Modesty did not become him. “I think in ten years,” he told Film Comment, “Blazing Saddles will be recognized as the funniest film ever made.” In response to a New York Times query about his favorite recent films, he said, “Both mine. I go back and watch my films.” Asked by the BBC’s Desert Island Discs to name his favorite music, he listed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3, Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” Helen Forrest and Dick Haymes’s “Just My Luck to Love in Vain”—and “Springtime for Hitler.”
He did give good interviews. “The funniest man in the world,” as Harry Stein* proclaimed him to be in New Times, could be more compelling and entertaining in person than his films. Yet even the flattering Newsweek profile noticed that Brooks’s personality seemed a constant balancing act. “Beneath the cheerful informality bubbles a volcanic energy that fuels his comic genius,” the newsweekly noted, “and occasionally launches him on extended transports of anger, especially at a negative or tepid review of his work.”
After the New York publicity push, Brooks headed to London, where the comedy filmmaker introduced Young Frankenstein at the National Film Theatre (its premiere timed for an NFT retrospective of his first three pictures), then Paris, where “besides top reviews,” in Variety’s words, “Brooks’ appearance, interviews, and TV stints also helped swell press coverage.” (The Paris reviews and box office prompted distributors to dig out and release The Twelve Chairs, which had never been shown in France.) Duplicating the sizzle of Blazing Saddles abroad, Young Frankenstein established Brooks as the “top foreign comic force” in Europe, in Variety’s words, especially in London, Paris, and Rome.
Brooks could reasonably have anticipated any number of year-end awards. Since both had come out in 1974, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein ended up competing against each other for Oscars (and other year-end recognitions), and that may have divided potential voters and hurt both films. Blazing Saddles earned three Academy Award nominations: Best Song (“Blazing Saddles” with Brooks’s lyrics and John Morris’s music), Best Editing (Danford B. Greene and John C. Howard), and Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Madeline Kahn). In all three categories, however, it fell short of winning.
The membership of the Writers Guild voted the Blazing Saddles screenplay—credited, in nonalphabetical order, to Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor, and Alan Uger—the year’s Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen.
Curiously, Young Frankenstein fared even less well in the postseason awards derby. The Writers Guild nominated it for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium, but it lost in that category to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The film’s sound (Richard Portman and Gene S. Cantamessa) and the Wilder/Brooks script (again for adaptation) were Oscar nominated; both lost, the script to The Godfather, Part II.
As the Oscar-winning writer of The Producers could attest, however, in Hollywood money spoke louder than any prizes. In 1975, Brooks was, in his own parlance, tops in taps; the filmmaker boasted two extraordinary hits, and the stream of revenue for Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein marked a seismic shift in his status and power.
When Young Frankenstein was released in late December, Blazing Saddles was still showing in certain US and European cities (in Denmark, the Western spoof played continuously for three years). Blazing Saddles would be rereleased widely several times in the years ahead before topping out at a reported $100 million in gross earnings, a figure that doesn’t include revenue from video, DVD, TV airings, and licensed insignia products.
Young Frankenstein would rank as the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1975, behind Blazing Saddles (number one), The Towering Inferno (number two), and The Trial of Billy Jack (number three). It grossed nearly $90 million worldwide before also being rereleased several times.
Only his accountant knew the extent of Brooks’s earnings. Brooks was paid something in the neighborhood of $50,000 for his captaincy of the Blazing Saddles script and another $50,000 for acting in and directing the film. The other writers earned far less both up front and down the road. Richard Pryor’s salary has never been made public, but the comedian cannot have been paid much more than Norman Steinberg, who earned a mere $21,000. (“Guess what? I’d do it again for the same money,” said Steinberg.) According to Steinberg, the originator, Andrew Bergman, was given five net points in his contract, and Brooks had anywhere from fifteen to eighteen. “Each point was worth about $1 million,” Steinberg said. He’d hoped that Brooks might throw him a thank-you point, but no way.
Brooks’s net points and ancillary rights clauses made him, for the first time, a truly wealthy man. But his first wife and three children didn’t get any thank-you points, either.
