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The Leonard Lopate Show Transcript Aug 25 2004

From Brooks to Brooklyn
hosted by Leonard Lopate
Recently transcribed by the Brookslyn webmaster!
Original audio available at WNYC

The one and only Mel Brooks discusses the play Squeeze Box (produced by his wife Anne Bancroft), and life since The Producers”. We’ll talk to Utah State archaeologist Kevin Jones and David Hurst Thomas, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, about the significance of the Fremont ruins at Range Creek in Utah. Kept under wraps on land owned by a 74-year-old cowboy, the ruins—which researchers are saying are some of the most important archeological remains in the country—were recently sold to the federal government. Then editor and contributor Tim McLoughlin and contributors Kenji Jasper and Ellen Miller join us to discuss the short story collection Brooklyn Noir. Finally, sports writer Alan Schwarz offers insight on the allure of baseball statistics in his new book The Numbers Game.

Leonard: I'm Leonard Lopate and this is WNYC 93.9 AMA20 we're online at wnyc.org. Let's try a little free association. If I say the Producers, your answer would be Mel Brooks right? Well how about husband of the producer? Well 2 years ago Mel Brooks and his wife the acclaimed actress Anne Bancroft happened to pop into a one woman show in a Los Angeles theatre and they liked it so much they bank rolled it and brought its writer and performer Anne Randolph to New York. And Anne Bancroft has assumed the roll of the shows producer. It's called Squeezebox and it's being presented at the Acorn Theatre at 410 West 42nd St. With me now is the one and only Mel Brooks here to tell us more about Squeezebox and it's star Anne Randolph to talk about his talented wife's debut as a producer and also to give us an update of what he's been doing. Mel Brooks, I'm very pleased to welcome you to the show.

Mel: Leonard Lopate, it's almost a pleasure to be here.

Leonard: So what exactly is your role on Squeezebox?

Mel: Well you know I'm, I'm, well you know,when they serve hor'derves at a bharmitzvah and you know, a guy comes in and says and says uh, he says I'm an uncle, I'm an uncle on the bride's side ya know meaning give me one of those little frankfurters ya know.

Leonard: You're the producers husband.

Mel: I am the Producers husband, husband of the producer. It was about two and half years ago that we went to the Cort theatre on La Cienega Blvd in the city of Los Angeles and there was about 60-70 people paying something like, I don't know, between 15 and 20 dollars a piece, not very much, to see this unknown person who claimed, and we checked on it, it's all true that for the last 6 years she has been working, her name is Ann Randolph, she'd been working as a care giver and a counseler to homeless women at a homeless women's shelter in Santa Monica. So she stored her experiences and some of them... are border on the tragic and yet are some what hilarious, and so I mean it's a wild, ya know.. What were you going to say?

Leonard: Well, I was thinking about it being quite funny but not in the way that you're funny necessarily. And I wonder if somebody who writes comedy and understands how to make people laugh appreciates when somebody else can do it and does it in a different way.

Mel: Yeah well it... ya know it's strange, uh, comedy comes from all sorts of directions. And uh... also what's funny to one person may not necessarily be funny to another. And uh... I got so many wonderful letters in my life from making people laugh, ya know, on their death bed or whatever.

Leonard: Generally that's the way they laugh when they're watching your film.

Mel: Yeah right, right, thank you Leonard, you'll pay for that. But anyway... and then I get a lot of letters that say "No, bad taste. No, don't say that. You used the N word, you used the J word." Ya know, all these bad words. I never say bad... I just use J and N, that's as far as I go.

Leonard: Well in this case we have another sensitive subject. It's always touchy when mentally ill people becomes the subject of comedy. So this is something that you must have appreciated because you have, as you said, pushed the envelope in matters of taste and what can be considered funny and what can't.

Mel: Well, if your heart is in the right place and your mind is in the right place... if you're bright and you have a good heart then you can say all kinds of things about black people... if you love that Sheriff and you're rooting for him to succeed in Blazing Saddles... and uh, even when the townsfolk use, use uh, terrible language in the movie, they have to so that the sheriff can succeed.

Leonard: But there are other cases of some people were upset that you were using nazis as a source of comedy in both the Producers and in the remake of to be or not to be and many... some people anyway were upset by life stinks in which you played a greedy developer who had just spent a month living with homeless people.

