It's Good to Be the King

by James Robert Parish

  As Brooks prepared for the film’s debut on December 22, 1995 (a strange marketing choice; Halloween would have been a better time), he admitted to having concerns about the public’s response. “I just hope that they [i.e., audiences] don’t think that I’m aping the Zuckers [filmmakers Jerry and David, who made such screen spoofs as Airplane! and the Naked Gun series] now when I come out with a Leslie Nielsen movie.… I hope [they recall how far back I go]. That they wouldn’t say, Who is this Mel Brooks, and why is he stealing the Zuckers’ star and their type of comedy? That would certainly be ironic.”

  The critics gave Dracula: Dead and Loving It a very mixed reception. Georgia Brown (of the Village Voice) reported, “A bloodless Brooks supplies very few of his trademark taste-defying gags. Instead, he relies much too heavily on the stumbling and bumbling of his star, Leslie Nielsen, and the frantic mugging of Peter MacNicol.” Janet Maslin (of the New York Times) labeled the picture “Mel Brooks’s slight but amusing new parody.” She noted, “Mr. Brooks may no longer be at the forefront of silly comedy, but he’s still laying on the genre gags, horrible puns and enema references with dependable good cheer.”

  When the film was released abroad, Simon Rose (of the London Sunday Mirror) criticized, “Great title, shame about the movie.… Even Nielsen’s mad mugging can’t save things. Dracula moves window bolts with his mind, but he can’t make the corners of our mouths turn up.… The only good thing to be said is that it’s better than Robin Hood: Men in Tights. But so is everything.” Adina Hoffman (of the Jerusalem Post) said, “The real belly laughs never come in Dracula, a film whose timing is comic but whose punchlines are strangely not.… Brooks’s directing style has always been sloppy and rather haphazard. This was forgivable, however, when the jokes were sharp and numerous. The problem in Dracula is that the script… simply isn’t amusing. The shticks range from passable (like the slurping-through-a-straw sound that Dracula makes when he drinks the blood of a beautiful young maiden) to really leaden. Whats worse, some of the better lines are rehashed three or four times, till every last giggle has been drained away.”

  Dracula: Dead and Loving It accumulated a paltry $10.77 million in domestic distribution. Clearly, Mel Brooks was still out of favor with 1990s moviegoers, having failed to establish a new connection with his core audience. However, he had not lost his way with words when he was riled. Mel loved to tell people of the time he encountered film critic Roger Ebert, who had once been a great Brooks supporter. Brooks described, “I ran into Roger Ebert. He didn’t like Dracula. He made no bones about it—thumbs, pinkies, every digit that he had. And I said to him: ‘Listen, you, I made 21 movies. I’m very talented. I’ll live in history. I have a body of work. You only have a body.’”

  31

  Comedy—Tonight!

  A musical comedy is like a cinnamon bun. You keep moving it toward the center, getting ever sweeter and even more intensely satisfying. As you get closer to the core, it gets wetter and more gorgeous. With a musical, picaresque scenes are death. And you don’t want to introduce a lot of new characters. Audiences want the people they’ve come to know and love to start going somewhere. A lot of writers try to solve their problems by introducing a fresh new character. They don’t realize a bunch of new characters thins out the batter and the pancake gets flat.

  —Mel Brooks, 2003

  As Mel Brooks’s filmmaking career continued to ebb in the late 1980s, he became increasingly active in other people’s show business projects. It gave him something to do, brought in income, and kept his name alive with a new generation of audiences.

  Mel provided the voice of Mr. Toilet for the 1990 comedy Look Who’s Talking Too. For his friend Ezio Greggio (the Italian actor, director, screenwriter, and TV host), Brooks did a bit as the motel checkout guest in the 1994 movie spoof The Silence of the Hams. That same year, Mel had an extended cameo in the feature film version of The Little Rascals, in which he played Mr. Welling, the banker. In 1995, Mel made an audio guest appearance on the cartoon series The Simpsons. In 1998, Mel and Anne Bancroft were among those who helped to fund the making of The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. (The well-regarded documentary dealt with the famous Detroit Tigers first baseman, who coped with anti-Semitism in the major leagues.)

