It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (26 page)

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 efforts, 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.”

Eventually, Brooks had a polished 30-page screen treatment and various drafts of his ever-developing screenplay. He began to peddle it to different movie studios, but almost invariably he was met by rebuffs from executives who were flabbergasted that Mel could expect any Hollywood lot to produce an unorthodox comedy that dared to highlight Adolf Hitler in such a lighthearted manner, let alone include a slimy Broadway producer who seduced elderly women for their life savings.

The fact that these conservative movie executives had missed the obvious satirical thrust of Mel’s work was all the more infuriating to Brooks. There was, however, one Hollywood top honcho, Universal Pictures’ Lew Wasserman, who said he might actually take a chance on Brooks’s shocking frolic. But Wasserman demanded that the author agree to substituting the “less” odious Benito Mussolini—Hitler’s Italian dictator/ ally—for der Führer in the narrative. Much as Brooks wanted his much sweated-over property to become a film, he could not conceive of his very personal work becoming
Springtime for Mussolini.

A dejected Brooks returned to New York. He wondered if his film would ever become an actuality. Then an associate introduced Mel to producer Sidney Glazier. Glazier, born in Philadelphia of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, had endured a very difficult childhood. After serving in World War II, Glazier relocated to New York City. For a while he was the night manager of a bar. Later, he became an apprentice jeweler, then a salesman of bonds for Israel. Eventually he emerged as the executive director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Foundation. After Mrs. Roosevelt’s death in 1962, Glazier produced a documentary on the late humanitarian. The 1965 film won an Academy Award.

Mel made an appointment to meet Glazier at Manhattan’s Hello coffee shop. When Brooks walked into the restaurant, Sidney was eating a tuna fish sandwich and drinking a cup of coffee. Brooks immediately launched into his hard-sell pitch, in which he dramatically acted out highlights from
Springtime for Hitler.
Brooks’s all-out presentation so amused Glazier that soon the producer was choking with laughter—and spitting out bits of tuna and a spray of coffee. When Sidney finally regained his composure, he informed Mel, “I vow to get this movie made. The world must see this picture.”

True to his promise, Sidney Glazier set to work locating the necessary backing for the unorthodox feature film. He raised over $400,000 himself and then turned to industry sources for the balance of the needed money and the all-important theatrical distribution deal. He took Mel with him to a battery of meetings with industry big shots. At these conferences, Brooks provided a condensed account of
Springtime for Hitler
, along with copies of the screen treatment. The two enthusiasts met with little success until they visited the New York City offices of Avco Embassy, the filmmaking/distribution corporation run by Joseph E. Levine. (This self-made man had gained his fortune in the movie business with a series of Italian-made cloak-and-sandal features, as well as with such art-house imports as the Oscar-winning foreign film
Two Women.
Levine was the same powerful moneyman who had been a backer of the 1965 Broadway fiasco
Kelly
, for which Mel had provided script rewrites.)