Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  The acclaimed highlights of the special included Bancroft as a graying mother listening to Tommy Smothers soulfully croon the antiwar song “Maman” from the short-lived 1967 musical Mata Hari (lyrics by Martin Charnin); and a comedy skit, which has gained a second life on YouTube today, with Bancroft confiding a recurring nightmare to her psychiatrist. She relates her difficulty hosting a dinner party for the Peruvian soprano Yma Sumac and introducing the singer with a funny first name to the other guests that rhyme: Ava (Gardner), Ida (Lupino), Mia (Farrow), Uta (Hagen), Oona (O’Neill).

  Still more the writer, Brooks did not appear on camera in the Bancroft special. The couple was wary of mingling their careers. The columnist Earl Wilson asked Brooks, during the publicity campaign for The Twelve Chairs, if he’d ever make a film starring his wife. “My wife is my best friend,” he replied flatly, “and I want to keep it that way.”

  “Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man” went on to win two Emmys: one for Outstanding Variety or Musical Program and one for the main writers (not Brooks).

  Alan Heim launched the editing of The Twelve Chairs at Avala Film in Belgrade, putting together a half-hour cut of early footage and screening the scenes for a handful of people that included Brooks, the visiting Anne Bancroft, and producer Michael Hertzberg. “I felt pretty good about the cut,” Heim recollected, although he also understood that such first cuts are usually “really horrendous.” Bancroft got up to leave immediately after the viewing; “she sort of backed out of the room,” Heim said. Brooks stood up and began by complimenting himself: “It’s remarkable how close you are to my original concept . . .”

  “From there to what seemed like forty-five minutes later,” Heim recalled, “it was pure excoriation. He just lit into me about touching his material and daring to change what he had in mind.” They patched things up, and “we eventually ended up working well together.” Certain editing touches—the speeded-up, Keystone Cops–type comedy at intervals—became Brooks trademarks. But Heim, who would have a long, respected career, winning an Oscar for All That Jazz in 1980, never edited another film for the director.

  The rest of the editing and postproduction took place in New York, occupying the first half of 1970. The manic Brooks slowed to a crawl when editing. “I can never let a picture go,” he explained. “I could work on Twelve Chairs for the rest of my life. I spent a year of my life making that picture, I thought it was going to be my masterpiece!”

  He issued a public warning to future editors applying for work on future Mel Brooks films. “What you want in the end is a fraternal relationship where you are the absolute boss,” he explained to Action!, the Directors Guild magazine, coinciding with the release of The Twelve Chairs. “I am schizoid about editors. I love them and I hate them . . . . A lot of editors like to go home at six o’clock. If you meet one like that, fire him.”

  By June, Brooks had finished the post-production gloss, and he and Bancroft embarked on a London vacation, which was becoming an annual tradition. Brooks could conduct business—planning the European release of The Twelve Chairs—while the couple enjoyed the shopping, restaurants, museums, theater scene, and private clubs for celebrities like Tramp. And no summer was complete without August on Fire Island.

  Revving up for the fall, Brooks devised an accelerated release schedule for The Twelve Chairs that would put the film into more and bigger theaters faster than The Producers. He’d key the publicity and advertising in foreign capitals to the novel, which was better known in Europe. In September, he shuttled between Los Angeles and New York, organizing the publicity and distribution, and made trips to London accompanied by Sidney Glazier.

  In the third week of October, Brooks hosted a sneak preview for European exhibitors and distributors in London. Glazier, Michael Hertzberg, and Alan U. Schwartz flew in for the occasion. “Elite show biz turnout was copiously wined and dined and supped before and after the show,” reported Variety, which predicted, however, “doubtful mass appeal” for Brooks’s second comedy film.

  One week later, The Twelve Chairs saw its bicoastal US premiere at two theaters picked for their size and prestige: the Loew’s Tower East on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and Loew’s Beverly Theatre in Beverly Hills. Brooks gave countless print and broadcast interviews. He talked about his deep-seated connection to the story (“I’m a Russian Jew, and finally, I could bathe in everything Russian that’s in me”) and the strides he believed he had made as a filmmaker (“I may have moved ahead cinematically . . . . The shots are more beautiful, and the whole ambience, look and texture . . .”).

