Hal Hinson (of the Washington Post) decided, “What you’re conscious of throughout this movie is that you’re sitting in your seat, not laughing at performers who desperately want you to laugh.” Roger Ebert (of the Chicago Sun-Times) carped, “Brooks’s intelligence and taste seem to switch off when he makes his own films, and he aims for broad, dumb comedy: Jokes about names with dirty double meanings are his big specialty. Maybe the reason Spaceballs isn’t better is that he was deliberately aiming low, going for the no-brainer satire. What does he really think about Star Wars, or anything else, for that matter?”
Spaceballs brought in a relatively low gross of $38.11 million in domestic distribution. (This was in sharp comparison to the grosses of the year’s five top Hollywood productions: Three Men and a Baby [$167.78 million], Fatal Attraction [$156.64 million], Beverly Hills Cop II [$153.55 million], Good Morning, Vietnam [$123.92 million]), and Moonstruck [$80.64 million]). Fortunately for Brooksfilms and MGM, Spaceballs did well in its later home entertainment versions, and Brooks counts this entry as one of his most successful releases on VHS and DVD. This, in turn, led to recurrent talk of Brooks’s making a sequel to the feature, something that would not occur for nearly two decades.
• • •
In 1987, the year that Spaceballs debuted, the Brookses moved to a fresh Los Angeles address—a hugely spacious 12,000-square-foot house on La Mesa Drive in Pacific Palisades, close to the Riviera Country Club. Their new residence towered over the others in the exclusive neighborhood, with their Spanish-style house boasting an indoor swimming pool. The family also had a getaway home in the expensive community of Malibu. The family’s other real estate holdings included a co-op apartment on Manhattan’s East 89th Street, beachfront condos on Fisher Island off Miami, and, over the years, various residences in Long Island’s Southampton.
Despite his growing material riches, Mel had not abandoned his concerns for the world at large. “I still rail at all the injustices that rear their head in this world. I get angry about our President’s polices, about Jell-O TV, about the crap that passes for culture and society’s wholesale neglect of whole segments of our population.”
Brooks also had learned to insulate himself against the fickleness of critics and the public, who were always finding new, and usually younger, favorites to adore. “Listen, I know that everybody has worn out their welcome—[Charles] Chaplin, [Buster] Keaton—everyone has. I’ve had waves of anxiety after a picture hasn’t done so well. I say, ‘It’s over, it’s over, I’ve been replaced by [filmmaker] Ivan Reitman!’… When the critics kill you, it hurts, at least at the time. But the feeling doesn’t last. I learned a long time ago that it’s the process that counts, not just the result.” However, he admitted, “It does bother you when someone doesn’t like your work. It confirms your worst fears. You try not to get caught up in it. But sometimes I feel like writing these critics a letter, saying, ‘Why so angry? What was there to hate so much?’ I want to tell them, ‘I mean no harm. I only wanted to entertain you.’”
On one subject, Brooks had no equivocation—his luck in finding Anne Bancroft and keeping her love over the decades. He said of his wife, “I’m very, very lucky that we’re still lovers as well as good friends. Besides, she saves me a couple of hundred a week that I’d be spending on psychoanalysts. I tell her everything, and she tells me what to do.” Brooks enthused, “Anne is simply terrific. She’s beautiful, she has great shoulders, and she makes me laugh.”
In response, the revered actress said of her zany spouse, “I do make him laugh, that’s true. Mel’s sort of jaded about funny things, because he knows almost everything, but I guess I’m spontaneous. Things pop out, and that makes him laugh. That’s why our marriage works so well.” She elaborated, “When you strip away who we are as Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, and you think of us as children, you can see we would have been in love as kids. We have the same values. We think alike about what’s important and what makes us happy. It’s the simple things—our son, my garden, making other people happy. Our life revolves around our family and friends.” She admitted of Mel, “He is not that easy to get to know. He is often ‘on’ in public. He’s funny, he’s fast, and he talks a lot. But that’s a façade. Mel is much more private than I am. He’s enormously sensitive, and he’s twenty times as funny in private and a thousand times more lovable.”
