The Mad Mad Mel Brooks
by Paul D. Zimmerman
(Originally published in Newsweek Feb 17 1975)

    Let me tell you about this character who lives in my head, His name is Bronsky and he owns 5,000 square feet of land in Larcimont, N.Y. What he wants to do is build a pyramid on that land, and on that monument he wants to inscrive two words: "Bronsky Lived!" The only problem is he's having trouble convincing the zoning board to let him go ahead. This Bronsky, he's been living in my head for a log time, He's very important to me.

-Mel Brooks to Paul D. Zimmerman over a tin of salmon at Factor's Deli in Los Angeles

Master builder Bronsky and master comedian Brooks share the same dream. Both want to beat death. Whether he is shooting one of his hilarious, crazy films, cutting a comic record or making a television speical, Mel Brooks at 48 is locked in a ceaseless struggle to achieve what he calls "immortality in my lifetime." "I still have a couple of feet to go, " he concedes. "Call it a yard."
    It is a short yard. On the strength of "Blazing Saddles," an inspired, loony Western spoog, and, more recently, "Young Frankenstein," Brooks's uproarious homage to the horror classic, this man-child of Brooklyn's Jewish ghetto has already insured himself the inscription "Brooks Lived" In less than a year, "Blazing Saddles" ha become one of the top-grossing films of all time, and "Young Frankenstein" will ultimately join it. But more important, Brooks's comedies are sure to last as long as people care about his special brand of cleansing, liberating comic anarchy.
    For it is wildness that makes Brooks wonderful. In an age of caution and calculation, he has a demonic drive to knock the world off its axis with the ultimate joke. To watch his black railroad gang in "Blazing Saddles" suddenly break into Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You" is to be rocketed out of the humdrum world into the exhilarating universe of the absurd. Alex Karras knocking out a horse with one punch, monsters tap-dancing to the strains of "Puttin' on the Ritz," uniformed Nazis high-kicking in a Broadway chorus line, a quiz-show contestant asphyxiating in an isolation booth - the incongruous is Brooks's natural habitat and the source of his effectiveness as a funnyman.
    Woody Allen delights our brain. Mel Brooks goes for the solar plexus. "Mel doesn't want you to giggle or smirk," says Peter Boyle, who plays Frankenstein's monster like 7 feet of newborn baby. "His humor is a punch and a jab. It's visceral and ... BANG!!!" "Mel's interested in what's funny about the human condition," says Gene Wilder, who plays young Dr. Frankenstein with inspired hysteria. "He punctures our greed, our frustrations, our contradictions - our desire for money and purity, domestic love and battalions of lovers, great food but slim and beautiful figures. He's after comedy which will still be understood in 200 years."
    Brooks's parodies of old movie conventions torpedo the posturing inherent in those genres. The noble scientist, stoic in the face of failure, becomes, in "Young Frankenstein," an apoplectic, demented Gene Wilder drumming out a tantrum of disappointment on the chest of a corpse that refuses to come to life. The pioneers of sagebrush tradition become, in "Blazing Saddles," dolts and bigots who thrill to nigger-baiting, money and violence. And after a half century of movie cowboys eating beans around campfires, it took Brooks to film the flatulent truth about the aftermath of that diet.
    Such gags have drawn accusations of bad taste. And Brooks does sometimes offend - sometimes needlessly, sometimes therapeutically, almost always deliberately. "I don't question my taste," says Brooks, "and I get angry at those who attack me for it. They're simply narrowminded, I incite them to stay home." Brooks is like the fool in "King Lear." He is our jester, asking us to see ourselves as we really are, determined that we laugh ourselves sane. "To be the funniest has always been my aim," he says from behind his huge desk at Twentieth Century-Fox. "Not the most philosophical, not the most profound, but the funniest."
    It is a title Brooks now shares only with Woody Allen, whose work he respects. But if Brooks is tied for funniest man in America, he alone is hottest man in Hollywood. His phone at Fox never stops ringing. "Hello, Mel Brooks, what can we do for you?" he unfailingly answers. One producer wants him to read a script. "No," Brooks declines politely. "Not a chance. I write my own scripts. I only direct in self-defense." the phone rings again. It is Vanessa Redgrave calling from a public booth to solicit money for a charity. "You can dump that phony accent and talk like a regular person," Brooks kids her. The phone continues jangling but Brooks holds all calls as he dictates a reply to a fan letter from his niece. "I love your face," he begins. "I'm sorry you cried when the monster got chained up, but it all worked out in the end, didn't it?" "I only answer mail like this from kids," he pauses to explain. "They really care."
    Every morning, fresh reports of fresh profits roll in. Brooks and producer Michael Gruskoff survey the figures with satisfaction. Brooks also oversees every detail of the ad campaign for "Young Frankenstein," mounted in the trade papers to garner some Academy Award nominations - a tough job for comedies - and to wow distributors across the country. Brooks is just as meticulous with the lettering of a scene. (He spent four days getting several minutes between the Monster and Gene Hackman as a blind man to the right pitch of madness.)

