Now I've Seen Everything Dept.: Mel Brooks

It's GOOD to be the King!  
or
(Well! Talk About Bad TASTE!)

Melvin James Kaminsky was born small and Jewish on June 28, 1926 and has remained that way for most of his life. Brooklyn-born, he grew up in Williamsburg, where, at the age of 14, he was taught how to play the drums by Buddy Rich. He majored in psychology in his only year at Brooklyn College before he was drafted in the Army, where he defused land-mines during WWII. Surviving that unique service, he became a drummer and pianist on the Catskills-circuit in the "Borscht Belt," eventually becoming a stand-up comedian and "tummler" at Grosslingler's resort.

Brooks also did radio work and summer stock before turning to a writing career, landing what would be a legendary place on Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows" (starting as "The Admiral Broadway Revue") from 1949 to 1954, alongside such comedic lights as his life-long friend Carl Reiner—who would use the writer's room as his inspiration for "The Dick Van Dyke Show"—Mel Tolkin, and brothers Neil and Danny Simon). In 1954, the show evolved into "Ceasar's Hour," which added writers Larry Gelbart and a young Woody Allen to the writer's room.

Following the end of "Ceasar's Hour," Brooks did some writing for Broadway and dabbled in other improvisational projects, the best-known of which was his skit-work with Reiner, introducing the 2000 Year-Old Man, who had known "the great and the not-so-great." Originally designed as a "party-piece," Reiner and Brooks recorded a series of albums, which won the first of Brooks' "EGOT" awards (the quadruple crown for winning the Emmy, the Grammy, The Oscar, and the Tony. His first Oscar, he won for the development of a short subject called "The Critic."

With Buck Henry, he created the spy-spoof television series "Get Smart!" which starred Don Adams for the 1965 through 1970 seasons, winning the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1968 and 1969. Brooks then brought to fruition an idea he'd been long developing that would begin a series of films that would bring him his greatest fame as writer, producer, director, and, often, star.

The Producers (1967) The idea for The Producers was inspired by an off-Broadway impresario Brooks used to work for, who would routinely seduce old ladies for production funds, pocketing much of it for his own purposes. That, combined with Brooks' impertinent idea for a musical making fun of Adolf Hitler, created this ingenious scenario about producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and his new auditor-soon-to-be-partner Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) and their search for a sure-fire flop to disguise their embezzling of the production's finances.

That play, "Springtime for Hitler" (the screenplay's original—and deemed unuseable—title), becomes an unexpected hit, despite the wrong scrpt, the wrong director, the wrong lead, and Bialystock and Bloom must take more extreme measures to keep from going to prison.

Brooks' direction is fairly simple and he's aided immeasurably by his leads: Zero Mostel has rarely been more effective on-screen, manically displaying the worst impulses of man, and Gene Wilder was Brooks' secret weapon combining the extremes of hysteria and sweetness in one neurotic package.

The Producers won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, beating, among others, the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. The Producers was also named to the National Film Registry in 1996. He would adapt the film for the Broadway stage in 2001, eventually running for 2,502 performances and winning an unheard-of 12 Tony Awards—winning him the fourth of the most prestigious arts awards given in the United States.

The Twelve Chairs (1970) Based on a 1928 Russian tale by authors Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs was a fairly straight adaptation—with a less extreme finale from the story—by Brooks, about a motley crew of grifters in post-Revolutionary Russia, disoriented by the change in their fortunes and, old ways dying hard, trying to secure a cache of gems hidden in the upholstery of one of twelve chairs of an elegant dining room set that had been "re-distributed" by the Communist government. 

Ippolit Vorobyaninov (Ron Moody), a former "Marshall of the nobility" hears the confession of hiding the jewels on his mother-in-law's death-bed. But, so does Father Fyodor (Dom DeLuise), who decides to forego the priesthood and seek his fortunes...by seeking hers. Vorobyaninov, determined to get the jewels himself, forms a partnership with a local con-artist, Ostap Bender (Frank Langella, in his film debut) to try and locate the hidden fortune, which takes them all over Russia amidst the various strata of the populace as the dining set has been broken up and sold individually. The two seek out all twelve chairs, with Father Fyodor following a parallel path that frequently crosses that of Vorobyaninov and Bender. It's a Hustonian premise of fortune forever changing the fates of those foolish enough to seek it, and it's the "straightest" film Brooks ever made, a disciplined, witty script that often goes buffoonishly under Brooks' direction and DeLuise's manic portrayal (and Brooks has a memorably off-kilter role as Vorobyaninov's former serf). It's Brooks' farthest "reach" with his most restraint.

