It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (43 page)

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Carrying On

Don’t grow up. Growing up will do you in. Getting old doesn’t make you wise or smart. It just makes you old.

—Mel Brooks, 2004

In the wake of the hugely successful Broadway launch of
The Producers
in the spring of 2001, Mel Brooks found himself increasingly engulfed by supervisory chores on various U.S. and foreign productions of the acclaimed show. Over the coming years, versions of the hit musical were staged in Australia, Japan, Korea, Denmark, Italy, Israel, and elsewhere around the globe, including Las Vegas.

Certainly, Brooks thrived on all the newfound industry respect, public attention, and financial rewards generated by his fantastic comeback. However, eventually it reached a saturation point at which Brooks and Anne Bancroft felt the show essentially had taken control of their lives. (An amusing spin on this predicament of excessive success was played out in winter 2004 on the fourth season of the cable TV comedy
Curb Your Enthusiasm.
In this Larry David sitcom, Mel made several guest appearances as himself, and he was joined by Bancroft in the plot-twisting season finale that wrapped up a story arc about why Larry David had been cast to take over the demanding role of Max Bialystock on Broadway.)

The Brookses did their best to separate their daily existence from the swirling world of
The Producers.
When their married son, Max, who had been on the writing staff of TV’s
Saturday Night Live
from 2001 to 2003, wrote a book parodying a survival guide (2003’s
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
), Mel used his celebrity status to help promote the tome. (Mel himself had been signed in early 2003 to write a book—an anecdotal memoir—but it had not yet reached fruition.) While Anne was seen in the cable TV version of Tennessee Williams’s
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
in 2003, Mel’s one-act play,
Of Father and Sons
, was given a reading in New York City (but did not lead to a stage production). In addition, Mel took on the role of Wiley the Sheep in the PBS cartoon series
Jakers—The Adventures of Piggley Winks
, which debuted in September 2003. (Brooks accepted this TV series assignment as a project to amuse his young grandchild Samantha—the daughter of his son Edward.) Mel also lent his distinctive voice to the role of master inventor Bigweld in the expensively produced animated feature
Robots
, released in 2005.

Bancroft saw a showcase performance of Ann Randolph’s one-woman show
Squeeze Box
, based on Randolph’s experience working in a homeless shelter. Anne was so enchanted with the piece that, later, she backed an off-Broadway production of the property that was mounted in 2003. Having already provided a voice for the animated comedy/fantasy feature
Delgo
(set for a 2006 release), Bancroft was cast in late 2003 to play a character lead in the film
Spanglish.
However, she dropped out of this Adam Sandler vehicle due to poor health and was replaced by Cloris Leachman in the part of the star’s mother-in-law.

•     •     •

Ever since
The Producers
became a smash hit in New York City, it was assumed that one day the stage show would be converted into a film musical. By mid-2004, that supposition had become a reality. The picture was to be made by Universal Pictures in conjunction with Brooksfilms and other backers. Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick were hired to re-create their roles on screen, while Susan Stroman was green-lighted to make her film directing debut with this $45 million project.

Initially, the movie was to have been shot in Toronto, Canada. However, Brooks and the other decision makers were persuaded by tax incentives to shoot instead at the new Steiner Studios in Mel’s hometown of Brooklyn. Nicole Kidman was announced to play the part of the high-voltage Ulla, but she dropped out and was replaced by Uma Thurman. TV/film comedian Will Ferrell was cast in the role of Franz Liebkind, while Gary Beach and Roger Bart repeated their roles as, respectively, Roger De Bris and Carmen Ghia.

It should have been a joyous time for Mel as filming on
The Producers
got under way at the Steiner Studios on February 28, 2005. The huge sets were ambitious and elaborate and the costumes flashy, and the screen adaptation had been done by Brooks and Thomas Meehan. (Mel wrote a new song, “There’s Nothing Like a Show on Broadway,” for the film edition.) However, as it was revealed later, Brooks was then undergoing tremendous personal stress. Anne Bancroft had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. Her condition had greatly deteriorated and she had been admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital. During this torturous period, Mel did his utmost to keep the tragic situation out of the media so he could deal privately with his wife’s ordeal. As a result, Brooks was on the set of
The Producers
far less often than he had anticipated and was not available to the degree he had intended in order to help and guide Stroman through her directorial debut.

