Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Privately Brooks thought of himself as the Nice Mel. He referred to himself as a mensch. “I’m such a mensch,” he’d say, “I’m so generous.” “Mel, you’re cheap!” one of the writers on the Club Caesar reunion panel called out once when Brooks went on and on about being such a big tipper in restaurants, “Some of us worked for you!” Brooks called on the testimony of Howard Morris, who was sitting in the audience. “Not very much,” Morris humorously rebuked him. (“A good tipper,” the ever-loyal Carl Reiner chimed in.)

  As Brooks traveled around, “he tried to do mensch-type things at times when he was losing that impression,” recalled Factor. One day, sharing a taxi, Factor had had enough of the mensch self-compliments, and he informed Brooks, “Mel, you’re a lot of things, but you’re not a mensch.” First Brooks got upset. Then he turned blank, sullen.

  The jokes went over better in the broker meetings than the investment package ultimately did. The $1.5 million unit offering was priced at $9 to $11 per unit, which entailed one share and also what is known as a warrant, or a fixed price with an expiration date, on a third of a second share. Brooks would keep 3 million shares of the company, whose net worth was estimated, according to the prospectus, at $45 million. But details in the prospectus showed the stock priced “at a side-splitting 65 times [the] earnings” of Brooksfilms, according to an account in the business journal Forbes. Brooksfilms had reported only $323,000 profit on revenues of $6.5 million in fiscal 1989, reported Forbes, while the top man had collected a $4 million company salary, with other fees and expenses—travel, per diems, etc.—flowing from his myriad contracts.

  “Taxes!” Brooks roared to American Film when asked about the disparity. “Why the hell should I produce revenues and pay taxes on them when I own the company? I took the money and paid it to Mel Brooks to avoid double taxation. By going public, I’m taking a one thousand percent drop in salary. How can I ask the public to invest in a company that produces annual revenues of only $323,000. I mean, that’s ridiculous.”

  A number of experts regarded the Brooksfilms venture as “a vanity offering,” according to American Film, in effect a greedy prospectus that would provide a kind of golden parachute for the director verging on retirement age. The venture gave Brooks all the control and compensation while limiting investors’ rewards. (“I don’t want a single rich man to call me on the phone to tell me his niece had just graduated from drama school,” Brooks told American Film. “The public, the shareholder, won’t do that.”)

  “Comedy is hot today but Brooks may be running out of gas,” Time magazine reported on the venture. “Hollywood insiders say dealmakers have been wary of Brooks.”

  After Oppenheimer dispersed a reported 40 percent of the offering, the stock sales slowed to a halt. Brooks was left with “egg on his face,” reported Forbes.

  Brooks promptly sued Factor’s New York–based public relations firm, seeking $15 million in damages for its failure to perform in a “professional, competent and workmanlike manner.” Factor told Forbes that the suit was Brooks’s “desperate attempt” to evade paying rightful fees and expenses for his company’s “road show,” including limos and meals. “He wanted to scare me,” said Factor. “He was pissed off that the thing never went on and he blamed everything in sight. The last thing he wanted to do was pay expenses.”

  Lawyers took up the dispute. Alan U. Schwartz, who had overseen the language of the failed prospectus, now oversaw the settlement. Brooks paid Factor in full. The next time Brooks saw Factor on a plane, he gave him a bear hug as though nothing had happened. “Classic Mel,” Factor recalled. “Fundamentally I liked the guy. I still like the guy.”

  All of that transpired as Brooks and a new team of writers were crafting his first new big-screen comedy since Spaceballs, the first that was to have been undergirded by the rejected public offering, a story about a rich man who learns that money isn’t everything.

  Four years elapsed between Spaceballs and Life Stinks. Brooks worked on The Nutt House, but he also supervised the Brooksfilms productions that were not his starring vehicles and spared time for extracurricular professional activities, including a notable guest appearance on one episode in the last season of The Tracey Ullman Show, where he played a sleazy producer enticing A-list goddess Ullman into his B picture.