Brooks, Moody, and Langella

Blazing Saddles (1974) It started as an original script by Andrew Bergman called "Tex X"—a western about a black sheriff with contemporary language. Brooks' agent told him he should direct and Brooks and Bergman hammered together a script, along with Richard Pryor and a gaggle of comedy writers in a joke-trading floor, not unlike the situation in the writer's room of "Your Show of Shows," The result was part parody, part send-up, equal parts borscht-belt and chitlins circuit schtick, capped with a cynical fantasia about making movies. Pryor was briefly considered to star, but what was needed was someone a bit less nervous, and they traded up finding Cleavon Little, who managed to play up the comedy and look smooth doing it. For the part of The Waco Kid, Gig Young was cast, but replaced by Gene Wilder, who was once considered for the role of Hedley Lamarr (as was, weirdly, Johnny Carson). For the part of dance-hall impresario Lilli von Shtupp, Madeleine Kahn was hired and did such a scorching parody of Marlene Dietrich, she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

It was controversial and almost not released. Warners wanted to cut most of the language, the campfire "bean scene," Mongo flattening a horse, and the extensive use of the "n" word, in which case, Brooks said "you've got no movie." His contract gave him content control over the kvelling execs and the movie emerged unharmed. Brooks tried to get John Wayne for the role of The Waco Kid at one point, but Wayne said he couldn't possibly appear in something that "dirty." "But I'll be first in line to see it!"

It was Warner's biggest hit that Summer. In 2006, Blazing Saddles was inducted into the National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress. Brooks must be proud of that, but also wonder where he went wrong.

Young Frankenstein (1974) Gene Wilder's agent was looking for a project to star his clients Wilder, Marty Feldman and Peter Boyle—as mismatched a collection of talent as one could find. Wilder was working on the script idea—based on 1939's Son of Frankenstein—while filming Blazing Saddles and Brooks asked to read it. Wilder asked Brooks if he was willing to direct it—not yet feeling ready to shepherd a motion picture through production—and Brooks agreed, on the condition that he and Wilder fine-tune the script, a process Wilder found amazing and valuable, if brutal.

The result is a love letter to the classic Universal horror pictures of the 1930's and 40's, filmed in a pristine black-and-white—a move that 20th Century Fox was very much against. The match-up between Brooks and Wilder creates an oddly raunchy, but sweet movie that still manages to convey Mary Shelley's underpinnings of scientific hubris, sexual subtext, and the plight of those who are granted life against their will.

Blazing Saddles was hit-and-miss, but Young Frankenstein manages to have a high percentage of genuinely funny and inspired gags, which are helped immeasurably by a cast headed by Wilder, Feldman, and Boyle, with the by-now essential Madeleine Kahn, as well as Terry Garr, Cloris Leachman, Kenneth Mars, and (in an unbilled cameo) Gene Hackman.

Young Frankenstein was voted into the National Film Registry in 2003 and, an even bigger financial success than Blazing Saddles, giving Brooks the market-value to do something even more unconventional with his next film, a return to film-comedy basics, while making a stinging comment about a current state of moving-making, the self-reflective Silent Movie.

"Shtup it! Shtup it! You're killing him!!"

Silent Movie (1976) If 20th Century Fox had issues with Young Frankenstein being shot in black-and-white, they must have had many with Brooks' scheme for his next film—to make an entirely silent movie (there were objections, and Brooks compromised with a continuous soundtrack and sound effects—which he took advantage of for jokes, anyway). Silent Movie is more of a satire of Hollywood deal-making and chicanery, in the highly visual style of silent melodrama. The story has a down-on-his luck director (Brooks) propose a "big-hit" silent movie to the head of Big Pictures Studio (Sid Caesar, who smokes double-barreled cigars) to save it from being a acquired by a "soulless" corporate conglomerate, Engulf and Devour.* To ensure that it's a smash the director and his two side-kicks (Marty Feldman and Dom DeLuise) try to attract the biggest stars in Hollywood (cameos by Burt Reynolds, Liza Minnelli, Paul Newman, James Caan, and Mrs. Brooks, Anne Bancroft) to ensure it's success. One of the best gags of the film is they also make a call to mime Marcel Marceau who delivers the only spoken line in the film: "Non!" ("What did he say?" says the title-card "I don't know. I don't speak French!")

"Non!"

