It's Good to Be the King

by James Robert Parish

  The writers came up with other inspired lunacy for the program. Maxwell’s trademark gadget would be a shoe phone. (Reputedly, this particular idea was based on the time that several phones were ringing all at once in Brooks’s office, and it prompted him in crazed reaction to take off his shoe and answer it.) Not to be outdone, the hard-working and inventive Henry suggested the Cone of Silence, a plastic dome that could be lowered from the ceiling at CONTROL headquarters so the Chief and Agent 86 could discuss vital matters in secret. (Naturally, the Cone never operated properly and the two men were always forced to shout at the top of their lungs, thus giving away the contents of their top secret discussions.)

  With the pilot episode of the daffy situation comedy mapped out, the next chore was to cast the lead characters. At first, Orson Bean was considered to play Maxwell Smart. Mel suggested that he might be right to portray Agent 86, but that idea never triggered great momentum with Talent Associates. When the pilot script was presented to ABC, the network decided that Tom Poston, who had gained currency on The Steve Allen Show (especially with his role as the goofy “Man on the Street”) and on panel programs, was the right choice to be Maxwell Smart. While this notion was being bandied about, ABC executives voiced concerns about the overall tone of the pilot script. They claimed they did not realize it would be so antic ... so antiestablishment. Network management suggested that Agent 86 should have a mother (seen on the show) and Max should reveal his tender side by being the thoughtful owner of an appealing canine. Brooks and Henry rebelled at such conventional sentimental notions. In retaliation, they added a pooch for Maxwell, but called him Fang, and made him a rather disheveled dog. As to a mother for Smart, the writers said, “Absolutely not!”

  Soon thereafter, a displeased ABC shelved Get Smart. Talent Associates wanted to shop the project elsewhere but had to return the $7,500 development money to the network. The duo scraped together the necessary sum, and Get Smart was again their property. Through Grant Tinker, an NBC executive on the West Coast, Talent Associates was able to convince that network to shoot a pilot. NBC “suggested” that the acerbic comedian Don Adams (whom they had under contract) be cast instead of Tom Poston in the pivotal role. (Brooks agreed to this decision because he thought he and Adams shared a physical resemblance—especially with their close-set eyes—and each had a biting sense of humor. It was Adams who contributed many of the personality traits and character business for the Maxwell Smart character, some based on past routines he had performed.) Rounding out the show’s lead players were Barbara Feldon as the sexy, intelligent Agent 99, and Edward Platt as the harassed Chief. The pilot was shot in black and white by Brooks’s onetime Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour colleague Howard Morris.

  Get Smart debuted on NBC-TV on September 18, 1965, in the 7:30 P.M. time slot. The show quickly gathered momentum with critics and the public alike. Variety reported, “It is broad and unadulterated hokum, usually played to the hilt.” Time magazine quipped of the new half-hour offering, “It dares to be healthily sick while the competition is sickeningly healthy.” TV Guides Cleveland Amory endorsed, “Credit the developers of Get Smart, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry with at least getting down to that serious business of being funny right from the start.” In contrast, Jack Gould of the New York Times was far less enthusiastic: “Having begun with a whale of a concept, the program promptly proceeded to lay on the slapstick much too heavily and, on the premiere at least, spoil just about everything.… The use of a dwarf in the part of ‘Mr. Big’ was indicative of an undercurrent of tastelessness. With a massive dose of restraint, however, Get Smart might still make it.”

  The TV show gathered steam through the year and rode a rising crest of popularity. Many of the show’s catchphrases caught on with home viewers, and before long, such expressions as “Would you believe?” “Sorry about that, Chief,” “I asked you not to tell me that,” “Missed it by that much,” and “The old so-and-so trick” entered the lexicon. Get Smart ended the season as America’s 12th favorite TV series. Analyzing the program’s hearty endorsement from the public, Brooks sounded off with, “We’re doing a comic strip. Smart is a dedicated boob whose heart is in the right place, but whose brains are in his shoes. We don’t pretend that Smart himself or the situation he’s involved in is plausible. It’s the broadest kind of satire. It succeeds because it’s bright, witty, refreshing—and lucky enough to be on opposite low-rated shows.”