Brooks arrived in New York for interviews to promote the opening of Young Frankenstein already certain of reaping a financial bonanza in 1974. And while he was in New York, the man of the hour signed the agreement that would free him from all future financial claims from Florence Baum Brooks Dunay.
Florence’s lawyers had wrestled all year with Brooks’s lawyers without making much headway. Brooks badly wanted to buy back the clause that promised his ex-wife one-third of his net income above $44,000 until 1980, and his lawyers were shrewder than hers in concealing his fortune-to-be. She was ultimately offered and accepted a total settlement of $325,000. The first check for $125,000 arrived on Christmas Eve. After paying back debts, taxes, and payments to her lawyer and accountant, she was left with $95,000.
It was another shrewd deal for the filmmaker of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and one of the worst in history for the first Mrs. Mel Brooks.
Chapter 12
1975
Club Brooks
By mid-1975, his annus mirabilis, Brooks was ensconced in a big corner office on the third floor of the 20th Century–Fox executive building, which he stocked with a black lacquer piano, a large portrait of Leo Tolstoy, and a blow-up label of a 1929 Château Latour. Over time he’d decorate the space with posters of his films and a table of awards.
“I was king of movies for that year,” Brooks rightly boasted.
“To have those two movies in a year,” producer Michael Gruskoff echoed, “as he says, he wasn’t Mel Brooks, he was MEL BROOKS.”
“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,” Brooks informed Kenneth Tynan.
Moving to Hollywood was one of the best things he’d ever done. “I like it here in California,” he’d told interviewers wryly soon after the move, “but it isn’t like my home. New York is my home. I don’t like it [New York]. But like your family, you don’t like them but they’re your family . . .” Success eased the relocation, however, and now the formerly die-hard Brooklynite took to California like a religious convert, making West Coast lifestyle adjustments that once upon a time might have seemed unthinkable.
Weaning himself from cigarettes, Brooks switched to Trident and Raisinets. (It would take him a few years to succeed in quitting smoking, however.) He and Anne Bancroft launched a daily regimen of jogging. They even took up tennis, often playing doubles with other show business couples at the home of Club Caesar friends Larry and Pat Gelbart. Every bit the achiever, Gelbart was busy writing and producing the hit comedy series M*A*S*H. The Gelbarts would lay on extra masseuses. “Tennis, sauna, massage, then tennis, sauna, massage” is how one guest described the Gelbart soirees.
Playing tennis had long been a way of doing business in Hollywood while enjoying the sunshine. The Club Caesar crowd, with their spouses and children, formed a circuit of their own, which was sprinkled with other people on the A-list—film and television writers, directors, producers, agents, attorneys, studio executives, performers, and comedians.
The Brookses exhibited their tennis expertise at public events, including Carl Reiner’s annual benefits held at the La Costa Resort Hotel & Spa in Carlsbad, where Hollywood players were m
atched up with professionals for the tournaments. Tennis was one way for Brooks, not then or ever a big donator of actual money, to support charitable causes.
Reiner was Monsieur Hulot on the tennis court: light on his feet, never throwing a tantrum, making everyone else feel good and invariably mocking himself. Brooks was pretty much the opposite. “Mel wants to be the best,” Gene Wilder explained to the Los Angeles Times, “but he hasn’t taken lessons. Mel watches tennis on TV. He then thinks God should come down and kiss him and he’ll be able to play as well as he visualizes. He sees perfect tennis in his mind’s eye. If he screams and yells, there’s a reason. He figures it’s good to do that and then it’s done. We just duck when rackets get thrown.”
Brooks and Bancroft were sometimes a hard “get” for the big Hollywood parties outside the realm of Club Caesar. But they were hardly “homebodies,” as Brooks liked to describe them. The couple usually made the opening nights at the Mark Taper Forum, and they regularly appeared at major museum events. Brooks alone or accompanied by his wife could be counted on to show up at most industry occasions: Writers Guild, Academy Awards, American Film Institute, and Golden Globe fêtes.
The couple was often spotted at Beverly Hills watering holes with the Reiners, huddled over pasta at La Famiglia or ribs at Tony Roma’s. They frequently dined out alone as well, that bugaboo of Brooks’s having long since been laid to rest by Bancroft.
