“Only once did I shout back at Mel and reprimand him,” Rosenblum wrote. “Mel calmed right down, looked a little contrite, and then went back to whatever he was doing, as if nothing had happened. I realized then that while shouting matches left me debilitated for hours or days, to Mel they were an accepted everyday phenomenon. He could demean, insult, or threaten you one moment—or suffer the same sort of treatment himself—and return to business as usual the next.” But Rosenblum did not have the same thick hide and felt “violated by his rancor and moodiness until the last day of cutting.”
Rosenblum’s last day was not the last of editing, however. Brooks still wanted to rework a “few scenes” and “the main titles,” recalled sound editor Alan Heim. Rosenblum suggested Heim could handle it and left. Heim agreed, although “I really didn’t want to be in the room” with Brooks, “a very high-energy guy. He tummels a lot.”
One of the scenes over which Brooks and Rosenblum had sparred, with Brooks insisting on his editing ideas, took place in Liebkind’s apartment, with Liebkind comparing Hitler to Churchill as painters and imitating the latter with a V closely framing his face. (Kenneth Mars improvised some of Liebkind’s best lines in the scene: “Churchill . . . and his rotten paintings. The Fuhrer. Here was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in von afternoon—two coats”!) When Heim looked at the “trims and outs,” he discovered this amusing bit and other “close-ups which were very, very funny” but which had not been used—an “enormous number of them.” Rejigging the scene, he found that “within six or eight frames of my marks, there was a splice where the film had been reconstituted; it was clear that Ralph Rosenblum had already cut the scene this way and Mel hated it.” With emendations, Heim restored the earlier editing. Brooks—if he noticed the similarity to Rosenblum’s version, he didn’t mention it—accepted Heim’s cut.
On weekends, especially when in the company of his wife, Brooks was more relaxed. Frank Langella and his girlfriend lived in a $70 monthly flat at 61st and Third Avenue. The couples were in constant touch: “daily phone calls, long late-night visits to each other’s homes, takeout, endless games of Scrabble, cards, Charades, and trips away to exotic beach locations. They willingly climbed the four flights to our modest rabbit warren of an apartment, and we made an equal number of visits to their luxurious Village town house.”
By December, The Producers was ready for its East Coast previews, including Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. Brooks, who toured with the preview print, was already proficient at interviews. Washington Post critic Richard L. Coe loved the twisted comedy (“I roared like drains in April!”), but the first Philadelphia showing was a bust, occasioning anecdotes from Brooks down the years reinforcing his underdog credentials.
The Lane Theatre in Philadelphia, an eclectic, Art Moderne–style house on North Broad Street and 67th Avenue, had been the local first-run venue for the film version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum starring Zero Mostel. Brooks and a New York contingent went to Philadelphia for the midweek sneak preview of The Producers, following Helga, a German sex education film featuring actual scenes of childbirth.
“Mel did a local radio talk show and a local television talk show,” remembered Alfa-Betty Olsen. “He was a great guest, funny and smart. He sparkled . . .
“[On the TV show] he sang ‘Springtime for Hitler,’ the song from the big production sequence in the movie and, hands on hips, imitated the long-limbed showgirls dressed as pretzels and beer steins who descended a staircase in the number. Mel invited the talk show host to the premiere. He said wild horses couldn’t keep him away.”
The small audience for Helga dotted the cavernous Lane Theatre. “There was a bag lady sitting in the second row just sleeping and maybe three or four people scattered around,” according to Brooks. Present for The Producers were Olsen, Sidney Glazier, Joseph E. Levine, and AVCO Embassy staff members, and Florence and Edward Dunay and Brooks’s children Steffi, Nicky, and Eddie, who had driven down from New York.
The laughter was as sparse as the crowd. According to Glazier, Levine wore a stone face throughout the preview and swore at them afterward. (Levine was there mainly “to see how much money they would spend on advertising,” Brooks recalled.) Olsen didn’t mention Levine’s reaction in a reminiscence she wrote for a Writers Guild event, but she did say the local talk-show host rushed past them after the preview without saying a word. “He cut us dead,” Olsen said. “The worst night of my life,” Brooks often recalled. Disheartened, he and Olsen took the train back to New York.
