The public did not agree. Audiences saw a breezy, unpretentious, entertaining burlesque of an old familiar story with the Mel Brooks stamp. In a movie summer that was starved for laughs, Men in Tights opened in 1,261 theaters with brisk ticket sales that sent it to fourth place at the box office, the best Brooks showing since Spaceballs. By September, the New York Times could describe the film as “a modest success” with $26 million gross in the United States. In Europe, where the reviews were no kinder, Men in Tights did well enough to add another $9 or $10 million to the figures. Future television and cable showings and video buys would continue to grow the returns, although with its $20 million budget the actual profits would disappoint everyone—20th Century–Fox and Brooks included.
Back to the future Brooks went for the dubbing of a French picture—a job of work that harked back to similar assignments he had taken for the pocket money in the mid-1960s.
For much of 1994, he poured himself into writing and recording English-language dialogue for Jean-Marie Poire’s comedy Les Visiteurs, which concerned a time-traveling knight and his squire. Les Visiteurs had been a smash hit in France in 1993, but Gaumont and Canal+, the producing companies, were convinced that enhanced jokey dubbing would boost the US prospects and equally convinced that Brooks was the man to make it funnier.
According to Variety, however, director Poire disliked Brooks’s version, which did not test well with American audiences. “I wasn’t happy at all,” Poire said. “Instead of remaining a comedy, which involved a French knight [played by Jean Reno], the film had become a parody, with the knight’s accent so French that it was almost impossible to understand.”
“It was an experiment,” Brooks told Variety. “I love the film and I’m very proud of the dubbing, but [research company] NRG tested it mostly on young people, and I don’t think this film is for them; it’s a great film for Francophiles, not 12- to 15-year olds.”
Miramax put the US release on hold until the summer of 1996, when Les Visiteurs was kitted out with standard subtitles and sent to art theaters without a trace of Brooks’s involvement. He was paid $500,000 for his time, however—not too shabby.
Chapter 16
1995
He Who Laughs Last
Robin Hood: Men in Tights would be the last Mel Brooks comedy for 20th Century–Fox.
In 1994, the filmmaker moved his operations back to the MGM lot at Culver City. Though, during his US publicity tour, he praised 20th Century–Fox for its handling of Robin Hood: Men in Tights, overseas he slagged the studio in interviews whose clippings 20th Century–Fox officials probably read. Perhaps his motormouth compelled him, but perhaps, too, the 20th Century–Fox bloom was already off the rose and he knew he was done at the studio of his glory years.
“Demolition Man [a 1993 20th Century–Fox action picture starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, and Sandra Bullock],” Brooks mused aloud in an interview with The Independent in London, “probably one of the greatest adventures in stupidity, one of the least important and dopiest films, right? You go to the commissary at Fox, and these schmendricks, these . . . assholes, they’re all very proud because it’s done $27 million the first weekend. Now I don’t want to seem bitter, but I jumped up on the table and I said, ‘This is shit. This is ridiculous.’ I said, ‘We have to run [Jean Renoir’s] Grand Illusion and Demolition Man side by side, just once—once—once!—to see what a great movie is.”
Another member of the Reiner family stepped into the breach: Carl’s son Rob and his company, Castle Rock Entertainment, were riding high owing to such hits as A Few Good Men (directed by Reiner) and In the Line of Fire (starring Clint Eastwood). Castle Rock was partnered with Columbia Pictures and had offices on the shared Warner’s-Columbia lot. Castle Rock made a deal with Brooksfilms to produce the next Brooks comedy, and Columbia, which had been involved in the foreign handling of Robin Hood: Men in Tights, invested in the production budget in exchange for US distribution and ancillary rights, with Gaumont joining for a European share.
The subject this time would be Dracula—another ancient legend like Robin Hood; a vampire comedy was an idea Brooks had bandied about for years. The notion of spoofing Dracula, Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror masterpiece, which had inspired a classic horror film starring Bela Lugosi in 1931, had floated around for decades as a natural successor to Young Frankenstein. Brooks had sniffed at the likelihood in 1970s interviews, however, because the horror story was too similar to Mary Shelley’s classic, he said, and because “Dracula is too fantastical and does not have the philosophical granite.”
