It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (38 page)

Nearly six years had passed since Brooks had directed his last screen entry,
History of the World: Part I.
He enunciated some of his reasons: “I only direct things I write. I’d rather write the Ninth Symphony than conduct it. And these days, it takes three years to do the script and set up the deal and—well—I just won’t direct a picture I haven’t written.”

The show business veteran, now nearly 60 years old, had mixed feelings about helming a new big-budget movie (and, in turn, the youth-focused film industry was beginning to wonder if Mel had grown seriously out of touch with the new crop of moviegoers). Sometimes, he expressed his concerns in a serious tone: “Frankly, I hate directing. I only direct in self-defense [of protecting my screenplays]. It’s like building a building and having someone else paint it and furnish it. They’re going to get it wrong!” On other occasions, he masked his beliefs on the subject behind a veil of glib amusement. “There’s nothing worse than being on the set. All the excitement and the merriment and celebration. You know, all the sociability—what are we going to eat today? Where are you going for the weekend? … But all I can think about is what happens afterwards. I know that all those people are going to leave me and go on to another picture, while I’m stuck in the editing room for months, slaving over the film.”

As the new Brooks project got under way, Mel and his collaborators (Thomas Meehan and Ronny Graham) decided that a primary set of references to be spoofed in
The Planet Moron
would be George Lucas’s enormously successful
Star Wars
trilogy (released in 1977, 1980, and 1983). But, rightly so, Brooks questioned whether he was on the right commercial/artistic track. “It’s a paradoxically risky venture; on the one hand, to parody a film genre, the genre has to have been around long enough to become a genre, and yet in the case of the space films, although there certainly is much to parody, interest in the genre seems to be on the wane. Even George Lucas has stopped making them.” (Later, Anne Bancroft would comment on her husbands preproduction concerns: “Mel is always so unsure when he starts out. When he began …
[The Planet Moron]
he was filled with self-doubt. Anxiety feeds on that, and when he’s not happy, I’m not happy. But that’s when you must do something—be there for each other.”

Actually, at the time that Mel put his sci-fi spoof at the top of his production list, he was scripting another movie project,
Scared to Death
, a satire of the mystery genre. However, he shelved that screenplay because he came to believe that its commercial appeal might be too narrow. By now, the projected
The Planet Moron
had undergone a name change to
Spaceballs.
(The title switch was done to avoid confusion with a 1985 scifi comedy from the United Kingdom titled
Morons from Outer Space.
) As Brooks, Meehan, and Graham began writing, Mel contacted George Lucas—as he had Alfred Hitchcock when making
High Anxiety—
to gain the filmmaker’s seal of approval on the planned big-screen spoof. Lucass one request to Brooks was that if Mel went ahead with the satire of the
Star Wars
movies, Brooksfilms would refrain from merchandizing anything from
Spaceballs
(which could interfere with Lucas’s ongoing
Star Wars
merchandizing bonanza).

Over many, many months, Brooks and his writing team whittled down their script from 315 pages to, finally, a 126-page version. Meehan acknowledged of the results, “Unlike To
Be or Not to Be
, we were going for everything. It’s much more of a vulgar picture, full of wild, low comedy.” Ronny Graham commented on the long development period of getting the property to the actual filming stage, “Of course, we have our disagreements. After a while, cabin fever sets in and we start to shout at each other.” He went on, “Mel’s very vehement. If he doesn’t like a line you write, he’ll shout and stomp and holler. He’ll bellow, ‘You’re totally wrong. You don’t know anything about comedy!’… But here’s what really happens. He’ll fight ferociously against something Ezra [Swerdlow, the producer] or I suggest, but all the while he’ll be rolling that idea around in his head. And if the idea has any merit at all, he won’t necessarily admit it. But he’ll find a way to use it in the scene.”

The filming of
Spaceballs
began on October 28, 1986. A production deal had been set up at MGM, where Brooks’s friend Alan Ladd Jr. was then chairman and chief executive officer. The budget allocated for this genre spoof was a substantial $22.7 million, a good deal of which was devoted to utilizing the latest high-tech special effects and to creating the impressive sets. For the shoot, Brooksfilms took over the giant Stage 30, one of the three biggest stages on the MGM lot. Much of the outdoor filming was accomplished in the desert around Yuma, Arizona, as well as at assorted southern California sites: a church in Pacific Palisades, locales near San Diego, and sections of Imperial County (home of the Salton Sea and the Imperial Sand Dunes).

