It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (32 page)

When Brooks did return to work, he rather surprisingly chose to revisit his earlier stomping ground: television. (Mel reasoned, “I’m not turning my back on television just because I can write my own ticket in movies. After all, for a long time TV paid all my bills.”) ABC-TV persuaded Brooks to quickly package a new half-hour TV series. His choice of projects was
When Things Were Rotten
, a wacky satire on the Robin Hood legend (a topic that Mel already had teased briefly in one of his 2000 Year Old Man recordings). The sitcom had been brought to Mel by comedy writer Normal Stiles, who had worked on the property with John Bonny. Brooks and others reshaped the entry, and Mel exerted his industry clout to launch the program.

When Mel was asked why he had selected this particular vehicle, he offered, “All my life, I am after dangerous comedy.… Dangerous comedy—that’s the kind where you hit the ground, you want to stop laughing and you can’t. With
Rotten
I have this effervescent, ‘Meshuginah,’ dangerous comedy.” In touting his fall 1975 small-screen fare, Mel emphasized, “It was fun that roped me in. I couldn’t resist the fun of somebody saying ‘Hold Your tongue’ and everybody holding their tongues.” According to Brooks, the comedy expert, “With Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest, I thought I’d make the series kind of a blazing forest rather than
Blazing Saddles
—lots of people falling off horses and plenty of sets and locations. I love physical comedy.”

Unlike the latitude that feature films allowed Brooks for his display of vulgar puns, sexual situations, and so forth, the television industry’s censorship rules were, by comparison, far stricter. Another roadblock for Brooks in mounting
When Things Were Rotten
was finding a way to pack his typical humor into the 24 or so minutes allotted for each episode and then having to deal with home viewers being distracted by the program’s rash of commercials. On the plus side, Brooks bubbled, “With costume comedy what we have is the chance to juxtapose medieval cliches against modern knowledge.” He bragged, “We’re giving viewers big, brave, visual comedy. We’re taking them outdoors. They’ll love it. We’re handsomer, we’re cuter, we’re taller, and we’re better than those other shows. We have six different, complicated sets, plus Sherwood Forest, plus a large, first-rate company of players. I honestly think we’ll be one of the top 10 shows in just a little while.”

For his cast of regulars, Brooks relied on two veterans of the old
Get Smart
series: Dick Gautier (cast in the title role) and Bernie Kopell (as sidekick Alan-a-Dale). Dick Van Patten (who became a regular in several of Mel’s later projects) was recruited for the series (as Friar Tuck) after the veteran actor and Mel met on the tennis courts at the estate of TV talk show host Merv Griffin and quickly became great pals. (By now, Brooks had developed a passion for playing tennis, a favorite sport of his wife’s). The attractive Misty Rowe was cast as the heroine, Maid Marian. Filming took place largely at Paramount Pictures (where an entire sound stage was devoted to Sherwood Forest and the Sheriff of Nottingham’s offices). Location work was done in a forest near Thousand Oaks, California, as well as in Malibu and at other outdoor sites.

According to the show’s star, Dick Gautier, “Mel was actively involved in the pilot episode. Although Jerry Paris was the titular director, Mel had a lot of input and rewrites on the spur of the moment and he was open to ad-libs and bits of business from the actors many of which had backgrounds in improv and comedy.”

A few days before the debut of
When Things Were Rotten
on September 10, 1975, the Dope Sheet column of the
New York Times
reported, “Once again, the network schedules reflect the fact that Wednesday is the least-watched television night. The only item of interest is a new show conceived in the fevered mind of Mel Brooks for ABC:
When Things Were Rotten
to be seen at 8
P.M
. The Robin Hood spoof was greeted with explosive laughter at the ABC convention, but whether it can generate enough stories for a weekly series remains to be seen.”

Many critics applauded Brooks’s series for being innovative compared to the formula shows then peppering the networks’ lineup. However, a few weeks after the debut of
When Things Were Rotten
, critic John Leonard was writing in the
New York Times
about “The Worst Television Season Ever, Ever, Ever.” He noted, “So far, we haven’t even discussed quality, unless it’s the quality of panic. Watching
When Things Were Rotten
is like being locked inside a package of bubblegum where the only card is Alvin Dark [a veteran major league baseball player]. I think Mel Brooks should turn himself off, but the nine-year-olds of America apparently disagree.”