At Factor's Deli, Mel is backslapped, hand-shaken, congratulated and hugged by everyone in the business. When he can't get seated immediately, he refuses to full rank. He dresses casually, in suede jacket, sport shirt and slacks, and lives informally, greeting one friend bouyantly as "a leading California gentile" and greeting another with an improvised song: "Ah, Feinstein, you're dangerously near me... "
    But beneath the cheerful informality bubbles a volcanic energy that fuels his comic genius and occasionally launches him on extended transports of anger, especially at a negative or tepid review of his work. Sometimes he can turn that anger on himself. Learning that an afternoon of picture posing has been wasted and that everything must be reshot, he fumes: "That's God punishing me for my ego trip, I shouldn't be pushing my film. I should be doing my work."

Newsweek asked the 2,000 year-old filmmaker if he would submit to intensive questioning. "Only for three or four days." he replied.The following are his views of great films and great performers. Q. What's the greatest comedy team in the history of film? A. I would have to say wilt and Nevill Chamberlain. What a hysterical team. First Nevill would read the Nuremburg Pact. Then Wilt would stuff him through a basket. Q. Who was the most intersting performer you ever worked with? A. Believe it or not, a blue crab. Q. A crab? What did he do? A. He walked any way you wanted - sideways, up, down. In those days sideways alone was enough for a movie. Fred Astaire wasn't even born yet, you know. This song-and-dance crab starred in "Sideways on Broadway," "Sideways in Rio," "I'm Steppin' Out Sideways." Q. And then what happened to him? A. Well we were doing a low-budget picture. We ran out of money. And, unfortunately, we were forced to eat him. You know something, he was a great dancer, but he was even better as lunch.

Q. Can you tell us about any other remarkable animal performers? A. Well, in the earliest days of film, there was this dog who sounded like a banjo and would go around late at night plinking and plunking. People would rush out with sticks and try to hurt him. He was a hit for seven months. Q. What happened? Did he go into defecting at that point? A. No, he went into death at that point, killed by people trying to sleep. A great loss. He was int he longest movie ever made, "The Hundred Years' War." Q. How long was it? A. A hundred years. It was a full-length feature. Q. How many people actually saw it all the way through? A. Everybody. Everybody saw it to the end. They were glued to their chairs - from the gum that built up after all those years of watching, taking it out of their mouths and sticking it under seats. Everyone was gummed down. Q. Was it a good film? A. In and out. Hit and miss. The first 35 years - terrific. Then it bogged down for about 50 years. Then, for the last fifteen years, it was tops again. But by then, most of the people watching had died in their seats. They didn't die laughing. They just died.

Q. Who was the star of the movie? A. The greatest romantic lead of all time, Ramir Ramon, a Sephardic Jew born in a small suburb of San Diego. Q. What was the secret of his appeal? A. He was born with a patent leather head - 40, 50 takes, he never lost his shine. And the strange thing is his shoes were made of bald skin. He had a patent leather head and wing-tipped bald shoes. Q. Did you ever use him in your work? A. Yes, he played King Henry VIII in my film "The Rain of King Henry VIII." That's the one in which Henry is mainly trapped indoors by bad weather. Q. But that's a terrible idea for a film. A. It was a flop. What can I tell you? Q. What do you think of the critics? A. They're very noisy at night. You can't sleep in the country because of them. But, otherwise, I like them. Q. I think that's crickets you're talking about sir, I meant critics. A. Oh, critics! They're no good. Q. Why is that? A. They can't make music with their legs.