  By now the press looked forward to talking to Brooks. If his boasting didn’t always endear him to reviewers, he made those journalists who were not critics laugh.

  Yet the critics once again proved hard to please. Brooks’s second film as writer-director was well made, likable, picturesque. The three leads romped. But the serious, literary side of the novel, which Brooks touted in interviews, was disarmed by too much silliness. (One could argue that silly comedy was as personal for Brooks as the Russian setting was.) Some critics did applaud the film, to be sure, and some were overly negative; but many—already it was a set pattern with Brooks—mixed pros and cons in the same notice.

  Again the New York Times delivered the bitterest pill. Like Renata Adler before him, while commending the three stars—Ron Moody, Frank Langella, and Dom DeLuise—Vincent Canby assessed The Twelve Chairs as “a comedy for Brooks-watchers somewhat more indulgent than I.” Canby was conflicted by “a sense of humor [that] is expressed almost entirely in varying degrees of rudeness and cruelty,” and a split personality in the filmmaker, who “wants to be lovable and to stomp on your foot at the same time.”

  The “praise” from Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times and Gary Arnold in the Washington Post was just as equivocal. Champlin wrote that “despite some nicely farcical and stylized moments,” the comedy ended up “thin and disappointing.” Arnold thought that “the movie certainly looks better than The Producers” and the performances were mostly good. “This new comedy is much more consistent and fluid than Brooks’ first film . . . . You don’t gyrate as wildly between inspired and rather mediocre bits.”

  One consolation: the majority of reviewers praised Brooks’s own performance. His scenes buoyed the film. “As able as the three leading actors are,” Canby wrote in the Times, “it is Mr. Brooks who, though he appears only briefly in the film, dominates it from the beginning.” Otherwise diffident about The Twelve Chairs, Pauline Kael agreed. “When Brooks is on-screen, he brings a fervid enthusiasm to his own nonsense,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “When he isn’t around, there’s no comic tension.”

  The early turnout in New York and Beverly Hills was impressive, regardless of the critics. The Twelve Chairs was ushered into a peak number of seventy-two theaters and briefly rose to number two at the US box office in late January. Europe also responded well initially, with the London revenue boosted by Ron Moody, a national treasure because of Oliver! US ticket sales fell off abruptly in February, however, with The Twelve Chairs slipping into sub-run. And in Europe, strong bookings beyond the United Kingdom were scarce.

  It is hard to say what went down worse with Brooks: the critical caveats or the humble earnings. He had touted The Twelve Chairs as a major advance in his filmmaking—his “great statement about man’s relationship to man,” as his lawyer Alan U. Schwartz later explained to Kenneth Tynan, “and how revolutions fail to work because of human frailty. Mel wanted to be serious and literary.” Critics by and large rejected the film as being serious and literary, and worse, the masses did not flock to his comedy.

  After the bicoastal premiere, after the bulk of the interviews and promotion, Brooks and Anne Bancroft traveled to Miami Beach to visit his mother. From Florida they flew to an island in the Caribbean, where they could relax and follow the fate of The Twelve Chairs from afar. Brooks fished, walked the sands, and brooded over the rejection—a film that was almost as personal for hi
m, as steeped in his genes, as The Producers; it was a favorite novel he’d been carrying around and thumbing for years.

  There was not much he could do about the critics. He had complained about them in the past, and he would be vociferous about them in the future. If critics continued to snipe at his films, he would have to bypass them, go over their heads to the people.

  Variety had said that The Twelve Chairs lacked “mass appeal,” and Variety appeared to be right. The trouble, Brooks decided, explaining later, was that he had been making films that were too personal. The Producers had been “a private story with universal features,” he realized, and The Twelve Chairs had been similar, “though the human aspects were once again universal.”

  Because it was such a private story, The Producers had attracted only a cult audience and The Twelve Chairs an “even smaller one,” he continued. “It didn’t make a lot of money, ever,” he said of The Producers. “I mean, it played in the big cities, but would people in Kansas understand about raising 1,000 percent to put on a Broadway show?”