Anne explained the special dynamics in the Brooks household: “[Mel’s] energy fills the house—and so does my son’s. Sometimes there’s not much room for mine. So whatever I need, I ask for, and if I don’t get it, I scream. Then I get it.” She detailed, “We have a motto in our family: inch by inch, life’s a cinch. Yard by yard, it’s very hard. I say it to my husband at the start of every film. I say it to my son before every test. Now, I wish someone would say it to me.”
She also revealed one of the greatest pleasures in her daily life: “Learning. I didn’t always know that, but just the fact that I can still learn is thrilling to me. It doesn’t have to be anything earthshaking. Listen, I bought a book on pruning the other day and just read the first few sentences. I learned something, and it made me happy all day. I was going to be able to prune these trees in my garden, and it lifted me up to the ceiling!” (Eventually, Bancroft, the devoted gardener, became a proud member of the California Fruit Growers Association.)
• • •
In the spring of 1987, Brooks was among those who received Life Achievement Awards from the newly formed American Comedy Awards. (The others were Steve Allen, Woody Allen, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Bette Midler, Mary Tyler Moore, and Lily Tomlin.) However, Brooks regarded public acclaim for his latest show business venture as the best prize he could receive and, therefore, was anxious to find a new vehicle that could accomplish that goal. After launching Spaceballs in the United States and abroad, he found himself with too much time on his hands and no appealing film deal in the works. Wanting to keep active in show business, he returned to the world of television, which many industry observers regarded as a comedown for the filmmaker.
Mel’s new TV project actually owed its impetus to the 1988 movie comedy Big Business, costarring Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin. When the makers of that Touchstone/Disney Studio feature were unable to negotiate permission to film sequences of the comedy at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, they chose to build a huge hotel set on the studio’s sound stages in Burbank, California. That set was still standing, and Disney executives decided to initiate a TV sitcom that would make use of the costly structure.
The studio turned to Mel Brooks to come up with a property. In turn, Brooks chose to work with the much-younger Alan Spencer (as producer) on the project. As an adolescent, the star-struck Spencer had snuck onto the set of Young Frankenstein and, once there, had become friendly with actor Marty Feldman. In the process, the young man pursued his idol, Mel Brooks, and, eventually, the intruder and Brooks developed a father-son type of friendship. Subsequently, Spencer developed a career in television. Most recently, he had created, written, and produced Sledge Hammer, an off-the-wall detective series that ran on ABC-TV from 1986 to 1988. (Spencer had written in his high school yearbook that his dream was one day to work for Brooks. Said Alan: “When my dream came true, I used to drive to work with him and he’d be doing these non-stop routines. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”)
Brooks’s new offering, The Nutt House, revolved around a once elegant Manhattan hotel that had fallen on hard times, largely due to mismanagement by its staff of insanely incompetent workers. Disney green-lighted the project, and Brooks and Spencer began pitching their show to the networks. According to Spencer, he and Mel had a meeting with NBC. “We went in and winged it.” Before the meeting with the “suits,” Brooks had advised his less-experienced associate: “Talk a lot and make ‘em laugh, then leave. You’re on the air.”
The network bought the half-hour program and set its debut for fall 1989. In casting the venture, Brooks turned to some old reliables: Clo
ris Leachman (in a dual role as the eccentric elderly owner of the hotel and the starchy, oversexed head housekeeper), Harvey Korman (as the pompous hotel manager), and Ronny Graham (as the befuddled doorman). Mark Blankfield, who had been in Spencer’s Sledge Hammer and would be in later Mel Brooks productions, appeared as the myopic elevator operator.
There was much hype regarding Nutt House’s premiere on September 20, 1989. However, the show’s high profile was short-lived. Howard Rosenberg (of the Los Angeles Times) reported, “There are moments... that are knee-slapping funny. Nevertheless, the script by executive producers Mel Brooks and Alan Spencer is an example of a few great jokes going a short way.” Rosenberg observed, “Korman and Leachman are a riot. In their hands, absurdity was never better.… Yet even they can’t sustain lumpy material that ranges from exquisite nastiness to excruciating slapstick, with much more of the latter.”
By its second week on the air, Nutt House had slipped badly in the home viewers ratings. By October 25, 1989, the expensive-to-conceive sitcom had been canceled and aired its last episode. It left Brooks angry and humiliated and wondering, once again, where to find his next show business options.
