Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (53 page)

That sense of right versus wrong is consistent throughout your movies.

It is, and I think it helps when writing. I was lucky with
Blazing Saddles
because the black sheriff gave us a
great
little engine that chugged its way through the whole movie. We had lines like, “Kill the nigger! Kill him!” A lot of people, especially movie executives, mistook that for racism. But the point was understood by the audience. There would be no way for me to have written that type of a script if it didn’t have that underlying sense of goodness. I wouldn’t have written it otherwise. And if I did, none of the jokes would have worked. Audiences never would have liked the characters.

Were there any scenes that you had to cut out of
Blazing Saddles
?

The executives didn’t want the farting scene kept in the movie. They wanted that out. I told them I would get rid of it, but I never touched it. Obviously, that scene, as well as others the executives didn’t like, were kept.

The scenes that were eventually cut had to do with racial issues. There was an interracial love scene between Cleavon Little [who played Sheriff Bart] and Madeline Kahn [who played Lili von Shtupp] that had to be cut short. What you see in the movie is the lights go out and Madeline says, “Oh, it’s true, it’s
true
!” The joke we had written was for Cleavon to then say, “Excuse me, ma’am. I hate to disillusion you, but you’re sucking on my arm.” We had to tone down the racial aspect of that scene. It was too much for its time.

Blazing Saddles
is now considered a comedy classic, but at the time it wasn’t loved by critics. What do you think they missed when the movie was released in 1974?

I think they missed the irony. They missed the satire. They missed the greater message. As a writer, you can appeal to the critics. It can be done. But you’d lose half the audience.

It was also the subject matter. In
The Producers
, which the critics also despised, the main problem was that we were dealing with a subject—Nazis—that up to that point had never been dealt with. Even now it’s hard to deal with. You see a film like
Life Is Beautiful
; it can fail miserably. You’ve got to know how to do it. It’s tricky. You have to have the perfect vehicle, the perfect Trojan horse. For me, that vehicle was the worst musical in the world. And by using that vehicle, I could get across more serious topics. The musical became an orgasm of insanity that allowed everything else.

You’ve had your issues over the years with those critics who never understood your work. Have your feelings toward critics mellowed?

No. I can learn from my failures when it comes to an audience. I can learn from questions like, “What didn’t they like about it? Who didn’t like it?” Instead of abandoning it, instead of being angry, instead of getting on my high horse and being arrogant and becoming unapproachable, I can look at why something didn’t work.

But I’ll never do that with a critic. Critics seem to have some personal axe to grind. They all like to be protagonists, and they all like to be in the ring with you, except they have no right to be in the ring with a creator. You should never take on a critic, ever. They may be dead right, but it’s still only one person, one opinion. It is kind of a parallel universe. The critic is in show business, but at the same time, he isn’t.

You once described your comedy as midnight blue, not black. What’s the difference for you between those two hues?

I’ve never been hopeless, I’ve never been despondent, but sometimes I will hit tremendous lows. And I feel that I’ve got to show that in comedy. I need to show that characters can be despairing but not suicidal. They can be agonizingly despondent, but they will always go on to the next step; they will always get back up the ladder. Midnight blue is that thin brushstroke. It’s not pitch black. It’s the color just before darkness comes at sunset. Or just after the lightness arrives after sunrise.

What comes first in your creation process? Is it the idea or the characters?

The characters are everything. If you’re talented, you’ll find a good idea to put these characters in. You’ll find a good story. But the characters are what you start with. Everything I’ve ever done, I’ve started with characters. I learn what they want, what they need. Where they need to go and how they have to go about achieving that. I listen to them. You can’t just have pure action.

Before you began writing the script to
The Producers
, what characters were your inspiration?

