It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (33 page)

Silent Movie
was made for about $4.5 million (with another $5 million devoted to release promotion) and generated $21.24 million in domestic theater rentals. While the picture was certainly profitable, it was not in the same league as
Young Frankenstein
(which owed so much to Gene Wilder’s input) and thus not the anticipated financial bonanza Twentieth Century-Fox had counted on so heavily to rescue the studio during a particularly bad fiscal quarter.

Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, and Barry Levinson were nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award in the Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen category, but lost to Bill Lancaster (for
The Bad News Bears
). On a more positive note, the National Association of Theater Owners (made up of 8,000 film exhibitors) named Mel Brooks director of the year for his work on
Silent Movie, Young Frankenstein
, and the upcoming
High Anxiety.
Said Brooks: “I was delighted, especially so since the N.A.T.O. convention is going to be held in Miami and it’ll give me a chance to see my little Jewish mother, who lives there.”

In this same period, U.S. film exhibitors ranked Mel Brooks fifth on their annual list of the 25 stars who demonstrated the greatest box-office appeal. (Interestingly, Brooks’s only starring appearance to this time was in
Silent Movie
, in which he did not speak.) Mel, the one-time bumbling tummler at Catskill Mountain resorts, was enthralled that he should now have such wide appeal as a performer with the moviegoing public. Giddy with success, Brooks could not resist ribbing Burt Reynolds, Mel’s box-office “rival,” who was then ranked sixth in box-office popularity. Whenever Mel phoned Burt, Brooks would start each conversation with: “Hello, Six, this is Five speaking.”

•     •     •

In 1971, Avery Corman wrote
Oh, God!
a comedic novel that was later adapted into a screenplay by Larry Gelbart, once part of the impressive writing team on
Caesar’s Hour.
Carl Reiner, another veteran of that vintage TV series, agreed to direct the big-screen project. At one point en route to production, it was rumored that Mel Brooks would take on the title role of the Lord, with Woody Allen (who had worked with Brooks on Sid Caesar’s TV specials in the late 1950s) projected to play the young grocery man who is recruited by God to help spread the gospel. That intriguing casting did not happen and the resultant film teamed George Burns with singer-turned-actor John Denver. It became an enormous box-office success.

Instead, Brooks, delighting in his power to generate his own career decisions, chose to focus on another of his own vehicles. He reteamed with his
Silent Movie
collaborators (Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, and Barry Levinson) to create
High Anxiety.
The thrust of the new project was to spoof “two things I love desperately: Alfred Hitchcock and psychiatry. Ever since I was a little boy watching
The 39 Steps
and
The Lady Vanishes
wash over me in a dark movie house, I was lost in that world of Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, English accents, railway instead of railroad, windows on both sides of the compartment. I just couldn’t get over it.”

Also of key importance to Mel in seizing on this property was the fact that this film would showcase Brooks in a dream role: as a Cary Grant-type hero. “I’ve always wanted to be the character I’m playing: Prof. Richard H. Thorndyke. I mean I like a hat that comes down on both sides. I like a Phi Beta Kappa key. I like a gray suit. I mean there it is a dream come true: I’m a Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist in an Alfred Hitchcock picture. That’s a kid’s fantasy.” As a bonus, Brooks also had a cameo as the hero’s look-alike, an actual killer.

As the project revved up at Twentieth Century-Fox, Mel expounded to the media on his personal guidelines for creating a commercially successful feature. “You don’t want to make a picture just for the smarties. That’s no good. You want all the people. You want a potato salad picture. You know what I mean by a potato salad picture. You’re in the deli and there’s this guy with a little piece of potato salad stuck in the corner of his mouth, and he’s talking about your picture to his cronies. He’s saying, all the time with the potato salad hanging, ‘You gotta see this Mel Brooks pitcha, you’ll laugh so hard you’ll pish yourself.’”

Mel’s ambition in his new venture was to create a narrative that would be understood by anyone—including those not familiar with Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre. However, for aficionados of Hitchcock there would be an extra layer of fun in witnessing Brooks’s farcical twists on famous sequences and setups from various of the master’s classic screen thrillers, including
Spellbound
,
Vertigo
,
Psycho
,
The Birds
, and
North by Northwest.
Fearful of possibly offending the great Sir Alfred, Brooks visited Hitchcock at his Los Angeles home to gain his seal of approval for
High Anxiety.
Mel relished detailing his meeting with Hitchcock: “He’s a very emotional man. I told him that where other people take saunas to relax, I run
The Lady Vanishes
for the sheer pleasure of it. He had tears in his eyes. I think he understood that I wasn’t going to make fun of him. If the picture is a send up, it’s also an act of homage to a great artist. I’m glad I met him, because I love him.”