The stars have a fine time sending up their images, and Brooks has a grand time making sight gags of anything he can think of...and playing with the dichotomy of tile-cards and images. Despite what one of the characters says slapstick may not be quite so dead—and loving it. It had me at its opening title: "Hello"

High Anxiety (1977) Another Brooks parody, this time utilizing the cliches and tropes and whole sequences of a very particular niche—Alfred Hitchcock suspense films, and made with the tacit approval of the director himself, who was still quite alive at the time.** 

Brooks plays Dr. Richard Thorndyke, who has been named to replace a recently passed-away administrar of The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very Very Nervous. Thorndyke finds the cure rate at the facility abysmal ("Once in a Blue Moon") and he begins to suspect that there is no "curing" being done, merely the perpetuation of the symptoms, while, at the same time, he begins treatment there for his own "high anxiety"—a paralyzing fear of heights. It becomes clear to Thorndyke—although no one else believes him—that he is being targeted for his suspicions by any means necessary—blackmail, discreditation, even murder. The basic spine of Brooks' film is taken from Hitchcock's 1945 film Spellbound, but Brooks borrows liberally from Hitchcock's entire film career.

Given the "Hitchcock style," with its repeating themes and psychological underpinnings, it's very easy to make a parody of the "wrong man" suspense story—Hitchcock has done it enough, himself. Where High Anxiety fails is in the rigorous camera technique and film-language employed by the director to communicate visually what might be going on psychologically with his characters. Brooks just isn't good enough to be able to do what Hitchcock could (but then, nobody is), and although angles may be copied, set-up's xeroxed, lighting reproduced and ideas filched (like the spider-web lighting effect and invisible floor pictured below), Brooks doesn't have the sheer scrupulousness of the art-form, like The Master of Suspense. But, then, his goals are very different —he echoes the technique to elicit mirth at the recognition of it, rather than to genuinely manipulate an audience's emotions.

History of the World: Part 1 (1981) The one Brooksfilm that has no feature-length story-line, but is a series of historical comedy sketches, not unlike "Your Show of Shows." There are five segments, all narrated by Orson Welles: 1) the stone age and the early inventions of man (played by Sid Caesar); 2) The Old Testament with Brooks as Moses bringing a changing number of Commandments down from Mt. Sinai; 3) The Roman Empire; 4) The Spanish Inquisition; and 5) The French Revolution.

One gets the impression that Brooks had some good ideas brewing for another film, but nothing that could be sustained for a full 90 minutes, so went with the anthology format, instead. The film suffers for that, as it is difficult to care about any of the characters as they go through their brief episodes, but the film has one absolute cracked gem of a sequence—The Spanish Inquisition, which is staged as a Broadway production number by way of Busby Berkley. It takes the outrageousness of "Springtime for Hitler" a few kick-steps further and points out a much-needed reminder that Brooks is at his best when he is skewering repression, prejudice, and the puritanical. Every time some politician or religious flunky bleats about the current so-called persecution of Christians, I think "well, you wrote the bible for it" and "The Inquisition" vaults heavenward through my head. 

Spaceballs (1987) In the last minutes of The History of the World, Part 1, Brooks promised that Part II would have a segment called "Jews in Space." Well, Part II will probably never happen, but for that promised segment, Spaceballs is as close as we'll probably get. A parody of all things Star Wars (including the merchandising), and (as with High Anxiety) with the wary approval of the film's original author, George Lucas, Brooks plays with the Big Universe of science-fiction movies. Ostensibly, it's a parody of Star Wars, but (like Lucas' film, which was a micro-waved stew of influences) there are shots taken at The Wizard of Oz, The Planet of the Apes, Alien (featuring John Hurt having another bad meal with a hilarious Looney Tunes riff thrown in) and the comedy highlights the contrasts between light and dark and big and small. For example, Spaceballs presages Lucas' "Star Wars" prequels by casting Rick Moranis as a decidedly whining functionary hidden underneath the mask of its evil version of Darth Vader, named—appropriately enough—Dark Helmet.

The Empire checks out the plans of the Rebels by renting the home-video release.

It is low-hanging fruit for Brooks to have the center of the story be the rescue of a Jewish Princess (played by the very game Daphne Zuniga) and her robot attendant Dot Matrix (voiced by Joan Rivers) by a space rapscallion (Bill Pullman) and his trusty dog-co-pilot Barf (John Candy) who can only defeat the evil Spaceball Empire by learning the ways of "The Schwartz" from a troll named Yogurt (Brooks). Some of the merchandising shots hit home (although one could fire one back at Brooks for the character of "Pizza the Hut"), but mostly, it's softball skit-comedy stuff, along the lines of a MAD Magazine parody. Fun, with some inspired gags, but Lucas probably knew, as did Hitchcock, that Brooks' film would be affectionate and not do his work any damage.