  During that same time period, Alan Ladd, Jr., found himself back in charge of the former MGM studio. Laddie, who had quit MGM/UA in September 1988, resurfaced in February 1989 as head of a new entity, Pathé Communications, which was affiliated with the venerable French film firm of the same name. An Italian business shark named Giancarlo Parretti had taken over Pathé and signed a distribution deal with MGM/UA, then swiftly acquired MGM/UA, forming a parent company, in 1991, renamed MGM-Pathé.*

  When Ladd, Jr., returned to the former MGM lot, now the MGM-Pathé lot, Brooks moved his offices from 20th Century–Fox to Culver City, and Laddie, who had expeditiously approved Spaceballs, just as swiftly okayed Brooks’s plans for an informal “Re-Do” of Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels. The title of the new film: Life Stinks.

  Brooks had often spoken reverently of the celebrated Sturges picture from 1941, in which a successful Hollywood comedy director disguises himself as a hobo to experience hardships that would be grist for his first serious film. Brooks had flirted with the subject of homelessness before, notably in his semiautobiographical “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” script, in which the lead character, divorced and foundering financially, briefly becomes a down-and-outer rousted by police from sleeping on a Central Park bench.

  Ron Clark’s homeless comedy, revolving around a similar reversal of fortune, had sat on the shelf for a decade before Brooks, done with The Nutt House, dusted it off in 1989.

  Oddly, Clark, a friend of the Brookses who had spent most of the ten-plus years after High Anxiety working in television and writing stage plays, did not involve himself further in the planned film. And Spaceballs had proved to be the last hurrah for Ronny Graham, who was undergoing health issues and whose acting and writing career had begun to peter out. Thomas Meehan had decided he was not a movie or Hollywood man and returned to New York to work on long-gestating Broadway musicals; for several years he wrote the annual Tony Award telecasts. A fresh Club Brooks was needed.

  Rudy DeLuca was still in Hollywood, writing for movies and television. DeLuca was a friend of Brooks’s who had played small parts in most of his screen comedies since helping to write High Anxiety. He was brought in early enough to share the story credit for Life Stinks with Brooks and Clark. DeLuca recruited Steve Haberman, a former storyboard artist with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of classic films, who’d worked on Transylvania 6–5000, DeLuca’s 1985 film. Shazam!—the new writing team.

  By the time Life Stinks—touted as a “serious” comedy about homelessness—was first cited in news items about Pathé’s buyout of MGM/UA, their script was nearly done.

  The lead was tailored for Brooks, playing Goddard Bolt, an arrogant tycoon who covets a large slum property. (Bolt keeps in his office a model of his dream phallic structure—“one of the film’s funnier puns,” Village Voice critic Georgia Brown wrote later—which he hopes to build on the property.) Bolt makes a bet with a rival scumbag developer that he can last thirty days of homelessness: the winner gets the slum property. But once he has adopted his homeless guise, Bolt finds himself adrift and beleaguered. He meets vagabonds who befriend him, including the beautiful Molly, a feisty bag lady. In the end, although Bolt wins the bet, his desperate adventures change him profoundly.

  There was warmth and sweetness in the script along with coarse humor—scenes of drifters urinating on Bolt as he lives rough—that hedged on the supposed “seriousness.”

  Laddie thought the script was too serious, however, especially its original ending, which was messagey. Brooks agreed with the criticism: Life Stinks would have greater commercial potential if it finished joyfully, as most Brooks comedies did; only The Producers and The Twelve Chairs
had had endings tinged with defeat. “He felt [Life Stinks’ ending] was a little too negative,” Brooks explained to The Times of London, “and he asked us to change it before we had finished shooting . . . . I was happy to take his advice.”

  The new Club Brooks could write with certain actors in mind. For one thing, DeLuca wrote the biggest part yet for himself as a skid rower who insists he was once richer than Bolt. Old Brooks crony Howard Morris was in the pipeline, too, as the grubby, dim-witted Sailor, whose death is the film’s darkest note, albeit made humorous by the acting out of one of Brooks’s oft-told anecdotes about cremated ashes scattered by the wind.