Mel: Yes, that's why I was so attracted to Randolph, Randolphs play. Ya know, it's brilliantly written. I mean she weaves together these desparate characters. She plays them all, she plays dogooders, she plays paranoid schitzofrenics, she plays, she play all, all friends and family of these poor retched people. I mean she's an amazing artist really.

Leonard: And with very little to tell us which characters it is, we know right away. Sometimes she sticks on a headband.

Mel: Right, a little head band... or she takes a little, I don't know, elastic thing and does her hair in a different manner. That's when she does Irene, that poor woman from the Ozarks whose husband is a minister, obviously cheating on her, and she goes berzerk. That's a great story. And my wife and I watching this, said this is about 21/2 years ago. We came out of the theatre. There was no backstage there so we had to wait for her to come out and then we kissed her and hugged her and told her how moved and how we laughed and at how great it was. And I said immediately, "you know there's a movie here. It's very much like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, only it's more heart felt," and it's... I guess, even less commercial and more real, ya know.

Leonard: and you're going to make a film aren't you?

Mel: My company Brooksfilms, look we made crazy... look, everybody thinks... I don't put my name Mel Brooks on a lot of stuff. Like we've done, we've done 84 charing cross road, a beautiful Helene Hanff story.

Leonard: You did the Elephant Man.

Mel: We did the Elephant Man. We did the Fly, ya know with Jeff Goldblum, that version. We've done a lot of quasi-serious and sometimes flat out serious movies. But as Brooksfilms, not as Mel Brooks, ya know, comedy. So this is another in our line of, our line of upmarket serious films. I think that Squeezebox is going to make a great, really a great movie.

Leonard: Of course it's going to be quite different. I suspect you're not going to make it into a one woman show. You'll open it up, bring in different actors to play the different parts.

Mel: As a matter of fact I hope that Anne Bancroft will play Brandy, that crazy prostitute that you saw, ya know, her portray.

Leonard: We haven't been seeing her as much as we like, she's one of the greatest actresses alive today. Instead she's producing something.

Mel: She's producing, she's writing and uh, you'll be seeing her soon, she's uh, I can't talk about it. But she'll be coming out in something very soon.

Leonard: Well it's very obvious about your own work that you know something about producing. I hope you didn't give her some advice.

Mel: I had to, ya know, when you...

Leonard: The Producers, she didn't oversubscribe to this thing?

Mel: No no no I didn't give her the Bialystock & Bloom advice. No I didn't give her that adivce, no I went the straight way. And ah, we think that Ann Randolph should play a role, maybe Julie, the dogooder.

Leonard: Not herself?

Mel: No I think, I think herself has to be a slightly, younger, a slightly younger person, the person she was 8 years ago when she started working at the women's shelter. I mean it's gotta take that time reality.

Leonard: Hasn't your family been rather busy lately? Uh, we've been talking about your wife making her debut as a Producer. Your son max just published a box last year, didn't he?

Mel: Max wrote a book, he didn't publish it. Random House published the book.

Leonard: You've been catching me on my bad English. You are a writer first.

Mel: No, no, but my syntax is ya know questionable. Max Brooks uh, has always been a weird kid. He's our only child. He's a terrific kid, and we have no complaints. He's always... if we had a pool he would put cheese boxes together and make a spanish armada and no body could swim in the pool. If he uh, if he got into any kind of electricity we were without lights for three days, three nights. Ya know, thank god we had a freezer to keep our food. Max is a crazy kid, now he's always been fascinated, ever since he was three years old, this is true, with zombies. He's adored zombies, he loves zombies, he's been terrified of zombies. So he's been writing this book about zombies for the last two or three years. I said, "why are you writing this?" And he said, "because, Dad I know there are no zombies, therefore I'm writing a book about something that can't get back at me. That I know, this I can conquer because there are no zombies." So he wrote a book, a manual, like a British Army military manual and it's called the Zombie Survival Guide... giving you chapter a verse about who zombies are, why zombies are, how dangerous they are, what they can do to you, how to avoid them, where to hide. Cut off the staircase, they can't climb. Go out on a boat, they can't swim. He'll tell you, he will tell you just what to do. Now I said "Max do you expect this book to sell?" He said, "No, I'm just writing it because I've gotta get it out of me." A division of Random House, called Crown publishing, published it last year. It has sold, I'm not making this up, it's in it's 7th printing ,it's sold over 60,000 copies because there are nerds that are living in their mother's basement who wait for these books. They wait to know how to grapple with Zombies. So Max Brooks is going to get richer than me writing this mashugina Zombie Book.