To play the picture’s hero, Brooks chose Bill Pullman. (Said Brooks, “The studio fought me on that choice. They wanted Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks—anybody named Tom who cost $2 million.… That’s what wrong with this business. If you make it a ‘Tom’ movie, it’s no longer a parody, it’s a “Tom’ movie, and you have to build scenes around him.”) The heavy-set comedian John Candy claimed the role of the hero’s half dog, half man sidekick, Barfolemew. Daphne Zuniga was contracted to portray the spoiled princess, comic Rick Moranis was assigned the role of the villainous Dark Helmet, and Joan Rivers was hired to provide the voice of Dot Matrix, Zuniga’s robotic helper. George Wyner, an excellent second banana character actor who had been in To
Be or Not to Be
, was on tap as Colonel Sandurz, while Dick Van Patten returned to the Mel Brooks camp as the daffy king. In comparison to his several parts in
History of the World: Part I,
Brooks cut back on the number of roles he assigned to himself in
Spaceballs.
In this slapstick intergalactic odyssey, Mel cavorts as the dapper, sinister President Skroob (whose motto is “Skroob the People”) and as the pint-sized Yoghurt (the wise old soul whose favorite saying is “May the Schwartz be with you”).

Spaceballs
was released in June 1987. Gene Shalit (of TV’s
Today
show) ranked the picture “eight trillion on the laugh meter” and the
Wall Street Journal’s
reviewer rated it “extremely funny—buoyantly tasteless.” However, more on target was Richard Schickel (of
Time
) who wrote, “It’s not that Mel Brooks has lost his cunning, though he does need a freedom of speech not to be found under a PG rating. What’s missing is that zany old gang of his, ranging in size from Zero Mostel to Marty Feldman, in shape from Madeline Kahn to Dom DeLuise (who does deliver the voice of Pizza the Hutt in
Spaceballs
). With their living-caricature presences, they could have proved and improved Brooks’ comic points. And when comic invention failed him, they could have earned laughs just by standing there, making faces. There is simply nobody like them on this trip.”

Hal Hinson (of the
Washington Post
) decided, “What you’re conscious of throughout this movie is that you’re sitting in your seat, not laughing at performers who desperately want you to laugh.” Roger Ebert (of the
Chicago Sun-Times
) carped, “Brooks’s intelligence and taste seem to switch off when he makes his own films, and he aims for broad, dumb comedy: Jokes about names with dirty double meanings are his big specialty. Maybe the reason
Spaceballs
isn’t better is that he was deliberately aiming low, going for the no-brainer satire. What does he really think about
Star Wars
, or anything else, for that matter?”

Spaceballs
brought in a relatively low gross of $38.11 million in domestic distribution. (This was in sharp comparison to the grosses of the year’s five top Hollywood productions:
Three Men and a Baby
[$167.78 million],
Fatal Attraction
[$156.64 million],
Beverly Hills Cop II
[$153.55 million],
Good Morning
,
Vietnam
[$123.92 million]), and
Moonstruck
[$80.64 million]). Fortunately for Brooksfilms and MGM,
Spaceballs
did well in its later home entertainment versions, and Brooks counts this entry as one of his most successful releases on VHS and DVD. This, in turn, led to recurrent talk of Brooks’s making a sequel to the feature, something that would not occur for nearly two decades.

•     •     •

In 1987, the year that
Spaceballs
debuted, the Brookses moved to a fresh Los Angeles address—a hugely spacious 12,000-square-foot house on La Mesa Drive in Pacific Palisades, close to the Riviera Country Club. Their new residence towered over the others in the exclusive neighborhood, with their Spanish-style house boasting an indoor swimming pool. The family also had a getaway home in the expensive community of Malibu. The family’s other real estate holdings included a co-op apartment on Manhattan’s East 89th Street, beachfront condos on Fisher Island off Miami, and, over the years, various residences in Long Island’s Southampton.

Despite his growing material riches, Mel had not abandoned his concerns for the world at large. “I still rail at all the injustices that rear their head in this world. I get angry about our President’s polices, about Jell-O TV, about the crap that passes for culture and society’s wholesale neglect of whole segments of our population.”

