Everyone in Club Caesar knew that to be dubious, and legions of Flynn fans have tried in vain to fact-check Brooks’s boast. “The truth of the matter,” said Norman Steinberg with a sigh, “is Errol Flynn was never on Your Show of Shows. It was Basil Rathbone on Your Show of Shows. Once the film was made, as far as Mel is concerned, the story becomes Mel and Errol Flynn have gone to the Waldorf with two Cuban girls—okay, fine. I don’t want to refute those things. I don’t want to say it’s bullshit.”
Despite its R rating, History of the World, Part I continued the downward slide of box-office receipts and reviews for the three 20th Century–Fox comedies of Brooks’s that followed Young Frankenstein. Under pressure to reverse the trend and innovate, Brooks revived the idea of a remake of an Ernst Lubitsch gem, To Be or Not to Be, with his wife, Anne Bancroft, as costar.
Seven years had gone by since 1975, when the remake had been initiated and abandoned after James Kirkwood, Jr., had written a draft of the script. The original producer, Bancroft’s high school friend David Lunney, had quit the American Film Institute and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he was running the Oregon Repertory Theatre.
20th Century–Fox would have been happier about its revenue from Brooks’s comedies if not for deepening inflation, the escalating budgets of his vehicles, and his steep contract sweeteners. By hosting Brooks on its lot, the studio was also helping to support the “serious” Brooksfilms productions, but the most prestigious ones were being parceled out to other studios. Wouldn’t remaking a vintage sophisticated comedy anointed by the Lubitsch touch, with Brooks costarring with his wife, an Oscar-winning actress, be one way of wedding the superserious Brooksfilms productions with the wacky Mel Brooks comedies?
By early 1982, Brooks and 20th Century–Fox had agreed on parameters, and the “Re-Do of Ernst Lubitsch” was announced in the trades. The “Re-Do” would stick to the time frame and setting of the original: Poland before and during the Nazi invasion and occupation, from August 1939 to September 1941. While the original film had been photographed in black and white, the “Re-Do” would be made in color. “Brooks will essay the role that Jack Benny originated as a hammy matinee idol with a penchant for playing Hamlet,” Variety reported. Bancroft would portray his wife, the lead actress of his troupe, who flirts with a handsome Polish officer in the audience. “After the invasion, the stock company upsets German officers and Gestapo with various impersonations, including one of Hitler.”
The most eye-opening detail about the “Re-Do,” which was promised in time for Christmas 1983, was that Brooks would neither write nor direct. Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan were going to team up as the scenarists, and Brooks’s longtime choreographer Alan Johnson would sit in the director’s chair. 20th Century–Fox would bankroll and distribute the film worldwide, although the announcement said little more about the financial details, suggesting that Brooks had backed away from demanding additional foreign or ancillary market shares.
Brooks did not want Robert Towne or James Kirkwood. He needed “his boys,” a new Club Brooks. His longtime friend Ronny Graham had spent a decade in a professional Siberia of his own devising after his first career triumphs. The multifaceted performer had notoriously served months in jail in 1967–1968 for nonpayment of alimony. The hard years had taken a toll on his looks; now he was best described as “a handsome gargoyle,” in Brooks’s words. (“Often inept in life,” Brooks later eulogized his friend, “but always ept in art.”) Graham had rebounded as a writer for TV’s M*A*S*H, and he would bring to the job the old camaraderie, a musical knack, and a lunacy to match the boss’s.
As for Thomas Meehan, he had haunted the periphery of Club Brooks for years, while working often with Martin Charnin in television and on Broadway. A native of Ossining, New York, the rare Catholic among Brooks’s pool of Jewish writers, Meehan had graduated from Hamilton College and done a stint in the army, afterward taking an editorial job at The New Yorker. There he had written short pieces, including “Yma Dream” in 1962, which later became Bancroft’s funniest monologue in “Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man.” In 1977, he had won a Tony for writing the book for Annie. Meehan was a meticulous writer, mild-mannered to a fault, with a sweet temperament that rivaled Graham’s.