  In the 1998 animated feature The Prince of Egypt, Brooks utilized his distinctive, raspy voice to provide a small bit. For 1999’s Screw Loose, produced and directed by Ezio Greggio, Mel had a lead assignment as a World War II veteran who has landed in a mental institution. He is “rescued” by the son of a combat buddy and enjoys outrageous adventures en route to being reunited with his long-ago pal. The Italian-made feature went almost immediately to home video/DVD in the United States. In the Swedish-made Sex, logner & videovald, made in 1992 but not released until 2000, Brooks had a bit part as a stressed old man.

  However, it was Brooks’s participation on the popular TV sitcom Mad About You that generated marvelous new acclaim for him. On September 24, 1996, he made his first appearance on the program, cast as Uncle Phil, a daffy old Jewish man who lives in Brooklyn. Mel was at his comedic best as the lovable relative of the series’ lead character, Paul Buchman (played by Paul Reiser, who was a great fan of Brooks’s). Mel brought zaniness, pathos, and dimension to his interpretation of the eccentric elderly soul with a thick old-country accent and a hairstyle that was always in wild disarray. Uncle Phil’s favorite gambit was to thrust out his arms toward a loved one and order, “A firm embrace.” Brooks’s zesty performance was so endearing that he returned to the popular sitcom three additional times before the show ended its long run in 1999. For each of these guest-starring return appearances, Brooks won an Emmy Award.

  Meanwhile, Mel, along with Carl Reiner, went back to the recording studios in mid-1997 to turn out a new comedy CD. The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 was released on the Rhino label. It was for this fifth entry about the philosophical old soul that Brooks and Reiner won a 1998 Grammy Award in the category of Best Spoken Comedy Album. This revival of the 2000 Year Old Man led to Mel and Carl’s doing guest shots on TV and at charity events around the country. Their book version of the new CD landed on the nonfiction bestseller list of the Los Angeles Times.

  Despite these distractions, Brooks dearly wanted to return to film-making—to prove he still had the wherewithal to succeed in the business. He was working on a script titled S.N.A.F.U, a comedy based on Mel’s misadventures as a combat engineer during World War II. To his great disappointment, he could not raise film studio interest in this or other potential screen projects (such as Backwards to Forward, his spin on Hollywood musicals).

  • • •

  If Brooks’s career had spiraled downward, his marriage to Anne Bancroft remained rock solid. The media continued to be fascinated by the union of two such seemingly unlikely companions. However, there was no mystery for Bancroft about why she and her spouse had stayed together for so many years. “There is just nobody sexier than Mel Brooks. He has the most brilliant, unique brain. He keeps me excited from the moment I wake up in the morning to the moment I go to bed. There’s nothing more exciting than interesting and unique ways of thinking.” The veteran star also confided, “No, we don’t discuss my work. We hardly discuss each other’s work with each other. It’s not one of our conversations. There’s so much to discuss about life and so much to do, so many things that take up our time. And we very rarely discuss that. I don’t think there’s more than one sentence out of the week that’s about show business.” Mel’s summary of his marriage to Anne was, “So we made a crazy child together and we have a pretty happy life. We like each other. We like Chinese food. We like foreign films. We like the beach. We really appreciate each other. So, I mean, it’s been a great, great thing being married to Anne Bancroft.”

  There was also much speculation as to how Brooks had invested the profits from his lucrative decades in show business. In his trademark antic way, Mel explained his philosophy: “Real estate is a conservative and wise investment as
long as you use it. Especially a house at the beach. You can put your feet on the sand. You can put your toe in the water. And you can always rent it.” Besides his diverse real estate holdings on the West and East coasts, Brooks had invested in California state bonds, but had generally stayed away from stock market speculation. He especially had no interest in risking his hard-earned money on speculative commodities or futures. As he said, “You always have your house. It is hard to live in pork bellies—just the odor alone would chase you out.”

