It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (30 page)

•     •     •

Just when everything seemed so bleak in Mel’s career, along came Brooks’s fortuitous 1973 encounter with the powerful talent agent David Begelman. Miraculously, the latter soon engineered an offer for Brooks to write and direct
Blazing Saddles
. The film’s tremendous box-office reception not only thrust Mel back into prominence, but made the zany man far more of a household name than he had been, for example, when his 2000 Year Old Man albums were such a craze in the 1960s. By all standards, Mel had made a monumental professional comeback—one that brought him industry admiration and public adulation.

With his regained prominence, Mel found himself called upon by reporters to analyze the special appeal of his loony, trailblazing film. Brooks emphasized, “Cliches are just the ornaments. The tree has to be solid. The movie has got to be about something. Take
Blazing Saddles
. It was about whether a black could survive in the good old West. It may seem like a silly picture but, to me, it had a strong underpinning because it was really about love.” He reasoned further, “But most audiences only remember the ornaments of a comedy—the jokes. They don’t see the tree. It’s dark. It’s all bark. But what would all the ornaments be without the tree for support? They’d just be a pile of shiny baubles on the ground.”

Thrilled by the enormous success of his latest picture, Brooks predicted, “I think in ten years, and I’m tooting my own horn now,
Blazing Saddles
will be recognized as the funniest film ever made. Just funny—I’m not talking about other faults or virtues, I’m just talking about the amount of laughter evoked. I think it’s funnier than other movies, even Mae West and W. C. Fields, or Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers, all of whom I love. The only thing that might compete with it for the amount of laughter are the Three Stooges shorts.” It led him to ask rhetorically, “Should I be happy that I’ve spawned such insanity? Yes, I’m very proud and very ashamed at the same time.” In his estimation, “
Blazing Saddles
allowed me to be the lovely Rabelaisian vulgarian that I am. I mean those cowboys farting around the campfire allowed me for the first time to really exercise my scatological muscles.”

At the time, Brooks had no way of forecasting that his wild and wacky feature would have its greatest impact on the next generations of filmmakers, who set about pushing the envelope even further throughout mainstream cinema. These would include such moviemakers as Terry Gilliam (in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
), David Zucker, Jim Abraham, Jerry Zucker (of
Airplane!
fame), and the Farrelly brothers (with
There’s Something About Mary
) and actor Jim Carrey (with his lowbrow comedy in
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
).

•     •     •

Now that Brooks was riding so high in Hollywood, the industry watched with keen interest to see what the unorthodox Mel would do as a follow-up to the oddball success of
Blazing Saddles.

25
A Monster Hit

It’s very hard to break through in our business, because the public is murderous. They’re envious and contemptuous of anybody who would stick their neck out. So very few people get through that skein of public ferocity. Most people think you don’t make it because of apathy. It’s not [the case].

—Mel Brooks, 1974

On one hand, Mel Brooks was jubilant that the megasuccess of
Blazing Saddles
allowed him to be taken seriously by the Hollywood establishment, which respected anyone who could create such a substantial box-office hit. On the other hand, the veteran talent still yearned to be taken seriously by film reviewers and the moviegoing public.

As to being called zany, Brooks argued, “It’s a convenient pigeonhole for lazy minds. If they [i.e., the critics] really knew my work, you could not say zany Mel Brooks and seriously discuss
The Twelve Chairs
,
The Critic,
or certain aspects of the early
Show of Shows
, when tragedy and comedy met so beautifully. I object to it because I think you could call Picasso zany because he’s not a naturalistic painter, or dull. Or you could call Dalí zany. But they’re great artists and we’ve got to learn that abstract comedy or surrealistic comedy is not necessarily cheap.”