Curiously, when the film officially premiered at the Lane on the weekend—advertised with Mostel’s name above the title in huge type (dwarfing the director’s) and a squib from the New York Daily News (“a wild and wacky comedy”)—The Producers enjoyed a three-week run.*
A better time was had by all at the midnight preview convened at the Cinema 57 Rendezvous near Carnegie Hall on West 57th Street in Manhattan. Hundreds of people came, “including scores of Mel’s show-business friends and Joseph E. Levine with his entourage from Embassy Pictures,” as editor Ralph Rosenblum recalled. “For fifteen minutes [before the screening] Mel stood in front of the crowded room and performed. The audience was in a state of utter comic delight before the film ever began.”
After the show congratulators swarmed Brooks in the lobby. “My distaste for him was still strong,” Rosenblum recalled, and the editor tried to slip past the director without being noticed. Brooks shook loose from his admirers, rushed over, threw his arm around Rosenblum, and led him outside and strolled him down the street toward Sixth Avenue. “Thanks for making it professional,” Brooks whispered. It was the last time Rosenblum, who went on to edit several films for Woody Allen, including Annie Hall, ever saw him.
In the first week of December 1967, Variety jumped the gun with the first trade paper review of The Producers, which its correspondent had caught at the Washington, DC, preview. “Brooks has turned a funny idea into a slapstick film,” the Variety critic enthused. Despite having some manifest flaws—a weak third act and climax—the movie was fast-paced and entertaining with a “hilarious” Third Reich production number and marvelous performances that were “unmatched in the scenes featuring [Zero] Mostel and [Gene] Wilder alone together, and several episodes with other actors are truly rare.”
Still, Joseph E. Levine did not rush the film into theaters. The producer was focused on the Christmas release of The Graduate, with Oscar winner Anne Bancroft in the cast and Oscar nominee Mike Nichols as director, whereas The Producers lacked any name with marquee value outside New York City (“lack of a big name may hamper b.o. prospects,” Variety had warned). Levine didn’t care to see two of his pictures vie against each other in the marketplace; not only would that pit husband (The Producers) against wife (The Graduate), but, worse, it would be Levine versus Levine. He scheduled The Producers for national release in March—a slow release with targeted advertising, counting on critics and word of mouth to boost the film. That meant his two pictures would fall into different calendar years and not compete against each other for Oscars.
In Los Angeles, meanwhile, writer Paul Mazursky and Peter Sellers were busy filming I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! Typically, after a day of work, Mazursky and Sellers got together with friends, drank some wine, and gobbled marijuana brownies while watching prints of movies not yet in general release. One night Mazursky, a friend of Brooks’s, offered The Producers. Sellers, who had eluded playing Leo Bloom, loved what he saw. Repaying Brooks for years of solicitous attention, Sellers took out full-page advertisements in the trade papers proclaiming the “true genius” of Brooks “in weaving together tragedy-comedy, comedy-tragedy, pity, fear, hysteria, schizophrenic-inspired madness and a largess of lunacy of sheer magic.” Levine now had Sellers’s encomium for his publicity file along with Variety’s and other glowing early notices.
Brooks had to be patient, which was not his forte. He joined AVCO Embassy meetings to map the release strategy, soa
king up sales and distribution tips for the future; but, more important, he went back to work with Alfa-Betty Olsen on their next comedy, which they had announced in the spring before filming even started on The Producers.
The follow-up to The Producers was going to be a labor of love: an adaptation of the satirical Russian novel penned by authors Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov entitled Diamonds to Sit On—more popularly, The Twelve Chairs. Either Brooks had heard the story “as a child” (according to one version of events) or stumbled into a Brooklyn library one day and chanced upon the novel on a shelf (“at age fifteen”), or Mel Tolkin had first handed it to him. However it began, filming The Twelve Chairs had been an idée fixe since the 1950s.