But Dracula lingered in Brooks’s mind. For one thing, the story was in the public domain; for another, Francis Ford Coppola had recently guided a lurid adaptation of the novel, with the title Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to stratospheric worldwide box office in 1992. Brooks’s devoted friend and admirer, the Italian farceur Ezio Greggio, had been in and out of Hollywood around that time, making his first comedy in the United States, The Silence of the Hams, in which Brooks had made a spot appearance. Greggio’s all-horror spoof had included Dracula.
Not to mention the only film directed by Rudy DeLuca: Transylvania 6–5000 in 1985, a monster/vampire comedy with Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley, Jr., and an actor Brooks had always liked, Joseph Bologna, as a mad scientist. DeLuca and Steve Haberman, the Life Stinks team, went back to work with Brooks on Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
The two were fated to be the last official roundup of Club Brooks. DeLuca and Haberman channeled the boss’s trademark humor into a PG-13 script that affectionately drew from Bram Stoker and Dracula movies dating back to the German silent-era Nosferatu. In their story Count Dracula was a debonair klutz who enslaves a solicitor visiting Transylvania and then travels to London to prey on the bosomy daughter and ward of a mental asylum director. The daughter is engaged to Jonathan Harker (the main protagonist of Stoker’s novel). A Mittel European vampire expert (not in the novel) must save the day from the night.
Nothing was inherently wrong with the cast: not Brooks himself, chewing up scenery, as the vampire expert Dr. Abraham Van Helsing; Peter MacNicol as the silly enslaved solicitor; Steven Weber, from TV’s Wings, as Harker; Amy Yasbeck and Lysette Anthony as the beautifully endowed Mina and Lucy; and Harvey Korman enjoying his last fling in a Mel Brooks film as the asylum chief. There was also one last stagey cameo for Anne Bancroft as a soothsaying gypsy, named (what else?) Madame Ouspenskaya, after the florid Russian character actress who played a similar role in 1941’s The Wolf Man.
Although the trade papers reported that Brooks had offered Kelsey Grammar, the small-screen star of Cheers, $3 million to play Count Dracula, that news item was undoubtedly a feint. In the end the director went for the mock-suave Leslie Nielsen in a fluffy wig and speaking with a Bela Lugosi accent. Brooks told interviewers he had cast Nielsen, a former straight actor reborn as a droll, unflappable comedy lead in the 1980s, after watching The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, a Zucker brothers film, on cable television one night. (“I was amazed at the comic skill of Leslie Nielsen,” recalled Brooks. “I had no idea!”) Nielsen did not get the $3 million supposedly dangled in front of Kelsey Grammar, but Dracula: Dead and Loving It inched over a $30 million budget anyway.
Since Columbia did not own soundstage facilities, Dracula: Dead and Loving It was shot at Culver Studios from late May through July 1995. The cast recalls Brooks doing the job in his now customary fashion—no hint of the bell tolling on his career as a filmmaker. He shot scenes efficiently and evoked laughter on the set with bombastic antics; Nielsen added to the fun with his battery-operated fart machine. The postproduction was also done faster than usual to get Dracula: Dead and Loving It in theaters by Christmas.
Never did a Mel Brooks comedy land with more of a thonk, which was pretty much the reaction from critics and moviegoers alike. “If anybody hears of any good reviews, which are very rare, tell me about them and I will read them,” Brooks told USA Today. “But even in a good review, they’re gonna say somet
hing that’s gonna be shattering.” Although Dracula: Dead and Loving It made its debut in tenth place in the holiday box-office charts, the word of mouth was unfavorable and the US grosses topped off at $10 million, which was not only an embarrassment but also a genuine loss on the books for Castle Rock and Columbia Pictures—though probably not for Brooksfilms, which counted on rights and percentages overseas, where Brooks’s comedies still fared okay.
American critics were attuned to the revolution in comedy that was upending the paradigm: badder-taste comedies such as 1994’s Dumb and Dumber (where the farting jokes became shitting jokes). “Crickets” saw the last Mel Brooks film as creaky, and sometimes their language was harsher than that. “Anemic,” declared Rolling Stone. Tame and cheesy, agreed the Los Angeles Times. “Quick, drive a stake through its heart!” pleaded the Village Voice. “Dead on arrival,” pronounced the Washington Post.
