Yates, paid $100,000 and low net points on a film that probably never turned a profit, was credited as “coproducer” and never had any credit on another Hollywood picture. Sanger, in his memoir Making the Elephant Man, states without elaboration that he “brought” Frances to Brooks as a project. He doesn’t mention Arnold or the lawsuit.
Chapter 14
1983
Why So Angry?
Brooks could supervise Brooksfilms productions with his left hand (“I spend about 30 per cent of my time on Brooksfilms,” he told an interviewer) while making Mel Brooks comedies with his right. The Brooksfilms projects were more of a hobby, while the filmography of his comedies was going to be etched on his gravestone, like John Carradine’s credits on the door to his office in the scene from Blazing Saddles that was never shot.
Brooks was the decider in chief. Only he could say yes to producing any particular film under the company banner. He oversaw the subjects and scripts, the major casting, the choice of director, and, almost always, he got involved in the editing and scoring of the Brooksfilms productions. He was capable of inserting himself into the production process at any stage, and then, although not always, he was capable of shrewd decision making.
The Brooksfilms non-comedies were touted as the bleak antitheses of Brooks’s comedies. An adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby to star Howard Rollins; a film of the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Marsha Norman’s novel The Fortune Teller; an adaptation of John Fante’s Depression-era Ask the Dust; a partnership with the Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven to chronicle the life of “Jesus the Man,” based on the research “of the New Testament scholars who vote on the authenticity of sayings attributed to Christ”; a collaboration with the South African playwright Athol Fugard on “an epic film about apartheid”—those were among the wishful Brooksfilms projects announced, explored, never actualized.
Occasionally Brooks himself considered directing a serious, dramatic Brooksfilms project, and he almost did just that in the case of the same folktale that had inspired the farcical television series When Things Were Rotten. Quietly, in the early 1980s, he commissioned an earnest film, mixed with a little humor—not much—about Robin Hood.
He did not pay for many screenplays without filming them, but in this instance he hired Clive Exton to script an account of Robin and his band of merry men and their exploits in Sherwood Forest. Unlike most first-time writers associated with Brooksfilms, Exton boasted BBC credits and top-notch big-screen dramas, including a version of Emlyn Williams’s psychological thriller Night Must Fall with Albert Finney and 10 Rillington Place about the British serial killer John Christie. In 1982, Exton was paid handsomely for a foundational draft called “Robin Hood.” Brooks planned to add in some comedy later (Marty Feldman and Spike Milligan were rumored to be joining the cast).
There was no part in Exton’s script for Brooks to play, however; he was going to stay behind the camera—the first time since Young Frankenstein. Furthermore, Brooks was intending to direct the Robin Hood drama/comedy in England, which had always been a dream of his: to direct an English picture entirely on English soil.
20th Century–Fox was not interested, however, largely because Brooks, continuing the trend of his contract negotiations, wanted a bigger cut for himself of certain foreign markets, beginning with England itself. So in Mel-on-a-mission style he took the idea across town to Columbia Pictures. But Columbia also harbored doubts about a “Robin Hood” drama with Brooks directing—without his comedic presence on the screen—so for the first time Brooks sought public sector financing to ameliorate the budget. The Wall Street firm of D. H. Blair & Co. was recruited to raise the $8 million that was considered necessary. Columbia would control the world rights, but Brooks would get the percentages 20th Century–Fox had balked at conceding. Be that as it may, the deal remained too daring for both Columbia and Wall Street, and the serious “Robin Hood” was shelved after months of effort. Brooks could have fought harder, he could have done the film cheaper without his preferred financial guarantees, but he didn’t care to take the risks, and, as was true for much of his career, he’d get paid better for an easier path with his characteristic comedy.
During this busy time of producing, which coincided with his court performance in the Frances lawsuit, Brooks probably worked hardest on the script for another Brooksfilms production that was going to be directed by someone else. Yet it was the rare Brooksfilms production that was also a comedy and, curiously, the most autobiographical film he’d ever make, the type of which he’d attempted only once before with “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud.”