Leonard: Well where does he go from there, obviously he's not going to go... you started as a stand up comic didn't you?

Mel: Yeah, I started in the Borscht, in The Borscht Belt.

Leonard: Do you see any similarity to what Ann Randolph is doing in a one woman show and what you did?

Mel: Yes, absolutely. By the way Max Brooks... there is a guy called James Stern, James D. Stern, and Jim Stern is one of the producers of, by the way of the Producers on Broadway, and as a lark he was visting with me, we were talking about some other things and he picked up this book and without my knowing about it he called Max Brooks and his agents or whatever. There's going to be a movie next year, coming out I think in March or April. It's going to be called the Zombie Survival Guide directed by Max Brooks. Simple premise.

Leonard: Wow.

Mel: Guy writes a book, because you know the zombies can't get after him. And [the] FBI grabs him and says "What do you know about this?" He says, "Nothing I made it up, it's"... "Oh no, watch this." They watch a video and there are zombies. So I mean...

Leonard: You have to be proud because you, you're not the one producing this. No accusations of nepotism. This is something he did on his own.

Mel: Not at all. Not at all, he wouldn't give it to me, because this thing is going to make many millions. And I wish I was in on it.

Leonard: He doesn't want you to take a piece of his, all these years you've supported this kid and now he doesn't want to give anything back.

Mel: Oh that's okay, as long as your children don't ask for more, you're a very happy daddy.

Leonard: My guest is Mel Brooks, his wife Anne Bancroft is the producer of Squeezebox, a new play written and performed by Ann Randolph directed by Alan Bailey and now being presented at Theatre Row's Acorn Theatre on West 42nd St off 9th Ave. We will continue our conversation after we take a little break here on WNYC, stay with us.

Leonard: I'm Leonard Lopate and this is WNYC 93.9 AMA20 we're online at wnyc.org. My guest is Mel Brooks, we're talking about all sorts of things, who knows where our conversation with Mel Brooks, may go. But ostensibly we're talking about Squeezebox, a new play that's been written and also performed by Anne Randolf. It's being performed at the Acorn theatre on West 42nd St off of 9th Ave and it's producer is Mr. Brooks' wonderful wife Anne Bancroft.

Mel: I urge you to see it, don't miss it because it will be packed. And, and if you want to get tickets you can push little old ladies out of the way and get those tickets. God will forgive you, this is such a good show.

Leonard: Is that the way you learned to do things while you were growing up in Williamburg. We both went to Eastern District High School. We went to the same elementary school and the same junior high school.

Mel: We went to public school 19, you told me, and junior high school 15.

Leonard: Francis F, Francis Scott Key Junior High School 15.

Mel: Right, Francis Scott Key Junior High School 15.

Leonard: I barely survived.

Mel: And uh, you know Williamsburg, I want to tell you a cute little story. I'm doing my homework and I'm having a lot of trouble and my brother Irving who went to Brooklyn college comes home at midnight. Hero. No father, my father died when I was two. Mother, Kitty, Kate Kaminsky, four boys. Kaminsky real name. Uh, her maiden name Brookman, hence Brooks. All my brothers are sleeping Irving comes home from Brooklyn college after uh, having worked 8 hours at Rosenthal & Slot[?], knitting mill on seventh. Providing for us, a great hero. and I say Irv, and he says well you look I'm shattered, I can't do this, I'm supposed to memorize at least ya know half the signers of the declaration of independence there's about 59, i can't do it. So he said "maybe I can help you out." He said "where do you play stick ball?" "Marcy Ave," "Well, there's a signer." I said "oh, Marcy Ave, Marcy?" He said "what about, uhm, where's your friend Merch [?] live?" "Rodney, Rodney St." He said "there's a signer." He said "well where do we live?" "Hooper Street" "Hooper, well, there's a signer." He said "and what's the street over, one over from us?" "Hughes" "Well, there's a signer." I said "Irving, what are you telling me?" "I'm telling you we live in a community of Brooklyn called Williamsburg."

Leonard: And there was Wythe and there was Kent [note: I don't think Kent was a signer of the declaration of independence]. But there wasn't South 5th and there wasn't Broadway.

