Even though you have a cold, you look great. Well, I was always a good-looking guy. So is this going to be about the show or a Mel Brooks thing?
Both. There’s no show without Mel Brooks and there is no Mel Brooks without the show. OK, I want you to lead with that.
What’s it like being back on Broadway for a second time, especially when the first time was such a phenomenon? This may really be the fifth time. I started on Broadway way back in 1952 with Leonard Sillman’s “New Faces,” starring Paul Lynde, Carol Lawrence and Eartha Kitt. I wrote one of the sketches. It was a great show—and a hit. Then I worked on another show with Eartha Kitt that wasn’t successful, and I did a show called “Nowhere to Go But Up” that was good but didn’t run very long, either. The first real smash hit I had on Broadway was “The Producers,” and I didn’t expect it.
Really? I was just adapting my little cult movie—I didn’t know how much resonance it had.
Not even after Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick were cast? No, I was suspect as a Broadway songwriter. When David Geffen was originally going to produce “The Producers”—though in the end he was too busy—he wanted Jerry Herman to do the score. Jerry did “Mame” and “Hello, Dolly!"—you can’t do much better, so I really couldn’t blame Geffen. I brokenheartedly met with Jerry saying, “Here’s my chance to write a Broadway score and I’m never going to do it.” Jerry got on the phone immediately and called Geffen and said, “Mel is a great songwriter, he’s got a song in every one of his movies”—and he convinced Geffen to let me write.
Are you worried now about following such a big hit as “The Producers”? No, I was just so happy and grateful to the fates, the gods. Even if I never have another one, it will always bring in $100 a week.
Ha! But do you feel that the critics are sharpening their knives right now? I do. I could write some of those reviews. It’s the nature of the business. You know, when I made movies, I learned all about critics. The first movie I wrote and directed was “The Producers,” with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. The New York Times said it was black college humor and the leading man is too fat. The next New York Times review was a review of “The Twelve Chairs,” and the Times said, “What happened to the genius that gave us ‘The Producers’?” By then I’d won an Academy Award for the “Producers” screenplay. I always got a good review in the Times—one picture later. So I’m pretty sure something like that might happen with this. I think in a couple of years, they’ll probably say it’s pretty good.
The show has been in previews for weeks. Do people recognize you at the theater? All the time—too much. I get people that say, “Don’t you remember me?” I look and I say, “Where do I actually know you from?” “I was in your class in the second grade at P.S. 19.” I say, “Well, you were much shorter then.” Everybody knows a famous person, but it’s hard for the famous person to know everybody.
How was adapting “Young Frankenstein” to the Broadway stage? Was it different from “The Producers”? Not really—it had an existing story. The story of “Young Frankenstein” started with Mary Shelley, and then in 1931, James Whale made a movie for Universal called “Frankenstein.” When I made my movie, I tried to stay with the look and feel and texture of the black-and-white James Whale movie.
Yeah, it terrified me and stayed with me. I think I made a movie comedy of it, in a strange way, to exorcise it from my soul so I wouldn’t worry about Frankenstein climbing up the fire escape and coming into my bedroom. We lived in Brooklyn, and my mother used to say, “It’s a big tenement. Why would he choose our apartment? We’re on the top floor, he doesn’t have to climb—he can get somebody on the first floor.”
Tell us a little about growing up. My father died when I was only 2?. I had three older brothers—my brother Irving was only 12, Lenny was 8 and Bernie was 6. There was no father, no income. Aunt Sadie threw some money into the house to keep us going, and my grandmother next door cooked and cleaned and helped out. But my mother raised four boys.
Did she work? She worked at home—she never went out. My Aunt Sadie was a floor lady at a factory and she would bring home piecework. One time she brought rhinestones for my mother to set into little stars that would go on beaded gowns. I woke up—it must have been 2 in the morning—and I said, “We’re rich! Look at all these diamonds!”
What musicals did you love as a kid? The first one I ever saw I fell in love with: “Anything Goes” by Cole Porter, with one great song after another—“You’re the Top,” “All Through the Night.” I was 10 and my Uncle Joe, who was a cabdriver, took me. He used to trade free rides to doormen, so a doorman got him tickets. It starred William Gaxton and Ethel Merman. I sat in the last seat in the last row of the balcony and she was still too loud—and there were no microphones back then.