  He had made his first two movies trying too hard to please critics—and Jewish intellectuals. “If you were a Jewish intellectual,” he said, “whose parents had emigrated from Russia you could like my pictures, but there were hardly any of those in Amarillo, Texas, where you gotta play in one of their three or four theaters or else you’re outa luck. You gotta get into one of the John Wayne houses or you ain’t ever gonna break out.”

  Forget the carping critics and elite Jewish intellectuals; Brooks would have to make his name as big as John Wayne’s in order to conquer “John Wayne country.” In the future, he vowed, he’d make only mass-appeal comedies, films that could be counted on to fill the biggest theaters in the heartland or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world.

  Chapter 10

  1971

  Blazing Mel

  Along with The Twelve Chairs, many other dark, freewheeling, often scatological comedies exploded on the scene in the early 1970s, including Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland, and the first films directed by Club Caesar writers Carl Reiner (Where’s Poppa?) and Woody Allen (Bananas). Although certain of these young Turks—Brooks, Reiner, and Altman—were over forty, the American nouvelle vague was young in spirit and reflected the late-sixties zeitgeist.

  The Twelve Chairs got lost in the jumble. In later interviews Brooks often cited his second film as his most neglected work. It stayed a favorite among some of his fans, though, especially those who felt he deserted them later with less literary, less serious comedy.*

  At least The Twelve Chairs got respect from the Writers Guild, which nominated the script for best adapted comedy of the year. (Brooks’s script lost to Ring Lardner’s for M*A*S*H.)

  But after The Twelve Chairs, what? In the months following the release of The Twelve Chairs, Brooks floated several projects. “Have You Heard, Bronsky Is Dying?” which James Robert Parish described as a story about “a New York City garment industry businessman who hoped to build a pyramid to himself in the suburbs,” had a lead character supposedly tailored for Zero Mostel, but it sounds more like one of those snappy titles that rolled off Brooks’s tongue than a script with many actual pages.

  An eighteenth-century comedy of manners might seem equally unlikely, but Brooks invested time and energy into developing a screen version of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. He had recently seen an off-Broadway production of the time-honored farce, whose tangled plot involves an affluent countrywoman posing as a serving maid to woo a wealthy Londoner, and felt that he could easily modernize the text. He mused about Albert Finney playing the role of Tony Lumpkin, who instigates the practical joke that triggers the plot, and met with Finney in New York. Finney was a fan of the 2000 Year Old Man (“He thought I was God,” recalled Brooks), but the actor declined.

  Not only did Brooks need a bankable star, he needed new financial partners. Louis Wolfson, who’d sunk money into The Producers and The Twelve Chairs, had been convicted of stock manipulation, perjury, and obstruction of justice in 1968, and after exhausting his legal appeals he had spent nine months in prison. Emerging from jail in 1970, he dissolved Universal-Marion, the parent company of UMC Pictures, the spin-off that had been created for Sidney Glazier to produce movies with Brooks and other filmmakers.

  UMC re-formed as Sidney Glazier Productions. Glazier announced Brooks’s forthcoming adaptation of She Stoops to Conquer with a $1.5 million budget and Gene Wilder as its possible star instead of Albert Finney. Still, Glazier had to find money somewhere. He and Brooks spoke to Bud Austin, a former executive of Filmways, a film and television production company with a successful game-show division (Brooks had appeared on its Hollywood Squares). Austin now headed up his own Austin Productions and he was seeking film properties. He liked Brooks and said he was interested in the project.

  Brooks and Michael Hertzberg took a jaunt to Europe to meet with people and scout location sites. But She Stoops to Conquer was too big a lift for Austin Productions, especially given the fact that Brooks never completed a script with his take on the eighteenth-century play.

  Flailing, Brooks tried to cash in on a television project that was baldly imitative of Get Smart. Together with Gary Belkin (with Brooks listed first in the “created by” and “written by” credits), he conceived of a hapless “world-renowned Master Detective” summoned from Italy by a secret international police agency to stymie the planned assassination of the “Shah of Tyrhan.” He and Belkin wrote a pilot for the proposed “Inspector Benjamino” series, registering it as a Crossbow Production. But their script was tepid, the vogue for Clouseau-type spoofery had waned, and there were no buyers.