Both Graham and Meehan were Brooks contemporaries; like him, they could have seen To Be or Not to Be in its first release. Neither had scripted a film before. They faced a daunting task: the 1942 comedy, with its original story by Melchior Lengyel and script by Edwin Justus Mayer, was admired as one of Lubitsch’s best and bravest. It mingled, during World War II, anti-Nazi fervor, tightrope suspense, and sparkling humor.
According to Meehan, Brooks regarded the Lubitsch classic as “slightly dated.” The writers spent the first few days debating a modernized title, which Brooks favored, but they ultimately couldn’t agree on a viable alternative. To Be or Not to Be would be less applicable to the remake because Brooks wanted to substitute a vaudeville-style troupe for the dramatic repertory company in the Lubitsch version, in order to have musical numbers and openings for his “off-the-wall zaniness,” in Meehan’s words. In the “Re-Do,” Brooks’s character, Frederick Bronski (“world famous in Poland”), would perform only “highlights from Shakespeare” as a break from the vaudeville material or, as things would transpire in the new script, as a forced substitution for Nazi-censored fare.
One significant departure was how Hitler himself would be depicted in the remake. In Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, the real Hitler is glimpsed twice from behind: once entering the theater for the climactic play within the film and once in his box. Meanwhile, a faux Hitler prepares himself; one of the lesser repertory players has courageously volunteered to imitate the Führer to facilitate the troupe’s flight to England. That player—Greenberg in the original, Lupinsky in the “Re-Do”—is clearly Jewish in Lubitsch’s comedy, although his ethnicity is never stated; his role playing bars his own escape. His Hitler masquerade is among the original film’s nail-biting moments.
But Brooks was “obsessed with ridiculing Hitler throughout his career,” Meehan wrote later, and he wanted his character, Bronski, to impersonate Hitler—first in the silly song-and-dance number “Naughty Nazis,” which comes early in the film and helps set the broader tone of the “Re-Do.” Later, because audiences already know that Bronski likes to imitate Hitler, the number has the effect of dulling the plot turn of Bronski/Brooks substituting for the lesser player and posing as the real Hitler at the height of danger.
Another major change was the prominent gay character created as a symbol, in the remake, for the many homosexual victims of Nazi oppression. (Unlike the original, the film made explicit mention of Jewish victims, some of whom are hidden in the theater basement until the final escape.) Critics had singled out the many, often tin-eared, “fag” jokes that had cropped up in Club Brooks comedies following Young Frankenstein. In High Anxiety, for instance, the dapper Dr. Thorndyke (Brooks) attracts same-sex attention instantly upon his arrival at the Los Angeles International Airport after the opening credits. Thorndyke is lured into the men’s room by a handsome stranger who promptly exposes himself, asking plaintively, “You find me attractive?” This, in the world of Mel Brooks, demonstrated, not very humorously, how “fags” expressed their crushes.*
Perhaps because first-time director Alan Johnson was openly homosexual, the Graham/Meehan script introduced a swishy backstage dresser named Sasha, whose job it is to faithfully attend Anna Bronski (Anne Bancroft’s character) and facilitate her love affairs. (The character was a matronly type in the original Lubitsch comedy.) When Sasha comes under Nazi scrutiny, he is forced to wear a humiliating and self-incriminating pink triangle—the equivalent of the yellow star forced on Jews. The character suggested amends for earlier Brooks comedies with debatable “fag” humor while illuminating the neglected plight of gay people under the Third Reich.
How extensively the script renovations departed from the Lengyel/Mayer original became another one of those
murky writing controversies that has clung to Brooks throughout his career. Meehan later insisted that although the screenplay adhered to “Mayer’s scene-by-scene construction of the movie’s intricate plot,” their new version used “at most perhaps only a total of five pages of dialogue from the earlier script.” Not everyone saw it that way.
Vincent Canby, for example, praised the Brooks version as an “exuberant delight” in his review in the New York Times, yet he expressed dismay that so much of the screenplay had been “lifted directly” from the Lubitsch film, while Mayer, Lengyel, and even Lubitsch himself were mentioned only in small type in the end credits, their names trailing after those of the last of the cast. In publicity and interviews, Brooks stubbornly insisted that his To Be or Not to Be was not really a “Re-Do” any more than when the male star of any generation (i.e., him) took on Hamlet. “That’s true,” returned Canby, “but when each great star of a succeeding generation does Hamlet, Hamlet doesn’t have a new author.”