  Having reached the status of an elder statesman of comedy, Brooks was being compared and contrasted with new generations of funsters. In April 1997, Entertainment Weekly listed America’s 50 top comedians. Robin Williams came in at number 1, Jerry Seinfeld at number 2, Rose-anne at number 3, Jim Carrey at number 4, Albert Brooks at number 5, and Mel Brooks at number 20. The publication described Brooks as an individual who “has struck sparks with fellow comic giants Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar, and Gene Wilder, injecting his jovial wackiness into an anarchic assortment of vulgar, gleeful parodies on both small and big screen.… In recent years, Brooks has seen his role as filmdom’s premier satirizer pass into the hands of [others] … and his particular style of broad humor has come to seem mildly antiquated, but his occasional movies (Robin Hood: Men in Tights) and TV appearances (Mad About You) remind us that he’s still here, comedy’s big mocker.”

  When asked in the late 1990s to comment on the current state of comedy, Brooks responded, “You can’t go too far if you’re intelligent and your heart is in the right place. You can only go too far if you’re stupid and you have nothing to say.”

  • • •

  Since its 1968 release, The Producers had been a mixed blessing for Mel Brooks. On the positive side, it was his first feature film and had won him an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. However, in subsequent decades, critics insisted that The Producers represented the best of Mel Brooks’s talents. They reasoned that from this creative high everything thereafter had gone downhill as Brooks became seduced into appealing to the public on a far more crass commercial level (e.g., Blazing Saddles). Many observers thought it was too bad that Mel had abandoned his more serious filmmaking (e.g., The Twelve Chairs) for the likes of History of the World: Part I or—even worse—Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

  During these up-and-down career years, Mel had continued to write songs for his movies. However, that did not satisfy his longtime dream of one day creating a hit Broadway musical (to make up for the long-ago failures of Shinbone Alley and All American). Occasionally, Brooks considered converting The Producers into a song-and-dance extravaganza for the New York stage. Yet he always found reasons to put aside the idea as a pipe dream. Sometimes he reasoned aloud that it was better to leave the property as a cult film hit rather than to chance adapting it for Broadway and having it flop. On other occasions, he snapped, “That’s my insurance policy. I’m saving it for my old age.”

  If Brooks’s passing thoughts of converting The Producers into a stage musical remained unrealized, others saw bona fide commercial potential in such an adaptation. However, whenever someone approached Mel with this idea, he politely thanked the person and firmly said no. Then, in the late 1990s, music industry mogul David Geffen contacted Mel about turning The Producers into a Broadway show. Brooks courteously brushed off Geffen’s notion. However, unlike others, Geffen refused to take no for an answer and doggedly kept after Brooks to move forward with the suggestion.

  Geffen caught Brooks’s attention at a particularly vulnerable time. Mel’s career was in an awful decline, many of his longtime pals were seriously ill or dying, and he was feeling—more so than ever before—that the world and fate had turned against him. No one was more acutely aware of Brooks’s depression than his wife. Hoping that The Producers project might renew Mel’s zest for life and work, Bancroft joined Geffen’s concerted effort to get Brooks to do the adaptation. (Anne even sent her spouse to see a psychiatrist, hoping the therapist could help Mel overcome his fear of tackling the project.) Finally, Brooks gave in to the ongoing pressure and said yes to Geffen’s suggestion. (Thereafter, Mel referred to his wife as his Obi-Wan Kenobi for her wise counsel in pushing forward with adapting The Producers to the musical theater format.)

  Brooks discussed this brewing project with his old pal and coworker Ronny Graham, who, among his many talents, was also a songwriter. The duo were soon joined by another friend and screen collaborator, Thomas Meehan. Since the latter was a Tony Award-winning writer of librettos for Broadway musicals, he seemed the perfect match for Mel. For a great many months he and Meehan worked on the book of The Producers at Brooks’s Culver Studio offices. In retrospect, Meehan wondered to himself about the audacity of their task: “‘My God, you’ve taken this perfectly classic movie and destroyed it. Where’s Zero? Where’s Gene Wilder?’… People suggest ideas for musicals all the time and most of them just don’t, ahem, sing.” (In July 1999, Graham passed away, leaving Mel and Tom to go it alone.)