•     •     •

In devising his “dapper” alter ego for
High Anxiety
, Brooks allowed his flight of fancy to run loose. Here was an opportunity for a short, average-looking man to transform himself into a romantic leading man. At least in the make-believe of this cinema excursion, he could compensate for the many years of being the mug who envied the handsome men who made easy conquests of the opposite sex. “In my heart of hearts, I always wanted to be Errol Flynn.… Yeah, I was heartbroken. And I always wanted the most beautiful, long-waisted, long-legged women in the world to fall on their knees and pray to me. But as life and God would have it, it was the other way around. Every time I see a tall, beautiful woman, I just crash to my knees and I pray to her. I say, ‘Please, just give me a slap in the face, something. Show me that you know I’m alive, too.’”

Another impetus for Brooks to make
High Anxiety
was to provide an on-screen forum in which he could imitate Frank Sinatra singing in a club. (For years, Mel had been doing his impersonation of the crooner at parties and on TV.) To that end, Mel wrote the song “High Anxiety,” which John Morris scored for the new movie.

In assembling his cast, Mel chose Howard Morris to play his mentor, Professor Vicktor Lilloman. It was the first time Brooks and Morris had worked together in a decade, and the first movie ever in which the two old friends acted together. The occasion prompted Mel to say, “I look into Howie’s eyes and I see my life there! We hug each other and laugh and cry a lot.… He’s as funny as you want him to be and yet he’s very moving and warm.” In turn, Howard said of Mel, “He has always had the ability to cut through the shit. The way he has changed is that when you are eighteen or nineteen and you have that instinct, people think you’re crazy. You think you’re crazy. Now he has the confidence, having proven himself economically.”

Brooks again asked Cloris Leachman to take on the role of another celluloid villain. (Mel enthused about her, “Cloris’ genius is that she never plays comedy for laughs. She’s deadly serious as the character.”) To make her new screen character (Nurse Charlotte Diesel) unique, Leachman chose not to reprise the ridiculous Eastern European accent and stern countenance she had used to play Frau Blücher in
Young Frankenstein.
To heighten her sinister portrayal, she took the initiative to pencil in a light mustache, add additional shoulder padding to her outfits, and raise the costume’s torpedo-shaped breasts to just below her chin, and she decided to talk out of the side of the mouth. Her exaggerated appearance gave even the notoriously screwball Brooks pause. However, she stood her ground, saying, “My intention is not to do something I’ve done before.” Mel finally went along with Leachman’s suggestions for her character.

Madeline Kahn returned to Brooks’s fold for the third time, this go-round cast as the very blond, glamorous heroine, Victoria Brisbane, whose father is being forcibly detained at the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. Harvey Korman came aboard as the murderous Dr. Charles Montague, who is putty in the hands of his sadomasochistic lover, Nurse Diesel. Ron Carey, who had had a small role as a corporate miscreant in
Silent Movie
, had a far more vocal role in
High Anxiety
, as the hero’s hyperactive chauffeur/helper. Dick Van Patten, another member of Mel’s stock company, joined the ensemble as a nervous clinic staffer who knows far too many dastardly secrets to remain alive. Since Brooks made a policy of having his collaborators on the set during filming, he decided to give each of them (Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, and Barry Levinson) a small role in the proceedings. Even Mel’s lawyer, Alan Schwartz, had a bit role (as a psychiatrist).

Filming on
High Anxiety
began on April 25, 1977, on location in San Francisco, with scenes lensed at the ultramodern Hyatt Regency Hotel (which boasted futuristic glass cylinder elevators that were a critical plot point in the picture), Fisherman’s Wharf, and historic Fort Point (the latter under the Golden Gate Bridge on the exact spot where Hitchcock had shot an important sequence for
Vertigo
). Back in Los Angeles, the production shot at Fox and at such area locales as Mount St. Mary’s College, the Bonaventure Hotel, and Los Angeles International Airport. The shoot ended on July 14, 1977, four days ahead of schedule. The final sequence, in which the leading man is seen fleeing from a flock of attacking pigeons, was shot in a park in Pasadena, California.

