Monday, April 23, 2012

Mel Brooks


Mel Brooks in 2003      Photo: Steve Grayson/WireImage.com

In the spring of 1975, I was in my sophomore year at UC Irvine.  Every morning, I would walk from the dorms around the ring that circled the campus park to the Biological Sciences building.  One morning, all the pathways into the park were closed off for some reason.  While most of the park was empty, there was some activity in an area near the Humanities building.  It was a film shoot.  Joining the small crowd that had formed, I scanned the scene.  Much to my delight, I recognized Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, and (could it really be?) Paul Newman.  Then, coming out from behind a Panaflex camera, was Mel Brooks, the director of The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, three of the funniest movies ever made.   They were making Mel Brook’s Silent Movie (1976).  The scene involved Brooks, Feldman, and DeLuise chasing Newman around in motorized wheelchairs.  Our campus stood in for a hospital in which Newman was a patient after a racecar crash - and the crashed car lay, inexplicable, in the center of one of the plazas. I figured that would make sense once I saw the movie but, even then, it didn’t.  The next day, as security waned, I strolled down to the shoot and sat next to Marty Feldman. Though I never did figure out which eye was looking at me, we talked for about an hour. Paul Newman got a cake for his 50th birthday that afternoon. However, the real thrill was getting to watch Mel Brooks direct.

Mel Brooks got his start doing stand-up comedy in Catskill Mountain resorts.  In 1950, he joined the writing team for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows alongside Carl Reiner and Neil Simon.  That writer’s room would later inspire Reiner’s Dick Van Dyke Show and Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor.  Brooks and Reiner became close friends and would regale party guests with improvised comedy sketches where Reiner would interview Brooks who would take on various personas.  One night, Brooks was a 2000 year old man – and a comedy legend was born.  The routine evolved and expanded through the 50’s culminating in appearances on the Steve Allen Show and the 1961 comedy album 2000 years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. In 1965, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created Get Smart, a TV show about a bumbling spy named Maxwell Smart played by Don Adams and beautiful Agent 99 played by Barbara Feldon.  While Brooks didn’t participate beyond the pilot, the show ran for five seasons and introduced a wide array of kooky gadgets (e.g. the shoe phone, the cone of silence) and catch-phrases (e.g. “Sorry about that, Chief”, “Would you believe…”, and “Missed it by that much”) into the popular culture.

Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in The Producers (1968)
For years, Mel Brooks had joked about writing a musical about Adolf Hitler.  While that never happened,  the idea inspired the screenplay for his first movie, The Producers (1968). Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder star as Broadway producers Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom who find a way to make more from a sure-fire flop than a hit and set out to produce the worst musical ever, “Springtime for Hitler.”  The Producers includes the opening number from “Springtime for Hitler” which leaves the cinematic audience in jaw-dropping silence and the real audience in uproarious laughter.  The Producers won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.



Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974) are both outrageous send-ups of their respective genres.  Blazing Saddles, while packed solid with gut-splitting jokes, is surprisingly true to the precepts of the western genre – even as it spills out of the backlot and onto the streets of Hollywood.  The big showdown between the good guy and the bad guy takes place in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.  Young Frankenstein duplicates the look and feel of the Universal Studios 1930’s horror films.  They even used some of the original laboratory equipment from Frankenstein (1931) to recreate the lab in Young Frankenstein.  The movie is breathtakingly funny, particularly when Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) and The Monster (Peter Boyle) tap dance and sing Puttin’ on the Ritz.  These two movies made Mel Brooks a household name but also started him on a course of making one genre-parody movie after another – with mixed results.  Silent Movie (1976) failed to find the slapstick of silent movies.  High Anxiety (1977) satirized Hitchcock thrillers but wasn’t very funny.  History of the World: Part I (1981) took on the epic genre in very silly ways (Moses dropping one of the three tablets bearing the fifteen commandments is priceless.) Brooks delivered the comic goods once again with Spaceballs (1987), a Star Wars–like space opera. Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) is a weak satire of the Robin Hood myth.  In all of these, Mel Brooks found a part (or two) for himself from the Yiddish-speaking Indian in Blazing Saddles to Yogurt in Spaceballs.


In 2000, with his movie career apparently behind him, Mel Brooks returned to Broadway with a musical version of The Producers. Sporting new tunes and a new ending, The Producers was a smash hit.  It won 12 Tonys and ran for 2,502 performances.  With that Tony win, Mel Brooks became the eighth person to win an Oscar, a Tony, an Emmy, and a Grammy.  A movie of The Producers – The Musical was released in 2005 with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane reprising their Broadway roles (let’s see…that would be a movie of a Broadway musical based on a movie about producing a Broadway musical, right?)  This story took one last weird twist with Season 4 of Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry David is cast as Max Bialystock.  It is revealed that casting Larry was supposed to end The Producers, freeing its creators from its long run at last.  Instead, Larry is a hit. Sound familiar?

Despite Mel Brooks’ reputation for broad, ribald humor, three Mel Brooks films are listed in the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Best American comedies: Blazing Saddles (#6), The Producers (#11) and Young Frankenstein (#13).





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1 comment:

  1. I rented the first season of Get Smart from Netflix a few months ago and it was still pretty funny. Not as riveting and clever as it seemed during its days on the small screen, though Barbara Feldon certainly stood the test of time.

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