• • •
The 1970s and 1980s had been an especially bullish period for independent film production companies in Hollywood. In this era, there always seemed to be a plentitude of investors—both in the United States and abroad—to back such firms even on the more chancy ventures. (This was still the time of enticing tax shelters, a situation that ended when the U.S. government finally plugged the legal loopholes for most such lucrative tax write-offs.) By the end of the eighties, investors were generally far more cautious about funding “glamorous” movie production companies. As a result, many of the smaller firms were hard-pressed to finance new projects privately. One such operation was Mel’s decade-old Brooksfilms Ltd.
In late 1989, Brooks was persuaded to undertake a public offering to raise $13 to $16 million for upcoming movie/TV projects at Brooksfilms. (Unfortunately, Brooksfilms had earned only $323,000 in fiscal year 1989, and Wall Street analysts predicted that the company might register a loss in 1990.) Mel’s planned stock offering prompted Time magazine to report, “Comedy is hot today, but Brooks may be running out of gas. He has had no major hit since Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein in 1974, which reaped a total of more than $86 million in North America alone.” The publication also alerted, “Hollywood insiders say dealmakers have been weary of Brooks. ‘He’s not hot enough that he can make any film he wants [with a top studio],’ says the president of a major studio.”
In the past, Mel the comedian and raconteur who loved to entertain most any type of audience at any given moment had undertaken extensive tours to promote his latest movie and television vehicles. Now he took his dog-and-pony show on the road on behalf of Brooksfilms’ bid to go public. He visited Oppenheimer & Co. brokerage houses in both the United States and Europe. Looking quite distinguished in his conservative suit, Brooks typically opened Q&A sessions with a joke and a few Hollywood anecdotes. Then he got down to serious business, explaining that this offering was not a vanity situation. “I want to make movies. I’m an energetic guy.” This said, the showman had to field blunt queries from the brokers as to why Brooksfilms thought it could sell its stock at many times higher than its current market price. He was also asked to explain such Brooksfilms overheads as his approximately $4 million annual salary from the company. His response was, “Taxes! Why the hell should I produce revenues and pay taxes on them when I own the company? I took the money and paid it to Mel Brooks to avoid double taxation. By going public, I’m taking a 1,000 percent drop in salary. How can I ask the public to invest in a company that produces annual revenues of only $323,000. I mean, that’s ridiculous!” (Following Brooks’s stopover at Oppenheimer’s Seattle office, one broker at the session admitted, “My attitude changed over the course of the meeting, coming to believe that Brooks was interested not just in being entertaining, but in making a buck.”
However, by February 1990 the much-touted financing package had been shelved after Oppenheimer & Co. was only able to place about $6 million (or 40%) of the planned offering. The brokerage firm attributed the unsatisfactory response to “general market skittishness.”
The unsuccessful stock offering was another staggering blow to Mel, who was already suffering the ignominy of living down his trio of disappointing 1980s films and the quick rejection by home viewers of his The Nutt House series. It must have seemed to Brooks that all his many decades in show business counted for little with audiences, reviewers, and industry decision makers. With so many overwhelming career misfires in so many forums of show business, Mel somehow had to come to terms with the growing industry belief that he was a relic—having been passed by a new breed of comedic talents who had taken his vulgar brand of satiric comedy to new levels of crudeness in order to spark audience interest. His whole professional world seemed to be crashing before his eyes, with little to no potential of pulling out a new miracle from his hat to recharge his dwindling career and reputation.
It was little wonder that Mel Brooks titled his next picture Life Stinks.
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Back to Work
In a strange way, I don’t think I could make a serious movie. I’m too private to do it. What I really feel is nobody’s business. I need a comedy proscenium to disguise it in.… I like filmmakers who are storytellers, not psychologists. I just don’t like to interpret my work that much. For example, sometimes I think my pictures are ripe with blatant sexuality, only so I can hide things I really feel—affection, love and desire. Maybe by being really blatant about the sex ... I can disguise the more subtle feeling.