My Favorite Year began in 1979 when Dennis Palumbo, a writer of television sitcoms, pitched a script to Michael Gruskoff about Wyatt Earp going to New York at the turn of the century in order to promote his memoir. The story revolved around the relationship between Earp and a young publicist designated to keep the lawman sober. Gruskoff thought the idea was doomed by its period setting, and he encouraged Palumbo to develop a similar yarn about a wayward movie star who must be babysat by a young comedy writer during his guest appearance on a Your Show of Shows–type variety series. Absent from Brooks’s circle since Young Frankenstein, during which time he had produced other motion pictures, including Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins and Lucky Lady, Gruskoff molded the idea for Brooks, seeing it as a chapter torn from the comedian’s life.
Brooks huddled with Palumbo, trying to inject his concepts into the script drafts. The fading movie star became Errol Flynn, and the working title became “In like Flynn.” But Palumbo and Brooks never enjoyed any chemistry. Palumbo resisted Brooks’s pet notions, and his drafts disappointed the boss; partly, according to Brooksfilms sources, because Palumbo hailed from Pittsburgh and the pivotal Brooks character, a junior writer who is assigned to manage the hard-living movie star, came from the Bronx in Palumbo’s drafts. Palumbo stubbornly refused to make the kid from Brooklyn. Palumbo was too Pittsburgh, Brooks didn’t care for the Bronx, and Palumbo didn’t know Brooklyn.
Brooks ended up phoning Norman Steinberg, another member of Club Brooks, who had been out of the loop since When Things Were Rotten had gone off the air in 1975. Steinberg had turned down several writing jobs from Brooks in the intervening years, feeling ill suited to the projects on offer. But he had batted two for two with Brooks as part of the Blazing Saddles writing team and as producer of the Robin Hood television comedy series; the friends felt they were good-luck charms for each other. Also, Steinberg’s writing evinced the warmth and sweetness that “In like Flynn” needed.
Brooks pitched the story excitedly in his salesman mode (“Mel Brooks meets Errol Flynn on Your Show of Shows!”), pointing out the inadequacies of Palumbo’s drafts and the long road ahead. A fan of Your Show of Shows, Steinberg was instantly hooked.
“Norman,” finished Brooks, “I need you very badly, but I can’t pay you enough.”
“Can’t or won’t?” asked Steinberg, knowing his man.
A long pause followed before Brooks replied, “One of those two.”
Steinberg, who never cared enough about the money, said yes: “I’ll do it for whatever you want to pay me.” But the writer had a couple of nonfinancial stipulations: he did not want to forgo his writing credit this time; nor did he want to share the credit with a long scroll of other people. And he especially did not want to share the writing credit with Brooks, whose name had automatically come to overshadow everyone else’s.
Steinberg could not do anything about Palumbo, who was guaranteed his “original story” credit and, because Palumbo had written several drafts, a cocredit on the screenplay. But Steinberg wanted to see his name first in the script credits, before Palumbo’s, just the two of them with no one else’s name on the screen. Not even Brooks’s.
Swallowing hard, Brooks said yes.
The other proviso was, if anything, even harder for him to accept.
“I’m not going to write you into the story as the young comedy writer,” Steinberg
told Brooks.
“Why?” Brooks demanded.
“Because you’re too abrasive. I’m going to write myself.”
Another long pause. “Okay,” Brooks said with a sigh, “go ahead.”
Steinberg quietly put in a few years of work, consulting with Brooks and writing multiple drafts. The Brooks character became Benjy Stone, who has changed his name from the too-obviously-Jewish Benjamin Steinberg (as in Norman Steinberg) to join the American melting pot. Stone narrates the story, reminiscing about his favorite year: 1954. That was the year the youngest writer on a hit network show known as “Comedy Cavalcade” was called upon to superintend an aging, hell-raising movie star. Steinberg also changed the star: no longer the real-life Errol Flynn, now the fictional Alan Swann.
The Sid Caesar character was also sculpted into Stan “King” Kaiser, who reigns dictatorially over “Comedy Cavalcade.” Other good parts were fashioned for an ingenue in the form of K. C. Downing, the chief assistant to the Max Liebman stand-in, and Belle Carroca, to be played by an older actress, the overbearingly Jewish (despite her own exotic name change) mother of Benjy Stone. There was also a beleaguered writers’ room with a tower-of-Jell-O head writer, a Lucille Kallen type, and a Neil Simon–like whisperer.