    The anger burns off quickly, followed by apologies, and Brooks returns to his customarily kind and coridal manner. Friends find that his new celebrity has made him less compulsively comic. "He's no longer always 'on', remarks a colleague. "Success helps you ease up," says Brooks, a health nut who devours medical texts. You can walk into any executive office with a script in your hands and remain dry under the arms."
    Success is always sweet but to Brooks, who fought up from the pavement of Brooklyn's Williamsburg slums to force his presence upon an indifferent world, it represents the reward of a lifetime struggle. He still retains the street fighter's stance - the belligerent tilt of the head, the tense alert posture. But instead of punches, he throws jokes.
    Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky, the youngest of four sons whose father died when he was 2. His mother, now 78, and living in Miami Beach, struggled to make ends meet by working twelve-hour days in the garment trade. "At home I never touched the ground," he reminisces. "I was always being tossed in the air, kissed, adored and punched. As early as I can remember, I was expected to perform. Recalls his oldest brother, Irving Kaye, who today runs a small Long Island hospital supply company. "We used to tell him to make a face and he'd wrinkle up his nose or something. Even though he was only a few monthsold, he understood what we wanted."
    Outside the house, Brooks grew up in a ghetto so tightly sealed that he believed English was a temporary language, spoken when young and abandoned at adulthood in favor of Yiddish. Out of htis world, years later, emerged Brooks's 2,000 year-old man whose reminiscences delivered to Carl Reiner made Brooks and underground her. "The 2,000 year-old man is a pastiche of everyone around me, my mother, my uncle Joe, my grandmother," says Brooks. "When I became him, I could hear 5,000 years of Jews pouring through me."
    "Look at Jewish History," he says. "Unrelieved lamenting would be untolerable. So, for every ten Jews, beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the tiem I was 5 I knew I was that one." That was about the time young Melvin lef the loving atmosphere of his home for the harder world of the ghetto streets. "The notion that we get into the business of making people laugh because we didn't get enough love as kids - that's all, {well?} he says. "I knew what love was, so I wanted more of it. And I realized early on that if you truly entertain people, they'll love you for it." So Brooks began by entertaining the kids on his own block. "They wanted no part of me," he says. "I was little, I was funny-looking. I couldn't smoke. But I could talk better than any of them. I wormed my way in with jokes."