Mel emphasized, “You start with a vision, and you just want it to come out that way. You do everything in your power short of a criminal act to make sure it comes out that way. You’re the only one who has the vision. All these scenes, these tiles in the grand mosaic of your brain, you’re the only one who has the whole vision. I suspect that’s the trouble with a lot of films, that they’re not writer-director made. They’re director-made. And that the writer is the only one that has the true vision.” Now that Brooks had the comforting reassurance of having turned out such a significant box-office hit, his self-confidence was restored—and then some. In this mode, he enthusiastically expounded to the press on the impetus behind his expanding activities in the filmmaking process: “I think I enjoy writing the most, because that’s really the genesis. The explosion of a new idea in your brain is really the happiest moment. Directing is good, too, because you can mold and shape and sculpt. Acting is good, because it cuts out another middleman; it cuts out an actor who may not do it as well as you can, who may not understand it and get the nuances. I am very happy to be doing what I’m doing because a lot of people just work for wages. If the money wasn’t good, I’d still be doing it. If they’d let me do it I’d still do it. I mean, essentially, it’s just showing off.”

•     •     •

Even before
Blazing Saddles
was released, in February 1974, Mel Brooks found himself working on a new Hollywood screen project. It stemmed from the fertile imagination of Gene Wilder. Perhaps inspired by Mel’s ability to be a screenwriter, director, and actor, Gene had aspirations of one day following in that same career path. For now, however, Wilder focused on being a performer—and a very much in demand one at that. Back on the East Coast—before he became involved with
Blazing Saddles—
Gene had had an idea of adapting Mary Wollstonecraft: Shelley’s Gothic horror novel,
Frankenstein
, for the screen. Wilder recalled his creative process: “I took a yellow legal pad and a blue felt pen and I wrote
Young Frankenstein
on top.… And then for two pages, I thought what could happen to me if I suddenly found out that I was an heir to Beaufort von Frankenstein’s whole estate in Transylvania. And I finished the two pages. I called Mel [Brooks]. I told him, Well, he says cute. Cute. That’s all he said.”

Later in the summer of 1972, Mike Medavoy, then Wilder’s talent agent, asked Gene if he might have any ideas in mind that would be suitable for teaming Gene on camera with two new Medavoy clients. The personalities in question were Peter Boyle (a stocky character actor best known for such films as
Joe
and
The Candidate
) and Marty Feldman (a British performer—mainly in TV series—who had unusually angular features and bulging eyes, which often darted about wildly and out of sync with each other. It occurred to Wilder that he could incorporate roles for both Boyle and Feldman into his
Young Frankenstein
property.

Over the coming months, Gene, the film writing novice, wrote snatches of his screen treatment (and screenplay drafts) in between movie assignments—one of them being
Blazing Saddles.
Meanwhile, Medavoy showed Wilder’s treatment to Michael Gruskoff, who had produced two films
(The Last Movie
and
Silent Running
) and was looking for a new venture. Gruskoff liked the
Young Frankenstein
concept and the package of Wilder-Boyle-Feldman. He suggested that adding Mel Brooks to the deal would make it an easier sale. Mel was just then finishing principal photography on
Blazing Saddles
and was again reluctant to work on a film that was not based on his own material. Eventually, it was agreed that Brooks and Wilder would work together on a new (fourth) draft of Gene’s screenplay and that, if the property should sell, Mel would direct the picture.

While Brooks was engaged in postproduction activities on
Blazing Saddles
, he and Wilder met during evenings at the Bel Air Hotel (where Gene was staying) to reshape the
Young Frankenstein
script. Whatever the difference of personalities between the two men, and their varying viewpoints on this joint effort, the pair worked relatively fast and harmoniously on the screenwriting collaboration. (One of their few creative disagreements occurred when Gene insisted there must be a sequence within the film in which young Dr. Frankenstein reveals his creation to the public and the monster is dressed for the occasion in formal attire. This leads to the creature and his creator launching into song and dance to Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Brooks thought this vaudeville-style number would be too frivolous and out of context within the rest of the story line. However, the usually meek Gene stood firm on this point and Mel acceded to his partner’s wishes. The odd sequence proved to be one of the most memorable scenes in the entire picture.)

Brooks said of the teamwork with Wilder, “We really had fun, we were like a couple of kids. When I’m writing a script, I don’t worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters—what they need, what they want, what they should do. That’s what gets the story going. Like a child, I listen to the characters.… You can’t just have actions, you’ve got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.”

