Playing a small role in The Twelve Chairs, his first screen acting, Brooks held his own—and some say stole—scenes from stars Ron Moody (left) and Frank Langella.
Brooks wanted Richard Pryor to play Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles but the studio said no. Cleavon Little proved sly and witty in the role.
Gene Wilder was an eleventh-hour substitution as Jim, aka the Waco Kid, but on- and off-screen he found an instant chemistry with Cleavon Little.
Madeline Kahn, as Lili Von Shtupp, performed “I’m Tired,” and cemented her immortality among fans of Mel Brooks films.
The television special Annie & the Hoods aired in November 1974, testing the waters for future husband-wife teamings with a skit that featured Bancroft married to the philandering Brooks and serenading him with “Guess Who I Saw Today.”
When not out and about, Brooks and Anne Bancroft were happy homebodies in Hollywood. Making music was a shared enthusiasm. The cigarette smoke dates this photograph to the early 1970s, before healthier California habits took over. (© Don Ornitz/Globe Photos/ZUMApress.com)
Young Frankenstein was Brooks’s most controlled direction, but there was plenty of improvisation and laughs on the set, as is illustrated by this still showing Teri Garr, Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, and the director breaking up.
The cast of the short-lived television series When Things Were Rotten: (left to right) Dick Van Patten as Friar Tuck; Richard Dimitri as Bertram/Renaldo; Dick Gautier, playing Robin Hood; Bernie Kopell as Alan-a-Dale; and David Sabin as Little John.
The Three Silly Musketeers of Silent Movie: Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, and Brooks.
Brooks’s star rose as Sid Caesar’s waned, but Brooks stayed faithful and gave his mentor a pivotal role as the chief of Big Picture Studios in Silent Movie.
Often wearing outlandish costumes, Brooks made countless personal appearances to promote his films. Here he is with Mike Douglas (center) onstage at the Las Vegas Hilton for The Mike Douglas Show, which was cohosted by Brooks friend and Silent Movie cameo-star Burt Reynolds (at left). Pop singer Engelbert Humperdinck is at far right.
Out to dinner with wife Anne Bancroft and the Master of Suspense while planning High Anxiety, Brooks’s satire of Hitchcock thrillers.
The High Anxiety troupe: (from left) Howard Morris, Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, Brooks, Madeline Kahn, and Ron Carey.
John Hurt starred as the Elephant Man, one of the first Brooksfilms productions—the “serious” side of Brooks’s filmmaking that was meant to help Anne Bancroft launch her directing career with Fatso. Fatso tanked but The Elephant Man became a phenomenon, surprisingly successful commercially and nominated for eight Academy Awards.
“The Inquisition/Let’s begin/The Inquisition/Look out, sin!/We have a mission to convert the Jews . . .”
Film critic and Shadowland author Bill Arnold, among the writers who challenged the king of Hollywood comedy for poaching their ideas—and the only one who actually got Brooks into court.
Brooks’s and Anne Bancroft’s Polish-language duet of “Sweet Georgia Brown”—the highlight of To Be or Not to Be.
Solarbabies, a science fantasy parable for teenagers, promised the “stars of tomorrow” with cast members (left to right) Peter DeLuise, Jami Gertz, Lukas Haas, Jason Patric, Claude Brooks, and James Le Gross. Directed by Alan Johnson, it had Brooksfilms’s biggest budget and proved a box-office stinker.
Spaceballs showed Brooks still had his comedy mojo. The casting was refreshed for the Star Wars generation with goyish leads and younger comedians like John Candy as Barf the Dog.
Brooks added to the fun by playing two parts: numbskull President Skroob and (as seen here with Bill Pullman) the sawed-off, wisdom-spouting Yogurt the Magnificent.
The Nutt House, with Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman, was Brooks’s last failed stab at a TV series in 1992.
Another “Re-Do,” Life Stinks, Brooks’s reimagining of Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, did not attract his usual fans. Brooks always defended the film as one of his finest and said his fantasy dance with Lesley Anne Warren (“gorgeously staged by me”) was a favorite moment from all his films.
A joke publicity shot of Brooks with young admirer and Robin Hood: Men in Tights screenwriter J. D. Shapiro. (The joke was that the price Brooks paid for Shapiro’s script constituted highway robbery.) Later, their collaboration would sour.
Brooks as Rabbi Tuckman marrying Maid Marian (Amy Yasbeck) and Cary Elwes (Robin Hood) in Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Mark Blankfield (right) played Blinkin.
