falls in love with an attractive lady (Azzara) from the neighborhood.
While Fatso was officially Bancroft’s screen project, Brooks did make his presence felt on the production. Years later, in Mollie Gregory’s 2002 book, Women Who Run the Show, Brianne Murphy (the cinematographer on Fatso) recalled, “I was never allowed to go to dailies. Nobody went to dailies except Anne and Mel, so I’d see the film at the lab before I came to work in the morning. Usually at dailies, the DP [the director of photography] goes with the director and the director tells the DP what she likes and doesn’t like. The editor usually goes, too. But in this case only Mel went with Anne. I guess he told her what he liked. Word had gotten around that he was very controlling.
“But on the set everybody loved Anne and we had a wonderful camaraderie. Around four or five in the afternoon, Mel would come to pick her up. We never knew when he’d arrive and it seemed to be at his convenience rather than hers because whenever he did appear, she’d start wanting to complete a shot. One day, he came on the set, not introduced to anyone and not saying hello to anyone.… Mel goes over to the video assist to look at it
and in the middle of the shot he says, ‘Cut, cut, thats no good, that won’t work, cut it.’
“My camera operator, Bob Lavar, a big man, took his eye away from the camera, looked down at Mel, looked over at me, and said ‘Who the fuck is that little guy?’ All hell broke loose. Very upset Anne picked up her stuff and left. It was a wrap.… No one ever says ‘Cut’ except the director. Ever.
“The next day, I came in to the set and we’re all lit and ready to go. No Anne. After an hour or so, the assistant director came to me and said, ‘Bri, Anne wants to see you in her dressing room.’ I went in. Her eyes were all red and she said that she’d been crying all night. ‘This is just terrible what happened yesterday,’ she said, ‘and I hate to tell you this, but Mel says you have to fire Bob, the operator.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Mel says he’s potentially dangerous.’”
According to Murphy, for the next day there was a battle of wills over whether the camera operator would or would not be fired. Finally, the matter was dropped and “we all got back to work.” In summing up her experience on the film, the director of photography noted, “Anne Bancroft is a very talented person. I always thought she could have been a great director.”
Fatso was released on February 1, 1980, to mildly positive reviews and generated a relatively modest $7.65 million in domestic distribution. After that experience, Bancroft never again directed another feature. She reasoned, “I think to be a director you have to have a certain kind of personality which I don’t have. I do not like manipulating people. My greatest philosophy is to let everybody just be who they want to be, but it isn’t workable. Somebody has to have a very dominating hand, and I just don’t have that kind of hand.”
• • •
At the time of Fatso’s pending release, Mel was persuaded by the press to comment on his wife’s new picture. He remarked, “The title is funny, yes—but it says so much about the hurt inflicted on fat people. And the movie is funny, but it also condemns society for making outcasts of fat people, and examines the psychology that makes these superfat people want to throw their lives away. Because, really, that’s what they’re doing.”
His observations reflected a theme that would course through many of the projects brought to the screen by Brooksfilms in the coming years: that of individuals who are different from society’s norm and how these outsiders react to and deal with the world. (Such outcasts were certainly close to the heart of Mel Brooks, who, from childhood on, had been both a victim and a product of being “different” from the average man.) This attitude was particularly evident with Brooksfilms’s next major film offering, 1980’s The Elephant Man.
The idea was brought to Mel by his babysitter’s boyfriend. The evolving screenplay was based on various nonfiction accounts of John Merrick, who lived in nineteenth-century England and who suffered from a physically disfiguring disability called neurofibromatosis. For much of his short life he existed as a carnival sideshow freak gawked at by paying audiences. He spent his last four years at London Hospital, cared for by a sympathetic surgeon. The quite bright and polite man died in 1894 at age 27.
This insightful, sensitively told story was certainly a far cry from such Brooksian mirthfests as Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. However, because the venture resonated so deeply with Mel, he worked extremely diligently over a long period with the project’s young scriptwriters (Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren) as well as with David Lynch, the film’s director (and cowriter on the final screenplay). Brooks said later, “I have a lot of pride in ownership of that film.” He also acknowledged, “I knew the critics would take offense if there was a property they felt was sacred and the bean-farting wacko from Blazing Saddles was going to put his grimy paws on it.” For this reason, Mel served as the uncredited executive producer on The Elephant Man, while the film was produced by Jonathan Sanger (already established as part of Mel’s production team from past projects).
Keeping to the spirit of David Lynch’s concept for this unusual case study, Brooks agreed the picture should be filmed in black and white. It was shot economically in England and boasted a strong cast, including John Hurt in the title role, Anthony Hopkins as the caring physician, and Anne Bancroft as the stage actress who befriends the human oddity. The well-crafted feature was released by Paramount Pictures in the fall of 1980 and received high critical praise. Made for an estimated $5 million, it earned several times that amount at the box office, drawing in a lifetime gross of over $26 million. The Elephant Man received eight Academy Award nominations, including in the categories of Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay (adapted from another medium), and Best Actor (John Hurt).