Initially, Mel’s small-screen outing, with its cornucopia of sight gags, received high national ratings from home viewers. This solid response was partially due to Brooks’s moviegoing fan base tuning in to the show to see if the same entertaining degree of irreverence and lunacy would be carried over to the television series. However, when they saw that—alas!—it was not, they quickly lost interest. Meanwhile, regular TV viewers proved to be more attracted to watching the competition during that Wednesday evening time slot: CBS’s
Tony Orlando
6*
Dawn
variety hour, and NBC’s
Little House on the Prairie
family drama.

By December 24, 1975, after airing the already filmed 13 episodes, the network dropped
When Things Were Rotten
from its schedule. Per Dick Gautier, there were behind-the-scenes reasons for the program’s sudden cancellation. He told this author, “This may not be gospel but from what I understand Fred Silverman was head of CBS and was pitched the Robin Hood concept and turned it down. They then went to ABC, made a deal for a pilot and we got on the air. Pretty good reviews, we didn’t do badly in the ratings,
but—
and this is where politics rears its head—Fred Silverman then switched from CBS to ABC and there on the schedule and doing fairly well was
Rotten
which he had turned down. We were summarily axed. Politics, ego, or pragmatism? You tell me.” Dick Van Patten recalls that Mel was extremely angry when his show suffered an inglorious demise.

•     •     •

It was through Will Jordan—with whom Brooks had worked back in the late 1940s at the little theater in Red Bank, New Jersey—that Ron Clark first popped into Mel’s life. Clark was already an established TV writer (on
The Danny Kaye Show
and telefeatures) and playwright. Jordan arranged for Ron and Mel to have a lunch meeting, during which Clark proposed the idea of a new screen comedy, whose gimmick would be that for nearly the entire film no words would be spoken. (The characters’ conversations would be conveyed to the audience in traditional silent cinema fashion through title cards containing dialogue and via the actors’ pantomime.) One can only imagine how Brooks, the lifelong verbal pundit who thrived on exploiting on-camera vulgar dialogue and crude sounds, responded to such an audacious suggestion. At first blush, Mel seemed the very last filmmaker in Hollywood to be amused by such an apparently uncommercial conceit. Then, slowly, the challenge of making such a gimmick work artistically and commercially appealed to Brooks’s sensibilities and ego. Mel was soon envisioning the great pleasure he would derive from demonstrating to Hollywood bigwigs that he could both resurrect silent screen comedy and maintain audience interest among 1970s filmgoers. The more enthusiastic Brooks became about the off-the-wall concept, the more determined he became to convince Twentieth Century-Fox to approve this seemingly unviable screen idea. Over several months, he and Clark worked in tandem with two other TV comedy writers (Rudy DeLuca and Barry Levinson) to whip together a screenplay. (In devising their story line, the four authors riffed on many of the roadblocks they were encountering in persuading Twentieth Century-Fox to green-light their vehicle.)

According to Brooks, “The studio bosses at 20th Century were thinking about some kind of light noise, a buzz maybe [on the movie’s sound track]. Because they were afraid there would be just deadly silence, and it can get very uncomfortable sitting in a silent theater.… But I said, ‘No! There won’t be any silence! The people will be laughing. The sound track will be the audience itself! Laughter! Laughter will be the sound track. We don’t have to worry about silence!’ But I put in 90 minutes of music, like a rug from beginning to end, just to be on the safe side.”

As it evolved,
Silent Movie
became Brooks’s tribute to the glorious silent screen comedies he had so enjoyed watching as a child back in Coney Island. It was also a forum for barbed attacks on the growing trend in 1970s Hollywood of “multinational companies and conglomerates getting into the movie business. They’re moving into an art form and I [Brooks] hate them for it.” In casting the feature—set in the mid-1970s—Mel handed himself his first leading role in movies. He also utilized the talents of such past teammates as Marty Feldman and Dom DeLuise as the hero’s daffy sidekicks in order to create a contemporary counterpart to the Three Stooges. (For Brooks, the Feldman and DeLuise characters also served as surrogates for his three real-life brothers, with whom he had been so close during his childhood.) Brooks also found a role for his longtime pal Sid Caesar, whose career had never rebounded after his heyday with
Your Show of Shows
and
Caesar’s Hour.

During the filming of
Silent Movie
, which began production on January 5, 1976, and shot for 12 weeks, Brooks claimed to have dealt with a great obstacle on the set—getting an audible reaction from the crew. “We could not get the crew to laugh! There we were, knocking ourselves out to be funny, and behind the camera, not a snicker. This was a veteran crew. After 50 years of making sound movies, they were afraid if they made a noise it would spoil the shot. Fer chrissakes, fellas, I said, there’s not even a microphone. Laugh a little! Yuk it up!”

