It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (39 page)

Brooks’s new offering,
The Nutt House
, revolved around a once elegant Manhattan hotel that had fallen on hard times, largely due to mismanagement by its staff of insanely incompetent workers. Disney green-lighted the project, and Brooks and Spencer began pitching their show to the networks. According to Spencer, he and Mel had a meeting with NBC. “We went in and winged it.” Before the meeting with the “suits,” Brooks had advised his less-experienced associate: “Talk a lot and make ‘em laugh, then leave. You’re on the air.”

The network bought the half-hour program and set its debut for fall 1989. In casting the venture, Brooks turned to some old reliables: Cloris Leachman (in a dual role as the eccentric elderly owner of the hotel and the starchy, oversexed head housekeeper), Harvey Korman (as the pompous hotel manager), and Ronny Graham (as the befuddled doorman). Mark Blankfield, who had been in Spencer’s
Sledge Hammer
and would be in later Mel Brooks productions, appeared as the myopic elevator operator.

There was much hype regarding
Nutt House’s
premiere on September 20, 1989. However, the show’s high profile was short-lived. Howard Rosenberg (of the
Los Angeles Times
) reported, “There are moments... that are knee-slapping funny. Nevertheless, the script by executive producers Mel Brooks and Alan Spencer is an example of a few great jokes going a short way.” Rosenberg observed, “Korman and Leachman are a riot. In their hands, absurdity was never better.… Yet even they can’t sustain lumpy material that ranges from exquisite nastiness to excruciating slapstick, with much more of the latter.”

By its second week on the air,
Nutt House
had slipped badly in the home viewers ratings. By October 25, 1989, the expensive-to-conceive sitcom had been canceled and aired its last episode. It left Brooks angry and humiliated and wondering, once again, where to find his next show business options.

•     •     •

The 1970s and 1980s had been an especially bullish period for independent film production companies in Hollywood. In this era, there always seemed to be a plentitude of investors—both in the United States and abroad—to back such firms even on the more chancy ventures. (This was still the time of enticing tax shelters, a situation that ended when the U.S. government finally plugged the legal loopholes for most such lucrative tax write-offs.) By the end of the eighties, investors were generally far more cautious about funding “glamorous” movie production companies. As a result, many of the smaller firms were hard-pressed to finance new projects privately. One such operation was Mel’s decade-old Brooksfilms Ltd.

In late 1989, Brooks was persuaded to undertake a public offering to raise $13 to $16 million for upcoming movie/TV projects at Brooksfilms. (Unfortunately, Brooksfilms had earned only $323,000 in fiscal year 1989, and Wall Street analysts predicted that the company might register a loss in 1990.) Mel’s planned stock offering prompted
Time
magazine to report, “Comedy is hot today, but Brooks may be running out of gas. He has had no major hit since
Blazing Saddles
and
Young Frankenstein
in 1974, which reaped a total of more than $86 million in North America alone.” The publication also alerted, “Hollywood insiders say dealmakers have been weary of Brooks. ‘He’s not hot enough that he can make any film he wants [with a top studio],’ says the president of a major studio.”

In the past, Mel the comedian and raconteur who loved to entertain most any type of audience at any given moment had undertaken extensive tours to promote his latest movie and television vehicles. Now he took his dog-and-pony show on the road on behalf of Brooksfilms’ bid to go public. He visited Oppenheimer & Co. brokerage houses in both the United States and Europe. Looking quite distinguished in his conservative suit, Brooks typically opened Q&A sessions with a joke and a few Hollywood anecdotes. Then he got down to serious business, explaining that this offering was not a vanity situation. “I want to make movies. I’m an energetic guy.” This said, the showman had to field blunt queries from the brokers as to why Brooksfilms thought it could sell its stock at many times higher than its current market price. He was also asked to explain such Brooksfilms overheads as his approximately $4 million annual salary from the company. His response was, “Taxes! Why the hell should I produce revenues and pay taxes on them when I own the company? I took the money and paid it to Mel Brooks to avoid double taxation. By going public, I’m taking a 1,000 percent drop in salary. How can I ask the public to invest in a company that produces annual revenues of only $323,000. I mean, that’s ridiculous!” (Following Brooks’s stopover at Oppenheimer’s Seattle office, one broker at the session admitted, “My attitude changed over the course of the meeting, coming to believe that Brooks was interested not just in being entertaining, but in making a buck.”