So it was Merman’s siren song that set your future career? I got into the theater because I saw people in tuxedos. I was bowled over—I was a little kid. People went to the theater in the ’30s and early ’40s in evening clothes, black tie. In the ’50s they came in suits and now they come in lederhosen and backpacks. But I loved that the theater was so swanky, like it’s a champagne night. Most of the people in my neighborhood got jobs lifting things, putting things on trucks, sometimes driving the trucks. Half the people in my tenement ended up pushing clothes racks around all their lives. So I really feel blessed and privileged. The heaviest thing I carry around is a pencil. I still don’t use a computer. I write everything out in longhand. If I see something printed, it’s already sacrosanct. You can’t touch it. But with a pencil with an eraser, you can reread it and erase it.
When you were writing this show, did you try to involve Gene Wilder? No, he doesn’t write musical comedies.
But he co-wrote the movie “Young Frankenstein,” as well as starring in the film. Yes, he actually found the screenplay. He was just taking the garbage out one morning and he found it on the ground—it was the script; it said YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, and he brought it to me. Actually, he gave birth to the idea of Freddy Frankenstein being the grandson of Dr. Victor Frankenstein. He figured it out. We were making “Blazing Saddles” together when he told me. I said I’ve always loved those monster movies, and he had a nice little outline and some very good jokes. And he had a great idea that I kept on fighting him on. He wanted the doctor to show how complicated this creature was by having the monster sing and dance to Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” I said, “Gene, that’s just a joke”—I mean, any reality would be torn to pieces. He said, “Let’s try it.” I said, “No, it can’t be in the movie”—and it’s in the movie because I kept thinking about it and laughing and I thought, “What the hell, let’s tear it up.” He was right.
How do you know when something is funny? Everybody has theories about comedy. Basically, most comedy writers will tell you that comedy is surprise, it catches you off guard, that’s why it’s hysterical. They’re not wrong, but that’s not the whole story. That’s why the movie “Young Frankenstein” is a great reference. Some of the biggest laughs are recognition and anticipation, and when those things are delivered you’re in comedy heaven.
Is it true that when you collaborated with writers on TV—or was it with Carl Reiner?—that a joke wouldn’t stay in a show unless the stenographer rolled over laughing? You know, Carl and I didn’t write “The 2000 Year Old Man.” Carl would ask me absurd questions: “Sir, it’s hard to believe you’re 2,000; do you have any proof?” I would say, “My birth certificate. It’s in the Land of Oz, it’s a big stone, I can’t carry it around with me, it’s a boulder.” The joy of that was that most of it was ad-lib. I never knew what he was going to ask me. In this musical, if Tom [Meehan, Brooks’s co-writer] and I didn’t break up, it’s not in the show. If we fall about, then we keep it. Most of the jokes are good because we’re tough to break up, and we laughed a lot, so it must be a good show.
Do you still hang out with Carl Reiner? Yeah. When I worked at Fox, Alan Ladd Jr. was the studio chief, and all you had to do was write down an idea on a napkin and write a price under it that you thought you could make it for and shove it under his door, and the next thing you’d get a call and he’d say, “Make it,” and that was the end of it. So I still meet with Alan Ladd Jr.—“Laddie” we call him—Paul Mazursky, who was on the third floor at Fox, and the producer Mike Gruskoff. We meet for lunch out in L.A.—I won’t tell you where because I don’t want to be bugged. It’s all the old-timers, Jay Kantor—who was Marilyn, Marlon’s and Grace Kelly’s agent—and the legendary agent Freddie Fields. We try to meet every Friday, tell each other bad jokes, news of the rialto. It’s a great treat.
Are they coming in to see the show? They’re all coming opening night.
Is Wilder coming? That’s a secret. Gene is very circumspect and doesn’t want anybody aware of anything. Gene was already here; he saw a Saturday matinee. It must have been bittersweet for him because it’s his baby, but he laughed. I didn’t want to sit with him because I didn’t want to embarrass him, but I had four spies around him, and he laughed his head off and he cried a few times.
There are only 35 or 40 $450 tickets at the most, and there’s 1,830 tickets sold at the normal price. The $450 ticket, according to my producer, was to head off the scalpers. It all goes back to the investors. Like I said in “The Producers,” never put your own money into the show because you never know.
So you’ve got no money in “Frankenstein”? No, not a penny.
What about the line you have at the end of the show, inviting the audience to come back for the musical of “Blazing Saddles”? It’s just a joke.
But you love doing Broadway shows. The great, great, great thing about Broadway is that you get what you got into show business for—the immediate payoff. Make a movie, you gotta wait 18 months for your first laugh. When I wrote for “Your Show of Shows,” we got instant laughs because it was live, and then it was all taped and they added laughter. This is the only place your heart takes wing. This is why I got into this, for this love and appreciation. There’s nothing like a live show. You can’t get goose bumps watching a movie, but you can always get goose bumps at musical theater.