But jokes could get him just so far. The rejections of adolescence and the alienation of adulthood gave his comedy its anarchic energy. "You want to know where my comedy comes from?" he asks. "It comes from not being kissed by a girl until you're 16. It comes from the feeling that, as a Jew and as a person, you don't fit into the mainstream of American society. It comes from the realization that even though you're better and smarter, you'll never belong."
    Brooks was determined to make his mark. At 14, he learned to play the drums from a celebrated neighbor, Buddy Rich, and took the show-biz name of Mel Brooks, a contraction of his mother's maiden name, Brookman. But World War II interrupted his budding career. At 17, he enlisted in the Army, which sent him to Virgina Military Institute. "They had us ride horses and cut down flags on bamboo poles," he remembers. "I was trained to become a Confederate office."
    After D Day, says Brooks, "I was shipped to the European Theater of Operations where there was very little theater and lots of operations. I was put int he combat engineers. We would throw up bridges in advance of the infantry but mainly we would just throw up." The highlight of Brooks's war: when the Germans made a propaganda pitch over a loudspeaker after the Battle of the Bulge, Brooks replied over another loudspeaker with an imitation of Al Jolson singing "Toot Toot Tootsie."
    After the war, Brooks resumed his drumming career in the mountains. "I don't mean the Vosges," he gulps, " I mean your basic Catskills." One night the hotel's resident comci fell ill and Brooks delivered the comic's awful routine ("My hotel room was so small I had to go into the hall to change my mind"). The next night , Brooks did his own stuff - imitating one of the hotel maids who had been locked in a closet and whose cries of "Los Mir Arois!!!" (let me out!) had echoed about the resort. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," Brooks began, "LOS MIR AROIS!!!"
    He was an instant hit, eventually working his way up to the zenith of Borscht Belt prestige - tummler (or social director) at Grossinger's. he was spotted by a young saxophonist who not long after became a television comedian and who hired Brooks to write for him at $50 a week. The working relationship between Mel Brooks and Sid Caesar lasted a decade and fueled television's golden age of comedy.
    "I would have been a successful comic on my own ten years earlier if I hadn't me Sid," muses Brooks. "But he was such a great vehicle for my stuff," Brooks and Caesar chose their material pragmatically. "The test was whether we laughed," recalls Brooks. "And I mean laughed, tears streaming not being able to stand up or sit down. I mean dangerous laughing."
    When Caesar moved to "Your Show of Shows," Brooks found himself the first of many jesters to the crown prince, all competing violently for Caesar's recognition. "Mel always came up with the most outrageous stuff," remembers Carl Reiner. "Late on day, he started fooling with the word 'carrot.' Somone groaned, 'Not another one of those dumb eyesight jokes.' Mel was up against the wall but he was going to deliver the best carrot joke of all time. Finally, he blurted out, 'He ate so many carrots he couldn't go to sleep because he could see through his eyelids.' The joke was used on the show."
    "Mel would tease Sid incredibly," says Larry Gelbart, who worked with Brooks on "Caesar's Hour" in the mid-1950s as did such gag writing luminaries as Woody Allen and Neil Simon. "Mel would make fun of his clothes, his shoes, his jewelry. Sid loved it, because he knew he owned all that cleverness. He once grabbed Mel by the head and said, 'This is mine!' And Mel grabbed Sid's wallet and said, 'This is mine!'."

But Brooks was restive sharing credit with others. "Credit is part of the whole business of affirming yourself," he says. "You start as a little boy, scratching your initials in your desk. You're saying, 'I was born. I am here. I live.' I began by making noise. 'Ya! Ya! Ya! Here I am!' I yelled but nobody cared. I discovered you had to find a form for that noise if people were going to notice. So my next noise was as a drummer, then as a comedian and tummler. But I wanted the noise to last longer, so I became a writer. Only there were seven of us writing for Sid. When people asked, 'Who wrote that?', all seven of us answered, 'Me. I did!' "
    The rivalry of those days still continues. Former writing colleagues complain about Brooks's claiming major credit for collaborative work. Other colleagues find Brooks's featuring his name all over his work "piggish," but if it is egotistical it is also very good commerce. Today Brooks is scrupulous and generous in crediting all those who have helped him. He sees the attacks on him as expressions of professional jealousy - the same kind of jealousy that made his own blood boil watching other writers make it to the top. "The public will never see him at his funniest and most intelligent," says novelist Joseph Heller. "Melvin is at his best when he's with friends and in a raging jealousy over someone more successful. But now there's no one who's more successful."
    During the television years, Brooks, still in his 20s, was earning $2,500 a week. His reaction: panic, hysteria, insomnia, occasional vomiting and years of psychoanalysis. His seven-year marriage to Broadway dancer Florence Baum brok up in 1959, leaving three children - Stefanie, now 18, Nicky, 17, and Eddie, 15. The split left a huge hole in his life, for Brooks is, foremost, a family man with a weakness for kids. During the years after the split-up, he managed to see his children nearly every day - "for myself," he adds. "I wasn't doing anyone a favor. I had to see them."
    In the early 1960s, he found himself without a show, a wife or much money, and started dating actress Anne Bancroft. They were married three years later and live a happy and adamantly private life in Beverly Hills. "Annie and Mel are as well mated as any couple I've ever seen," says Carl Reiner. "They both are sharp and bright and volatile - quick to anger, quick to forgive." In one legendary marital battle, Brooks is said to have grabbed Bancroft's arm. "Let go of me, she replied. "My body is my instrument." The fight ended in laughter when Brooks sent back, "Oh, yeah? Then let's see you play 'Begin the Beguine'."
    Brooks started getting the recognition he wanted with "The 2,000 Year-Old Man" record, which featured his face on the album. His money worries ended in 1965 when he and Buck Henry developed the smash television series, "Get Smart." At about the same time, Brooks was writing a novel about a shady Broadway producer who concocted a show called "Springtime for Hitler." The novel eventually became a screenplay called "The Producers." With the script under his arm, Brooks made the rounds of the studios - in one door and out the other. "They kept telling me, 'But you've never directed a picture before!' and beneath that I heard, 'And if we have our way, you never will'!"

