Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Other players were slotted, a topflight backstage team was engaged, and in December Susan Stroman launched five weeks of intensive rehearsal at the New 42nd Street Studios, with Brooks omnipresent, pushing his notes but always funny and upbeat. By late January 2001, the cast and crew were in Chicago for the first out-of-town tryout.

  Brooks deliberately kept advance publicity to a minimum in Chicago and (later) Pittsburgh, where the press corps scrounged for crumbs. “Local critics were kept away for three weeks [in Chicago],” wrote Variety, “little money was expended on marketing and stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick did very limited media appearances.”

  One underlying issue for the show was how much vulgarity the self-proclaimed emperor of bad taste could insert into the dialogue and songs for stage audiences. Brooks wanted to attract the traditional Broadway crowd of playgoers, but he also wanted to lure the burgeoning new demographic—commuters from the New York and New Jersey suburbs, tour bus riders from the Midwest, tourists from overseas. How much vulgarity would be a turnoff?

  There was one line in “The King of Broadway,” Bialystock’s introductory song, in which he asks, “Who do you have to fuck to get a break in this town?” In Chicago during the show’s tryout, the line got huge laughs. “In Pittsburgh, however, it drew only a gasp,” according to an authoritative account, “so Brooks and Meehan changed it temporarily to ‘shtupp.’” Nathan Lane argued fiercely with Brooks, who told him, at a post-Pittsburgh run-through, “We can’t say fuck in a musical!” “Wait a minute?” Lane reportedly rejoined. “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” “Fuck” went back in.

  Since the era of New Faces of 1952, Chicago had superseded Philadelphia as the lead tryout town, and Chicago was where the drumbeat of success for The Producers began. The reviews were glowing, but equally auspicious were the grosses of $4 million accumulated in three and a half weeks, breaking records at the 2,300-seat Cadillac Palace Theatre. Among the portents: orchestra seats scalped for $1,000. Brooks knew he had rolled the dice on a winner, and one cold day, as he and Meehan headed for a run-through, the wind whistling around them, he exclaimed, “This is the happiest I’ve been since I was nine years old!”

  Wildly received in Chicago and Pittsburgh, The Producers arrived at the St. James Theatre on West 44th Street for March previews and its April 19 opening with “theater pundits,” according to Variety, “already talking about boffo box office and Tony Awards.”

  For once the pundits were right. Never before had there been such “a fantastical third act” (Brooks’s words) in a life story: The Producers musical bulldozed all expectations. On the verge of turning seventy-five, by dint of willpower and persistence, Brooks had managed to transform his decades-old pet script and writing-directing debut—a story about the worst possible idea for a stage show—into a triumph that transcended the dreams of his youth.

  Critics gushed with praise for Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, for the miracle of the staging, above all for Brooks’s “genius” in reinventing his film; “genius” became his permanent honorific in the excitable press coverage. Hillel Italie, the longtime reviewer for the Associated Press, hailed the musical as “demented, deliriously funny.” Amy Gamerman of the Wall Street Journal called it “rude, irrepressible, and riotously funny.” The hard-to-please John Lahr of The New Yorker wrote that Brooks “has found the secret that Broadway feared it would never find again: not money . . . but joy.”

  Of course, with Brooks and “crickets” there would always be camps and curmudgeons with their sour notes. Did the stage musical improve upon or water down the original film? Was “Springtime for Hitler” as outrageous as it once had been? Did the comedy slight the Holocaust, which is never mentioned in the film or stage musical?

  Thane Rosenbaum in the Los Angeles Times: “The film had a much darker, smarter edge to it than the musical, which is actually funnier, camper and more gay than the original.” Daniel Mendelsohn, in The New York Review of Books, said the musical was pablum that “risks absolutely nothing . . . . [Brooks] smoothly processed his movie, whose greatest virtue was its anarchic, grotesque energy, into a wholly safe evening.”

  Though Bialystock and Bloom might “bring tears of joy to any anti-Semite,” Tom Teicholz wrote in Jewish Journal, when the road company later visited Los Angeles, Brooks’s “exuberance in both being Jewish and making fun of Jews forgives a lot of slurs.” The musical fed on nostalgia for an idealized past, Teicholz opined, the kinder, simpler past of popular culture in the 1960s, when the original film was made and Nazis could be treated comically in The Producers or on television’s Hogan’s Heroes. If the film had offended, Teicholz wrote, the musical had matured into “delightful inoffensiveness.”