Later, Wilder acknowledged that in the long run, working with Brooks on this feature film had been tremendously beneficial to his own career growth. “Mel has all kinds of faults. Like his greed, his megalomania, his need to be the universal father and teacher, even to people far more experienced than he is. Why I’m close to him is not in spite of those faults but because of them. I need a leader, someone to tell me what to do. If he were more humble, modest, and considerate, he would probably have more friends, but I doubt whether he and I would be such good friends. He made me discover the
me
in Mel. He taught me never to be afraid of offending. It’s when you worry about offending people that you get in trouble.”

While Mel and Gene were refining their latest draft of
Young Frankenstein
, Mike Medavoy negotiated a potential deal for its filming at Columbia Pictures, where Peter Guber was then head of production. By the time Brooks and Wilder finished revamping the screenplay, the project was estimated to require a $2.3 million budget. However, Leo Jaffe, chairman of Columbia Pictures and part of the old guard who didn’t “get” Brooks, insisted the studio would only fund the project to a maximum of $2 million.

Negotiations between Columbia and Brooks/Wilder had bogged down over the budget, but what really killed the prospective transaction was Brooks’s insistence that
Young Frankenstein
be filmed in black and white rather than in color. Mel was not being arbitrary or old-fashioned in this “artsy” demand. He reasoned that since this picture would be a tribute to director James Whale’s classic genre entries (
Frankenstein
and
The Bride of Frankenstein
), the new entry must recapture the look of those atmospheric 1930s productions, which had been filmed in black and white. On a more practical basis, Brooks’s team had already done makeup tests for the monster and discovered that the appropriate skin look (i.e., a greenish tone) lost its proper effect when photographed in color.

Columbia refused to back down on the issues of the budget and their insistence that the movie be lensed in color. (In actuality, the studio was not that excited about the script.) This prompted producer Mike Gruskoff to shop the project elsewhere. Among others, he sent a script to his friend Alan Ladd Jr., a top production executive at Twentieth Century-Fox. Almost overnight, a deal was made with Fox.

•     •     •

During this period, Brooks had grown quite enthusiastic about making
Young Frankenstein.
Among the property’s many virtues for Mel were that the film would deal with an individual who finds a way to sidestep death. This certainly appealed to Brooks, who had a lifelong concern with mortality. For another, Mel would be working in a genre that was close to his heart. “These [horror pictures] were the movies I loved most as a child. They burned images in my head: long shadows, backlighting, fog. I mean there was always fog in the rooms for no reason. Why fog? Crazy, but I loved it.” Another intriguing aspect for the moviemaker was the story line’s focus on medicine, long a topic of special interest to Mel.

In a mixture of facetiousness and utter seriousness, Brooks observed about the screenplay he and Wilder had fashioned, “In many ways we’ve gone back to the original thinking of Mary Shelley, if not her original story. I think she was the first person to discover womb envy. I think I’m the first person to call it that, but what it is, is that most men get even with women for being able to have children by saying ‘I can paint, I can write,’ and women say, ‘You’re full of shit. Look—a baby.’ And of course, she’s the winner. So here’s this scientist and he says, ‘All right, so can I make a baby. I’ll put a few rods in his neck and plug him in somewhere and we’ll make a life.’ That’s really it: to create life, like a woman.”

Since Brooks was coscripting, directing, and coproducing the venture and was the pivotal force behind the success of
Blazing Saddles
, he met with little opposition when he stepped into the role of spokesman for the new project, which owed so much to Gene Wilder’s idea and collaboration on the screenplay. Mel pointed out that
his
forthcoming picture dealt with “the ignorant vs. the intelligent. The mob vs. the intelligent people.… The story of Dr. Frankenstein addresses itself to the fear quotient. The monster is just symbolic of his mind, and the mob hates his mind, they hate his imagination.” But Brooks also noted of this film, which tipped its hat to such horror genre satires as
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein:
“If they [i.e., moviegoers] pay three dollars to forget about their problems and just want to laugh, that’s fine too.” In a rather disingenuous statement, Brooks (who always highly valued the importance of money) insisted, “You know, they could never pay me enough money to do what I do; it’s a total joy, hearing people laugh.… it’s wonderful, it’s thrilling. That’s the best.”