However, by February 1990 the much-touted financing package had been shelved after Oppenheimer & Co. was only able to place about $6 million (or 40%) of the planned offering. The brokerage firm attributed the unsatisfactory response to “general market skittishness.”

The unsuccessful stock offering was another staggering blow to Mel, who was already suffering the ignominy of living down his trio of disappointing 1980s films and the quick rejection by home viewers of his
The Nutt House
series. It must have seemed to Brooks that all his many decades in show business counted for little with audiences, reviewers, and industry decision makers. With so many overwhelming career misfires in so many forums of show business, Mel somehow had to come to terms with the growing industry belief that he was a relic—having been passed by a new breed of comedic talents who had taken his vulgar brand of satiric comedy to new levels of crudeness in order to spark audience interest. His whole professional world seemed to be crashing before his eyes, with little to no potential of pulling out a new miracle from his hat to recharge his dwindling career and reputation.

It was little wonder that Mel Brooks titled his next picture
Life Stinks.

30
Back to Work

In a strange way, I don’t think I could make a serious movie. I’m too private to do it. What I really feel is nobody’s business. I need a comedy proscenium to disguise it in.… I like filmmakers who are storytellers, not psychologists. I just don’t like to interpret my work that much. For example, sometimes I think my pictures are ripe with blatant sexuality, only so I can hide things I really feel—affection, love and desire. Maybe by being really blatant about the sex ... I can disguise the more subtle feeling.

–Mel Brooks, 1987

Typically, when an individual reaches the age of 65, he or she retires from the work world or, at least, thinks about cutting back on the daily grind. However, Mel Brooks was far from the usual person. His zest for entertaining the world and his inner need to do both that and maintain his status as a comedy-world giant had neither dissipated with time nor shrunk from the adverse public reaction to his string of increasingly less profitable show business projects in the 1980s. He remained committed to perpetuating his career. Without professional activity, Brooks would be a man without real identity or purpose, and that was not an option for him.

•     •     •

One might have thought that for Brooks’s first new directorial/starring vehicle since 1987’s
Spaceballs
, he would have reverted to another of his wild and wacky genre satires—something to evoke his zany and highly successful screen comedies of past decades. However, in recent years, Brooks had been undertaking a reevaluation of his life and his work—a lot of it the result of his career’s floundering in the ever-changing world of show business.

Back in 1978, he said, “Why should I waste my good time making a straight dramatic film? Sydney Pollack can do that. The people who can’t make you laugh can do that.” However, by the mid-1980s Mel was saying, “I hide the serious Mel Brooks from the public and the critics. You can’t show them that—it’s confusing.… My comedies are probably the most serious thing that I have to offer the world. They say the deepest things about human behavior. A lot more than
The Elephant Man
or
My Favorite Year
or
Frances.
If you really get into
Young Frankenstein
or
Blazing Saddles
or
The Producers
, you will find the external varieties of human behavior are greater, with a lot more care and respect than most dramas.”

By the start of the 1990s, Brooks was ready to come out to the world as a purveyor of films about serious topics. (Moving into new arenas of filmmaking would also be a way to curtail the penchant of reviewers and moviegoers for comparing a new Mel Brooks picture with his comedic successes of the 1970s.) Thus, his new vehicle of choice was
Life Stinks.

Brooks claimed the spark for creating his new screen showcase occurred one day when he was driving on a southern California freeway and the water pump in his car broke. He exited near downtown Los Angeles to find a garage to handle the repairs. Mel remembered, “I looked around and said to the guy pumping gas, ‘Where is this, Calcutta?’ There were tramps everywhere. Beggars, homeless, what have you. Mendicants. It was shocking.” This set Brooks to cogitating about the social inequities surrounding him. This, in turn, led him to thinking he would like to explore the conflicting and contrasting strata of society, just as filmmaker Frank Capra had done in his classic 1930s and 1940s feature films (such as Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town
and
Meet John Doe
). Later, Brooks happened to attend a screening of Preston Sturges’s 1941
Sullivan’s Travels
, a classic comedy that explored the very social issues that were percolating in Mel’s mind. Thus inspired, Brooks began to map out a comedy (to be filmed in black and white) that would address just such concerns. However, eventually, he realized that the script was “heavy, much too heavy, preachy.” He decided he needed fresh input, and linked up with Rudy DeLuca, a veteran writer of several past Brooks vehicles, along with the much younger Steve Haberman, a University of California graduate who had worked in production capacities on such films as 1987’s
Return to Horror High.
The three men “funnied up” the screenplay and agreed it should be made in color.

