Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Variety totted up the New York notices, counting only three critics who had offered no clear opinion and twelve who had been favorable: Vincent Canby, New York Times; Jay Cocks, Time; Kathleen Carroll, Daily News; Joseph Gelmis, Newsday; Howard Kissel, Women’s Wear Daily; Stewart Klein, WNEW-TV; Jack Kroll, Newsweek; Frank Rich, New York Post; Gene Shalit, NBC-TV; Walter Spencer, WOR; Frances Taylor, Newhouse; William Wolf, Cue.

  Not all the favorable reviews were out-and-out raves, though. Vincent Canby, for one, saw Silent Movie as “a virtually uninterrupted series of smiles” but qualified his kudos. Silent Movie did not rival the “lunatic highs” of Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, he wrote. It “is not the greatest movie Mr. Brooks has made,” partly because his character, Mel Funn, embodied the “polite, sweet, and vulnerable qualities one associates with some of the old silent film comedians and that fit Mr. Brooks less well than a nun’s habit.”

  Doling out interviews to tout the release in New York (“Silent Movie is the funniest picture I ever made, the best picture I ever made”), Brooks was neither polite nor sweet on the subject of Canby. “Why should Canby—why should he appreciate my humor? I’m too Rabelaisian for his sensibilities,” he snapped, speaking to the Village Voice. “Canby’s review refers back to the great Blazing Saddles, and it’s bullshit. Canby forgot he hated Blazing Saddles,” Brooks pointed out—even though “hate” was too strong a word for Canby’s problems with Saddles, which in any case he had never called “great.”

  Roger Ebert, in the heartland where Brooks had worked so hard to make inroads, proclaimed, “Brooks has taken a considerable stylistic risk and pulled it off triumphantly.” Ebert loved the “great scenes” that were sure to become “classics”: the arcade-video Pong game in the intensive care unit, the fly in the soup, the horse and merry-go-round, the Coke machine battle. He had laughed “a lot,” Ebert confessed in the Chicago Sun-Times. Even so, on the “Brooks Laff-O-Meter,” Ebert added, Young Frankenstein had made him laugh more, Blazing Saddles about as much, and The Producers most of all.

  Gary Arnold in the Washington Post was a skunk in the woodpile for Silent Movie as he was for other Mel Brooks comedies down the years. Arnold’s review singled out the “stretches of dead air and arid clowning” in Silent Movie and the scenes in which the actors were okay but the directing floundered. (“The commissary scene falls flat partly because we can’t distinguish one falling-down comic from another but also because the camera remains rooted in place at an unhelpful middle distance.”) “If one strung them together, the good gags and spontaneous laughs in Silent Movie probably wouldn’t amount to more than one hundred and twenty seconds,” Arnold complained.

  However, it was a strong comedy in a weak summer for funny movies (Woody Allen, who was spending extra time on the next year’s Annie Hall, had nothing in release), and Americans swarmed to the new Brooks film. By August it was number one at the box office.

  Yet quite apart from Ebert’s Laff-O-Meter—a complaint about diminishing returns echoed by other critics—there were distinct warning signs. The film stalled at $36 million in US grosses, a dramatic drop-off from Blazing Saddles ($119 million after reissues) and Young Frankenstein ($86 million domestically). After Europe was added to the total, those grosses might have doubled, however, because Brooks oversaw heavy promotion in England, France, Germany, and Italy and overseas his profile continued to rise.

  Regardless, Silent Movie was the bonanza of the summer for 20th Century–Fox, and the Writers Guild wound up nominating the Club Brooks script as Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen in 1976. (It lost to Bill Lancaster’s script for The Bad News Bears.)

  After periods of hard work, twice yearly in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Brooks and Anne Bancroft stole long weekends with an elite group of friends: Norman Lear and his wife, Frances, Carl and Estelle Reiner, Larry and Pat Gelbart, Dom DeLuise and Carol Arthur.

  Lear began organizing the getaways after learning from a friend, Cliff Perlman, the owner of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, that the casino and resort maintained two five-bedroom villas as “freebies for their high rollers,” in Lear’s words. Both villas, one located in La Costa, California, and the other in Palm Springs, were fully staffed, and Perlman offered free use of the villas to Lear, who made up a guest list of compatible couples for a trial weekend. “We all loved the mix,” Lear said, “had the time of our lives, and spent two weekends a year together for a number of years thereafter.”