  At one point, David Geffen, who had agreed to back and supervise bringing The Producers to Broadway, suggested that Mel meet with Jerry Herman. Geffen believed that the composer/lyricist of such Broadway shows as Hello, Dolly! and Mame might be the right one to write the songs for The Producers. When Brooks visited with Herman at his Beverly Hills home, Herman sat down at the piano and announced, “I’ll play you a couple of songs from the guy who I think should write the music for this.” The songs were by Mel Brooks from his movies. Herman said “You’re a very good songwriter.… What’s more, you’d be crazy to do a Broadway musical of The Producers without including ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and ‘Prisoners of Love.’ So you’ve already got two major songs written. All you have to do is write a dozen or so more and you’ve got yourself a Broadway score. Go with my blessings, do it!”

  Sparked by Herman’s encouragement, Mel set about composing the necessary complement of songs for the show. As in years past, he continued his routine of writing down lyrics on a pad of paper and envisioning a melody in his mind. When he had the germ of an idea, he hummed it/ sang it into a tape recorder, knowing that he would use a music arranger to score the song. (Eventually, it was Glen Kelly who served as Brooks’s musical amanuensis.)

  Anne Bancroft was witness to Brooks’s long and often painful struggle with the song numbers. She recalled, “I admired his courage. He was putting his heart and soul into it. Sometimes, I’d come home from a very tiring day and say, ‘Acting is so hard.’ Then he’d put a blank piece of paper in front of me and say, ‘That’s how hard writing is!’” Finally, however, the score began to fall into place, and a pleased Mel was saying, “Only God knows why it took me so long to return to music. I’ve always wanted to write a musical. Music draws the dust off my soul.”

  As the book for The Producers took shape, Mel and Tom worked on one of the major flaws in the screenplay of the movie original: the plot letdown following the “Springtime for Hitler” showstopper. The collaborators fleshed out a new finale (which included having Leo Bloom run off to Rio de Janeiro with Ulla, but then return to New York to be a character witness at the trial of his friend Max Bialystock). Meanwhile, the writers dropped one of Mel’s favorite characters from the Broadway original—L.S.D.—as being too quaint a figure for contemporary audiences. They added in the twist of director Roger De Bris stepping in at the last minute to play der Führer in the musical within the story. (Said Brooks: “A gay Hitler! Let us thank God.”) In the process of punching up the original concept of spoofing Adolf Hitler, Brooks and Meehan expanded the lampooning of the story’s outrageous gay characters.

  Throughout this lengthy creative process, Brooks kept one goal firmly in mind: “If things are politically correct, it usually makes for a wonderfully dull show. When you try to hit home runs, you’re gonna strike out a lot. So when you want to do a great, daring… musical, you’re going to offend a lot of people. Otherwise, you’re going to do something safe and nice, and you’re going to have
a banana on the stage instead of a devastatingly funny comedy.”

  It was Tom Meehan who suggested that London-born Mike Ockrent (the director of such Broadway hits as Me and My Gal and Crazy for You) would be ideal to helm The Producers. Moreover, Ockrent’s American wife, Susan Stroman, was a much-in-demand choreographer with a string of important credits. Mel agreed to meet with Ockrent and Stroman and see if they all saw eye to eye on the show. Mel arrived at the couple’s Manhattan apartment and rang the front doorbell. In a typical Brooksian moment when they opened the door, there was Brooks already singing one of the show’s projected numbers. As Mel belted out the lyrics, he scampered and slid down a long hallway, veered off into the living room, and ended his number perched on the Ockrents’ sofa with a smile on his face and his uplifted arms spread apart. Then, and only then, did he say, “Hello, I’m Mel Brooks!”

  It was soon settled that Ockrent and Stroman would come aboard the venture. This led to many creative sessions with the Ockrents over the coming months. Then Mike suffered a relapse of his leukemia and died in December 1999. His devastated wife insisted that she would have to drop out of The Producers. Because Mel believed that work would be the best medicine for Stroman—and he had come to believe in her talents greatly—he begged her not to abandon their project. Eventually, she agreed to go on with the show, not only as choreographer, but also as director. (Brooks later said of Susan’s participation in The Producers, “She took out all the vulgar stuff, cleaned me up and made me look pretty.”)