On June 6, 2005, Anne Bancroft, age 73, died at Mount Sinai Hospital. She was buried at the Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, in Westchester County, New York. A few weeks later, on June 22, a tribute to Anne Bancroft was held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills. Carl Reiner hosted the event, at which a retrospective of film clips from Bancroft’s movies and TV appearances was shown. At the start of the event, Brooks requested that no one come up to him to express their sympathy. He explained that he didn’t need their tears; he had more than enough of his own. On June 27, 2005, Mel organized a private memorial for Anne at Manhattan’s St. James Theater, where
The Producers
was still playing. Among the notables who spoke of their friendship with the luminous Bancroft were actors Matthew Broderick, Patty Duke, and Nathan Lane, and musician Paul Simon (who played a solo acoustic version of “Mrs. Robinson,” the memorable song so closely associated with Anne’s movie
The Graduate
). As at the prior service in Beverly Hills, Brooks instructed the attendees, “If any of you are grieving, keep it to yourself. I don’t want to hear it.”

•     •     •

In the months following Anne Bancroft’s death, Mel remained much in seclusion, coping with his vast distress and anger at the loss of his wife of over 40 years. Because of his great grief, Brooks found it too difficult to participate much in the promotion of
The Producers
movie, which debuted on December 16, 2005. Unfortunately, the critical response to the movie was largely negative.

A. O. Scott (of the
New York Times
) labeled the 134-minute offering an “aggressively and pointlessly shiny, noisy spectacle.” Scott asked, “How come the movie feels, in every sense, like a rip-off?” He answered his own question with, “No effort has been made to adjust the show to the scale of the movie screen. Mr. Lane rants and mugs with his characteristic energy and agility, but you wish he would modulate just the tiniest bit. Or failing that, that Mr. Broderick could dry off enough to function as an interesting foil, rather than as a flailing, hysterical ninny.… Ms. Stroman, meanwhile, does not have the filmmaking instincts to match her deft, emphatic choreography.”

Kevin Crust (of the
Los Angeles Times
) observed of the PG-13-rated feature: “The original movie—a culture-clash time warp of New York theater nostalgia and ‘60s grooviness (remember Dick Shawn as L.S.D.?)—holds up because it’s sharp and biting. The new film is more stolidly set in 1959, though as in the stage show, the Village People seem to have replaced hippies as the out-of-place pop cultural touchstone.”

Mick LaSalle (of the
San Francisco Chronicle
) pointed out why the megasuccessful stage property did not translate well to the big screen: “Theater audiences are thrilled to see stars. If a star takes a pratfall, audiences are excited, because it’s happening just for them and in real time. Theater audiences appreciate an effort. If something has the broad shape of comedy, they will often laugh, if only to acknowledge the energy and generosity being lavished on them. Yet all this translates into exactly nothing for a movie audience, which is why Lane and Broderick, who were reputedly great on stage (I never saw them), are barely good onscreen.”

The costly, highly touted movie musical of
The Producers
generated a domestic gross of only about $20 million, and fared even worse abroad. It was a tremendous and awful anticlimax to the property’s success on the Broadway stage, but Brooks was too stunned by his wife’s untimely death to discuss publicly any reaction he might have had to the movie’s whopping failure.

•     •     •

By early 2006, Brooks had begun to get on with the fabric of his life. Besides monitoring the assorted stage companies of
The Producers
that were playing—and scheduled to open—around the world, the tireless showman had several new projects in the works. Warner Bros. Pictures was preparing a big-screen version of Mel’s old
Get Smart
TV series, with Steve Carell (the star of the movie
The 40 Year Old Virgin
) playing the lead. Meanwhile, MGM-TV had hired Brooks and Thomas Meehan to write a sequel to
Spaceballs
in the format of an animated series for the small screen. In addition, Mel and Thomas were collaborating on a stage musical adaptation of Young
Frankenstein
, hoping to strike the same jackpot as they had with
The Producers.
Of the “blood, sweat, and tears” expended on creating the new musical, Mel predicted—in typical Brooksian hype—that the new project was “going to be wonderful.”