  What about the “central-casting faggotry,” in the words of New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, which was the culmination of a longtime strain in Brooks’s humor? Stephen Hunter, writing about the film version later in the Los Angeles Times, said, “Mel didn’t get the memo . . . . It is no longer appropriate to make fun of the way certain highly feminized gay men walk or talk.” Paris Barclay, in The Advocate, lamented the “over-the-top caricatures,” writing “I couldn’t help feeling we were being laughed at, made the butt of jokes by a straight laughmeister who knows that we are the final frontier when even jabs at Hitler aren’t enough to proudly wear a badge of political incorrectness.”

  The overstuffed score for which Brooks alone was credited was his great personal accomplishment, but that, above all, seemed to divide the critics.* The dozen-plus songs that augmented “Springtime for Hitler” and “Prisoners of Love” found lovers and haters. “Brooks’ lyrics are formulaic,” conceded John Lahr in The New Yorker, “but when they abandon any attempt at articulacy and revel in Yiddish folderol they are sublime.” Michael Feingold in the Village Voice agreed that the music was among the show’s limitations, adding “No one would accuse Brooks of high lyrical wit or great melodic invention.” Tom Shales in the Washington Post stated flatly, “The score stinks.”

  This was one time Brooks could afford to overlook the nitpickers. So could the public, if they were able to shell out the $100 top ticket announced one day after the opening. The Producers became the first Broadway show to list that price. Yet theatergoers voted with their pocketbooks, stampeding to the box office. The show’s entire $11 million investment was recouped by Christmas, after advance tickets were sold. “These are the biggest numbers ever in the history of Broadway,” Lahr reported. Nothing could stem the tide, not even the September 11 terrorist plane attacks that devastated the World Trade Center in the autumn. “Come [to New York] and spend money, go to a restaurant, a play,” New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was quoted in the press as saying. “You might actually have a better chance of getting tickets to ‘The Producers’ now.”

  Less than two months after the opening of the musical, on June 3, 2001, the 55th Annual Tony Awards were held at Radio City Music Hall. With Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick as cohosts, the event was presaged as a love-in for Brooks. Musicals had fallen into a vulnerable state—one reason why The Producers had been greeted with such euphoria in the theatrical community—and Brooks’s revamping of his 1967 film garnered fifteen nominations, a record. Its twelve Tonys, sweeping a weak field at the ceremony, also broke records, winning for the year’s Best Musical, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical (Lane over Broderick), Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical (Gary Beach as Roger De Bris), Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical (Cady Huffman as Ulla), Best Book of a Musical (Brooks and Thomas Meehan), Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre (Brooks), Best Scenic Design (Robin Wagner), Best Costume Design (William Ivey Long), Best Lighting Design (Peter Kaczorowski), Best Orchestrations (Doug Besterman), Best Choreography (Susan Stroman), and Best Direction of a Musical (Stroman).

  “A familiar grinning face at the lectern,” as Newsday put it, Brooks sprinted away from his seat in th
e audience next to Anne Bancroft three times during the ceremony, becoming, during the night of awards, one of fewer than a dozen people to have reached the EGOT milestone—winner of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. “I’m going to have to do the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life—act humble,” Brooks said, accepting his first award of the evening for Best Book. “This is a phenomenon!” he exclaimed the second time onstage, hugging the Best Score prize. He promised the crowd he would return and he did so for Best Musical, “reportedly the win he most coveted,” Newsday reported, this time remembering “to thank Hitler . . . for being such a funny guy on stage.”

  He dampened the afterglow somewhat in late October when he and the show’s producers announced that they would raise the top ticket price for the musical to an all-time Broadway zenith of $480 for select seating. Brooks insisted that the unprecedented price tag was intended to undercut scalpers, who were reportedly getting $745 for seventeenth-row orchestra seats. “We may be in for some flak,” he explained, but “there should be some legal way for there to be no scalping whatsoever [so] we wouldn’t feel raped and robbed by strangers who take advantage.” In that respect, however, Brooks was a trendsetter. Despite widespread grumbling, once established, the $100-plus floor and sky-high select seats for The Producers became de rigueur for future Broadway musicals.