By early June 1990, the project (initially titled
Life Sucks
but changed to the less pessimistic and less idiomatic
Life Stinks
during preproduction) was under way. Mel cast himself as Goddard “Pepto” Bolt, the crass Los Angeles real estate tycoon who has always been too busy making a fortune to appreciate life. Lesley Ann Warren took on the role of Molly, the eccentric, feisty bag lady who helps Bolt survive on the city’s mean streets. Jeffrey Tambor appeared as Bolt’s unconscionable business rival. Mel’s old friend Howard Morris was signed as Sailor, one of the Skid Row denizens whom Bolt befriends.

The film was made for Alan Ladd Jr.’s regime at MGM. By the time the feature was in postproduction, there was a serious question as to whether the studio (recoiling from yet another painful corporate ownership changeover) might soon go out of business. It left in question the fate of such current studio productions as
Thelma dr Louise
and
Life Stinks.
Finally, after months of speculation about whether Brooks would have to find another distributor, MGM released the PG-13-rated feature in mid-July 1991. In an era when most mainstream features received saturation bookings in over 2,000 theaters,
Life Stinks
debuted on only 865 screens. It was a strong indicator that the studio’s powers had already concluded that the picture would have limited success in the marketplace.

Reviewers found occasional moments of Brooksian delirium in
Life Stinks
, such as the extended slapping scene between the “hero” and a delusional bum (played smartly by Rudy DeLuca) or the dance interlude (to Cole Porter’s “Easy to Love”) between Brooks and Warren. However, many agreed with Jack Matthews (of the
Los Angeles Times
), who asked rhetorically, “Is there anyone out there in Ronald Reagan’s mortgaged America who wants to spend two laugh-filled hours on Los Angeles’ Skid Row?” (Matthews did acknowledge of the new release, “It is a remarkably effective blend of slapstick and pathos, a story about a morally stunted industrialist forced to live among the homeless and to learn from them. Combining laughter and pain is never easy, but Brooks—fighting his own bad instincts, as well as the gag-huckster image he now calls ‘the bane of my existence’—managed to inhabit this world without a note of condescension.”)

Hal Hinton (of the
Washington Post
) was far less charitable toward Brooks’s modest new showcase: “Once upon a time he was hilarious. And can still be, in interview, which is his true art form. But for some time now, his movies have not even cruised near the neighborhood of funny. And this one is the bottom of the barrel.”

In contrast, Roger Ebert (of the
Chicago Sun-Times
) championed Mel’s latest picture as “warm and poignant.” He judged, “Brooks, as usual, is his own best asset. As an actor, he brings a certain heedless courage to his roles. His characters never seem to pause for thought; they’re cocky, headstrong, confident. They charge ahead into the business at hand. There is a certain tension in
Life Stinks
between the bull-headed optimism of the Brooks character, and the hopeless reality of the streets, and that’s what the movie is about.”

However, despite such boosts from Ebert and a few other critics, after a few weeks in domestic distribution,
Life Stinks
disappeared from view. Made at an estimated cost of $13 million, it only grossed $4.1 million in the United States and Canada. It fared better abroad but not sufficiently well to recoup its costs.

Brooks was crushed anew by the failure of his pet project and had a hard time coming to grips with its unfavorable reception. In 1993, two years after the fiasco, a still smarting Mel told Larry King on the latter’s cable TV talk show, “I tried to do a story of what was happening in America and blend it with insane physical comedy, and it worked—it worked in Europe. It didn’t work here. I mean, I think I was too close.” A decade later, the filmmaker was still proclaiming the injustice of the picture’s failure. “The best movie I made in a long time was a movie called
Life Stinks.
I was crucified. ‘Don’t annoy us, please.’ It was that ‘go away’ phenomenon, so
Life Stinks
quickly went away. It’ll be discovered, I’m probably dead 100 years, they’ll say [it’s] the best movie this little Jew ever made.”