  The scriptwriters may have hoped for Harvey Korman as the rival scumbag, but in the end the part was not very sizable, and instead Brooks snagged Jeffrey Tambor just as Tambor was getting noticed on television. Madeline Kahn’s biographer said the actress, absent from Brooks comedies since History of the World, Part I, had taken as a “personal slight” the fact that the director offered her no “substantial” roles in subsequent films. It would be easy to picture Kahn as Molly, the touched and touchy bag lady, but that part ended up in the hands of the well-regarded actress-singer Lesley Anne Warren, who had begun her career as a ballerina. She could carry off the dreamlike dance, with Alan Johnson’s choreography, that Molly and Bolt perform to the tune of Cole Porter’s “Easy to Love.”

  Using a new cameraman, Steven Poster, Brooks called the first take on Life Stinks in early June 1990. Shooting fast, without fuss, Brooks finished the filming in time for a brief August vacation. Then the director worked for almost eight months with three editors on the cutting and with his composer in chief, John Morris, on the score.

  The high expectations Brooks nursed for Life Stinks reflected his long-simmering ambition to craft a comedy that would be regarded, by both audiences and critics, as not simply a funny parody but a “smartie” that spoke to the human condition. Looking for an artistic liftoff, in May 1991, he took Life Stinks to the 44th International Cannes Film Festival, where his new comedy was screened out of competition as a “Surprise Film.”

  France was Brooks’s biggest non-English-language market, and Canal+, a French company, was Brooksfilms’ partner for the European exploitation and percentages of the film. Anne Bancroft flew in with her husband for a week of promotion and celebration.

  Among the appreciative capacity audience for the Cannes premiere was a film critic who had been slow to join his fan club, Vincent Canby of the New York Times. Canby hailed Life Stinks as “close to being vintage Mel Brooks . . . in a Frank Capra mode.”

  The admiring tone was echoed by a few other major reviewers when Life Stinks was released the next month in the United States, with Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times praising the film as “risky” and likable, despite defects, and Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times calling it the most thoughtful and soft-hearted of Brooks’s oeuvre.

  “This is the first time I’ve been able to come out of the closet,” Brooks told interviewers, “allowed to fuse the quiet, dark serious elements in me, and the happy-go-lucky silly comedy.” His many opening-week interviews to publicize the film included another stint on The Tonight Show and a Fresh Air segment for National Public Radio.

  A majority of the critics, however, found Life Stinks as insincere as the attempt to spread the wealth of Brooksfilms through a greedy public offering. The Village Voice described the implausible uplifting ending and the transformation of Brooks’s character as “mushy Schmaltz.” Desmond Ryan in the Philadelphia Inquirer described the comedy as “wretchedly off the mark.” Hal Hinson in the Washington Post ranked it at “the bottom of the [Brooks] barrel” and said that, just like the title, the film stank. Rolling Stone said that “it’s hard to judge what stinks worse—the tasteless jokes or the hypocritical piety.”

  Never had the “crickets,” his lifelong nemeses, struck him a lower blow.

  Whether or not they applauded Life Stinks usually depended on how convincing they found the lead actor—Brooks himself—appearing in practically every scene. Ebert saw the comic as “his own best asset. As an actor, he brings a certain heedless courage to his roles. His characters never seem to pause for thought; they’re cocky, headstrong, confident.” Hinson watched the same film and found Brooks “charmless” and unfunny.

  Preston Sturges was in his early forties when he made Sullivan’s Travels; his lead had been the tall, handsome Joel McCrea in his prime. Brooks was in his mid-sixties and looked his age. Always limited as an actor, he seemed daunted by his role, and though many critics singled out his MGM-style fantasy dance with Lesley Anne Warren as the highlight of Life Stinks, Brooks could sing but he was no Fred Astaire. This warmest, fuzziest Brooks made critics pine perversely for the Rude Crude Mel who had offended them in the past.

  “I was crucified,” Brooks often said later. But it wasn’t just the critics.

  Was it too late for him to have taken a thoughtful turn with a script and his audience? Yes: his usual aficionados gave wide berth to the “serious” comedy about homelessness. Despite its release to 850-plus theaters in late July, Life Stinks became “one of the quickest flops of 1991,” according to the Los Angeles Times, accruing less than $4 million before sub-run and video.