Life Stinks (1991) Originally titled "Life Sucks," nobody went to see Brooks' well-intentioned original satire of the dichotomy between the haves and have-not's in contemporary Los Angeles. Perhaps audiences thought it would be a "downer" (it isn't), or preachy (it doesn't), or they thought that however accomplished Brooks had become as a director (or producer, for that matter) that he shouldn't pretend he's Preston Sturges when it comes to making social satire (can I see a show of hands...just me, huh?).

So, what if I IMDB plot-summaried the movie this way—Donald Trump makes a bet that he can survive 30 days without means on the streets of Los Angeles in order to secure the property rights for a new development. Sounds a lot more fun, doesn't it?

It's certainly a better movie than I imagined it would be. Brooks' Goddard Bolt makes a bet with business rival Vance Crasswell (Jeffrey Tambor) that he will get his development rights for "almost" nothing if he survives life in the neighborhood for 30 days on the conditions that "#1) Bolt will be completely penniless; #2) He must wear an electronic anklet that will activate if he leaves the boundaries, forfeiting the bet if he exceeds thirty seconds out of bounds; #3) At no time can he reveal to any of the slum area residents that he is Goddard Bolt. If he succeeds, Bolt will gain the neighborhood for almost nothing."* The comedy is mined by Bolt being such a fish-out-of-water and having to play by street-rules that have nothing to do with boardroom antics, and anybody who thinks the comedy is sophisticated doesn't know Brooks. But, they should know that there will be some heart to it, as Brooks learns the ropes from a handful of street-people (primarily Leslie Ann Warren, Teddy Wilson, and Howard Morris) and develops a community-family to cope.

One little interesting bit of trivia (with a spoiler): at one point, the group have a ceremony to spread the ashes of one of their own, when the wind blows the ashes back into their faces. This was based on an incident that happened to Howard Morris when his father died—the character whose ashes are being spread is played by Morris. Eight years later, the Coen Brothers used the same bit in The Big Lebowski. 

Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) In 1975, Brooks produced a comedy television series based on Robin Hood called "When Things Were Rotten." It lasted only 13 episodes, but there must have been a lot of material left over, and with the recent release of Kevin Costner's version of Robin Hood, the character could be mined for even newer laughs. The movie takes the Kevin Reynolds-directed Robin Hood as the template, with the exception of casting Cary Elwes as a more traditional Errol Flynn-like Robin Hood ("Because, unlike SOME Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent!" he says at one point). 

Because that Robin Hood movie was a bit less segregated as the lily-white ones of the past, Men in Tights starts with a rap parody of a madrigal, and one of Robin's Merry Men is played by Dave Chappelle (and his father by Isaac Hayes), no doubt to equate Robin's band of Merrie Men with a posse. The movie is helped immensely by Cary Elwes in the lead, who again pulls off the same trick he did in The Princess Bride—walking the tight-rope between being a credible leading man, while making the most of the comedy. It's more affectionate than outright funny, leaving the best parody of Robin Hood being Terry Gilliam's (and John Cleese's) treatment of the legend as a clueless dilletante in Time Bandits.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) Three years after Francis Coppola's production of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Brooks made a parody of it with Dracula: Dead and Loving it, and he had an odd ally in the lead—Leslie Nielson, whose long career as a dramatic actor became supplanted by his ability to do comedy starting with his appearance in Airplane! in 1989. His newfound ability to shamelessly go for a laugh while (usually) playing it straight, is supported by a manic Peter MacNichol as Renfield, Steven Weber as Jonathan Harker, Harvey Korman as Dr. Seward and Brooks himself as Dr. van Helsing. Dracula's victims, Mina and Lucy are played by Lysette Anthony and Amy Yasbeck, respectively.

Coppola's Dracula version was just a canine tooth-length from camp, and Brooks makes good use of spoofing some of that movie's tropes, like the poofy hair that Gary Oldman sported in that film, Dracula's shadows that seemed to be out of sync with its originator, and a few other things from various Dracula movies, including a stiffly rising Dracula (who then clonks his head on a chandelier). Brooks even borrows the ballroom mirror idea from Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers.  And, given the amount of gore has increased over the years in the Dracula films, Brooks subtly demonstrates the change.

* Paramount Pictures had just been bought by Gulf and Western at the time of the film's conception.

** If we're to believe Brooks, Hitchcock even contributed ideas for the parody—the one that Brooks really wanted to use was Dr. Thorndyke being pursued by gun-men down a long pier and making a desperate leap to the lip of a ferry-boat...which, unfortunately is pulling INTO port and not away, so they keep shooting at him.

*** Thanks to wikipedia for the conditions. I'd forgotten them.