In the story line Stone haplessly woos Downing; and he accompanies Swann to Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway—which echoed Brooks’s own past, near where he had once lived—for a boisterous dinner with Stone’s mother surrounded by starstruck relatives and neighbors.
Steinberg wrote the screenplay “totally alone,” he said, but Brooks made himself constantly available for input and Your Show of Shows reminiscences. “I had Mel’s editorial help,” Steinberg remembered, “and he’s a great editor, and a great, great story confrere. We worked together a lot, I saw him a lot during that time, and I loved being with him.”
The script had glints of Brooks: nods to Buicks, Chinese food, and Al Jolson. (Benjy Stone admires the same comedy pantheon as Brooks: the Marx Brothers “except for Zeppo,” the Ritz Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy; however, Steinberg added one for the laugh: Woody Woodpecker.) Yet the script was also as different as night and day from other Mel Brooks comedies. There was chronological continuity. Characters breathed humanity and had emotional arcs. The humor was farcical, but the only F-word was “humping.”
Brooks took the package to MGM, where his onetime agent David Begelman, rebounding from his embezzlement scandal at Columbia Pictures, was now ensconced as president and CEO. The script was ready for location work in New York in October 1981, with Brooks okaying actor Richard Benjamin—best known as a droll comedic presence in such films as Goodbye, Columbus, Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Portnoy’s Complaint—as the first-time director. Benjamin could rely on cameraman Gerald Hirschfeld, who’d shot Goodbye, Columbus, Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Young Frankenstein for Brooks.
After trying for Albert Finney, once more in vain, Brooks snared another of the consummate English actors he worshipped, Peter O’Toole of Lawrence of Arabia, to play Swann. (O’Toole richly deserved his subsequent Oscar nomination.) Actor-writer Joseph Bologna, whose wife, Renée Taylor, had played Eva Braun in The Producers and who had appeared in a failed sitcom pilot with Taylor produced by Brooks in 1971, made King Kaiser almost as watchable as Sid Caesar. The eventual screen credits said that the film was “introducing” Mark Linn-Baker as Stone, because his debut in Woody Allen’s Manhattan had been left mostly on the cutting room floor. A Yale School of Drama MFA graduate, Linn-Baker had the required puppy face and boyish likability.*
Jessica Harper would be fetching as K. C. Downing, and Lainie Kazan put all of her pizzazz into Jewish mother Belle Carroca. Bill Macy was the pompous head writer, Anne De Salvo and (the whisperer) Basil Hoffman were his colleagues. Other solid parts went to veteran Cameron Mitchell as a labor racketeer objecting to King Kaiser’s merciless impersonation of him on television; lyricist Adolph Green as the Max Liebman–ish Leo Silver; and Club Caesar member Selma Diamond as a wisecracking wardrobe mistress.
As was customary on Brooksfilms productions, the namesake stayed out of the way during the filming. He was usually more active in pre- and postproduction. Producer Stuart Cornfeld told a story about the time they had shown a first cut of The Elephant Man to Paramount executives. Soon after, Brooks had gotten a call from studio officials with their comments, which began with not liking the beginning or the ending—“too oblique.” Brooks replied slowly, his voice rising in volume. “We showed you the cut,” he said, “because we are involved in a business deal and we wanted to bring you up to date on the progress of the product we’re working on. Don’t misconstrue that as soliciting the input of raging primitives!” Then he slammed down the phone. “Mel at his best,” Cornfeld recalled.
Brooksfilms productions were modestly budgeted on principle, and director Richard Benjamin recalled how Mel went commando one day when he had discovered that the film needed more money to accommodate the schedule. Benjamin asked Brooks to make an appointment with David Begelman in his MGM office. “No, no, we can’t go into an office,” Brooks told Benjamin. “You go into an office, you don’t get anything. They take phone calls, they don’t pay attention, they [have to] go to another meeting.” Brooks said they would ambush Begelman in the hallway at lunchtime, not before lunch, when he’d be hungry, but after “a nice big lunch, we get on him on the way back.” Benjamin said okay. (“I hadn’t heard about this in film school or anywhere else,” Benjamin noted.)
