It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (3 page)

Over a 10-week period,
Blazing Saddles
was shot at the studio, on various Tinseltown locations, and at a park in Agua Dulce, California, about 35 miles northeast of the Burbank movie lot. On this go-for-broke shoot, Brooks proved to be far more relaxed than he had been during his past two ventures. He was surrounded not only by his writing team, but by familiar faces from past Brooks films: producer Michael Hertzberg, choreographer Alan Johnson, and composer/conductor John Morris. (The latter also orchestrated Mel’s songs for this film, including the satiric title number sung over the opening credits by Frankie Laine and Lili Von Shtupp’s showstopping saloon piece, “I’m Tired.”)

Again, Brooks was heavily involved in supervising the film’s editing process. (During this several-month stretch of polishing his project, Mel and Carl Reiner recorded their fourth 2000 Year Old Man album,
Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks: 2000 and Thirteen
, on the studio lot.) Meanwhile, there was a minor flap with the Screenwriters Guild regarding
Blazing Saddles.
Somehow, Richard Pryor’s name had been left off the film’s official writing credits. Pryor was ready to let it go, but the guild insisted Pryor’s name be added to the picture’s credits.

Finally, it came time to screen the film for a few key Warner Bros, executives. The picture began unspooling, and none of Mel’s outrageousness seemed to get a rise out of the studio decision makers. The extremely mild response from the conservative executives stunned Brooks. He was all set to cancel a large screening scheduled for that evening, but Hertzberg urged him to go through with the showing, and, in fact, to invite a lot more of the studio’s secretaries and blue-collar workers to the event.

Brooks described what went on at this key screening: “So 8
P.M
. comes and two hundred and forty people are jammed into this room. Some of them have already heard the film is a stinker, because of the afternoon disaster. So they’re very quiet and polite. Frankie Laine sings the title song, with the whip cracks. Laughs begin—good laughs. We go to the railroad section. The cruel overseer says to the black workers, ‘Let’s have a good old nigger work song.’ Everybody gets a little chilled. Then the black guys start to sing ‘I get no kick from champagne.’ And that audience was like a Chagall painting. People left their chairs and floated upside down, and the laughter never stopped. It was big from that moment to the last frame of the last reel.”

When word of the tremendous audience response to
Blazing Saddles
reached the studio bigwigs, they swiftly reversed their plan to throw this irreverent comedy to the wind. They ordered further test screenings and previews, and each time the audience reaction was highly positive. According to Mel, “After those screenings of
Blazing Saddles
, I was cornered by the head of Warners. ‘Mel,’ he said, ‘it’s fine. OK they love it. But we can’t have the farting scene.’ So I made a little note and I said ‘Fine. It’s out.’ And he says we can’t have derogatory references to blacks. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘That’s out too.’ Then he says, ‘The animal rights people will come down on us if we have the horse being punched.’ ‘OK, OK,’ I say, ‘it’s out, out, out.’ The minute he left I tore up the notebook and never cut a thing. It’s what I always tell young film-makers. Say yes, yes, yes to every damn fool thing the producers ask, then ignore it all. No one ever notices.”

In so blithely defying the studio boss, Brooks also relied on the fact—which the executive had overlooked—that on all of Mel’s movies he had demanded and received control of the picture’s final cut. Most of all, Brooks had been determined from the start not to excise one bit of the movie’s controversial farting scene. For him it represented everything his unconventional movie was about. “In every cowboy picture, the cowboys sit around the campfire and eat 140,000 beans, and you never hear a burp, let alone a bloozer. For 75 years these big, hairy brutes have been smashing their fists into each other’s faces and blasting each other full of holes with six-guns, but in all that time, not one has had the courage to produce a fart. I think that’s funny.” For the irrepressible (and sometimes raunchy) Mel Brooks, keeping in the farting scene—which set a new standard in Hollywood for how vulgar a Hollywood mainstream comedy could be—was a do-or-die point of honor.

