So Far, So...

Max, Melvin & Mel

Hi Hello & Welcome to this week’s look at the movies and movie people that matter to me.

I don’t think well of idolatry, mainly cos when has idolatry worked out particularly well for our species. Besides, anything or anyone thought perfect is of course imperfect by their very nature. So it is therefore that I have very few heroes, count ‘em on one hand. This week I’ve chosen to focus however on one of those few people who I come as close to idolising as possible, who is a real and genuine hero to me, a guy who I’ve never and no doubt will never meet but who has enriched my life hugely and who’s made me laugh coffee out my nostrils, who’s left me dazzled and in awe at his personality mind and talents and who as a result of all these I feel I not just know but love and respect. His name -

MEL BROOKS

Now of course his portfolio of Film work - let alone Stage and TV - is quite phenomenal, and so picking the customary two to throw the spotlight on is both crazy and daft, but, as that’s what I have to do with this column so it is I’ve chosen two pretty obvious but also pretty genius movies of his - YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974) and BLAZING SADDLES (1974).

So let’s go.

Melvin James Kaminsky was born on a kitchen table in his parents tenement apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn on June 28th, 1926.

He was the youngest of four boys - Irving, Lenny, and Bernie - born to Kate (née Brookman) and Max Kaminsky, both of solid Eastern European Jewish stock. Brooks’ father died of tuberculosis of the kidney aged just 34 and when Mel was only 2yrs old. Brooks never really got over losing his father so very young, and indeed once said “There's an outrage there. I may be angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility.”

Brooks was a small, sickly kid growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and like so many comics was bullied and teased mercilessly by neighbourhood kids and classmates from an early age. However, aged nine his Taxi driver Uncle - Joe - took young Melvin to see a Broadway production of ‘Anything Goes’ and as they left the Theatre Brooks told his uncle that he wouldn’t be going to work in the garment district like everyone else, he was going into show business. God bless you Uncle Joe.

At fourteen he got himself a job in a Borscht Belt hotel as a ‘pool-side tummler’ (entertainer) and the young Melvin was zany-crazy from the get-go. One day he stood at the edge of a diving board wearing a derby hat and a large alpaca overcoat with two suitcases full of rocks he announced to the poolside guests - "Business is terrible! I can't go on!" before jumping, fully clothed, into the pool. Aged fourteen he was taught how to play the drums by a Jewish friend also from Williamsburg - Buddy Rich - and started to earn money as a stick man as well as a schtick man. During his time as a drummer he got his first opportunity as a comedian when at the age of 16 he was asked to fill in for an ill MC, and soon after this decided to change his name from Melvin Kaminsky to Melvin Brooks (influenced by his mother's maiden name Brookman, and having been confused with trumpeter Max Kaminsky one too many times).

He was drafted into the Army in 1944, aged 18, and served in France and Belgium as well as seeing action in The Battle Of The Bulge before Corporal Brooks was honourably discharged in 1946.

Mel went back to the ‘Jewish Alps’ and continued entertaining the ageing guests there with his drumming and impersonation skills. But in 1950 he got the break that would change the rest of his life and career when the great Sid Caesar hired Brooks (along with Carl Reiner and Neil Simon among others) to write for his Your Show of Shows.

Caeser’s Hour followed, as did the iconic ‘2000 Year Old Man’ sketch (with Reiner), followed by his first Broadway musical as writer - ‘All American’, his first involvement with an Oscar-winning film - the short animation The Critic (1963) - and in ‘65 Brooks and Buck Henry created & wrote ‘Get Smart’ for the NBC network, winning no less than seven Emmy’s for the smash hit comedy. Our boy was hot, hot in TV, and nicely warm in Film and Theatre. He was movin’, he was groovin’.

In 1968 Brooks won his first Oscar (Best Screenplay - beating out Kubrick and Cassevettes) for The Producers, and having directed it as well was now on the Hollywood map. However, The Producers wasn’t all that at the box office, and his second movie - The Twelve Chairs (1970) didn’t exactly set the world alight either, so when his Agent set up a deal with Warner Bros in ‘72 it was an all too rare example of an Agent actually doing their job and doing it well. Richard Pryor, Andrew Bergman, Norman Steinberg & Alan Uger were all hired as part of the deal too. How so? They had a draft script, called Tex-X. Or as we know it -

BLAZING SADDLES

Tex-X’s title riffed on Malcolm X and originally had Alan Arkin in the directors chair and James Earl Jones down to play the Sheriff. That fell apart - as these things so often do in film - and when the Studio brass rejected Pryor playing the Sheriff claiming his history of drink & drugs made him uninsurable (bullshit of course), Brooks settled on Cleavon Little. Incredibly John Wayne was offered the role of the Waco Kid (mercifully turning it down as he thought the script “too blue”), then Gig Young accepted and departed (he collapsed from alcohol withdrawal syndrome after shooting his first scene) and so it was that Gene Wilder was flown in as a last minute replacement for Young. Sometimes the path to the right ingredients that go together to make a classic film make absolutely no fucking sense and are in reality are just a series of insanely fortunate accidents and disasters, so don’t ever let anyone tell you any successful film was accomplished via terribly clever design and all round cleverness, for that’s bullshit.

Johnny Carson turned down ‘Hedley Lamarr’ before - thankfully - Harvey Korman got the nod, and the rest of the Cast was filled out with unbelievable talent in the form of Slim Pickens, Madeline Kahn, Brooks himself, David Huddlestone, and Liam Dunn amongst many others.

