Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  “I had assumed,” Sanger wrote later, that Brooks had only wanted to make “his own broad comedies. I knew that many people had tried to get him to produce and direct their comedies, and that this was the quickest way to court rejection. Trying to trade jokes with Mel was a popular pastime with people who came to meet him for the first time. It was rarely a successful gambit. The man’s mind was agile and his responses often funny, but trying to compete with him was foolish and not destined to win his respect.

  “Unlike other comic writers, actors or comedians I had met—Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Nathan Lane—who were mostly dour and introverted when out of the spotlight, Mel was always ‘on.’ If you met him on the street he’d do a ten-minute improv with you. When I had lunch with him at the commissary at Fox, he would go to each table in the Executive Dining Room and have something clever to say to everyone, while I waited to order lunch. Yet he once told me that he dreaded going on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because I always have to follow that introduction: ‘And here is the funniest man in the world.’ Too much responsibility.”

  Right away Brooks spoke about mounting The Elephant Man as a Brooksfilms production. 20th Century–Fox would never go for it. “The triumvirate of Alan Ladd Jr., Jay Kanter, and Gareth Wigan had recently left Fox,” Sanger recalled. “Dennis Stanfill, a ‘suit’ and not a creative type, was running things now.” Brooks saw Dustin Hoffman playing the Elephant Man. Sanger argued that they needed “a great actor, but one with not so well-known a face,” hiding under tons of makeup. Brooks nodded. But then they would need “the best actor in the world” to play Dr. Treves, the deformed man’s physician, he said.

  They concurred on “a couple of basics.” The picture ought to be shot in London on “as small a budget as we could manage,” in Sanger’s words. Brooks would sign off on the director and lead players, and he’d guide De Vore and Bergren on script revisions.

  Now they had to iron out a contract. Brooks arranged a meeting with Alan U. Schwartz, advising Sanger, “Bring your people if you like.” Not having a lawyer and unable to obtain one on short notice, Sanger went alone to a Beverly Hills Hotel room to meet with Brooks and Schwartz, “a distinguished looking man, tall, slim, Armani-suited with a blue striped Turnbull and Asser shirt and red tie, and with a great head of white hair.” Sanger was acquainted with him since the lawyer had played a bit as a psychiatrist in High Anxiety. “As usual,” Sanger recalled, Brooks “got right down to business.”

  Brooks offered him $100,000 to produce The Elephant Man and “a deferment of another $50,000 after the film breaks even.” Considering that Sanger was currently earning $2,500 weekly as a production manager, he was overjoyed. “We’ll split the profits, two-thirds to Brooksfilms and one-third to you,” Brooks continued evenly. “We will give percentage points away proportionately but you’ll have a hard floor of twenty-five percent of the net.” Schwartz said little, limiting himself to smiling and nodding.

  Sanger felt that the terms were “very fair.” (“A hard floor,” he explained later in his memoir, “meant that no matter how many percentage points we had to give away to writers or actors, I would never be reduced to less than twenty-five percent.”) Brooks said there would also be icing on the profits cake. “Look kid,” the namesake of Brooksfilms said. “We are going to own this film. We’re not giving it to the studios. They’ll distribute it, but that’s it.” Sanger left the hotel room, excited as never before, paperwork to follow.

  Within days Sanger had a lawyer who phoned him with the bad news relayed from Schwartz: Brooks had changed his mind. The fees were okay, but the split was too generous. Now Sanger was being offered just 10 percent on the back end. “I was both angry and hurt,” Sanger recalled, “angry that Mel could be so quick to change, hurt that he didn’t even see fit to talk with me and let me know himself. It was chicken shit.”

  Yet he knew that Brooks was “a tough man with a buck.” Michael Hertzberg had left his employ forever after he had been shut out of creative involvement or participation points in Silent Movie. And Club Brooks had gone “on strike,” refusing “to come to the set for several days” during the filming of High Anxiety, “until their back deals had been sorted out.”