They go to MGM, wait in the corridor. Begelman comes down the hall, Brooks grabs him. “Hi ya, David, how ya doing?” Brooks cracks three or four jokes as they all walk together toward Begelman’s office, with Begelman laughing at the jokes, moving all the time. “Then Mel says to him, just before we hit his office doorway, ‘David, do you got any cash on you?’ He said, ‘Why?’ Mel said, ‘The kid’—that was me—‘the kid here needs $300,000 to finish the picture.’ ‘Really?’ he asks.” Begelman turns to George Justin, the production manager, who is with them in the hallway. “Is that true?” Justin nods. Begelman says, “Alright, give them the money,” and he’s still laughing, and then suddenly “he’s laughing not quite as much, and he has a look on his face like what happened here?—and he’s in his office.” Brooks asks, “Do you need anything else?” Benjamin says, “Uh-uh, not now.” “And he’s gone . . . like Lamont Cranston, the Shadow . . . . He was there and then he was not there. It’s the Mel school of how to make movies.”
Like most of the Brooksfilms productions, My Favorite Year was not expected to be a big moneymaker, and boffo it was not. Yet none, with the exception of The Elephant Man, collected better reviews. Gary Arnold, who had excoriated most of Mel Brooks’s comedies in the Washington Post, acclaimed the film as exuberant and “superlative.” Although she lamented its sentimental streak (referring to the subplot of Swann’s estrangement from his young daughter, raised in Connecticut by his divorced wife), Janet Maslin in the New York Times described My Favorite Year as “occasionally inspired, always snappy, and never less than amusing.” Sheila Benson hailed the comedy as “effervescent” in the Los Angeles Times, while Pauline Kael in The New Yorker said the film bubbled with invention and authentic performances, especially that of the “simply astounding” O’Toole.
One informal group of Brooks skeptics was pleasantly surprised. Club Caesar members noted how the film about Your Show of Shows departed from the reality: Benjy Stone softened Brooks and turned him into a heroic figure, Mel Tolkin complained to Lucille Kallen. Brooks never babysat a drunk, Tolkin pointed out in a letter to Kallen; indeed, his constant clowning, Tolkin thought, might have enabled Caesar’s alcoholism. And the backstage scenes portraying the writing and producing of the TV show were silly. Still, even Tolkin confessed that he found My Favorite Year “in some way, sort of sweet.”
Other compatriots of Sid Caesar, in Hollywood and on the East Coast, in letters, and at social events, said they thought Brooks had done well—this kind of thing he never d
id.
Brooks could be justly proud. In a reflective interview three decades later, he commented on the three major works by different Club Caesar writers that had attempted to reimagine the special alchemy of Your Show of Shows. The first show to touch on the experience was Carl Reiner’s hit television series The Dick Van Dyke Show; the only movie was My Favorite Year; then there was Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor, which came along on Broadway in 1993 with a character, Ira Stone, closely modeled after Brooks, whom Simon’s script describes as “all energy with a touch of madness.”
“Which one came the closest to getting it right?” the interviewer asked.
“None of us,” Brooks quickly replied. “We’re all near misses. No one could get the exact feelings, the rhythms. You can only approximate.”
Brooks went on. “The funniest writers’ room I thought was on The Dick Van Dyke Show, but they were very honest. They didn’t try to exactly approximate the composition of the [Your Show of Shows] room.”
Neil Simon “did the best job in terms of getting the real stuff” about what went on in the writers’ room in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Brooks said.
“I think we were the best at [getting the characterization of] Sid Caesar” and the guest stars such as Alan Swann/Errol Flynn in My Favorite Year, Brooks concluded.
He spoiled it only a little by claiming too much credit for himself, as was his wont, in later interviews. On the Club Caesar reunion panel in front of a Writers Guild audience, he said, “I gave [Norman Steinberg] chapter and verse of everything we did.” And “My mother put on her wedding dress to make kugel and latkes for Sid Caesar.”
Brooks insisted, moreover, that he himself had escorted Errol Flynn around New York back in the day, prepping the aging star for his appearance on Your Show of Shows. “I was locked in the Waldorf Towers with Errol Flynn and two red-headed Cuban sisters,” he insisted. “For three days, I was trying to get them out of there, and he was trying to get me drunk. It was the craziest weekend of my life. I was twenty years old.”
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