The famous comic novel had been turned into a motion picture multiple times before under various titles and in different languages, twice in fact in Hollywood. Set in 1927, one year before the book’s publication, its story involved jewels worth fifty thousand rubles whose hiding place is secreted in one of twelve dining chairs that have been dispersed across the Soviet Union as former private property of the ruling class. Three scoundrels learn of the chairs from a dying dowager and frantically compete to find the hidden gems: the unscrupulous Father Fyodor; a young, handsome conniver named Ostap Bender; and an elderly aristocrat, ruined by the revolution, named Vorobyaninov.
In the first months of 1968, Brooks and Olsen carved out a working draft that stayed faithful to the novel’s plot and structure. While eliminating much of the Soviet-era context and detail, which had enriched the satire of the original fiction, Brooks and Olsen narrowed their script on the three rivals and their hectic search, which crisscrosses the Soviet Union with vignettes in Moscow, the Crimea, Siberia, and other far corners. The trio’s self-destructive greed made the story a thematic companion piece to The Producers.
Again Olsen did not expect to share credit on the screenplay; the Brooks-Olsen partnership was still wonderful, and they harked back to “our old procedure,” as the writer’s helper recalled. “Mel talked. I typed. And sometimes I talked too.”
Their main departure from the novel was a rosier ending. Brooks didn’t like unhappy endings; he believed audiences didn’t like them, either. The conclusion of The Producers, with Bialystock and Bloom languishing in jail (the scene that triggers the closing number, “We’re Prisoners of Love”), was the last somewhat downbeat ending he’d write.
In the novel (and film) Vorobyaninov and Bender form a fractious alliance to find the jewels before Father Fyodor does. Vorobyaninov goes insane and kills Bender after they learn that the jewels have long since been cashed in to underwrite a worker’s chess club. In the happier ending of the Brooks-Olsen script, the rogues part comically.
Their script also magnified the supporting role of Tikon, the aristocrat’s former servant, stretching out his drunk scene. Brooks thought he might play that character.
By February 1968, Brooks had enough pages to show actor Ron Moody and to announce Moody’s casting as Vorobyaninov. That same month, the 1967 Academy Award nominations were disclosed, with Anne Bancroft receiving her third Oscar nomination as Best Actress, for her iconic performance as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate.
The Twelve Chairs production was organized as an AVCO Embassy release, but this time with Joseph E. Levine’s investment and involvement limited. Yugoslavia had become a haven for international coproduction, and William Berns, an executive in Sidney Glazier’s company, who had worked in the country for Yugoslav national television, had contacts in the Communist regime. The authoritarian nation could furnish any picturesque scenery a filmmaker desired: beaches, forests, Ottoman architecture, Roman coliseums. Yugoslavia could stand in for the Soviet Union. President Josip Broz Tito was a cinephile friendly to filmmaking, and American productions could save wads of money on studio facilities and equipment, behind-the-camera personnel, lodging and food, supporting players, and any number of extras. After The Producers, Glazier’s company had filmed The Gamblers—also based on Russian source material, a Nikolai Gogol play—largely in Dubrovnik.
Yet Brooks also sought to restrict Sidney Glazier’s input. He wanted Michael Hertzberg, i.e., “Mel’s boy,” as his staff producer, while he himself would function as the real producer of his second film in order to boost his control, ownership, and earnings. Through Crossbow Productions he now partnered directly with Louis Wolfson’s new entity, Universal Marion Corporation (UMC). UMC agreed to bankroll The Twelve Chairs, which would cost about half the nearly $1 million budget of The Producers, with the funds coming almost entirely from UMC. Brooks had clashed with Glazier during The Producers, once angrily banishing him from the set, and now with an executive producer credit Glazier would have a circumscribed role distanced from the script and the filming.
On March 18, 1968, four months after its initial sneak previews, The Producers opened to the public at a single Manhattan theater usually a haven to foreign-language films: the Paris Fine Arts Theatre on 58th Street near Fifth Avenue. The Upper East Side art house booking positioned Brooks’s first film as sophisticated comedy—i.e., too sophisticated for big commercial houses. Joseph E. Levine wanted blurbs from important New York critics before rolling the film out nationally. That was a time-honored strategy in the trade.