Other longtime Brooks enthusiasts, such as Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, more ruefully submitted their thumbs-downs. The comedian’s strategy of satirizing other movies, “prolonged at feature length,” he reported, had been “exhausted,” making one yearn for the days of Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein. “The movie’s not very funny,” Ebert said, the kind of review that hit Brooks doubly hard; it dimly assessed the present state of his creativity while helping to depress box-office hopes for Dracula: Dead and Loving It in America’s heartland, the middle swath of the nation Brooks had stooped to conquer.
Perhaps the critics would have gone easier on Brooks if they had known they were helping to write his obituary in Hollywood. Never mind that audiences never warmed to the film, either. Brooks held the failure against the “crickets,” as he always had. “Critics are like eunuchs at an orgy—” the comedian liked to say, “they just don’t get it.”
Brooks ran into Ebert not long after his negative review was published and barked at the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. “Listen, you, I made 21 movies. I’m very talented. I’ll live in history. I have a body of work. You only have a body.”
Later, responding to a query from a reader, Ebert confirmed the unpleasant incident. “I was saddened by my encounter with Mel,” the film critic wrote, “because I have been a supporter of his work (when it deserved it) since ‘The Producers.’ . . . I was one of the few critics who liked ‘Life Stinks.’ I was surprised he didn’t realize himself that ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It’ just didn’t work. Yes, Brooks has put together a body of work and yes, a lot of it has made me laugh, but I would not be doing him a favor if I did not tell the truth.”
“It, I think, felt more like a Mad Magazine parody,” actor Steven Weber said later of Dracula: Dead and Loving It. “Not bad in itself, but it wasn’t enough of Mel in a way.”
The critics’ hectoring and the audiences’ turning away didn’t help, but in effect Brooks had gradually priced himself out of the business in Hollywood. He had played the domestic market against the foreign at a time when cheaper, more dangerous, younger-generation comedies were winning over American audiences. His rising budgets, his high salary and percentages, his slice of overseas and ancillary revenue made the financing of his productions a house of cards. By the 1990s, with the major studios preoccupied by megahits and sequels, Brooks had made himself an increasingly less attractive sell job.
Like Woody Allen or Robert Altman, Brooks could have worked with creative freedom at a lower salary, making less expensive pictures. He might have discovered, as Allen and Altman did, that stars would appear in his vehicles for the frisson of it. But the top guy would have made less money, and in his eyes, he would have devalued his brand.
Repeated attempts to obtain cofinancing for Mel Brooks comedies and Brooksfilms productions, focusing over time increasingly on French sources, had once seemed farsighted in industry circles, and in the short term the European monies added to the company coffers. But the French could not completely underwrite the making of a $30 million English-language comedy without taking the lion’s share of the US income, and the only entities capable of handling wide US distribution were the major Hollywood studios, which had seen profits from Brooks’s comedies steadily eroded by his contracts and declining grosses.
A few years later, Brooks reflected with rueful candor on the decisions he’d made in his career. He’d once aspired to be the American Molière, the modern Aristophanes. His comedy had been going to be based on “pathos and real life,” as Sid Caesar’s was. He was going to write scripts revolving around characters and the human condition. His “fantasy of success,” Carl Reiner once said, “was to write the great Russian novel.”
He’d eschewed the “crickets” and intellectuals and embraced John Wayne and Lawrence Welk country. He had spent too much time crafting deals, promoting his films, and selling himself. He’d gone broad for big numbers instead of digging deep.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 1998, Brooks seemed unusually chastened, perhaps because he was being jointly interviewed with his old friend, novelist Joseph Heller, who’d managed to do what Brooks had not: juggle the literary and popular labels.
“I often tell myself, ‘Mel, if you did nothing but be one of the writers on The Sid Caesar Show, nothing but that and The Producers and maybe The 2000 Year Old Man, that’s enough,’” Brooks told the Times during their joint interview.