Brooks explained how he actually filmed this pivotal campfire sequence: “They didn’t make a sound. I said, ‘Lift, turn, cross your legs. Do the normal gestures you would do to let a fart escape.’ Then afterwards, the sound editors got their friends together and they put soap under their armpits. Wet soap. And they slapped at it and made air pockets, and they did the noises that way. I came in to do some with my voice—a few high ones that they couldn’t do from under their arms. Y’know, bvrrrrrrvt. But nobody put an actual fart on the soundtrack.” Mel observed of this gross scene, “It’s a funny thing about audiences. Every single human being I know abhorred that scene, myself included. But collectively we loved it. What could be lower low comedy than a bunch of cowboys breaking wind around the campfire? But it worked. People were ready for it. It was a broad, brave truth that had always been on the back of everyone’s tongue when they were watching straight Westerns.”

With its R rating, the 93-minute
Blazing Saddles
had a special promotional preview at Los Angeles’s Pickwick Drive-in Theater on February 6, 1974. The guests of honor included 100 horses and their friends. Robyn Helton (who played Miss Stein in the movie) was the hostess of the unique event. The next day
Blazing Saddles
went into release, promoted with the advertising slogan “Never give a saga an even break.”

Vincent Canby (of the
New York Times
) allowed that the Western spoof was “Funny in the way ... a rude burp in church can be.” The
Wall Street Journal
labeled the proceedings “an undisciplined mess.” On the other hand, Roger Ebert (of the
Chicago Sun-Times
) reported, “There are some people who can literally get away with anything—say anything, do anything—and people will let them. Other people attempt a mildly dirty joke and bring total silence down on a party. Mel Brooks is not only a member of the first group, he is its lifetime president. At its best, his comedy operates in areas so far removed from taste that (to coin his own expression) it rises below vulgarity.…
Blazing Saddles
is like that. It’s a crazed grab bag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken. Mostly, it succeeds. It’s an audience picture; it doesn’t have a lot of classy polish and its structure is a total mess. But of course! What does that matter while Alex Karras is knocking a horse cold with a right cross to the jaw?”

In actuality, Ebert was exactly on target with his response to
Blazing Saddles.
Most moviegoers of the time were entranced by this madly unorthodox feature with its array of crude jokes, meandering plotline, and caustic comments on a wide range of topics (racial discrimination, homosexuality, the old West, and political hypocrisy). Following in the tradition of his favorite screen comedians—the Ritz Brothers and the Marx Brothers—Mel ensured that the antic
Blazing Saddles
was chockfull of slapstick, puns, non sequiturs, and, most of all, outrageous verbal and visual set pieces.

In its initial 1974 theatrical release, the atypical picture (which cost about $2.6 million to make) earned domestic film rentals of some $25 million, and tallied approximately $15 million more in reissue in the next few years. (This did not take into account pay and broadcast TV rights, foreign distribution, or home entertainment editions of the runaway hit.) Within short order,
Blazing Saddles
became the second-highest-earning Hollywood screen comedy of all time, outdistanced to that date only by 1970’s M*A*S*H.

With this megahit, the nonconformist Mel Brooks, at long last, had crashed the gates of the Hollywood establishment, and he intended to stay there.

2
Born into the Spotlight

I was adored. I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again. Until I was six my feet didn’t touch the ground. “Look at those eyes! That nose! Those lips! That tooth! Get that child away from me quick, Pll eat him!”

—Mel Brooks, 1976

Like so many other comedians of his era, Mel Brooks became famous on TV, but before that he had success getting laughs in the Catskills, and even before that, hamming it up on the streets of Brooklyn.

By the early 20th century, many sections of Brooklyn were fast becoming overcrowded, as tenements and two-family houses—along with a massive array of stores—replaced the once-predominant single-family homes. This was especially true of Brownsville, located on the eastern edge of Brooklyn. In this ghettolike district, a great many Jewish immigrants, fleeing the latest onslaughts of pogroms in eastern Europe, had settled into overcrowded dwellings, competing for meager living quarters with the expanding African American population of the area. At best, Brownsville (which became known as the “Jerusalem of America”) was a densely filled slum with oppressive tenement dwellings, sweatshops, ever-present pushcarts with vendors noisily hawking their myriad wares, and over 70 synagogues, generally lacking paved streets or a proper sewage system. By 1926, it was estimated, a good 75% of Brownsville’s 400,000 or more dwellers were Jewish, a large number of these refugees having fled harsh living conditions in oppressive Russia and Poland.