Brooks also had learned to insulate himself against the fickleness of critics and the public, who were always finding new, and usually younger, favorites to adore. “Listen, I know that everybody has worn out their welcome—[Charles] Chaplin, [Buster] Keaton—everyone has. I’ve had waves of anxiety after a picture hasn’t done so well. I say, ‘It’s over, it’s over, I’ve been replaced by [filmmaker] Ivan Reitman!’… When the critics kill you, it hurts, at least at the time. But the feeling doesn’t last. I learned a long time ago that it’s the process that counts, not just the result.” However, he admitted, “It does bother you when someone doesn’t like your work. It confirms your worst fears. You try not to get caught up in it. But sometimes I feel like writing these critics a letter, saying, ‘Why so angry? What was there to hate so much?’ I want to tell them, ‘I mean no harm. I only wanted to entertain you.’”

On one subject, Brooks had no equivocation—his luck in finding Anne Bancroft and keeping her love over the decades. He said of his wife, “I’m very, very lucky that we’re still lovers as well as good friends. Besides, she saves me a couple of hundred a week that I’d be spending on psychoanalysts. I tell her everything, and she tells me what to do.” Brooks enthused, “Anne is simply terrific. She’s beautiful, she has great shoulders, and she makes me laugh.”

In response, the revered actress said of her zany spouse, “I do make him laugh, that’s true. Mel’s sort of jaded about funny things, because he knows almost everything, but I guess I’m spontaneous. Things pop out, and that makes him laugh. That’s why our marriage works so well.” She elaborated, “When you strip away who we are as Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, and you think of us as children, you can see we would have been in love as kids. We have the same values. We think alike about what’s important and what makes us happy. It’s the simple things—our son, my garden, making other people happy. Our life revolves around our family and friends.” She admitted of Mel, “He is not that easy to get to know. He is often ‘on’ in public. He’s funny, he’s fast, and he talks a lot. But that’s a façade. Mel is much more private than I am. He’s enormously sensitive, and he’s twenty times as funny in private and a thousand times more lovable.”

Anne explained the special dynamics in the Brooks household: “[Mel’s] energy fills the house—and so does my son’s. Sometimes there’s not much room for mine. So whatever I need, I ask for, and if I don’t get it, I scream. Then I get it.” She detailed, “We have a motto in our family: inch by inch, life’s a cinch. Yard by yard, it’s very hard. I say it to my husband at the start of every film. I say it to my son before every test. Now, I wish someone would say it to me.”

She also revealed one of the greatest pleasures in her daily life: “Learning. I didn’t always know that, but just the fact that I can still learn is thrilling to me. It doesn’t have to be anything earthshaking. Listen, I bought a book on pruning the other day and just read the first few sentences. I learned something, and it made me happy all day. I was going to be able to prune these trees in my garden, and it lifted me up to the ceiling!” (Eventually, Bancroft, the devoted gardener, became a proud member of the California Fruit Growers Association.)

•     •     •

In the spring of 1987, Brooks was among those who received Life Achievement Awards from the newly formed American Comedy Awards. (The others were Steve Allen, Woody Allen, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Bette Midler, Mary Tyler Moore, and Lily Tomlin.) However, Brooks regarded public acclaim for his latest show business venture as the best prize he could receive and, therefore, was anxious to find a new vehicle that could accomplish that goal. After launching
Spaceballs
in the United States and abroad, he found himself with too much time on his hands and no appealing film deal in the works. Wanting to keep active in show business, he returned to the world of television, which many industry observers regarded as a comedown for the filmmaker.

Mel’s new TV project actually owed its impetus to the 1988 movie comedy
Big Business
, costarring Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin. When the makers of that Touchstone/Disney Studio feature were unable to negotiate permission to film sequences of the comedy at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, they chose to build a huge hotel set on the studio’s sound stages in Burbank, California. That set was still standing, and Disney executives decided to initiate a TV sitcom that would make use of the costly structure.

The studio turned to Mel Brooks to come up with a property. In turn, Brooks chose to work with the much-younger Alan Spencer (as producer) on the project. As an adolescent, the star-struck Spencer had snuck onto the set of
Young Frankenstein
and, once there, had become friendly with actor Marty Feldman. In the process, the young man pursued his idol, Mel Brooks, and, eventually, the intruder and Brooks developed a father-son type of friendship. Subsequently, Spencer developed a career in television. Most recently, he had created, written, and produced
Sledge Hammer
, an off-the-wall detective series that ran on ABC-TV from 1986 to 1988. (Spencer had written in his high school yearbook that his dream was one day to work for Brooks. Said Alan: “When my dream came true, I used to drive to work with him and he’d be doing these non-stop routines. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”)