  Tossing and turning all night, Sanger didn’t care to feel “victimized” and couldn’t decide if he should accept the reduced offer. If he accepted, his wife advised him, “you need to forget this even happened . . . it will eat at you and ruin the experience.” The next day he phoned his lawyer, “told him to close the deal,” and “never mentioned it again.”

  Sanger went on to produce The Elephant Man; Frances, the Frances Farmer biopic; and The Doctor and the Devils, another English gothic, for Brooksfilms. And later, after twenty years of working independently of Brooks, Sanger returned to Brooksfilms to share the producing credit with Brooks on the musical film of The Producers in 2005.

  Brooks earned his extra points with his financial as well as creative acumen.

  At the suggestion of Stuart Cornfeld, who was the first-time producer of Fatso for Brooksfilms, Jonathan Sanger met with David Lynch, the director of the cult film Eraserhead, a surrealist oddity Lynch had made as an American Film Institute student. Eraserhead was set in an apocalyptic landscape and revolved around a mutant baby, which was perhaps not far removed from a deformed Elephant Man in nineteenth-century London.

  Sanger personally liked Lynch, who looked and acted surprisingly normal. Swallowing hard, the budding producer screened Eraserhead for Brooks. “It’s an adolescent’s nightmare of responsibility,” Brooks summarized after watching the film with Sanger. “I like it!” Brooks met Lynch, liking him personally just as much as Sanger did, later often referring to him as Jimmy Stewart from Venus. (“Mel took to David right away and loved that he had a strong and solid handshake,” Sanger recalled.) Brooks approved him as director.

  Lynch wanted to shoot The Elephant Man, like Eraserhead, in black and white. “You guys know I love black and white,” Brooks reassured the director and producer. “We shot Young Frankenstein in black and white and it was my best photographed film.”

  However, the black-and-white photography had to be approved by Fred Silverman, the president of NBC. Brooks had the shrewd idea of financing The Elephant Man through a television “prebuy” on later broadcast airings, and to that end he made an appointment with Silverman, now the head of the network where Brooks was best known and had started out in the business. Brooks walked in carrying a life-size bust of the Elephant Man, planting it on Silverman’s desk. Silverman was sold, and he wasn’t fazed by their insistence on shooting the picture in arty black and white. “All movies are in color today,” Silverman explained. “Doing it in black and white will make it special.”

  NBC offered Brooksfilms $4 million for the picture, and Alan U. Schwartz then “concluded a deal with one of his foreign clients, EMI films, to sell the foreign rights to the film with an additional guarantee of $1.2 million,” in Sanger’s words, “which we could discount at a bank and get more cash [as] needed to make the film.” The only hitch: Silverman wanted to have “a Mel Brooks comedy special” in NBC’s future. “Mel agreed in principle to do a special, but with fees and timing to be negotiated later.”

  With Brooksfilms wholly owning The Elephant Man, 20th Century–Fox, under Dennis Stanfill, was unlikely to be interested in even distributing the film. So Brooks took the now fully bankrolled project to Paramount and Universal, two studios where he knew the executives would fly out from behind their desks to greet him; the higher-ups were akin to the button-down talk-show men, happy to have their dull days enlivened by Brooks. He aimed to pit Paramount and Universal against each other in the bidding for “a strong domestic distribution deal,” Sanger said, keeping the foreign rights separate. “He was determined to split the rights between domestic and foreign because he did not want the film [to] be cross-collateralized between territories. This was often how it worked on films where studios owned all rights. A film m
ight make money in one territory, say the U.S., but lose money in another territory. The studio could then write off the loss against the gain and the filmmakers might get nothing. Mel wanted none of that.”

  Brooks prided himself on his “strong relationships” with Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, the first in command and his lieutenant at Paramount. He sent the script ahead and booked a powwow on the top floor of the executive building on the Paramount lot. Accompanying him and letting Brooks do most of the talking, Sanger observed Brooks at the top of his form, playing poker with a stone face, “no hat in hand,” as though he were holding an unseen card. “Mike, remember,” Brooks told Eisner, “we’re only interested in a domestic distribution deal. We’re not selling the picture.”