  Mel grew expansive as he sounded off on the winning qualities of this highly commercial hit. “It’s a funny bird. It’s the Big City protest. It’s the only witty show on TV today.… I think Get Smart, incidentally, is a man’s show, the first one in a long time. All the TV shows today, y’know, are for women. Or for kids. Women and kids, they rule TV. It’s a matriarchal society. But Get Smart is for men.”

  During the first season, Mel Brooks wrote three episodes (numbers 1, 8, and 16), for one of which he was Emmy nominated in the Comedy Writing category. But then, involved in many other potential projects, he grew tired of his Get Smart scripting chores, which demanded far more concentration, organization, and discipline than he cared to invest. (He reasoned, “It’s hard to capture one’s vision and dream in iV/i minutes.” Another time, he reasoned, “When you are doing a series, of course, it’s terribly hard to avoid repetition. If I tried to write Get Smart every week, I’d run dry very soon—I could put a couple of things together, but the juice, the chemistry wouldn’t be there.”) Thereafter, Brooks served largely as just a consultant to the ongoing program. (This less taxing job required him to commute to the West Coast at least once a month.) Naturally, as one of the show’s creators, he received royalties and other allied income.

  Long before the end of the first season, Brooks and Buck Henry had a serious falling-out. It stemmed from the show’s credits crawl, which read “By Mel Brooks with Buck Henry.” Henry felt he deserved equal billing with Brooks, and it irked him greatly that Brooks was receiving the lion’s share of media attention. Mel insisted that the “misunderstanding” was a result of his agents pressuring him to take senior credit on the show because of his array of industry credentials, and that he deeply regretted the rift it had caused with Henry. Brooks also asserted that his representatives had originally wanted only Mel’s name listed as a creator of the series, and it was Brooks who fought to gain Henry his due. (A decade later, Brooks spoke sharply about the still frosty situation with Henry: “Buck envied me because of the hit I’d made with the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man. I’d galloped like a greedy child, and got ahead and taken off. I had a reputation for being a crazy Jew animal, whereas Buck thought of himself as an intellectual. Well, I was an intellectual, too.… What Buck couldn’t bear was the idea of this wacko Jew being billed over him. The truth is that he read magazines but he’s not an intellectual, he’s a pedant.”)

  Get Smart, under the strong stewardship of executive producer Leonard Stern, remained on the air for five seasons, the last two under the aegis of CBS. The cult favorite, which had been so heavily merchandized with all sorts of tie-ins, returned as a feature film, The Nude Bomb (aka The Return of Maxwell Smart) with only Don Adams among the lead players re-creating his TV role. The movie was a box-office flop. In 1989, the property emerged again as a TV movie, this time reuniting Adams with Barbara Feldon, and such others from the original series as Dick Gautier (as Hymie the Robot) and Bernie Kopell (as Conrad Siegfried). Six years later, the Fox network revived Get Smart. This time around, Andy Dick had the lead, playing the son of Agent 86 and his wife, Agent 99. The lame rehash came and went in early 1995. A decade later, Warner Bros. announced that it would film a big-screen version of the cult TV series.

  Despite the financial rewards and high industry visibility that Get Smart provided Mel, he was relieved when the show finally went off the air. For one thing, he had a great concern that Get Smart would force him to remain in the small-screen medium. It led him to say years later, “You know they can’t pay you enough for the aggravation you go
through in television. I went through six years [in one capacity or another] of Get Smart. The costs are always a factor. They would have preferred making that show by putting two people in a closet with a naked light bulb talking to each other for 13 weeks.” Thereafter, each time he was offered his own TV series, he declined because television “grinds you up, makes a sausage out of you every week.” However, over the coming years, circumstances would prompt the mercurial Brooks to change his mind about participating again in the hectic arena of television series.