Mel: There was no Broadway and no South streets. But almost every street in williamsburg was named after a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Once he told me... I play on those guys, I walk on those guys. I got it! And I aced that test, I got a, I got a hundred in history ya know. And he saved me from summer school.

Leonard: I don't know how to follow that story up.

Mel: Well you're a williamsburg guy, so you remember well.

Leonard: I do remember well.

Mel: Wythe & Rutledge. I mean, ya know, they're all there.

Leonard: Ross.

Mel: Ross, right.

Leonard: But not Havemayer and not Robling, they were involved in other things.

Mel: Robling I think we saluted because he gave us the bridge, right?

Leonard: Yes. Uh, thinking about Ann Randolph I get the feeling you like to discover new talent. I think about Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor and although they had been around before you, you really moved them to another level. I like discovering people. Um, when I was going to do Elephant Man, I had seen Eraserhead, a weird little Off, off-Broadway movie done by David Lynch. Paramount thought I was crazy. "No this is the guy to direct it. He understands black and white. He understands symbolism. He understands the human soul. He's a very, very gifted man and David Lynch is going to direct Elephant Man." "Besides," I said, "we can get him for a dime, he's never done a movie." Anyway, I gave him his break, ya know, and he was incredible, ya know. When we did uh... I try to give new people, when they're really talented, when I see a brand new talent I try to show that talent to the world. I'm not alone, listen to this. This is the New York Sun: In Ann Randolph's sneaky one woman show Squeezebox, choices that shouldn't work some how do. Deeply unfunny subjects like women's shelters and paranoid schizofrenics prove hilarious. Personal disclosures that should seem trite suddenly take on generous proportions and she goes on and on and finally says such warmth and frankness are in short supply in the theatre. So go, and bask while you can. Her piece has been optioned for films rights, that's me folks, and this off Broadway run may catapult her into bigger and better places so go now, get a bargain. If you want to see her after she is a star, that's as Brandy would say "will cost extra."

Leonard: Brandy is one of the characters she plays, one of the many characters she plays.

Mel: I think she, she really borders on, on big time talenet. Ya know?

Leonard: She done some stuff before right? Hasn't she done some television?

Mel: Yeah, she was with the Groundlings. But she was so different. She had a chance to go onto Saturday Night Live and said "not for me, too mainstream." I said, "Mainstream? Saturday Night Live is certainly not..." she said "yes, it's too commerical, it's too mainstream, it's not what I want to do."

Leonard: Can you imagine Squeezebox without her because uh there is a script. Any actress can do it, and yet there is something important about the audience knowing that the person whose saying these lines is actually talking about some version of her own life.

Mel: Absolutely, absolutely, I mean, um that's what Anne Bancroft, Mrs Brooks, saw. And we're... and the two Anns, even as we speak, Leonard, they are writing the screen play of Squeezebox, which uh, you know, should, won't be very expensive and should get done. And like I said, Anne might be playing Brandy, my Anne. And the original Ann might play that Julie, the do-gooder from Christ Church.

Leonard: She's a born again Christian who tries to impose her beliefs on these very troubled homeless women, it's a great comic effect.

Mel: Yeah, a great comic effect.

Leonard: The great productions on Broadway like Hairspray, The Producers, the Lion King attract out-of-towners. Do you think this will have appeal beyond New York natives?

Mel: Absolutely, I htink it'll work more for out of towners than anyone else because there is something grassroots and very simply and very earthy, and very every person in her. She starts with she and her mother just crossing a creek somewhere in Wisconsin going to a poor old fat lady's house. And immediately everybody's [caughten] on to the humanity that is so, it's drenched in human endeavor.

Leonard: Have you always been interested in theatre? Because your career really takes off with televsion, Sid Caesar and all that.

Mel: No, I left... well I started... how did I start? I started in the Borsch Belt, ya know.

Leonard: Well do you think of that as theatre?

Mel: Of course. I mean I was doing what Ann Randolph was. I was doing like... Do you know, in the producers? Did you see it?

Leonard: Of course, I've seen the film and the show with 2 different casts in the show.