A DVD set of eight of Brooks’s features
(The Twelve Chairs
,
Blazing Saddles
,
Young Frankenstein
,
Silent Movie
,
High Anxiety
,
History of the World: Part
I, To
Be or Not to Be
, and
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
) was released in the spring of 2006. By then, Mel had sufficiently regained his energy and humor to heavily promote the product. Shifting into high, wry huckster mode, he suggested of the DVD boxed set: “I think people should buy 20 of them. Buy 20 and save a lot of them for Christmas presents. Who knows how many of these they made?”

•     •     •

In retrospect, it has proved to be an amazingly bumpy, zigzagging, and colorful life’s journey for Melvin Kaminsky, a poor Jewish boy from Brooklyn, to emerge as Mel Brooks, the world-famous show business personality (who, to boot, was married for decades to the glamorous, highly talented Anne Bancroft).

Brooks easily might have rested on his laurels gained as a comedy writer on the landmark 1950s TV programs
Your Show of Shows
and
Caesar’s Hour.
Or after he made his sensational record album bow as the 2000 Year Old Man in 1960. Or after cocreating the classic TV sitcom
Get Smart
in the mid-1960s. Or, especially, following 1968’s
The Producers
, his motion picture debut as a director and (Oscar-winning) scenarist. However, Mel was, and is, too full of creative energy and an overwhelming need for constant public recognition to allow himself to fade too long from public attention. This unquenchable thirst to entertain and be applauded by the world propelled him to turn out such milestone movie comedy fests as 1974’s
Blazing Saddles
and
Young Frankenstein
(rated, respectively, numbers 6 and 13 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Funniest American Movies of All Time). Then, to satisfy his bent for filmmaking on serious topics, he formed Brooksfilms Ltd. in the late 1970s.

If mere survival for decades in the highly competitive entertainment industry—a forum increasingly monopolized by the young—isn’t enough of an accomplishment on its own, Brooks enjoyed the comeback of comebacks when he spearheaded the creation of the Broadway musical version of T
he Producers
in 2001.

According to Mel: “It’s always been very important to me that I was not only funny, but that I was either the funniest person in the world, or one of the funnier people in the world.… I have never been really out of vogue because funny is funny. I will always be in vogue. I can always spot the insane of the bizarre in the commonplace. That’s my job.” As for Brooks’s lifelong ambition to chisel his mark on the world, he has said, “You can win a conditional victory, I think [against death]. It all boils down to scratching your name in the bark of the tree. I was here. When you do that—whatever tree you carve it in—you’re saying, ‘Now, there’s a record of me!’ I won’t be erased by death. Any man’s greatness is a tribute to the nobility of mankind, so when we celebrate the genius of Tolstoy, we say, ‘Look! One of our boys made it! Look what we’re capable of!’”

Brooks’s incessant need for a bit of immortality has pushed him to “try to give my work everything I’ve got, because when you’re dead or you’re out of business or you’re in an old actors’ home somewhere, if you’ve done a good job, your work will still be 16 years old and dancing and healthy and pirouetting and arabesquing all over the place and they’ll say, ‘That’s who he is! He’s not this decaying skeleton.’” (Another time, the vivaciously zany man said, “I believe when you die you rot. So you know what I want when I die? Fill me with formaldehyde, stick me under a kitchen table, eat over me and talk, and just let me listen.”)

The celebrated laughmaker has emphasized repeatedly, “I never want to leave the Mel Brooks business, and that business is to make noises that make sense and that make people laugh. Enjoy! Revel! Live! Have yourselves one sweetheart of a good time. That’s what my films are saying. That’s what they’re all about.”

According to Mel, “I really get a kick out of making people feel good. There is no greater joy for me than to sit in the first row of a movie house showing one of my films and turn around. It’s not so much the laughter; it’s the glow of the faces in anticipation or just the silver light of the screen bathing over their faces. Success, money, they’re all by-products. Fame, the enemy is a by-product. It’s no good to be famous. It really doesn’t pay. People watching you, they don’t behave normally when you’re around, and your God-given gifts of observation are out the window. Whatever anonymity I have I cling to.”