  22

  Flaunt It, Baby

  The best way to stay alive as a good writer is to run a bulldozer through your conditioned values, learn to live frugally—which I haven’t—and take all the time you need to develop your ideas. You can’t do that if economics are smashing you to the wall. Movies and television are so mechanized now that if you’ve got a little bit of talent there are a lot of fellas in shiny suits waiting to grab you and chain you to a typewriter. Pretty soon you’re thinking the way they’re thinking. Or a television producer wants you to write a story about a bird with a broken wing or some other piece of idiocy which people don’t have to watch at all—they can just hear it kind of subliminally. This is what you’ve got to resist.

  –Mel Brooks, 1966

  By the mid-1960s, Mel Brooks had gained cult status as the 2000 Year Old Man and was enjoying high visibility in the entertainment industry and with the public as the cocreator of the thriving Get Smart TV series/franchise. Mel’s elevated professional status allowed him the luxury of being more selective in choosing his projects. Meanwhile, he and Anne Bancroft were enjoying the fruits of their respective professional successes. In late 1965, the Brookses purchased a summer home at Lone-lyville on Fire Island. When asked what inspired the new real estate purchase, Anne explained, “There are no autos and few phones on Fire Island. If I stayed home [in Manhattan] I couldn’t get any rest. I’ll do nothing for an entire month. Fire Island has the best beach I’ve ever seen. It is a narrow island with the bay on one side and the ocean on the other. From our house you can see both.”

  Bancroft also updated the media on life with the zany Brooks: “I’m a moody person. When I’m in a bad mood anything can make me angry: if I’m in a good mood nothing bothers me. I’m hard to live with and so is Mel hard to live with. But my husband is one of the funniest men who ever lived. Sometimes I laugh at him until the tears roll out of my eyes.”

  • • •

  In the mid-1960s, Brooks occasionally found himself hired as a “script doctor” for floundering Broadway plays. It was the type of task that meshed with Mel’s then helter-skelter work habits. Such assignments generally required no protracted commitment on the part of the consultant, but only to step into the fray and spew forth ideas that others on the production team would execute. If the last-minute counsel proved at all helpful, it enhanced the script doctor’s behind-the-scenes reputation; if the efforts failed, no serious fault could be attributed to the consultant, who had merely tried to salvage what proved to be an untenable situation.

  For Kelly, which cost nearly $650,000 (a whopping sum at the time), Mel was one of three writers (including Leonard Stern of Get Smart fame) brought in during the messy pre-Broadway tryout. The show’s producers (Get Smart’s David Susskind and Daniel Melnick, as well as independent film mogul Joseph E. Levine) paid Brooks to help rescue this floundering musical about the legendary Steve Brodie, who had once jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. The troubled show opened and closed at Manhattan’s Broadhurst Theater in one night during February 1965. Thirteen months later, Brooks was involved in a similar capacity with The Best Laid Plans, which bowed and folded in New York within two days. Mel insisted to the press that he had not rewritten Gwen Davis’s comedy but had merely helped director Arthur Storch in an advisory capacity.

  With much more success, Mel was a cowriter on The Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris Special that aired on CBS-TV on April 12, 1966. The nostalgic reunion of the gang from Your Show of Shows did well in the ratings. Along with Sam Denoff, Bill Persky, Carl Reiner, and Mel Tolkin, Brooks shared an Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Writing in Variety. (At the same June 1967 Emmy ceremony, Brooks’s Get Smart coworker, Buck Henry, shared an Emmy with Leonard Stern in the category of Outstanding Writing in Comedy for a particularly funny Maxwell Smart segment.)

  In his capacity as a TV personality, Brooks was still much in evidence on the small screen. He was a guest in 1966 on such game shows as CBS’s The Face Is Familiar and NBC’s Eye Guess. In May 1967, Mel paired with Carl Reiner as hosts of (and performers on) The Colgate Comedy Hour, a 60-minute variety show designed to resurrect the 1950s series of the same name. The NBC-TV pilot failed to generate sufficient network interest for any continuation. Also, Mel served as a dapper guest cohost on the syndicated Mike Douglas Show in late 1967.