For
The Producers
, I started with that little caterpillar who grew into a beautiful butterfly, the little accountant with dreams, dreams, oh, such dreams of glory!, showgirls, and footlights and curtains going up and down, and an orchestra in the pit playing trills! Could little Leo Bloom [played by Gene Wilder] ever really live this life of glory and thrill? That’s what I thought of. So I painted this character, this accountant, as loving theater. From there, I knew I needed a producer, a reprehensible producer, a guy screwing little old ladies on a casting couch just to raise enough money so he could have a little extra to stay in show business. Zero Mostel played that character beautifully.

For me, Zero’s character, Max Bialystock, is the Id. He’s the animal. Gene Wilder, playing Leo Bloom, was soulful. He was the Ego. There’s a more poignant aspect to him. In the end, both characters come to realize that they need each other more than they need the money. They needed the joy of working together.

It almost sounds like the combination of high and low we were discussing earlier.

That’s exactly what it is, I guess. It’s that combination that I’ve always been fascinated with.

Is it true that you based Zero Mostel’s character in
The Producers
on a real-life character that you knew?

I did. I worked for that guy. He was a producer; he put on shows. For one show, I worked everything: I was the stage manager, I was the assistant producer, I was even one of the actors. This was in the early forties. The play was called
Separate Rooms
, and it was about a theatrical event. I played a character named Scoop Davis, and I had one line, the opening line. I ran out on the stage and screamed, “We made it! It’s a hit! It’s the greatest thing since pay toilets!” That was my opening.

I’d put up advertising cards in barbershops for this producer. I can’t tell you his name because he has grandchildren and I don’t want them to know he screwed a lot of little old ladies. But that character was based on a real person. There’s a line in the movie that comes from real life; it’s absolutely true, I heard this guy say it. In the movie, Zero Mostel says to a little old woman, “Make out the check to Cash.” And she says, “Cash? That’s a funny name for a play.” And he says, “Well, so is
The Iceman Cometh
.” That comes from real life.

So you were an actor for this production?

Oh, yeah. I had worked as a performer for years as a tummler in the Catskills. A tummler is a performer who does everything. He tells jokes, he sings, he runs around like a crazy person. He’ll do anything to get the audience on his side. I started working in the Catskills when I was seventeen. We did a few shows, six nights a week. And when we weren’t onstage, we were busy trying to round up the guests to come to another show.

What did all that performing teach you later as a comedy writer?

That every second counts. And that’s a very streetwise thing to know. Danny [Simon] and Neil [Simon] were like that. They were street guys. They took advantage of every second and every joke at their disposal. Neil Simon, he never forgot a joke. Neil once said that he never forgot anything that he ever heard that had made somebody laugh, whether he wrote it or not. That’s just the type of memory he had. He didn’t need to steal jokes; he was so damn talented. But he never forgot, and that’s the way you have to be.

Another thing I learned from my time spent at the Catskills is not to be afraid to take chances. To jump off into the unknown, not knowing where you’ll land. To take terrifying leaps that can easily leave me bloodied.

Most of all, I knew that I did not want to push a rack of blouses in the garment center all my life. My uncle Jack was a big shot in the railway mail department in Penn Station, and he got me a job to work for a few hours a day around Christmas. I hated it. What I learned from the Catskills was that I had choices. I didn’t have to end up in a job in the garment district. It’s honest work, but the place reeked of stale coffee. I always hated coffee because of that. I couldn’t do it. I had to get out.

You once said that in your writing you had to always get to the “ultimate punch line, the cosmic joke that all the other jokes came out of.”

Why do anything else? Why not go as far as you can go, as deep as you can go? Why stop on the surface? It’s so difficult to come up with a punch line to a scene or a sketch. It’s so hard. The real struggle is to take a premise, the center of it, and blossom it into a punch line. I learned that at
Your Show of Shows
. We managed to do it because it was life or death. We fought like beasts in that room. Our backs were against the wall. And we had great guides and great leaders, like [the show’s producer] Max Liebman, to tell us if a joke worked. We were told if an ending to a sketch wasn’t great, and we’d have to rewrite it.

But it’s almost impossible to create a great ending to a sketch. I would say we pulled it off on
Your Show of Shows
50 percent of the time.