Dracula: Dead and Loving It in 1995 was arguably the weakest Mel Brooks comedy—and destined to be the last with Brooks behind the camera. Here the director guides Lysette Anthony and Leslie Nielsen through one of their scenes.
Brooks launched his fantastical third act with the stage musical of The Producers. He is seen here in a publicity pose for the film version of the musical with original Broadway stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Stage and screen director Susan Stroman peeks out from behind. (© Andrea Renault/Globe Photos/ZUMApress.com)
Brooks and Anne Bancroft at Radio City Music Hall for the 2001 Tony Awards. The actress died in 2005 after a marriage that had lasted four decades. (Andrea Renault/Globe Photos from ZumaPress)
Brooks, son Max, and lifelong friend Carl Reiner at 2010 Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremonies. (© Clinton Wallace/Globe Photos/ZUMApress.com)
About the Author
PATRICK McGILLIGAN is the author of the New York Times Notable Books George Cukor: A Double Life and Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. His biography Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light was nominated for an Edgar Award and won the prize for the best foreign book translated into French given by the national association of French film critics. His most recent book, Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times biography of the year in 2015. His other works include the life stories of directors Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman, and Oscar Micheaux, and actors James Cagney, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. He edited the acclaimed five-volume Backstory series of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters and (with Paul Buhle) the definitive Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. His books have been translated into ten foreign languages. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Patrick McGilligan
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane
Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only
Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light
Clint: The Life and Legend
Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast
Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson
George Cukor: A Double Life
Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff
Cagney: The Actor as Auteur
EDITED BY PATRICK MCGILLIGAN
Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age
Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s
Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s
Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s
Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s
Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (with Paul Buhle)
Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin
Film Crazy: Interviews with Hollywood Legends
Copyright
FUNNY MAN. Copyright © 2019 by Patrick McGilligan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retriev
al system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Joanne O’Neill
Cover photograph © Tony Weaver/ANL/REX/Shutterstock
Digital Edition MARCH 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-256096-4
Version 02222019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-256099-5
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* Actor and singer Boris Thomashefsky was a star of the Yiddish theater in New York City, performing classical drama as well as follies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was also a pioneering Borscht Belt entertainer.
* Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish provides several definitions of shmendrick, including “a Caspar Milquetoast; a kind of schlemiel—but weak and thin”; “a pipsqueak; a no-account; the opposite of a mensch”; and “someone who can’t succeed but thinks he can, and persists in acting as though he might.”
* Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had closed in September 1951, freeing Morris up for the 1951–52 season.
* Brooks had nothing to do with the screenplay, which hewed close to the stage script. The camera stodgily framed the action as though the audience were seated in the front row of a theater. Yet “Of Fathers and Sons” was filmed faithfully and remains, on DVD today, as wild and woolly as when it was first seen on Broadway.
* Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca lost in their Emmy Award categories, however, to Jimmy Durante and Lucille Ball.
* Not the American dramatic ballerina of the same name, Nora Kaye (1920–1987), who was married to the stage and screen director Herbert Ross.
* “Spec” is an entertainment industry term for a script written “speculatively,” without any advance payment, contract, or guarantees the material will be produced.
* The idea of rapscallion producers who scheme to stage a hugely profitable flop musical was hardly original with Brooks. For one, Moss Hart and Irving Berlin’s Face the Music, a 1932 Broadway musical, had featured a nincompoop producing Broadway failures in order to launder corrupt money. The film of Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1937, which had starred Milton Berle, also centered on a crooked producer staging duds. Andrew Sarris, the film critic of the Village Voice, added another progenitor to the mix in his 1969 review of The Producers: “An old Reed Hadley Racket Squad sequence on television some years ago [1951–1953] had almost the identical plot.”
* One day in the future, Michael Elias would collaborate with Steve Martin on The Jerk, and Carl Reiner would direct the film; together Elias and Frank Shaw would write The Frisco Kid for Gene Wilder.
* Brooks would also have seen Ulysses in Nighttown, an off-Broadway sensation in 1958, for which Zero Mostel had won an Obie Award for his performance as another vision of Leopold Bloom—one who could hardly be described as “a vulnerable Jew with curly hair.”
* This is not the same Barry Levinson who later worked with Brooks, first as a writer on Silent Movie.
* Officially, somehow (it may have been producer Joseph E. Levine’s maneuvering), The Producers would compete for Academy Awards as a 1968 film even though it had this initial 1967 run.