  Back in 1963, Brooks had written, directed, and appeared in the trailer to My Son, the Hero. This promoted a dubbed edition of The Titans, a European-made costume “epic” overhauled for U.S. release by Carl Reiner. Mel’s amusing promotional piece earned more attention than the actual film. Now, in 1965, Brooks was scheduled for a role in Easy Come, Easy Go, a low-budget comedy for Paramount Pictures to be directed by Barry Shear and to showcase British comedian Terry-Thomas and the singing act of Jan (Berry) and Dean (Torrence). However, on August 5, 1965, in Chatsworth (in the West San Fernando Valley outside of Los Angeles), a freight train being filmed for the picture slammed into a flatcar carrying several of the production’s acting and technical team. Twelve people were injured, including the 24-year-old Berry, who fractured his left leg, and director Barry Shear, 42, who suffered internal injuries. During the impact, a camera worth over $10,000 was thrown to the ground and smashed. The picture was canceled before Mel even got in front of the camera.

  Amid these myriad activities, Mel found time to talk with Larry Siegel for Playboy magazine. The results appeared in the October 1966 issue. The offbeat Q&A session labeled Brooks as that exceedingly amusing comedic writer who had now turned the usually staid forum of the print interview into a fresh and irreverent art form. In the course of this classic dialogue, the madcap Mel was witty, gregarious, and always ready to throw the writer off track with such non-sequitur interjections as: “How much are you paying me for this?” When asked about his recent trip to the Continent he shot back, “Europe is very near and dear to my heart. Would you like to see a picture of it?” The highly mirthful article was so popular it led to a second Playboy interview showcase for Brooks a few years later.

  • • •

  While Brooks had many professional, financial, and personal distractions in early to mid-1966, his mind was always on his pet project, Springtime for Hitler. At first, the satire about Germany’s dictator emerged in the form of a long anecdotal novel. It focused on key adventures in the despot’s life that led to his becoming the dastardly leader of the Third Reich. By the time of Mel’s travails on the Broadway musical All American, the long-brewing work had morphed in a new direction. Now the fiction highlighted a faded White Way producer (based on a man Brooks had worked for in the 1940s) who had mounted a string of flop shows, all of them financed by his wooing and bilking vulnerable old ladies. As Mel further developed the plot line, he utilized the gimmick of having the sleazy producer overfinance his latest production (a show glorifying Adolf Hitler) and hoping it will be a flop so that none of the backers—let alone the Internal Revenue Service—will be any the wiser. (A variation of this plot premise had been used in the past, including in the RKO screen comedy New Faces of 1937, costarring Milton Berle and Harriet Hilliard. Then, too, the gimmick of mocking Hitler to belittle his importance had been employed in the 1950s by Brooks’s old pal, comedian Will Jordan. Later, shock comic Lenny Bruce weaved a variation of Jordan’s routine into his own unorthodox club act and it appeared on his comedy album, The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce.)

  As Mel labored off and on for a long period over his effort
s, he showed his work in progress to various people in show business. Several critiqued that it was too dialogue heavy and would be better served as a play. Anxious to get the property off the ground, Mel followed this advice and tried to adapt his narrative into the new format. However, when he had completed a rough draft, he was now informed by those who saw it that the revamped work had far too many scenes to be feasible as a play. “So, what is it?” Brooks wondered. “A screenplay,” he was advised.

  By the mid-1960s, Springtime for Hitler was taking shape as a film script. Mel worked on it at home, as well as at his place out at Fire Island, and, increasingly, at an office on Manhattan’s West 46th Street. The latter premises belonged to producer Lore Noto, an acquaintance of Mel and his helper, Alfa-Betty Olsen. (She was transcribing Brooks’s handwritten drafts and notes into a typed format and, later, would serve as casting agent and assistant on the film.) Olsen remembered, “In return for looking after Noto’s mail and things, we had an office, and that’s where we wrote it. Lore would come in after lunch and then, around two o’clock, the phone would ring, and it would be Anne Bancroft. Anne would get Lore on the phone and ask him, ‘Is my husband there?’ That’s how it went. We also cast the movie out of that office. Everything was kind of makeshift.… And it was just evident Mel wanted it very much. You could feel him reaching for the brass ring. Writing… [this property] … was Mel creating himself, he wanted to declare himself to the world.”