–Mel Brooks, 1987
Typically, when an individual reaches the age of 65, he or she retires from the work world or, at least, thinks about cutting back on the daily grind. However, Mel Brooks was far from the usual person. His zest for entertaining the world and his inner need to do both that and maintain his status as a comedy-world giant had neither dissipated with time nor shrunk from the adverse public reaction to his string of increasingly less profitable show business projects in the 1980s. He remained committed to perpetuating his career. Without professional activity, Brooks would be a man without real identity or purpose, and that was not an option for him.
• • •
One might have thought that for Brooks’s first new directorial/starring vehicle since 1987’s Spaceballs, he would have reverted to another of his wild and wacky genre satires—something to evoke his zany and highly successful screen comedies of past decades. However, in recent years, Brooks had been undertaking a reevaluation of his life and his work—a lot of it the result of his career’s floundering in the ever-changing world of show business.
Back in 1978, he said, “Why should I waste my good time making a straight dramatic film? Sydney Pollack can do that. The people who can’t make you laugh can do that.” However, by the mid-1980s Mel was saying, “I hide the serious Mel Brooks from the public and the critics. You can’t show them that—it’s confusing.… My comedies are probably the most serious thing that I have to offer the world. They say the deepest things about human behavior. A lot more than The Elephant Man or My Favorite Year or Frances. If you really get into Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles or The Producers, you will find the external varieties of human behavior are greater, with a lot more care and respect than most dramas.”
By the start of the 1990s, Brooks was ready to come out to the world as a purveyor of films about serious topics. (Moving into new arenas of filmmaking would also be a way to curtail the penchant of reviewers and moviegoers for comparing a new Mel Brooks picture with his comedic successes of the 1970s.) Thus, his new vehicle of choice was Life Stinks.
Brooks claimed the spark for creating his new screen showcase occurred one day when he was driving on a southern California freeway and the water pump in his car broke. He exited near downtown Los Angeles to find a garage to handle the repa
irs. Mel remembered, “I looked around and said to the guy pumping gas, ‘Where is this, Calcutta?’ There were tramps everywhere. Beggars, homeless, what have you. Mendicants. It was shocking.” This set Brooks to cogitating about the social inequities surrounding him. This, in turn, led him to thinking he would like to explore the conflicting and contrasting strata of society, just as filmmaker Frank Capra had done in his classic 1930s and 1940s feature films (such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe). Later, Brooks happened to attend a screening of Preston Sturges’s 1941 Sullivan’s Travels, a classic comedy that explored the very social issues that were percolating in Mel’s mind. Thus inspired, Brooks began to map out a comedy (to be filmed in black and white) that would address just such concerns. However, eventually, he realized that the script was “heavy, much too heavy, preachy.” He decided he needed fresh input, and linked up with Rudy DeLuca, a veteran writer of several past Brooks vehicles, along with the much younger Steve Haberman, a University of California graduate who had worked in production capacities on such films as 1987’s Return to Horror High. The three men “funnied up” the screenplay and agreed it should be made in color.
By early June 1990, the project (initially titled Life Sucks but changed to the less pessimistic and less idiomatic Life Stinks during preproduction) was under way. Mel cast himself as Goddard “Pepto” Bolt, the crass Los Angeles real estate tycoon who has always been too busy making a fortune to appreciate life. Lesley Ann Warren took on the role of Molly, the eccentric, feisty bag lady who helps Bolt survive on the city’s mean streets. Jeffrey Tambor appeared as Bolt’s unconscionable business rival. Mel’s old friend Howard Morris was signed as Sailor, one of the Skid Row denizens whom Bolt befriends.
The film was made for Alan Ladd Jr.’s regime at MGM. By the time the feature was in postproduction, there was a serious question as to whether the studio (recoiling from yet another painful corporate ownership changeover) might soon go out of business. It left in question the fate of such current studio productions as Thelma dr Louise and Life Stinks. Finally, after months of speculation about whether Brooks would have to find another distributor, MGM released the PG-13-rated feature in mid-July 1991. In an era when most mainstream features received saturation bookings in over 2,000 theaters, Life Stinks debuted on only 865 screens. It was a strong indicator that the studio’s powers had already concluded that the picture would have limited success in the marketplace.
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