“Once you have a hit,” he went on, “you’re chained to capitalism. You’re inextricably linked to supply and demand. I did The Producers, I was free. I did The Twelve Chairs, I was still free. I did Blazing Saddles, I was captured.”
“You were a prisoner,” Heller interjected.
“I was okay for a while,” Brooks continued. “Blazing Saddles, great movie. Young Frankenstein, top of my game as a director-writer. After that, capitalism. Artists shouldn’t work because they can sell; they should work because they’re inspired.”
The onetime king of Hollywood comedy issued no official proclamation, but Dracula: Dead and Loving It was the last of just twelve comedy features he’d made over thirty years.*
Turning seventy in 1996, Brooks had his share of low moments in private. He could have rested on his laurels. But he still had round-the-clock energy and stayed busier than an ant farm.
With filmmaking behind him, in 1997 he found time to record a fifth and final 2000 Year Old Man album with Carl Reiner, another reluctant retiree. Their time-honored colloquy was less improvised than it had been for the first LP in 1961; certain exchanges were written out for rehearsal, and some expletives were added by Brooks that had not been in the vernacular of his character back in the button-down era. The septuagenarian friends performed the update on television and appeared at events, and finally they won the elusive Grammy for The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000—after failing to do so for their first three duologues.* For almost two decades Brooks had been wary about acting in other people’s films. Larry Gelbart had originally written Oh, God! with Woody Allen and Brooks in mind—Allen as the modern common man who is tapped for a mission by Brooks the almighty. Brooks had said yes, but after Allen declined to participate, he had reneged. Nothing could convince him, not as a favor to Gelbart nor to the director of the film, Carl Reiner. *
Director Stuart Gordon boasted a cult following for the offbeat horror comedies he had concocted, such as Re-Animator and From Beyond. After Gordon developed a friendship with Brooks over their shared passion for the horror genre, Gordon asked Brooks to play a pivotal character in his adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s play The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit. Gordon thought Brooks might portray the elderly haberdasher who sells fantastical wish-come-true suits to five amigos in the story. After Gordon outlined the character for him, Brooks demurred, joking “I don’t play Jews.” He recommended Sid Caesar instead.
Brooks shied away from roles outside his comfort zone. But his stint on The Tracey Ullman Show reignited his sideline of comedic cameos (he played a loan officer rejecting the ragamuffins posing as Amish in Penelope Spheeris’s film The Little Rascals) and voic
e work (he played Mr. Toilet Man in Look Who’s Talking Too). The acting cameos and voice work supplanted filmmaking and picked up momentum over the years until the list of his voice and cameo roles on imdb.com grew as long as a tapeworm. Often, still, the formerly dangerous comedian performed his bits in animation and family fare.
In his zone Brooks could be positively electric. He proved that as the wild-man Uncle Phil—Paul Reiser’s Uncle Phil—in several episodes of Mad About You. Reiser, a onetime stand-up and cocreator of the hit television series, concocted the recurring role for Brooks, whose 2000 Year Old Man he considered the “Rosetta Stone” of comedy. Reiser and costar Helen Hunt went on bended knee to persuade Brooks to appear on their program. (“He seemed to like that,” Hunt said.) Uncle Phil was a part that hewed close to the real Brooks. Although acting had been his Achilles heel and previously he might have been unimaginable as a finalist in the category of Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series, Brooks took home three consecutive Emmys for playing Uncle Phil in 1997, 1998, and 1999.
Also in 1998 came one last unofficial Mel Brooks comedy, a stealth film without his name attached as writer, director, or producer—and a work still obscure to most of his fans.
Screw Loose was the dream project of Ezio Greggio, a comedian, actor, and director who was a household name in Italy and all but unknown in the United States. Discovered in 1983 among a group of innovative young zanies behind a weekly two-hour variety show broadcast on a Milan television channel, Greggio became a leading light of contemporary comedy in Italy. Tall and boyishly handsome, he was especially adept at physical humor; his stock in trade was Inspector Clouseau–type bumbling. His shows included the long-running news parody called Striscia la Notizia (literal translation: “The News Slither”), which he had starred in and cohosted since 1988.
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