  The famous and funny friends dubbed themselves “Yenem Veldt,” which they translated as “The Other World.” “In the history of fun,” Lear recalled, “no group ever had more.” The Other World began their Saturday mornings in pajamas, laughing at DeLuise slicing fruit—“you cannot believe how funny Dom DeLuise was slicing fruit”—and then they laughed so “continuously that we often stayed in our bedclothes all weekend.”

  This was a straight crowd that still liked to play the Dictionary Game or Pass the Orange. For added entertainment, Brooks offered his impersonation of Fred Astaire, and Bancroft, Pat Gelbart, and Estelle Reiner transformed themselves into a singing trio called the Mother Sisters. DeLuise’s wife, Carol, imitated Imogene Coca so accurately that they all wept with laughter. Lear threw in his specialty of pratfalls. Larry Gelbart offered running commentary. Carl Reiner emceed, praising all of the performers to the skies.

  As merry a bunch as ever was found under the same vacation roof, each tried to outdo the others with their comic skills. “But Mel was clearly the most hilarious, north, south, east, and west,” Lear recalled. “I thought he was just as funny as anyone I ever met,” he continued, “just naturally. Maybe he qualified [as] the clown [of the group], [although] that’s a word I use very, very seldom. We get a few of those every century—clowns. He qualified for the clown because it was very difficult for him to not be funny.”

  Among friends Brooks was sometimes funniest when he was angriest. Every year, because Lear made the vacation arrangements, he and his wife took the largest bedroom or the one with the best view. “It always pissed [Brooks] off,” Lear recalled. Brooks would complain all weekend. Decades later he was still complaining. “I said to Mel [recently], ‘You were always mad,’” Lear said in an interview. “He said, ‘I’m still angry.’ I was laughing [as we talked about it]. ‘What can I do? It pissed me off,’ he said.”

  By the time Silent Movie had petered out in theaters at year’s end, Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, and Barry Levinson had another script on the griddle: a comedy spoofing the cinematic masterpieces of director Alfred Hitchcock. It was another idea Brooks might have pitched to himself in the mirror, but it came up among the group during the Silent Movie script-writing sessions. None of the writers or Brooks took the story credit.

  The idea gave Brooks the excuse to ring the doorbell of Hitchcock, another boyhood idol. The Master of Suspense was in his seventy-seventh year and had just finished his fifty-third and last feature as director, Family Plot, which was released in the spring of 1976. Hitchcock’s age, fragility, and steadily declining health are one reason why it is difficult to credit Brooks’s anecdote—spun with variations—of the time he and Hitchcock dined at Chasen’s in Beverly Hills, Hitchcock devouring a full-course meal, pausing after dessert before lighting his cigar, then asking the waiter to serve the whole repast again.

  Yet Hitchcock was flattered and cooperative. At a series of meetings at Hitchcock’s office in Universal, and at Chasen’s, the auteur of auteurs, who had often mingled humor with terror in his films, listened to Brooks’s ideas for scenes and gave his feedback. Brooks’s version of their friendship emphasized their mutual greatness.

  “Luckily for me he liked me,” Brooks said. “He had seen The Producers and had liked it, he really liked it. So he warmed up to me and allowed me to pump him for information for hours. I had expected a man with a really dry English sensibility and I found a warm human being instead. He kissed my hand and he said, ‘You’re the new master.’”

  Wh
en Club Brooks again convened, with Hitchcock spoofery on the agenda, Brooks wielded the gavel. Assistant director Jonathan Sanger, who was new to Crossbow Productions, watched. “Far from anarchic,” he recalled, “it was highly collaborative, four writers sitting in a room and pacing and tossing out ideas, jokes, situations.”

  The regimen had become formulized: the scene ideas, key dialogue exchanges, and approved jokes (verbal or visual) were typed on cards and pinned on a corkboard wall in Brooks’s office, according to Sanger. “As the wall became filled, some cards got amended, some rearranged, and some just got cut. I saw that there were no ‘bad’ ideas. It was important for each writer to feel safe enough to express anything that came to mind.”