  Chapter 17

  2001

  Unstoppable

  Even the musical’s most rabid enthusiasts could not have predicted that The Producers would run for six years on Broadway. The “crickets” who had bedeviled Brooks’s films seemed like ancient history. The hit stage musical with twelve Tonys opened the floodgates of career tributes and awards from national organizations.

  Arguably the sweetest of them was the least widely reported. The board of the Writers Guild of America West voted to confer the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement on the “exquisitely outrageous” Brooks at its March 2003 annual awards program. Brooks had been prominent in the Guild, intermittently holding minor offices since 1959, but the Laurel was the organization’s highest honor, bestowed annually on only one individual or writing team for advancing the literature of motion pictures. The Laurel formed a roll call of the greatest scenarists in Hollywood history, among them Preston Sturges, Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, John Huston, Blake Edwards (the previous year’s winner), and several Club Caesar members. Larry Gelbart and Carl Reiner had preceded Brooks in winning the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement, as had Norman Lear. Neil Simon and Woody Allen had collected their screenwriting Laurels in 1979 and 1987, respectively.

  When the Writers Guild membership was invited to vote on the “101 Funniest Screenplays” of all time in 2016, Young Frankenstein came in at number six, Blazing Saddles ranked number eight, and The Producers made twelfth on the list. My Favorite Year charted at number 87.

  In their time Brooks’s comedies had been nominated for six Writers Guild awards. But the last Brooks script up for any single-year Guild award had been Silent Movie, which had been nominated—and lost—in the comedy category in 1977. Comparisons between Brooks and Woody Allen, the rival Jewish gods of screen comedy in the 1970s—although to be fair there were other contenders, such as Paul Mazursky—had long since subsided. Allen had directed many more films; his thirteen script nominations and five wins stand today as the all-time Guild record.

  The Brooks-Allen rivalry was not a figment of the journalistic imagination, although perhaps it was one-sided, according to Allen’s producer Charles H. Joffe, who once said that Allen “feels no competition with Mel Brooks, who spends his time in anger about Woody.”

  Although typically they praised each other in print, Brooks could be oblique on the subject of his onetime Club Caesar colleague, even finding fault with his prolificacy. “I admire Woody Allen so much,” Brooks told the Rocky Mountain News in an interview promoting The Producers musical. “He’s given us so much, these masterpieces like Annie Hall, that I wonder what drives him to do the two movies a year that he does. Is it the ‘gotta get it all done before I die’ or is it that ‘I don’t want them to forget me’? I would say to him . . . ‘Woody, let the field lie fallow for a year.’”

  The next few years were given to managing the phenomenon that was The Producers. Brooks supervised the original cast recording, winning two Grammys in 2001, Best Musical Show Album and Best Long Form Music Video for Recording the Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks. He oversaw the American road companies and presided over the London opening in 2004, where Nathan Lane bailed Brooks out, returning to his role as Max Bialystock after Richard Dreyfuss quit the cast at the eleventh hour before the West End premiere. London was followed by versions mounted around the globe, from Tokyo and Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv and Berlin (at the Admiralspalast theater, where Hitler had once had his own purpose-built box). Brooks was usually involved in the major casting and any local tweaking of the script. He traveled to major venues for openings and gave untold interviews. As the New York run began to taper off, he began planning a film version of the stage musical with Susan Stroman directing.

  The non–New York versions did not always soar to the same heights as the Broadway template. “Productions in Toronto and Australia closed early, and even a version in Los Angeles starring Martin Short and Jason Alexander had trouble selling out,” reported Adam Sternbergh in New York magazine. The stage musical was too “verbal, manic, Jewish, and very, very New York,” he explained. Yet the profits accrued.