  The Paramount honchos were clearly intrigued by The Elephant Man, but they had one off-putting suggestion. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker had taken a leave of absence from her film-review column and was now employed by the studio, reading scripts and inputting on projects. She was a fan of Eraserhead. Could she meet with David Lynch?

  Brooks didn’t blink during the meeting, but in the car returning to 20th Century–Fox, Sanger asked him what he thought of the request that Lynch meet Kael. “Oh, I don’t know,” said Brooks. “We’ll put that meeting off. I don’t really think we need to have David meet with a ‘cricket.’”

  Off the two went, on another day, to Universal. In the end both studios submitted “reasonable” distribution offers, albeit both were inclined toward a “not very high print and advertising investment.” All monies would go to Brooksfilms out of “their percentage of the gross from the box office after the exhibitors take their cut,” in Sanger’s words. Paramount wanted to keep fifteen percent of the gross until the film reached $20 million, then twenty percent from $20 million to $25 million, and twenty-five percent after $25 million for as long as the film had revenue. The balance of the gross would go to Brooksfilms. Universal countered with twenty-five percent until the film grossed $20 million, twenty percent from $20 million to $25 million, and fifteen percent after $25 million.

  Talking it over with Brooks and Alan U. Schwartz (“our point man on these deals and he did about as well as he could”), comparing the two offers, Sanger believed it was a no-brainer: “If the film was a big hit, we’d make more money with Universal,” he thought.

  Brooks surprised them with his brainier decision: “Let’s go with Paramount.”

  “Why?” asked Sanger.

  “Because they’ll chase the money.”

  Observing his bewilderment, Brooks explained. “Look,” Brooks said, “at Universal, they make less the longer the movie runs so they have no incentive to chase the grosses, while Paramount is giving us a bigger taste earlier and then will push for higher grosses because they stand to make more in the long run. I like that way of thinking.”

  Paramount acquired the distribution of The Elephant Man. Pauline Kael, the “cricket,” never met with Lynch. And Brooks had only pretended enthusiasm for doing a television special for NBC. Still, in a clever way, that trade-off “was a safety valve for [Fred] Silverman, if the movie failed,” according to Sanger. “As it turned out, Silverman left NBC before the movie was delivered to the network and Mel never did have to do the comedy special.”

  David Lynch wanted to join in the script conferences with Brooks, Christopher De Vore, and Eric Bergren. “David and the boys,” as Brooks called them, congregated in his office along with Sanger, shortly after the producer’s first trip to London to begin hiring personnel and plan the filming. “Chris was the brooding soul of the work,” said Sanger. “Eric kept the spine in place and David brought a new, visual spark to the writing.”

  What role did Brooks play? Sanger hoped he’d “allow us the same freedom that took place in the comedy writers’ room” when Club Brooks had written High Anxiety.

  More than once that writers’ room had reminded Sanger of a James Agee essay entitled “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” “In that piece,” the producer reflected, “Agee described the working methods of Mack Sennett’s writers. They would often bring in a ‘wild man’ whose job it was to come up with crazy situations for the others to take off from. He acted as the group’s subconscious mind. In Mel’s comedies, each writer might take a turn as the wild man, but Mel himself tended to allow the irrational to surface the most.”

  Brooks introduced the very first script conference with “a simple analysis of the heart of the story,” Sanger recalled. “This is Pinocchio,” Brooks told the assemblage. “It’s about a lost boy—Merrick. Treves is Geppetto. He loves him and wants him back.”

  Brooks said he wanted the scenarists to go to work writing fearlessly and return to his office once a week, reading aloud their pages for his feedback and group discussion.

  For several weeks, that MO worked relatively smoothly. “David and the boys would come to Mel’s office and we would read the new pages out loud,” Sanger recalled. “Mel would listen and make a few comments and we’d be good for another week.”

  But sometimes “Mel would make comments that none of us agreed with,” Sanger wrote, and they’d go back to their respective offices at 20th Century–Fox and scratch their heads.

  “What are we going to do?” the others would ask Sanger. “We can’t follow all those suggestions. Some are just crazy.” Sanger would say, “Listen, I’ve seen this before. He’s just tossing out all kinds of ideas. Many are good, some are not. If we challenge him he’ll defend each idea with his life. Let’s just hear what he has to say and come back here afterward. We’ll act on the ideas we really like and just forget the other ones.