Your son Max is also a writer. He’s the author of two books,
The Zombie Survival Guide
and
World War Z
, but for two years he was a writer on
Saturday Night Live
. From what you’ve seen and heard, how different was the creative process for a writer on
SNL
versus
Your Show of Shows
?

You know,
Saturday Night Live
is really fun, but Max was one of eighteen writers on the show. That’s a lot. He slept under his desk in a sleeping bag. He got very few jokes onto the show, very few. I think he got one or two sketches in the two or three years he was there. For some of them, he’d say to me, “Why did they turn that down?” I’d answer, “I would have used that.” He wrote a commercial parody for a medication that had side effects like nausea, headache, abdominal pain. Max added “sudden bouts of anti-Semitism.” I think that’s great. The things that could happen if you ever took this medicine . . .

Things worked differently on
Your Show of Shows
. We’d never throw anything out that we could piece together or sharpen.

That’s a very Depression Era mentality. Never throw anything out.

Absolutely. “Why are you cutting the ends off the sandwiches just to make sandwiches for high tea? What are you doing?! You could live for years on those crusts!” Yeah, the writers grew up with that mentality, and we never threw away a joke that we thought we could eventually use.

In doing research for this interview, I was surprised to find that a major influence on your writing has been Russian literature, particularly the nineteenth-century book
Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol. What is it about Gogol’s work that speaks to you?

Gogol had two amazing sides to him. One is human, simple, heartfelt. He had tremendous understanding of the human condition. And the other side is absolute fucking madness. Just
madness
. Insanity. He would write about a nose that could speak. Gogol is not bound by the rules of reality, and yet he understands how the heart beats, why it beats. What death is. What love is. He is, of all the Russian writers, my favorite. And that includes a couple of good guys like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

When did you come to Gogol?

It was through the Russian Mel Tolkin, head writer for
Your Show of Shows
. He said to me, “You’re an animal from Brooklyn, but I think there is the beginnings of some mind, so I’d like to have you read this book and I know you’ll enjoy it.” And he gave me a copy of Nikolai Gogol’s
Dead Souls
.

And you think that affected your comedy writing?

My whole life. My whole future. I said, “Gee, creativity could be good. Writing could be good!” And Gogol also affected how I could be if I strove—if I never settled for the first joke that came into my head. In fact, Gogol is what drove
Blazing Saddles
to end up like it did.

How so?

For not settling for just writing a parody of Westerns. For digging deeper, for writing about subjects such as racism for blacks, racism for Mexicans, the indignity suffered by Asian railroad workers. Gogol affected my whole life.

What other comedic influences have you had over the years?

An early influence was Buster Keaton. His scenes were so crazy, but he played them with absolute reality. He never winked to an audience. Isn’t this grand? Isn’t this funny? That was a very important comedic lesson to learn. I’ve tried to do the same thing in my movies.

Another early influence was Harry Ritz and the Ritz Brothers. They were big in the thirties and forties. Harry had a physical insanity and freedom that no other character ever had. He was eyes-goes, nose-goes, mouth-goes,
all
-goes. He was another Jew originally from Russia. I’m ashamed to say this, but a lot of comedy for the Jews in Russia came from making fun of cripples and unfortunates. Really, they just imitated bad walks, with a hunchback, and they elicited incredible laughs. Harry Ritz was the master of wild walks and facial contortions.

With his brothers, Al and Jimmy, the Ritz Brothers would sing and dance—just perfection. As smooth as silk, every step. They would make movies that were hysterically funny.

Why did the Ritz Brothers never achieve the great fame that the Marx Brothers achieved?

The Marx Brothers were much more intellectual. They had a sense of character and story. The Ritz Brothers had a sense of the
meshugenah
—craziness. They were unfettered by anything normal.

Now that I think about it, I suppose I have a combination of the Marx Brothers and the Ritz Brothers. The
meshugenah
and the intellectual.