Brooks had worked more than a year on the screenplay - which eventually won him an Academy Award, "The script is the most important element in the film-making," he insists, "and besides, it's the part I like best. Your vision is still intact. That's why I direct ot protect that vision. And even then, I lose some control. After all, movies are essentially collaborative. They're the most expensive art form ever invented. Leonardo didn't need a studio chief for the money to draw a lower jaw. All he needed was a nickel for a pencil. Goya could paint you a national tragedy for $1.69. But to make a movie you need $1 million."
    Along with Zero Mostel, "The Producers" starred a mournful, Harpo-haired veteran of classical theater training, Gene Wilder. "Gene is a natural," says Brooks, who has since made Wilder the star of a Brooksian stock company that includes Madeline Kahn, Dom DeLuise, Kenneth Mars and Marty Feldman. "he's an Everyman with all the vulnerability showing. One day God said, 'Let there be prey,' and he created pigeons, rabbits, lambs and Gene Wilder." Wilder, who is now in London preparing to direct and star in his own screenplay of "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother," pinpoints the symbiosis between himself and Brooks this way: "He gives me the most insane things to do and I carry them out realistically."
    "The Producers" remains a classic of crazy comedy, although its box-office performance outside New York City closely resembled dying. "But from a few critics and respected friends, I got the message, 'Make more movies'," Brooks recalls. So he worked another eighteen months on a screenplay, "The Twelve Chairs," adapted from a Russian satire of the 1920s. The film, starring Dom DeLuise, became a cult movie among college students, the consolation prize for comedies that fail big. "I learned one cardinal rule of filmmaking from "The Twelve Chairs," says Brooks. "Never shoot a film in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. The whole town is illuminated by a 20-watt night light and there's notyhing to do. You can't even go for a drive. Tito is always using the car.
    The failure of "The Twelve Chairs" ushered in a period of gloom that Brooks jokingly calls "the Ralph Nadir of my existence." But Warner Brothers finally offered him a script by Andrew Bergman about a black sheriff in the Old West. The idea of juxtaposing Western jargon and hip, black, urban lingo intrigued Brooks and he put together a team of writers that included black comic Richard Pryor, Bergman and Norman Steinberg. "It was my first HOllywood movie," says Brooks. "Big cast, big sets, big budget, big risk. If you fail out here you learn quickly that you're no longer needed. They ask you to sit down and relax and, before your eyes, they burn your director's chair."
    "Blazing Saddles" played to stony silence before studio executives, an emotional catastrophe for Brooks, who is so anxious for immediate confirmation of his work that he invites large numbers of people to view rough-cuts of his movies months before they're ready. But the public loved "Blazing Saddles" and the kind of insanity that had Count Basie's band wailing in the middle of hte Palmdale Desert. Gene Wilder shooting guns out the hands of bad guys with his arms folded and Madeline Kahn doing a mervelously funny parody of Marlene Dietrich as a burlesque queen who services a frontier city. "Mel is sensual with me," says Kahn. "He treats me like an uncle - a dirty uncle. He's an earthy man and very moral underneath. He has traditional values."