Later, Brooks acknowledged that in
High Anxiety
, “One of the cliches I nearly used was, I was going to open with a small Swiss village and you see a train that is obviously a toy train. And I was going to have a big foot crush the village and say, ‘Oops I’m sorry.’ But I thought that was a little too exquisite and a little too subtle and I never did it.” In the same picture, Mel also had a notion of having his hero come out of George Washington’s nose on Mount Rushmore wearing a green jumpsuit. His script collaborators talked him out of it. (On the other hand, Brooks couldn’t resist the prankish gimmick of having the movie camera shooting the movie crash through a set wall as it dollied in and out of the action.)

In contrast to his earlier films
(The Producers
and
The Twelve Chairs
), Brooks now worked quite rapidly on the sound stages. (By this point, Mel kept graphs in his office, delineating “dialogue, dialogue … laugh.”) Typically, Brooks maintained an open set on his productions so friends (and even studio executives) could drop by to say hello and watch the progress of the shoot. It was Mel’s goal to have a happy and silly ambiance during the shoot so the cast and crew would feel relaxed and be comfortable about offering suggestions.

Having deliberately chosen “self-starters who don’t have to have every nuance of behavior explained,” Brooks encouraged them to improvise on their physical movements but
not
to vary from the dialogue of the final script. (Mel had also come to realize, “You can’t make up the movie as you go along. It’s too expensive.”) An example of giving cast members freedom to devise funny bits was the clinic sequence in which Mel’s character is making his rounds of the facilities. One of the more deranged patients (played by Charles Callas), who thinks he is a cocker spaniel, comes up on all fours to the hero, begins sniffing the newcomer, and then starts to hump the man’s leg. As Callas told this author, he thought up much of his business for this sequence.

When it came to interacting with the extras, the filmmaker was very much in his element, thriving on having a large audience eager to do his bidding. During a medical convention scene, he briefed the banquet hall full of extras: “You are all supposed to be psychiatrists at a convention so you’re allowed to have a lot of nervous ticks. You can mumble a lot, but don’t laugh till you get home.” When a tourist mistakenly barged into the room, Brooks quipped, “Lady, you’re in a shot! If you can act, stick around.”

On the other hand, the hyperactive, highly focused Brooks could, on occasion, be a bit too much for his cast. Madeline Kahn said, “Sometimes he gets very high-powered.” Harvey Korman observed, “You must be very careful he doesn’t engulf you.” And Howard Morris noted, “He has a hysterical kind of energy that causes some people to call him the Monkey because he sometimes appears to be climbing the walls.”

By August 31, 1977, Mel was screening a work print of
High Anxiety
for a gathering of 200 executives and workers at Twentieth Century-Fox. Before the showing, the convivial host said, “My beloved, you are guinea pigs.” Mel ended his welcoming speech with: “Finally, let me say that I wish you well, but I wish myself better.” Further on in postproduction, Brooks invited Hitchcock to a prerelease screening of the picture. When it was over, the master of suspense walked out without saying a word. Brooks thought, “Oh, boy, he hates it.” However, soon thereafter, Sir Alfred, knowing Mel was a wine connoisseur, sent Brooks a case of 1961 Haut-Brion (an expensive vintage) with a note that read, “A small token of my pleasure, have no anxiety about this.”

High Anxiety
premiered in New York City on Christmas Day, 1977. Vincent Canby (of the
New York Times
) weighed in that it was “as witty and as disciplined as
Young Frankenstein
, though it has one built-in problem: Hitchcock himself is a very funny man. His films, even at their most terrifying and most suspenseful, are full of jokes shared with the audience. Being so self-aware, Hitchcock’s films deny an easy purchase to the parodist, especially one who admires his subject the way Mr. Brooks does.” Canby pointed out, “As the afflicted Dr. Thorndyke, Mr. Brooks plays it so very, very straight that just the memory of one of his famous leers is funny.”
Variety
applauded Brooks as a “chance taker” who reveled here in “toying with the technical references” to Hitchcock’s canon of classic films and decided that “nearly all of these gags… score.” However, the trade paper alerted, “Where the film becomes uneven is the individual scenes which sway from the movie’s larger design.”