The fucking bean counters fought the film all the way (of course). Use of the ‘N’ word, campfire farting, horse punching, bestiality gags, dumb-assed authority figures, KKK gags, Count Basie’s orchestra in the middle of the desert - they hated the whole fucking bally lot and at screenings for Studio Executives barely a titter was heard. (always a good sign say I) BLAZING SADDLES was almost never released can you believe. The head of distribution actually said “Let's dump it and take a loss”. Dear god the people in charge of Film then and now.

But god bless him, studio president John Calley insisted they give it a test run at a few cinemas in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago to see what gave. It became the studio's top moneymaker that summer, the second-highest US grossing film of 1974 and was nominated for three Oscars. Beancounters, what do these glorified accountants know about Film ffs.

Structurally BLAZING SADDLES is a mess, but really, who cares. Funny is funny is funny is funny. And BLAZING SADDLES is one of the greatest - if not the greatest Comedy movies of all time. It’s chaotic, it’s offensive, it’s ridiculous, bonkers, it’s puerile, it’s juvenile, silly, and it’s genius, inspired, enlightened, revolutionary, activist, profound and just plain fucking hilarious. I love it to the moon and back and I love Mel Brooks for being as obstinately insane as he needed to be in order to get the thing made at all. If you haven’t seen it, ok, but by the same token do sort yourself out and get with the programme because you’re missing out on soiling yourself with laughter.

I was in the middle of shooting the last few weeks of Blazing Saddles somewhere in the Antelope Valley, and Gene Wilder and I were having a cup of coffee and he said, I have this idea that there could be another Frankenstein. I said, "Not another! We've had the son of, the cousin of, the brother-in-law. We don't need another Frankenstein." His idea was very simple: What if the grandson of Dr. Frankenstein wanted nothing to do with the family whatsoever. He was ashamed of those wackos. I said, "That's funny.” - Mel Brooks

Almost immediately after production of Blazing Saddles wrapped, Wilder and Brooks began work on the script for YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.

“Little by little, every night, Gene and I met at his bungalow at the Bel Air Hotel. We ordered a pot of Earl Grey tea coupled with a container of cream and a small kettle of brown sugar cubes. To go with it we had a pack of British digestive biscuits. And step-by-step, ever so cautiously, we proceeded on a dark narrow twisting path to the eventual screenplay in which good sense and caution are thrown out the window and madness ensues.”

It was shot in the spring of 1974 with another crack cast having been assembled, including in addition to Wilder, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Kenneth Mars, and even Gene Hackman with a lovely cameo.

A huge Anglophile Wilder wrote ‘Igor’ specifically for Feldman, they used the original Kenneth Strickfaden lab equipment from the 1931 Frankenstein, Brooks fought and won the battle to shoot it in black & white, and Columbia were kicked into touch and replaced with 20th Century Fox over budgetary and creative concerns.

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN isn’t just funny, it’s aggressive, subversive, and makes us laugh even when we really should be offended. (Explaining this process, Brooks once brilliantly declared, “My movies rise below vulgarity.”)

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN is as funny as we expect a Mel Brooks comedy to be, but it’s more than that: it shows artistic growth and a more sure-handed control of the material by a director who, like the ‘pool-side tummler’ in the Catskills, once seemed willing to do literally anything for a laugh. It’s really confident, less breathless. And plain fucking hilarious of course.

The film was another hit straight on the back of Blazing Saddles, grossing $86.2 million in the U.S. on a $2.78 million budget, and garnered two more Oscar nominations. The beancounters at Columbia must’ve been kicking the crap out of themselves. Hope so.

I can’t not quickly touch on a few more facts about the great MEL BROOKS.

He’s one of only seventeen people in history able to place one of the most exclusive acronyms in entertainment next to their name - the EGOT, he’s the man behind such wonderful Films as Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), History Of The World, Part I (1981), The Fly (1986), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), Spaceballs (1987), and over a 70yr+ career in Film, Theatre and Television has won an Oscar, four Emmy’s, three Tony’s, three Grammy’s, two Olivier’s, a BAFTA, been nominated for six Golden Globes, and among many many other awards has received a Kennedy Center Honor, an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, a BFI Film Institute Fellowship, a National Medal of Arts, and a BAFTA Fellowship. He is a phenomenon.

He is also 96 and thankfully still with us bless him. He won’t be forever of course, and on that sad day I know I’ll do something very rare for me - shed tears, many genuine authentic tears. MEL BROOKS has and will always mean a huge amount to me. Not just because of the laughs, the entertainment, the growing appreciation of him & his work as I myself grew up, not just because he’s a fellow working class kid done good - real good - not just because he’s one of the greatest chat show guests of all time (see his Cary Grant anecdote below), not just because he’s a fellow drummer, not just because I loved what he and Anne Bancroft so clearly and beautifully had, not just because he loves his family and close friends with all his heart & loyalty, not just because he’s 5ft 4 and no pretty boy, not just because although he was a pushy ass-kicker he was also fun humble and self-deprecating, but because I like him, because I love and respect the guy, because I’d love to have been a buddy of his and a good friend to him.

Melvin James Kaminsky brings out deep-rooted, emotional feelings in me, akin to Family - like he’s a Dad or Brother I wished I’d had. Which is nuts of course. But there it is.

I’m not saying he’s perfect, no-one is of course. He’s had his moments, his bad days and bad behaviours, of that one can be sure. But MELVIN is LOVED, I mean truly LOVED, and by so so many. There’s no award that can top that.

Almost finally then, here’s a bit of chat show gold as MEL sells his wonderful Cary Grant anecdote for all it’s worth and as only he can -

But finally finally…

Dear MEL BROOKS -

THANK YOU, from the bottom of my heart.

Yours Most Sincerely

Michael Warburton