One of these values is to make lots of money. Brooks cannot yet fathom exactly how rich he has become. He still worries about whether to travel first or second class and whether to trade in his present car for a cheaper one. But despite this lingering poverty mentality, he supports all the needy members of his family generously. "Mondey? All I want is enough not to be oppressed by it," he sais. His concern for film profits is a matter of artistic survival. The Hollywood equation is simple and absolute: more profits equals more artistic freedom. "If I could get the same control over my films that a novelist has over the written page or the artist has over his canvas," Brooks says, "I'd be a happy man."
    With "Young Frankenstein," Brooks excercisedall the control a filmmaker has over his film - that is, he had to collaborate with hundreds of people. He developed the screenplay from a first draft by Gene Wilder. "My job was to make him more subtle," says Wilder of the way they worked. "His job was to make me more broad. I would say, 'I don't want this to be "Blazing Frankenstein",' and he'd answer, 'I don't want an art film that only fourteen people see'."
    On the set Brooks worked easily with his carefully picked stock company. "He has actors that know how to turn on their own motors, but he's a wonderful chauffeur," says Wilder. "But he has trouble when an actor can't start himself. He'll perform something the way he wants it done and we'll laugh but it won't work. That's whyhe keeps using the same people - we're all self-starters. "Adds Madeline Kahn, who is again marvelous ad Dr. Grankenstein's repressed, ever-primping girlfriend: "Mel will shoot a take. Then he'll say, 'We're gonnna do another and this time go bananas'."
    "What I wanted," says Brooks, "was the truth behind the horror conventions, the way real people - crazy, but real - would behave in that castle. And I wanted to do it with the greatest affection for those great old films. All the time we were shooting, I was sure the picture was going to be a failure. We were having too wonderful a time. Work should be painful, I thought. How can this be good if we're enjoying it so much? Near the end, Gene Wilder got misty-eyed. 'We've got only two more weeks of shooting,' he said. 'I don't want to leave Transylvania. I've been so happy here'."

Tthe visual grace of "Young Frankenstein" represents a significant growth in Mel Brooks, film director, a dimension he wants to expand in his next film, about some Brooksian nuts who want to make a silent movie. The film will in fact be silent, with titles, and will star Brooks, along with DeLuise, Feldman and Kahn. "What do you think?" he asks, apprehensive but excited about such a daring prospect. "Do you think a silent can work?" They'll let me make it. They'll let me do anything now - once."
    Brooks has also helped develop a prospective television series, "When Things Were Rotten," a send-up of Robin Hood that features such Brooksian touches as a crowd that obeys the command "hold your tongues" literally and a hero who is going crazy from "forest fatigue." "I'm not turning my back on television just because I can write myown ticket in movies," says Brooks. "After all, for a long time TV paid all my bills."
    From time to time, Brooks visits theaters where "Young Frankenstein" is playing. "it's one of hte great joys of my life," he says, "to walk down the aisle toward the screen, spin around and slowly walk back up while the audience is howling at my work. I did that during the blind-main scene last week, when Gene Hackman is pouring the scalding soup on Peter Boyle, and what I saw looked a little like a Chagaill painting - people flying out of their seats upside down with laughter. You feel a great sense of power when you ses so many people responding to your work. That kind of laughter," he goes on, "is felt as love by a comedian. It bursts from the fut. It is absolutely without compromise. It's a vocal hug, a special sharing."
    But even this isn't quite enough for Mel Brooks. He is after the greatest laugh ever laughed, just as he wants all the love there is, all teh praise there is, all the attention, all the adulation, all of everything. But he is willing to work ceaselessly for it. He wants it - but he wants it earned. And he is happy to give the best of himself to us in return. "I never want to leave the Mel Brooks business," he says, "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."
    Mel Brooks may be more relaxed these days, but he's never really relaxed. It's not his nature. Where would all that energy go? He won't rest until he's immortal. "If Shaw and Einstein couldn't beat death, what chance have I got?" he asks. "Practically none!"

    Poor Bronsky, he'a a little more than halfway finished with building his pyramid. But I don't think he'll ever finish it all the way to the top. You see, the more successful he is, the bigger he wants to build the bottom of the pyramid. And the bigger he builds the bottom, the farther it is to the top. Frankly, if he ever felt he could reach the top of it, he'd never start builiding it in the first place.

-Mel Brooks to Paul D. Zimmerman over a pretty good piece of fish at Factor's Deli