  Brooks took the gauntlet overseas, traveling widely for print, radio, and television interviews, promoting Life Stinks in England, France, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and Italy, his best foreign markets. “There are three pillars that make a movie,” he explained to The Guardian, “the script, the production, and the one that nobody realizes—the selling of the film.” In Italy, Life Stinks stayed at “number one for six weeks,” he claimed. “They were lining up like [for] a cinnamon bun around the block.” Foreign moviegoers, along with ancillary bucks, helped the film, budgeted at $13 million, edge into the black. “Europeans got it,” Brooks liked to aver, “but in America it may have hit too close to home, and audiences may not have wanted to deal with that.”

  American audiences still balk at Life Stinks, which ranks lowest among the Brooks comedies on imdb.com at this writing, with a 5.8 out of 10 approval rating and only 8,443 respondents who have rated it. That actually ties it with Dracula: Dead and Loving It, but the horror spoof counts more than four times as many people who bothered to vote.

  The failure of Life Stinks, kindred to the failure of his other more formal remake, To Be or Not to Be, was devastating to Brooks’s morale. There would be no more attempts at “serious” comedy. Defiantly, Brooks always spoke of Life Stinks in superlatives, listing the comedy about homelessness among his underrated works, the dance scene (“gorgeously staged by me”) as one of five favorites in all the films he had written, directed, and starred in.

  If Life Stinks was a “serious” comedy, it was facile seriousness, and partly what made it artificial was its detachment from any autobiographical resonances of the type that deepened Woody Allen’s best films. Apart from being a very wealthy man, Goddard Bolt was not a character who closely resembled Brooks himself. Bolt is a pure businessman; he has no relationship to the film industry or the arts. His relationship with other people, his personal backstory, is restricted to fleeting references to a prior failed marriage: “It didn’t work out . . . she said I spent all my time making money.”

  Brooks and his wife, Anne Bancroft, in real life, were at no risk of homelessness, although the couple had recently become empty nesters. By the time of Life Stinks, Max had gone off, though not very far away, to Pitzer College, a liberal arts school belonging to the Claremont Colleges consortium, in the city of Claremont in eastern Los Angeles County. He would study history and spend a semester at the University of the Virgin Islands before taking graduate film studies at American University in Washington, DC.

  If anything, Bancroft stepped up her profile in television and films. While she never again starred in another Broadway play after Duet for One, she did play the lead in a Manuel Puig drama staged closer to home in Los Angeles in 1989. Television frequently s
howed her to the best advantage: she had good parts in telecasts such as Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound (for which she earned an Emmy nomination) and “Mrs. Cage” for American Playhouse (another Emmy nomination). She also played the title role in a broadcast of Paddy Chayefsky’s “The Mother” for Great Performances and portrayed the centenarian in the telefilm The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.

  In 1990, the actress even briefly starred in her own television series, called Freddie and Max, which revolved around a down-on-her-luck American diva in London who is collaborating on her autobiography with a harried personal assistant (Charlotte Coleman). The Times called the short-lived British sitcom “magnificently forgettable,” but Bancroft was paid $175,000 for six episodes and spent extended quality time in London.

  There was also steady work for her in motion pictures in the 1990s, even if she was increasingly relegated to brief roles. Among her credits were turns as a former dancing partner of Fred Astaire in Carl Reiner’s Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool in 1989; Nicolas Cage’s dying mother in Andrew Bergman’s Honeymoon in Vegas in 1992; and a gypsy fortune teller in Love Potion No. 9, also in 1992. Bancroft appeared in three films in 1993: Point of No Return, Malice, and Mr. Jones. She was among the ensemble in How to Make an American Quilt and portrayed the difficult matriarch in Jodie Foster’s Thanksgiving-themed Home for the Holidays, both in 1995. Nineteen ninety-seven saw Bancroft in another film for Sidney Lumet, Critical Care, and as a flinty US senator in G.I. Jane. She was Mrs. Dinsmore in Alfonso Cuarón’s modernized Great Expectations in 1998.