  Gradually the story emerged: a mash-up of Spellbound, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, and, first and foremost, Vertigo. In Silent Movie, Brooks had kidded his way through most of his scenes with Marty Feldman and Dom DeLuise. Now he was going to portray the lead character of the film, the troubled psychotherapist Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke—the H. for Harpo and the surname a twist on Cary Grant’s in North by Northwest. Dr. Thorndyke must overpower enemies real and imagined, including his acrophobia. He must overcome an angry bellboy who attacks him with a newspaper in the shower, fight off swarms of birds and their droppings, and defeat a murder attempt in a phone booth.

  It was a “kid’s fantasy,” in Brooks’s words, to play the straight role usually reserved for Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart in classic Hitchcock pictures, the prototypical wronged man trapped in a nightmarish situation. If Brooks was not as tall or handsome, as English or goyish as Hitchcock’s leads, at least, as had been true of Mel Funn in Silent Movie, he’d be playing another version of Nice Mel: dapper, warm, and likable, even heroic. Playing it as romantic as possible, too, Brooks would even get to woo an enigmatic Hitchcock blonde and sing a Frank Sinatra–type song in a nightclub.

  This was Brooks’s first starring part. “In the past he would have written that, been working on that, putting that together for Gene Wilder [as] the pseudo–leading man,” Barry Levinson reflected. “Mel is a falling-down-funny personality, a comedian type. But in a sense, when you’re going into High Anxiety, it’s pushing the boundaries of what you’re calling a real character performance. That’s why Gene would come to mind if you were thinking, who could be funny and sort of a leading man? With all those attributes.”

  The writers wrote the character to Brooks’s requisites, and he performed his pages “step by step” as the script progressed, Levinson recalled. “You’re talking out loud in a room. ‘What is this moment?’ You talk it. He begins to talk it. You hear it and say, ‘Well, that’s funny, he can do that . . . that doesn’t hold up so well.’ You begin to hear it [working]. You’re almost unconsciously rewriting as you’re writing, to fit [him].”

  Pinpointing parts for Brooks’s informal stock company, the script team also tailored characters for Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman, who were set to portray a psychiatrist and his nurse embroiled in an S-and-M relationship; Madeline Kahn, aping the Hitchcock blonde; and Dick Van Patten from When Things Were Rotten—the murder victim of heavy-metal rock. Hitchcock’s faithful matte artist Albert Whitlock would play an in-joke small role. And scenarists Levinson and Rudy DeLuca could write their own bits—Levinson as the newspaper-wielding bellboy, DeLuca the phone booth attacker.

  Having rebooted Sid Caesar in Silent Movie, Brooks now brought back another pal from Your Show of Shows days, Howard Morris, to play Dr. Thorndyke’s analytical mentor, a character with the punning name of Professor Lilloman. As with Caesar, it was the first time Brooks had acted with or directed Morris in one of his films.

  Paul Lohmann was again the cameraman, John C. Howard was the editor, and John Morris composed the score and helped with the music for the Frank Sinatra–style title song, “High Anxiety,” which Brooks serenades Kahn with in the nightclub scene.

  Hitchcock had located several of his most famous pictures in northern California, and High Anxiety was likewise shot, in the spring of 1977, with some San Francisco landmarks in the background. A few scenes were photographed at the San Francisco and Los Angeles airports and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where a university edifice became the Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. The interiors were done at 20th Century–Fox.

  Levinson and DeLuca were a constant presence, monitoring the script and video playbacks. Although Brooks had been faithful to Young Frankenstein’s script when restricted to directing, all the post–Young Frankenstein scripts were less sacrosanct. “Mel’s technique is to be thoroughly prepared with his script and to have a precise idea of what he wants to put on that screen,” Harvey Korman explained. “The problem is that when he does a scene, the crew laughs and he loves it. So he does the scene again, and the crew laughs again. But by the third or fourth take, the crew isn’t laughing anymore, and Mel panics and looks for new stuff to make them laugh again. As a result, he’s constantly improvising.”

  High Anxiety occupied Brooks for much of 1977. By the summer he was immersed in postproduction. Often geography separated him from his wife, Anne Bancroft.