  These and other air castles occupied Brooks for more than a year after The Twelve Chairs, before his financial insecurity and need for constant activity compelled him back toward television. A late-1970 appearance on The David Susskind Show, where he joined a panel that included comedian David Steinberg, actor George Segal, and author Dan Greenburg, mulling over the topic of “How to Be a Jewish Son,” returned Brooks to the fold of Talent Associates even as Get Smart, whose royalty checks had kept him afloat for five years, ended its prime-time run and went into profitable syndication.

  Talent Associates began to tease out possible new Brooks projects. The first of them was “The People on the Third Floor,” a proposed two-hour NBC special that would star “the writing” more than the actors. Six or seven vignettes would be “tied together by a single premise,” according to Leonard Stern’s story summary, depicting the third-floor tenants of a large apartment building who gather together for a house party. Their pitch called for reality-based comedy à la The Odd Couple, with Brooks, Buck Henry, Joseph Stein, Max Schulman, and Peter Stone among the proposed writers of intermeshing stories. Martin Charnin was attached to the prospectus as the show’s producer.

  The second was a situation comedy called “Annie,” built around the married comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. Renée Taylor (Eva Braun from The Producers) and Joseph Bologna (her actor-writer husband) wrote the pilot episode for the series, which was shot under Charnin’s direction in early 1971. Brooks gave input and was executive producer, but ABC, which underwrote the pilot, declined to air the series.

  The third was The Comedians, a one-hour syndicated program with Carl Reiner hosting a mock talk-show panel of comedians riffing on timeless topics. Although “The People on the Third Floor” did not survive beyond the publicity stage, The Comedians snagged a sponsor, Canada Dry, and several episodes were staged and shot in late 1971. The premiere, mulling over the subject of “Money,” featured Brooks, Tony Randall, Peggy Cass, Ron Carey, and Don Adams, while the second episode, “Love and Children,” featured Brooks, Marty Brill, Pat Carroll, Jack Cassidy, and Phil Silvers.

  The guest comedians sat around on folding chairs on a threadbare soundstage set, betraying the show’s “telltale on-the-cheap” investment, according to Variety. Rein
er and Brooks traded “‘2,000-year-old man’ type of repartee,” Variety noted, while the panel as a whole kicked around deep questions—“some answers being straight from real life, others lifted from comedy routines.” The series was offered on a barter basis to TV stations across the United States, with the Canada Dry commercials ready-made and paying for the first half hour of each episode; the balance of advertising fell to local outlets.

  Indicative of his higher name recognition—and his more likable persona—Reiner was on the in-house shortlist of possible hosts acceptable to both Talent Associates and Canada Dry; Brooks was not. They also shared a pay disparity: Reiner would receive $2,500 per episode, while Brooks earned $1,000. Otherwise Brooks’s contract was optimal, specifying a most-favored-nation clause for reruns (meaning that he’d be among the first paid), first-class airfare between New York and Los Angeles, another $2,000 for “general expenses plus [all] transportation to and from airport and reimbursement for rented automobile in California, plus additional expenses in the amount of $500.”

  Anne Bancroft had just accepted her first screen role since her Oscar-nominated performance in The Graduate. The actress would play Winston Churchill’s mother in Young Winston, a historical epic set during the British prime minister’s youth and his years as a Boer War correspondent. Director Richard Attenborough supervised the filming in London, which lasted through the summer of 1971. Brooks paid several long visits to his favorite European city, where he planned to shoot She Stoops to Conquer if that came to pass.

  In August, the couple sojourned on the French Riviera before returning to the United States. Shortly thereafter, the actress learned she was pregnant, with her baby due in the spring.

  By then Brooks had been running on a career treadmill for a year. The demand for future episodes of The Comedians had plunged after its heavily promoted premiere in dozens of markets late in 1971; by early 1972, the syndicated series had been abandoned.