  One spillover from The Producers was Brooks and Anne Bancroft’s joint appearance on Curb Your Enthusiasm, the cable series starring the cringe comedian Larry David, in 2003. Amusingly, the couple played themselves, auditioning David to costar with David Schwimmer in a cast reshuffle of The Producers. The clever story line had them secretly counting on David to flop so they could finally close the long-running hit. Their performances revived the memory of To Be or Not to Be and made audiences long for more of the married couple together. It also advertised the show still playing on Broadway with constant cast changes.

  The couple continued to travel together when possible, joining up for weekends in the Hamptons, at Malibu, or in foreign capitals. As ever, journalists asking questions about their marriage elicited effusion. “Every stray thought I get I have to tell her right away so she can get a kick out of it, or she can have some input,” Brooks informed the Boston Globe, “and every thought she gets she tells me. We really have a terrific time together. We laugh together, we cry together. We’re very lucky to have found each other.”

  A lingering bout of pneumonia, which interrupted and then shortened Bancroft’s 2002 appearance in an off-Broadway production of Edward Albee’s play Occupant, in which she played the sculptor Louise Nevelson, proved to be a tragic portent, however.

  Late in 2003, Bancroft went to work in writer-director James L. Brooks’s new comedy, Spanglish. The film starred Adam Sandler and Téa Leoni as an upscale husband and wife, with Bancroft as the alcoholic matriarch of their dysfunctional family, a role that promised to be her juiciest in years. After a few weeks of photography, however, the actress went to the doctor for a checkup, and the tests that were ordered revealed a tumor. She was replaced by Cloris Leachman and underwent what the trade papers reported as “minor surgery.” The press did not learn about the tumor or know her cancer history.

  Brooks and his wife retreated to the Hamptons for most of the summer of 2004, staying close to family and friends who lived in the New York area. The surgery had halted the cancer, the couple believed. Bancroft thought she might write a memoir, and with actor Alan Alda she attended a summer memoir-writing seminar at Stony Brook University presided over by Frank McCourt, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for Angela’s Ashes, about growing up in Ireland. Around the same time, Harper Entertainment announced that it had acquired Brooks’s proposed “anecdotal book” telling his own life story.

  The previous year, their son, Max, had married a budding playwright, Miche
lle Kholos, whom he had met at American University, and in the fall of 2004 Max published The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, his first book. “My dad was disappointed” in Zombie, Max joked in interviews. “He said I needed to cut it down and get to the jokes faster. I said there were no jokes. He was very unhappy, like I had left the family farm.” That fall as well, Kholos learned she was pregnant.

  Bancroft foresaw new career paths for herself. She laid plans to produce an off-Broadway play, an offbeat one-woman show called Squeeze Box, that depicted mentally ill women crowded into a homeless center. She and her husband had seen the show performed in Los Angeles by Ann Randolph, its playwright. Bancroft had worked with Randolph to sharpen the script, and Brooks arranged the necessary financing to bring the stage play to New York. Eventually Bancroft intended to produce a Brooksfilms screen version, following its off-Broadway run.

  Brooks, meanwhile, was immersed in preparations for filming The Producers. The stage play had to be “cleaned up for heartland families,” New York magazine reported. Brooks wrote a new opener, “There’s Nothing Like a Show on Broadway,” hoping to wangle an Oscar nomination (only “new” songs were eligible). That also took care of the edgy “Who do I have to fuck to get a break?” lyric from the stage musical’s opening number (the “fuck” was shot for the film but cut). Journalists listed that and other differences between the play and eventual film, which was shaped for broader appeal. (The film would be “just a teeny bit less ‘New York’—long Hollywood code for ‘too Jewish,’” Sara Stewart wrote later in the New York Post.) In other ways, though, the film script, emendated and polished by Thomas Meehan, closely followed the stage play.

  Susan Stroman was directing a movie for the first time. Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick were reprising their famous roles, while Uma Thurman, who had a prominent Hollywood career, was brought on to fire up the box office, replacing Cady Huffman, the original Ulla onstage. Former Saturday Night Live comedian Will Ferrell, now a marquee name in movies, would add his younger-generation cachet to Franz Liebkind, which Brad Oscar had originated on Broadway. (Oscar was now playing Max Bialystock in the West End production.) Most interiors would be shot at the new Steiner Studios, a vast complex within the Brooklyn Navy Yard, near Brooks’s old stomping ground Williamsburg.