One such Jewish family eking out a paltry living in Brownsville in the 1920s was the Kaminskys. Both Kate (nee Brookman) and Maximilian Kaminsky were first-generation Americans. She had been born in Kiev (the capital of the Ukraine) and came to the United States when she was three years old. Kitty (as Kate was nicknamed) was raised in her family’s tiny apartment on Henry Street on the Lower East Side. While her mother spoke the Yiddish of the old country, little Kitty was taught English in grade school. Because the girls instructors were mostly Irish, the youngster learned English with an Irish-immigrant accent. As Mel Brooks has recalled, “My mother, as a matter of fact, said, ‘erl’ and ‘berl.’ … My mother actually did say, ‘turlet.’ She never did say toilet. She said, ‘turlet,’ like the Irish do.”

When Kitty, a petite redhead who was less than five feet tall, was around 14 or 15, she became enamored of a neighborhood boy. He was Edward Israel Iskowitz, an enthusiastic, bright adolescent with big, saucerlike eyes and a buoyant personality. At the time, he was preoccupied with trying to become a show business performer, and the romance with Kitty never developed into anything serious on his part. Later, as Eddie Cantor, he performed very successfully in vaudeville, on the Broadway stage, in films, and on radio and TV. He would become an icon for Kitty’s lastborn child. Kitty’s heart was not broken over Edward, as she was more attracted to another young man, Max Kaminsky, whom she found even cuter than go-getter Iskowitz.

Max’s parents, Shlaimie (later Samuel) and Basha Kaminsky, grew up in Grodno, Russia. In the late 19th century, they emigrated to the United States with their young boy, Max, and settled in Manhattan’s Jewish ghetto on the Lower East Side. Back in Russia Samuel had peddled sewing equipment for a living. In the new country, the enterprising Samuel soon became a herring merchant. To ensure that he made good deals with the Norwegian fishermen, he focused on learning their language rather than on mastering English. Soon, Samuel became one of the herring barons of the Lower East Side. Back then they had herring barons, and Mr. Kaminsky was one of them.

By the mid-1910s, Kitty and Max, a process server, had married and were living in Brownsville, often struggling to make ends meet. Their firstborn, Irving, came in 1916, followed a few years later by Leonard, and then Bernard, born in 1922. On June 27, 1926, Brooklyn and the surrounding areas were suffering a sweltering heat wave. The oppressive weather had induced a crowd of over 500,000 to jam the beaches and boardwalks of Coney Island. However, Kitty Kaminsky was confined to her sweltering, overcrowded apartment, because she was expecting her fourth child any time. The next day, Thursday, Kitty went into labor. As was customary in her blue-collar neighborhood, she gave birth to the new baby at home. The family’s kitchen table was used for the delivery of their latest offspring, Melvin.

The next two years were comparatively happy times in the Kaminsky household. Relatives, friends, and neighbors were constantly coming by the flat to see Kitty, Max, and their quartet of children, especially darling little Melvin, who quickly became the apple of everyone’s eyes. This tiny bundle of energy and joy was constantly “oohed” and “aahed” over, whether by his parents and siblings or by visitors. The precocious infant had an instinctive ability to respond to the constant affection lavished on him, basking in the bright spotlight of people’s interest. (Brooks has reminisced of this joyous time, “I was the baby in the family, so I just assumed I was adorable. Everybody threw me up in the air, punched my feet and told me I was terrific.”) Being the pampered center of attention quickly became an important aspect of Melvin’s life. This strong need to be coddled became an ingrained craving that never left Melvin, even as he grew older. It prompted the boy to do whatever came to his mind to keep people’s focus on him, no matter how coy, outrageous, or humorous.

•     •     •

For the Kaminskys, the future seemed bright with promise. Even in the harsh slums of Brownsville, the general optimism of the Roaring Twenties made its positive mark. Max was doing quite well in his job as process server for the court system. An outgoing, congenial soul, he was often assigned special tasks, such as serving legal notices upon rather famous individuals.

He soon became known as the “process server to the stars.” Better or worse than being a herring baron? Hard to say.

However, life for the Kaminskys took a sudden turn for the worse during 1928. Max became seriously ill, with what was eventually diagnosed as tuberculosis of the kidney. At the time there was no known cure for the debilitating illness and he soon became bedridden. Many grueling weeks thereafter, on January 14, 1929, the 34-year-old head of the household succumbed to the then-fatal ailment.