Incidentally, David Lunney was not involved in development of the Meehan/Graham script; nor did he or his partner, William Allyn, have anything to do with the remake they had set into motion. One day Brooks himself phoned Lunney in Oregon to discuss the awkward fact that he and Allyn were still the producers of record. The producing partners had given legal notice to Brooks that hiring his own team of writers and moving ahead without their involvement violated the contract they had with him dating back to 1975, whereby the parties had agreed to jointly produce a new version of To Be or Not to Be, sharing the creative decisions and financial rewards with guaranteed producer credits.
Lunney no longer had any interest in Hollywood and no longer cared about producing films, but he and Allyn were owed fees as part of their pay-or-play contract, meaning that their money was guaranteed if To Be or Not to Be proceeded without them through no fault of their own. Brooks phoned repeatedly. “Mel kept trying to convince me to take far less money than we were contractually owed,” Lunney recalled. “He was trying to schmooze me down. I said a firm no.” The partners were forced to file suit for their money, and Brooks countersued; then he phoned some more, always keeping a friendly tone with his wife’s ex–high school friend, still trying to schmooze him down. “I said, ‘Mel, why don’t you just pay it? It’s costing us lawyers. It’s costing you money to do this.’”
Business was business, Brooks always replied. Lawyers eventually settled the case out of court, with Lunney and his partner receiving their original promised sums without diminution. A slice of the money did go to their lawyers, as Lunney had predicted. Eventually he saw the remake in a Portland theater, with his negotiated credit trailing after Mayer, Lengyel, and Lubitsch’s: “Production Suggested by William Allyn and David Lunney.”
Brooks took no writing credit but supervised Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan. The screenplay and the actors were ready for action by the end of January 1983.
As with My Favorite Year, it was a script that called more for trained players than for self-starting comedians. Brooks rounded up a capable ensemble: his movie-star friend from Sid Caesar days, José Ferrer, was engaged to play the duplicitous Professor Siletski; Charles Durning was cast as the irrepressible heavy Colonel Erhardt (“So they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt!”); James Haake, who had a career sideline as a female impersonator, signed on for Sasha, the swishy backstage dresser; and the clean-cut Tim Matheson got the role of the amorous aviator Lieutenant Andrei Sobinski. (Among Sobinski’s physical attributes, Anna Bronski muses, is that he’s tall—unlike her husband.)
In Club Brooks tradition, Ronny Graham would play the beleaguered stage manager named Sondheim (“Sondheim, send in the clowns!”).* The camera would also linger lovingly on eleven-year-old Max Brooks in a small part, playing one of the Jewish refugees hiding in the theater basement who must be rescued at the film’s climax.
The production was shaped as a showcase for the Brooks family. The married stars were as famous in real-life America as the Bronskis were in the fictionalized Poland of 1939. The Brookses had never shared billing as equals. Their billing became a running joke in the film, carried through in the perfect touch of the traditional curtain call with all the key performers taking bows onstage at the end of the film. (Brooks had reportedly shot a similar curtain call for Young Frankenstein but cut it.) Bancroft, everyone realized by now, could perform comedy with abandon and sing and dance as though it were second nature. Her Polish-language duet with Brooks, “Sweet Georgia Brown”—which Bancroft had also danced to with Dom DeLuise in Fatso—was a delight.
Jack Benny had distinguished himself with his lead performance in the Lubitsch version. Benny had inhabited his part superbly, absorbing his own mild-mannered, ironic persona into the character of Josef Tura, as Bronski was called in the original film. Exasperated at every obstacle his character must overcome—the dalliances of his wife are almost as upsetting as the Nazis—Benny never lost sight of the underlying gravity.
Though many of Bronski’s scenes replicated scenes from the original, others, such as the Brooks–Ronny Graham frolic with showgirls entitled “Ladies,” were devised to showcase Brooks’s zanier persona. Yet Brooks felt the pressure to measure up to Benny’s greatness in the role, and Benny’s ghost haunted Brooks as much as the ghost of Lubitsch did.