Although they shuttled to New York at the drop of a hat, it was not long before they sold their Village town house and took an expensive co-op on East 89th Street for extended stays in Manhattan. They still spent quality summer time on Fire Island, but with his newly minted wealth Brooks bought other non–New York houses, including a condo on Fisher Island, a barrier island for millionaires off south Florida, reachable only by water, where he could stay when visiting Kitty, his mother, who had retired to Miami.
He also quietly purchased a Malibu beach cottage that dated back to 1927 and had once belonged to the Golden Age movie director Mervyn LeRoy. The Malibu retreat boasted five bedrooms, six bathrooms, and 3,400 square feet. Their nearest neighbors were Jack Lemmon and the producer Aaron Spelling. On weekends, in the perpetual summer of Los Angeles, the famous couple could forget the wild Atlantic coast as they woke up in the upstairs master bedroom overlooking the tranquil blue Pacific.
At 8:00 a.m., Bancroft would throw a bathing suit into Brooks’s face, waking him up. “We’d rush to the ocean,” Brooks said of those idyllic days. “I’d say, ‘Is it cold?’ She’d say, ‘No, it’s fine.’ It was freezing, but she loved it. Afterward, we’d put on records and dance.”
Hollywood was his home for now and would be for the foreseeable future. In his early interviews after the move, Brooks had a tendency to grump about Los Angeles. The East Coast newspapers and museums were better, he said. “I miss the one millimeter of rudeness,” he told the New York Times. There was no more walking around the Village after midnight, if the fears of mugging were less. Plus: “A New York bagel really tests your teeth.”
Curiously, Los Angeles also grumbled about Brooks early in their coexistence. Though Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin was generally complimentary to his films, one columnist, Burt Prelutsky, who held a day job as a comedy writer for movies and TV, launched a tradition in the Times’ pages of dissent on the subject of Brooks.
In a piece entitled “Creating a Monster,” Prelutsky protested both Brooks’s ego and his success. Young Frankenstein was “just O.K.,” he wrote, “which made it fifty times funnier than Blazing Saddles,” but neither film was on a par with Chaplin, Keaton, or, he said (perhaps knowing it was one of Brooks’s favorites), the Italian comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street. Brooks’s “pompous quotes” glorified his accomplishments, Prelutsky wrote, but Frankenstein was padded and “boring for long stretches.” Brooks’s new hometown paper frequently published letters to the editor that agreed with Prelutsky.
Brooks’s self-praise, in interviews and advertising, aggravated the hostility that certain critics and members of the cognoscenti felt toward his rowdy sense of humor. The grand old humorist S. J. Perelman, a Hollywood pro who had written for the Marx Brothers, was quoted in a new book reviewed in the New York Times, saying only that “Mel Brooks is good when he is doing the 2000 Year Old Man” and nothing more. Buck Henry, Brooks’s bête noire, weighed in acidly: “Hollywood writers take themselves too seriously. It is the only place where someone like Mel Brooks could be called a genius.”
The Canadian Mordecai Richler, another specialist in Jewish humor, echoed Henry’s barb. Richler had scripted the film version of his novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (with Lionel Chetwynd), which had beat Young Frankenstein at the Writers Guild for the year’s Best Comedy Adaptation. Richler, in a New York Times essay covering new books about Woody Allen, approvingly quoted “somebody [who] told me on a recent visit . . . ‘All you need to know about Hollywood is that Mel Brooks is considered a genius.’”
Time and again Anne Bancroft was asked when she might appear in a Mel Brooks film.
“There are very few big women in his scripts, you’ve noticed?” was Anne Bancroft’s stock reply to journalists. “He writes to men, male relationships.”
Now in her midforties, the actress was of an age where important parts in Hollywood pictures were growing scarce. Although Bancroft was billed as the female lead of The Hindenburg, a big-budget re-creation of the airship disaster of 1937, her role as a countess fleeing Nazi Germany was secondary to the special effects and did not tax her abilities. Shot at Universal, just north of the Hollywood Hills, in the fall of 1974, while Brooks was editing Young Frankenstein at 20th Century–Fox, The Hindenburg did not go to theaters until late 1975. It did reasonably well at the box office but critics saw it as a dud.