  “I bet you he never mentions them again.”

  The casting moved ahead simultaneously. John Hurt as the Elephant Man and Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Treves met with Brooks’s quick approval. (“Mel felt that Hopkins was one of the best actors in the world,” explained Sanger. “It didn’t hurt that Mel’s wife, Anne Bancroft, adored working with Hopkins in Young Winston a few years earlier.”)

  Calling Sanger and Lynch in one day, Brooks “seemed uncomfortable. But in his inimitable style he jumped right in,” Sanger recalled. Brooks always used his wife’s full name when referring to her in professional situations. “Anne Bancroft” had read the script, Brooks said, and the four-time Oscar nominee was interested in the part of Dame Madge Kendal, a famous English actress of the era who had befriended Joseph Merrick. “This is neither a request nor a suggestion, just information,” he said. “It’s entirely your choice.”

  Lynch, who admired Bancroft, and Sanger, who as production manager had just finished working with her on the filming of Fatso, were delighted. “It was really a great coup for us to get her,” said Sanger. “She was a great actress and a valuable name and someone I knew.”

  Although the reviews were generous to Dom DeLuise, critics were unduly cruel to the uneven Fatso as a whole. Anne Bancroft’s first directorial effort, which was completed before The Elephant Man and became the maiden Brooksfilms release in February 1980, was weighed down by “not particularly funny material to begin with,” Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, in addition to Bancroft’s “ambiguous” approach to potentially comic scenes and poor camera choices. “Sentimental” and “unfocused,” Janet Maslin agreed in the New York Times. “Bumbling” and “sluggish,” Variety pronounced. Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic asked, “What in the world persuaded financiers to back this picture?”

  Fatso did not have a national distribution deal, and the film had only a limited release in US theaters before sinking like a stone. Bancroft’s directing debut cured the actress of her ambition to direct. Later in the decade, she told Films and Filming that she had loathed the experience and would prefer to forget the onetime experiment. More than once Brooks told interviewers he was proud of Fatso, “a beautiful film” and underrated.

  The Elephant Man held its premiere in October in New York City, and the vast majority of critics who saw it there and everywhere else were roused to superla
tives. Considering that it was a black-and-white period drama set in London, revolving around a hideously deformed man who wears a cloth sack over his head, the film became an unexpected “giant hit,” in Brooks’s words. Its US grosses alone amounted to $26 million, but the film did well internationally and eventually returned $70 million, according to estimates. And unlike Fatso, The Elephant Man would have a future life in television, cable, and video. Even John Morris’s score sold extremely well for a nonpop soundtrack.

  Brooks, in interviews both then and later, was coy about his contribution, often saying “I very skillfully hid my name when I created Brooksfilms,” other times pointedly mentioning his uncredited contribution to the script and other aspects of the production.

  Actually, there were three Brooksfilms titles in 1980. The surreptitious third was a lampoon of movie trailers called Loose Shoes, aka Coming Attractions, which was directed by Ira Miller, a former Second City improv comic from Chicago turned bit actor in Hollywood. Miller appears in an eye blink in many Mel Brooks comedies, including Blazing Saddles, When Things Are Rotten, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I, Spaceballs, Life Stinks, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

  Loose Shoes was a mélange of comedy sketches, musical performances, and satirical film clips with a cast that included Buddy Hackett, Avery Schreiber, Kinky Friedman, and Van Dyke Parks. Brooks may have contributed to the skits, which feature, among other setups, men farting in submarines; and he and another Club Caesarite were referenced in the trailers, which proclaimed, “Here’s a movie that makes Mel Brooks’ humor seem sophisticated, Woody Allen’s statuesque!” With graphic nudity, which Brooks avoided in his own films (tits, one critic wrote of his fare, were “oft-mentioned, never seen”), and the snappy theme song “Black Pussy, Loose Shoes, and a Warm Place to Shit,” Loose Shoes made Blazing Saddles seem like a Sunday sermon.