* Not all Brooks fans were Twelve Chairs fans, however. Kenneth Tynan, in his otherwise admiring profile of the comedian in The New Yorker, said that Chairs “as a whole never comes to life, its jokes seem shod with lead, and one watches glumly as, like the wounded snake in Pope’s poem, it drags its slow length along.” Tynan preferred the jokey Hollywood adaptation of the Russian novel called It's in the Bag (1945). “Though rampantly disloyal to the original,” he wrote, “it has many more laughs than the Brooks version.”
* Brooks’s old tablemate from Max’s Kansas City, Michael Elias, now Carl Reiner’s writing partner on The New Dick Van Dyke Show, helped Reiner think up the new questions for the 2013 Year Old Man.
* It helped the line’s durability when later, after seeing Young Frankenstein, the rock group Aerosmith wrote and recorded “Walk This Way,” which became one of the band’s signature hits.
* Incidentally, Harry Stein was the son of the former Your Show of Shows writer and Fiddler on the Roof playwright Joseph Stein, a longtime Brooks friend.
* Another song, not cowritten with Ronny Graham and not on the film's soundtrack, Brooks’s single “It’s Good to Be the King,” was recorded later and released to promote History of the World, Part I. It rose to number 67 on the Billboard charts.
* Sheila Benson returned from lunch on the Friday her Los Angeles Times review ran, taken aback to find a message that Howard Morris had phoned. “Squaring my shoulders and absolutely dreading the worst, I called him back,” she said, “only to hear him thank me, especially for saying that ‘everyone had been so busy doing shtick and reacting off each other that there was no one left to mind the store and say ‘Not funny.’” She added, “I was pretty well gobsmacked. Brave, lovely call.”
* It may be true, as Brooks wrote in his follow-up Letter to the Editor, that he had been misquoted and actually said, “Sid Caesar is the funniest man America has ever produced.” However, he added in his letter, “I am probably the sixteenth funniest.” And he had been rehearsing his sobriquet as far back as the October 4, 1965, issue of Newsweek, in which he was quoted as saying “People say I’m the funniest man alive. Why, three people have told me that already.”
* This Fred Silverman is not to be confused with the former NBC-TV president with the same name.
* Playwright Bernard Pomerance died in August 2017.
* A few years later on Broadway, Linn-Baker would play another Club Caesar writer, the Mel Tolkin character, in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Neil Simon’s re-creation of Your Show of Shows.
* This presumption of Brooks’s appeal to homosexuals was perhaps a leftover from his “Last Man” script fling with Terry Southern.
* Graham had also acted a small part in History of the World, Part I.
* The glibness of To Be or Not to Be was reinforced by Brooks’s “Hitler Rap” single. The faux hip-hop song with some lyrics borrowed from “Springtime for Hitler” was included in the soundtrack album but was not heard (or seen) in the film; it was more of a spin-off that would add revenue that could be separately accounted for. Though the single had only “limited success” in the United States, according to Wikipedia, it charted high in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden and reached number one in Norway.
* Later, the banks that had financed the maneuvers ushering in Giancarlo Parretti overthrew him for bad management, and for a few years the itinerant Laddie reigned as chief executive officer of MGM-Pathé.
* The bad blood between Brooks and Dr. Evan Chandler lingered. In the summer of 1993, Chandler made headlines when he accused
the pop star Michael Jackson of molesting his son, Jordan, during his son’s visits to Jackson's Neverland Ranch. That was the summer Robin Hood: Men in Tights was released, and Brooks’s office told journalists that he would grant interviews about the new film only if the interviewers agreed “under no circumstances” to mention Chandler.
* Thirteen—if you count My Favorite Year.
* Brooks had also been Grammy nominated unsuccessfully in two comedy categories for the History of the World, Part I: for the soundtrack album as a whole and for the music video of “The Inquisition.”
* The role of the deity ultimately landed in the hands of another comedian, George Burns, when Oh, God! was produced in 1977, with the folk-pop star John Denver as his message bearer.
* John Morris received no credit for any contribution to the stage musical’s score, although at least two of its best known songs, on which he assisted, were carried over from the original film. “While Mr. Brooks said that he solicited Mr. Morris’s opinions on some of the show’s songs,” the New York Times pointedly noted in Morris’s obituary in 2018, his daughter, Bronwen Morris, with whom Morris had worked on his reminiscences, said she had been “unaware of her father communicating with Mr. Brooks about the musical.”
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