The fate of Bancroft’s recent films—Young Winston, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, The Hindenburg—stood in contrast to her husband’s annus mirabilis. Pondering changes in her career, she reunited with an old friend she knew from having grown up in the Bronx, David Lunney, who worked at the American Film Institute (AFI). The AFI was headquartered in the Greystone Mansion on the Doheny estate, near the Brookses’ Foothill Road residence. Bancroft and Lunney had acted in high school plays together; once he had even kissed her onstage. Lunney began to stop by regularly.
Lunney talked up the AFI’s new Directing Workshop for Women, which had been inaugurated in 1974 with a small group of Hollywood women who wanted to learn the technology and techniques of filmmaking. The prominent graduates of the first class included producer Julia Phillips and actresses Lee Grant and Ellen Burstyn. Lunney piqued Bancroft’s interest in joining the second women’s workshop, set to start in 1975.
The two were poring over the application one day when Brooks arrived home. He acted surprised by the news. “He said, ‘Well, what would she do?’” Lunney recalled. “She said, ‘It’s a women’s directing workshop, it’s an application for it, I’m going to direct a film,’ and he said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to do that.’ And she said, ‘What? You can’t stand having two directors in the same house?’” It was “a flash of temper—and a joke.”
Bancroft signed up for the 1975 workshop, which included fellow actresses Dyan Cannon and Kathleen Freeman and future Children of a Lesser God director Randa Haines. For two years Bancroft immersed herself in the assignment of crafting two short films. One was a quasiautobiographical vignette about the role food plays in an Italian American family dominated by a binge eater. Dom DeLuise agreed to portray the binge eater, and Carl Reiner’s wife, Estelle, also would perform a small role. Brooks lent his staff to her short films shot on low budgets, largely within the confines of the Greystone Mansion.
Bancroft’s genius husband had not yet settled on the subject of his next—fifth—screen comedy. He mentioned “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” to interviewers, but subliminally, if not on a conscious level, as he explained later, the runaway success of the Western send-up and the Frankenstein spoof had
sparked a eureka moment for him.
“Ergo,” he explained later, “satire pays the rent.”
Spoofing genres—something he had largely avoided with his first two pictures, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs—was in his DNA. Satire of genres had been a staple source of comedy on Sid Caesar’s shows all those years ago. The past was the future.
But what should the next spoof be? He dithered. He dallied.
He found another outlet for his acting in voice jobs à la The Critic or the Ballantine beer commercials. Playing the 2000 Year Old Man for an animated television special in 1975 was old hat. But somewhat paradoxically, considering his stance as a dangerous comedian, he also began to become a fixture of G-rated fare. He gurgled as a puppet baby on Marlo Thomas’s “Free to Be . . . You and Me” special in 1974, played the Blond-Haired Cartoon Man on The Electric Company from 1971 to 1977, and had one of the best parts among the all-star cast as a mad German scientist—in this case, it was his voice and body—trying to lobotomize Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Movie in 1979.
Children’s television helped forge a connection to the television series lampooning Robin Hood that Brooks tried to launch into prime time in the first half of 1975. The idea for a series about the Robin Hood legend originated outside of Brooks’s fiefdom with John Boni, who had credits on Alan King specials and The Electric Company, and Norman Stiles, a regular writer for Sesame Street. Boni and Stiles pitched a pilot script to Norman Steinberg, who had accepted a day job after Blazing Saddles and was now developing programming for the TV division of Paramount Pictures.
The Boni/Stiles pilot script was wacky but not wacky enough, Steinberg thought. Knowing that Brooks had grown up as a fanatical fan of Robin Hood pictures, he walked the idea into Brooks’s office at 20th Century–Fox. Brooks said wow—great—let’s do it. Together over the next few months they revised and planned the pilot. “We actually sat down and wrote it in his office at Fox,” Steinberg recalled. ABC-TV picked up the series for the fall of 1975.
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