Within the extremely episodic narrative, Brooks is seen as accomplished filmmaker Mel Funn, whose career has fallen apart because of his alcoholism. Now recovering from substance abuse, Funn suggests to the beleaguered head of Big Picture Studios (played by Caesar) that he can save the company from corporate raiders by making a contemporary comedy that can’t miss at the box office. Its gimmick will be that it is a silent picture that, in all other respects, utilizes the latest movie technology.

Mel Funn is joined on his quest by his two goofy, juvenile-acting pals. The happy-go-lucky trio sets out to recruit major stars for its proposed movie so the studio will approve the project for filming. In time, the daffy threesome persuade Burt Reynolds, Liza Minnelli, James Caan, Paul Newman, and Anne Bancroft to appear in their offbeat venture. (Their one failure is trying to woo the French mime Marcel Marceau to appear in the picture.) Meanwhile, Funn and his cohorts combat the dastardly corporate forces of Engulf & Devour. In the process, the well-meaning, dapper Mel so charms the enemy’s sexy spy (played by Bernadette Peters) that she falls in love with him.

One of the two biggest pluses of
Silent Movie
was Brooks’s performance as the nattily dressed, personable hero. The other was the extended cameo provided by Anne Bancroft. She deliciously hammed it up as the regal movie star whose night on the town includes a stopover at the Rio Bomba Club. She soon finds herself ensnared in a wild tango with Mel and his two bumbling cronies. During the madcap dance, the agile Anne is tossed wildly about by the goofy trio, has her head smashed into a wall, and survives other indignities. In executing this highly athletic number, the real-life husband and wife proved a dexterous on-camera team. While they might not have been the logical successors to the elegant Fred Astaire and the graceful Ginger Rogers, Brooks and Bancroft admirably proved they were game performers and a duo very much in synch with each other. Bancroft, so long associated with heavily dramatic roles, exuded great joy at kidding her serious professional image, even mugging and crossing her eyes on camera.

In making
Silent Movie
, Mel discovered, “Making a silent, believe me, is more difficult than a talkie. That’s why my respect for the old silent stars has grown.” Concerning guiding himself on camera, Brooks allowed, “Directing myself relieves some of the frustration from impulse to reaction.… But I’m not going to tell myself how much I like me or I’ll ask for more money.” Mel the director also had to ride herd on Brooks the cowriter of the film. There was one sequence in the picture that as much as Mel the scenarist liked it, Brooks the director knew had to be excised from the release print. The scene in question was set at the Chez Lobster restaurant. There, a huge lobster is the tuxedo-garbed maitre d’. He greets two well-dressed lobsters and leads them to a vacant table. Brooks recalled, “Already, we thought this was hysterical. Then a waiter lobster in a white jacket shows them a menu that says ‘Flown in Fresh from New York.’ They get up and follow the waiter lobster to an enormous tank, where a lot of little human beings in bathing suits are swimming nervously around. The lobster patrons point to a tasty-looking middle-aged man. The waiter’s claw reaches into the tank. It picks up the man, who is going bananas, and that was the end of the scene. We loved it; we thought it was sensational. Every time we saw it, there was not enough Kleenex to stuff into our mouths.” But, alas, the filmmaker admitted, “It died at sneak previews.”

Brooks and his creative team maneuvered through the postproduction process of
Silent Movie
in a surprisingly short period (for Mel) to have it ready for its scheduled debut on June 16, 1976. The critics had reservations about the final results, noting, in particular, that the film’s pacing was far slower and the energy far less manic than, for example, Brooks’s
The Producers
, and this made the viewer all too aware of the picture’s hit-or-miss quality. Vincent Canby (of the
New York Times
) argued, “The lack of spoken dialogue doesn’t disable the character. It’s the concept. When you have a Mel Brooks who doesn’t allow himself to be rude, testy and master of the low leer, you don’t have a funny man. You have an affable floorwalker. He’s a surprise and sort of pleasant but not what you were expecting.” Canby concluded,
“Silent Movie
is not the greatest movie Mr. Brooks has made, but if you adjust your expectations, it could be one of the nicest things you’ll see all summer.” John Simon wrote in
New York
magazine, “The scenario is basically no sillier than those of the old silent comedies, but the innocence is gone. Some gags are too … esoteric; others are takeoffs on the old ones, and seem to kid something that depended on its deadpan dedication. Brooks is not an eloquent mime.” Stanley Kauffmann (of the
New Republic
) judged, “None of the picture made me double up with laughter … still there are some good sight gags.”