  During the first half of 1977, the actress juggled the part of the district attorney in a rape-revenge film entitled Lipstick with a stint as Mary Magdalene in a Jesus of Nazareth television miniseries directed by Franco Zeffirelli. The latter called for her to be in Tunisia and Morocco when not on the Lipstick set in Los Angeles. “I had all the jet lag to contend with,” Bancroft told journalists. “At times it was gruesome. I would catch a cold in L.A., recover, fly to North Africa and catch a cold, recover and fly back.”

  In the second half of the year, although plagued with illness, Bancroft was just as busy. She agreed to make her first Broadway appearance in nearly eight years in Golda, William Gibson’s new drama about the life of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. After its mid-November opening, Golda had a three-month run before the actress came down with acute bronchitis, shuttering the play and sending her back home in early 1978.

  By that time the sixth film to be written and directed by Mel Brooks, with numero uno also billed as the star, the composer and lyricist of the title song, as well as the producer of the screen comedy, was in theaters. There was a late-1977 premiere for publicity, reviews, and awards consideration. Brooks broke with traditional film industry release patterns by holding simultaneous Christmas Day openings at immense Westwood and Hollywood theaters and at the Sutton on East 57th Street in Manhattan. Variety reported that he had rejected substantial offers for some outdoor theater bookings to follow, looking instead for 800- to -1,000 seat “hardtops for a communal intimacy not possible in drive-ins.”

  Brooks’s arrangement with 20th Century–Fox called for the studio to add forty venues across the United States on February 1, another forty houses two weeks later, then seventy-five more by March 1. That was a record number of theaters for a comedy in that era of huge movie theaters.

  Although the reviews were uneven, the initial crowds again filled the theaters. While noting the obvious as well as “in” references to Hitchcock’s oeuvre—one scene had been shot from under a glass table, another with the camera gliding toward a window and crashing through—many critics weren’t sure how cinematic or funny the parody was.

  “A low-intensity, absent-minded pastiche,” Gary Arnold averred in the Washington Post. “A manic, hit-or-miss roller-coaster ride,” America’s leading feminist film critic, Molly Haskell, opined in New York, “best described as a compilation film in which famous bits and pieces and visual conceits from the ten most familiar Hitchcock films have been shuffled, crossbred, rewritten and staged with Jewish punch lines.”

  The picture’s PG rating reflected how quaint the crudity—and rating system—had become. The film included a storm of bird feces, Nurse Diesel’s (Cloris Leachman) torpedo breasts, and Dr. Thorndyke’s “pee-pee envy” and “caca-doody” speech to a packed hall of psychologists: not only did High Anxiety plunge on the Laff-O-Meter, according
to many reviewers, the “low points,” in Molly Haskell’s words, could be blamed on stale locker room humor—“tired jokes, old jokes, and gratuitous obscenities that make one long for the euphemisms and ingenious circumlocutions necessitated in the bad old days by the Production Code.”

  Many film critics focused on Brooks the star, who was playing it straight but also trying for a little sex appeal as Dr. Thorndyke. “Well-tailored in imitation of Cary Grant, I suppose, as the prototypical Hitchcock hero, he is having sport with a romantic type, but it is kidding on the square” wrote Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times. While adopting a “pale cast of sincerity,” Brooks had forsaken his strong suit as “king of the leer.”

  “What High Anxiety lacks,” Haskell echoed in New York, “is the compelling charismatic figure of the comedian himself. As a performer, Brooks is ambiguous, neither entirely comical nor quite serious. Close your eyes and you hear the rich baritone voice of a leading man; open them and you see—what? A character out of Malamud or Bellow. But behind the elusiveness of the actor is the whirring and scheming mind of the emcee.”

  Nevertheless, Brooks galvanized publicity by campaigning tirelessly on behalf of his sixth film (“my consummate height in artistry at this point”). Besides visiting as many US cities as possible for the opening and giving interviews in those places, he stopped in Sweden (a burgeoning market for his films), Madrid, Rome, London, and Paris, where he met with French feature writers and German journalists who were flown in to meet him.

  In most interviews Brooks spoke of his friendship with Hitchcock and told anecdotes about his own experience under analysis in the 1950s. He preferred the audience’s verdict to quibbling critics, he said in interviews, and he dropped into theaters to sit anonymously and bask in people’s laughter. Nonetheless, the brickbats from “crickets,” as he had taken to calling critics, stung. “They chirp and make noise but they should be ignored,” he said.