How much director Alan Johnson had to do with the script or the casting is conjecture. How much sway the first-time director had over the camera moves or Brooks’s performance is hard to calculate. Brooks was omnipresent during filming, just as he had promised 20th Century–Fox. Adding to his stress, he was suffering from dental bridge problems and more than once interrupted takes to rush to a dentist in his Hitler costume.
“It was a very strange period for me,” Johnson told Bancroft biographer Douglass K. Daniel in a rare interview about Brooks and To Be or Not to Be. “Because it was Mel’s movie. I’d stage something, a little bit of a scene, and he’d see it and say, ‘No, no. That’s terrible. Go look at the original movie . . .’ He was just hateful and a little crazed.”
The dilemma for Brooks was that he wanted to stay true to the original Lubitsch film yet put his own stamp on the material. Second-guessing the staging was one symptom of that conflict. His acting insecurity led to demanding multiple takes of his own scenes.
Johnson found Bancroft “very supportive [of Brooks]. She was on the set all the time with him, even when she wasn’t called. [Once] I was sitting next to her on the set. They were doing a take with Mel . . . they were setting [it] up and [someone] said, ‘OK, take nineteen.’ And she went, ‘Jesus, nineteen! How come I get two and he gets nineteen?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know what you’re doing.’ But he hated to let go of what he did. He always felt he could do it better. And so there were endless counts of takes for him.”
On- and off-camera, however, Brooks reverted to the rude, hyperbolic personality who when under extreme pressure found fault with other people, never with himself. He trained much of his ire on Lewis J. Stadlen, the Brooklyn-born, Sanford Meisner– and Stella Adler–trained character actor who was portraying Lupinsky, “the role of a Jewish spear-carrier,” in Stadlen’s words, a spear carrier who aspired to play Shylock. Lupinsky was supposed to recite Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech twice, according to the script, off the cuff and somewhat wistfully the first time, and then later in the film courageously, in front of German soldiers, risking his life to save the troupe. As Greenberg, Felix Bressart had made the speech truly memorable in the Lubitsch version.
The script for the remake used the word “Jew,” which was Shakespeare’s language verbatim, whereas the original Lubitsch comedy, which had had to cope with that era’s censorship and taboos, substituted the word “we,” referring more broadly to human beings and the anti-Nazi resistance. Brooks wanted the word “Jew” emphasized, and he fixated on Stadlen’s line readings. “Mel just put him through hell,” Johnson recalled.
Before Stadlen’s audition, Brooks had been among his major idols. (�
�I could repeat from memory most of his dialogue from his first film, The Producers, as well as his 2000 and 2001 Year Old Man albums.”) Flown to Hollywood, Stadlen was borne by limousine to the 20th Century–Fox lot and escorted into a large room, where he was seated facing Brooks with “a hundred other people crowded behind him.” There is no mention of Alan Johnson in this anecdote, but “sitting at Mel’s feet was the majestic Anne Bancroft.”
Stadlen recalled, “Something about Mel has always reminded me of a street tough trying to escape the body of an elderly Jewish woman. It’s like he’s holding a knife to your throat and demanding that you eat chicken soup. After I’d auditioned every scene the character [Lupinsky] had in the film, Mel looked as if he’d eaten a bad clam. ‘I can’t make up my mind!’ he barked.” Brooks hastily added, “Listen, go back to where you came from, and I’ll have to think about this, because I can’t make up my mind.”
Hoping to win his idol over and avoid another round-trip to the West Coast, Stadlen made a joke: “Listen, Mel, I think I’m uniquely qualified to play this part because even when I eat my eggs in the morning, I do it with a Holocaust sensibility.”
That got a laugh from everybody in the room, except Brooks, who “glared back at me as if my very presence in the room was undermining his confidence in the Jewish people.” Stadlen quickly followed up with a line from The Producers: “If you want me to play this part, all you have to do is ask me!” Again laughter from the room, but not from Brooks, who was still glaring; a silence ensued, then he yelled, “Wait a minute, that’s my line! You just stole my line!”
“Yes,” said Bancroft quietly.
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