More than a handful of critics did acclaim the film, with Gene Shalit in Look magazine supplying (as was his penchant) the perfect squib: “No one will be seated in the last 88 minutes of The Producers, they’ll all be rolling around on the floor.” There was also farsighted appreciation from Cue (“one of the funniest films around”) and major national periodicals such as Time (“uproariously funny”) and Mademoiselle (“a riot”) that would satisfy Levine’s advertising plans and travel well outside New York City.
But many New York critics who laughed also winced and groaned, and their mixed notices augured a stubborn pattern in Brooks’s film directing career. Some reviewers complained about the preponderance and inelegance of Brooks’s close-ups, which was the visual equivalent of his in-your-face rude and crude humor. There was lively debate about the exuberant performance of Zero Mostel. The script petered out after “Springtime for Hitler,” some critics said, without much in the way of catharsis.
There were caveats even amid the most enthusiastic partisans, with Wanda Hale in the New York Daily News, which gave the picture four stars, nonetheless delivering this backhand: “Anyone, from whose head came this fantasy with profound undertones, can be forgiven for occasional looseness in direction.” Newsweek said it was “a high-class low comedy.” The dean of auteurism, the school of criticism that touted directors as the true authors of films, was Andrew Sarris at the Village Voice. “Except for two or three expert sequences, the direction of Mel Brooks is thoroughly vile and inept,” he wrote.
The queen bee of film critics was the antiauteurist Pauline Kael. Writing in The New Yorker, Kael saw The Producers as “amateurishly crude,” dependent on “the kind of show business Jewish humor that used to be considered too specialized for movies.” After excoriating the camerawork and “gag-writing,” Kael confessed to laughing often enough. “For satire of the theatre as good as Brooks’ gags at their best,” she wrote, “one can endure even the rank incompetence and stupidity of most of The Producers.”
The most hurtful words came from Brooks’s longtime bête noire, the New York Times. Mostel grotesquely overacted “under the direction of Mel Brooks,” though Wilder was “wonderful,” Times critic Renata Adler wrote. The film’s editing was often “crude and incredibly amateurish.” The “Springtime for Hitler” number was “the funniest part of this fantastically uneven movie.” The whole thing was “a violently mixed bag. Some of it is shoddy and gross and cruel; the rest is funny in an entirely unexpected way . . . . The Producers leaves one alternately picking up one’s coat to leave and sitting back to laugh.”
At home, Brooks later said, he wept in the arms of Anne Bancroft after reading Adler’s decidedly mixed review, and years later he often quoted the Times piece to intervie
wers—spelling the critic’s name for the uninitiated (“A.D.L.E.R.”)—while exaggerating her grievances. “She said my leading man [Zero Mostel] was gross, my humor pedestrian, and that as a director I lacked pace”—none of which she had actually written.
His loathing of the critics who picked at his inadequacies had been festering for more than a decade; now it was cemented by the equivocal New York reviews for his maiden film as writer-director. Although he could also boast many favorable notices and bouquets, his cup was usually half empty, it seemed, where critics were concerned, with some of their jibes always echoing inside his head.
New Yorkers, however, took their critics skeptically and Paris Fine Arts ticket sales amounted to “one of the biggest opening week totals” in its history—a “socko” $34,562, according to Variety. A house record was also set in Los Angeles in early April at the small (379-seat) Granada Theatre on Sunset Boulevard. While cautioning that the comedy was “not for everybody,” the Los Angeles Times praised The Producers as “outrageously funny.” Brooks flew to LA to tout the film on The Steve Allen Show.
He planned to tour widely, giving interviews to promote The Producers when it went national in midsummer, but first he stole time in New York with Anne Bancroft before she departed for Stockbridge to appear as William Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, opposite Frank Langella in A Cry of Players, the new William Gibson drama. In the fall they’d take the play to the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center.
Levine had organized a “rather sporadic national opening schedule” for The Producers, according to Variety, and by late June the release was in slow progress. Disappointing single-theater bookings in Detroit and Pittsburgh were followed by premieres in Toronto, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Chicago, where Brooks arranged a special campaign in the hub of the heartland. His friend Walter Robinson had moved back to his native Chicago and spearheaded the local promotion with tie-ins and ticket contests. The extra effort resulted in “the strongest U.S. showing the film has made to date,” said Variety.
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