The Elephant Man was an amazingly prestigious and rather profitable undertaking for the fledgling Brooksfilms. It added enormously to the regard with which Mel was held in the movie industry. When the public realized that the film was a product of the zany Brooks, it caused many detractors of the self-acknowledged vulgarian to perceive the successful filmmaker and highly complex individual in a new light.
This Brooksfilms release paved the way for the company’s several other pictures in the 1980s. As on The Elephant Man, Mel’s primary function was always to remain behind the scenes in order to package the property and get it made as effectively and efficiently as possible. (Having learned the hard way about the rampant creative accounting procedures in the film business, Brooks became a shrewd negotiator. As a part of his education in the financial ins and outs of moviemaking, Mel hired the highly experienced and adept Emile Buyse—who supervised Twentieth Century-Fox’s overseas sales—to do the same for Brooksfilms. Brooks worked closely with Buyse on Brooksfilms’ releases, often making extended public appearance tours abroad, where Mel—like Jerry Lewis before him—was even more highly regarded than back in the United States.)
In 1982, Brooksfilms was responsible for two releases: My Favorite Year and Frances. The first was a nostalgic comedy set in early 1950s New York City and concerned zany happenings at a Your Show of Shows-type of TV program. It featured Joseph Bologna as a Sid Caesar-like star of the small screen and Mark Linn-Baker as a young TV staff writer (a part that had many parallels to Mel Brooks’s own life). Actor Richard Benjamin made his feature film directing debut with this project, which contained vivid performances by the Oscar-nominated Peter O’Toole (cast as an Errol Flynn-like swashbuckling movie star) and Lainie Kazan as Baker’s colorful mama. The popular comedy, released by MGM, went on to gross over $20 million.
This was followed by the Universal Pictures release of Frances, a strong drama based on the tormented life of the beautiful actress Frances Farmer. She had defied the Hollywood studio system in the late 1930s and early 1940s, became an alcoholic, spent long periods in the hell of mental institutions, and finally emerged a shell of her former rebellious self. Both Jessica Lange as the beleaguered Frances and Kim Stanley as her overly possessive mother were Oscar nominated. The controversial feature, which was meticulously directed by Australian-born filmmaker Graeme Clifford, was not a financial success, but like The Elephant Man, it enhanced the prestige of Brooksfilms within the Hollywood community.
Thereafter, the once very promising production company seemed to lose its professional way, turning out 1985’s The Doctor and the Devils. Lensed in England, it dealt with grave robbers who supply a physician with corpses for his medical experiments. (Some of its plot points recalled fragments of Young Frankenstein and certainly had an appeal for Mel, who never stopped being intrigued with the subject of man’s mortality.) The horror drama was much in the vein of the 1950s and 1960s Hammer Film thriller releases. (It was directed by Freddie Francis, a veteran of that U.K. studio’s creative team.) The picture was based on a 1940s screenplay by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and revamped later by veteran screenwriter Roland Harwood. Despite an interesting cast (including Timothy Dalton, Jonathan Pryce, Twiggy, and Patrick Stewart), the Twentieth Century-Fox release received scant American distribution and grossed only $147,000.<
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This was followed by 1986’s Solarbabies, a different type of science-fiction picture set in the distant future. It focused on a group of orphans escaping oppressive government forces. Directed by Alan Johnson (who had choreographed a few of Brooks’s past features), it proved to be both a critical and commercial loser for Brooksfilms and MGM. (In his review in the Washington Post, writer Paul Attanasio assessed, “Solarbabies” is a hilariously bad movie that doesn’t make much sense and isn’t much good when it does. Director Alan Johnson has stolen most of his visual ideas from Ridley Scott [Blade Runner] and George Miller [The Road Warrior], and he hasn’t the slightest idea how to direct actors. That said, the movie has its campy pleasures, particularly in the godawful dialogue.”) It was another box-office flop, grossing a mere $1.58 million in distribution.
Far more successful was Brooksfilms’s remake of the 1950s hit The Fly. With a relatively lavish $15 million budget, this 1986 Twentieth Century-Fox release was directed by David Cronenberg and costarred Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. It revolved around an eccentric, brilliant scientist who has successfully delved into matter transportation. However, his experiment to transport himself goes awry when a fly accidentally enters one of the transportation booths. Using the slogan “Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid,” the feature had a worldwide gross of $60.63 million. (It led to a far less impressive sequel, 1989’s The Fly II.)
Then there was Brooksfilms’s 1987 release, 84 Charing Cross Road, based on a best-selling book by Helene Hanff (which had become a BBC teleplay and a hit in its stage adaptation). One day, while the Brookses were relaxing at the beach at Fire Island, a man had come up to Anne and given her a copy of the novel. She fell in love with its story. Mel purchased the screen rights to the property as an anniversary gift for his spouse. The resultant picture was helmed by Britisher David Jones. The intimate drama focused on a single woman (a New York-based script reader) with a thirst for great literature. She begins a correspondence of many years with a London bookseller, a married man, who supplies her with used copies of wonderful editions of books she wants. This feature proved to be an impressive showcase for Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins as the two letter writers who nurtured each other, via the mail, for decades. Unfortunately, this delicate Columbia Pictures release only grossed $1.08 million in distribution.
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