Mel: In the show, uh, I'm using Nathan, Nathan Lane, somewhere in the end does an incredible piece called Betrayed in which he remembers what happened. How did I get here? Ya know, how did I get [into] this prison. He came here, you can make more money with a flop than with a hit, then we saw this gay produc, we saw this gay director, and... Well, I did that, when I was in in ya know, the King David Hotel and the Morningside and all these [cock a lines] and these whacky little joints. I would plant a little old lady, she had to be old and she had to take her time. It's like she started from her bungalow to the playhouse and she's just gotten to the play house now when the show is nearly over. And I'd have her come in and say "what happened?" And then I would do Betrayed. I'd say "well I opened with a..." ya know, I did a whole Danny Kaye reprise of what happened that night and thank god I remembered it so I could write it for uh, ya know, Max Bialystock.

Leonard: Only in the Broadway musical version. This has taken on now, two lives and now is about to take on a third one. The movie was your first big break, wasn't it?

Mel: Yes it was.

Leonard: In fact, did the studio take a real chance?

Mel: Well, they did.

Leonard: You, and then Zero Mostel? Who was still under a cloud because of...

Mel: Exactly.

Leonard: Because of McCarthyism.

Mel: Exactly, Joseph levine said "Can we use him?" I said "Joe, we must. We've gotta break this, ya know, this terrible oppression. Ya know, Zero is a genius, he should work."

Leonard: Noboby else could have played that in the film.

Mel: Noboby.

Leonard: Except maybe you.

Mel: Well it was written for Zero and then I found this crazy guy who was in... my wife did a show, a play that Jerry [Jerome] Robins directed, one of the few straight plays uh... Mother Courage, Mutter Courage [in German].

Leonard: Bertolt Brecht.

Mel: Bertolt Brecht, right. And Gene Wilder was a neophyte, a new actor, and uh and he kept coming off stage and kept saying to my wife and me "they're laughing at me, why are they laughing at me?" I said, "no matter what you do Gene, god has dubbed you, funny. So, you know, you can be as serious as you want to be, they're going to laugh at you." I said, "one day... I'm writing..." and I told him all about the Producers. "One day you're going to be Leo Bloom." He said "oh, please don't." Ya know, he didn't believe me. Finally, he made his way through Broadway and he replaced Alan Arkin in a Murray Schisgal play called Luv. And he was great. Sidney Glazer, is the Producers of the Producers, and I walked into his dressing room one day and we threw the script on his dressing room table and we said, "you're Leo Bloom." And he burst into tears, he just broke up and cried into a hank... into a towel for minutes, ya know, he couldn't believe it. Because I, I... I always knew Zero was Max Bialystock and I always new that somehwere there was Leo Bloom. That was Gene Wilder.

Leonard: And later didn't you help him by encouraging him to write? You collaborated on a script with him didn't you?

Mel: Yeah after we did Blazing Saddles... I did Blazing Saddles, he played the Waco Kid. And during the editing of that he said "ya know I got an idea," and he sprung Young Frankenstien on me. And I said "gee you know it's so weird, how can" I said, "well you know, Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, that worked, that was funny and kinda scary ya know." I said "well, let's give it a shot." So we hold up... it took us four months, morning, noon and night. We were very excited and we wrote Young Frankenstein.

Leonard: Well you're used to collaborating, you had worked with some of the most brilliant writers on the various Sid Caesar shows. Do you prefer that because you've done it both ways? the Producers is pretty much all yours, isn't it?

Mel: Leonard, good question, I don't know if I want to answer it, but it's a wonderful question. Uh, the truth, the truth...

Leonard: My mind is going wild now!

Mel: The answer is very simple, when it's a very private movie... like strangely enough, The Producers, there can be no collaborators. Or even like History of the World, where each section of history is my own personal interpretation, it's not up for grabs. But things like Blazing Saddles, that's a gang comedy and there are

Leonard: Well Richard Pryors worked on that one.

Mel: Yes, absolutely. And then there is just... very exquisite, elaborate things like Young Frankenstein, that you can, you can only work on with one other person. So it depends on what the subject matter is, how many people you work with, whether you work alone, whether you work with six people, whether you work with Gene Wilder.

Leonard: Well, then wou wrote the script and the songs for the musical version of the Producers.

Mel: Yes.

Leonard: And now...

Mel: Well, I wrote the script with Thomas Meehan, Tom Meehan.

Leonard: Did you need someone who knew stagecraft?

Mel: No, I needed company. It's hard to sit alone and write a... But what good company. A drunken Irishmen, always singing some tidbits that his mother sang to him as a baby, ya know, back in Kilarney. No actually...

Leonard: Now, I've met him, he's been on the show, I know that. If you knew him before he gave up drinking.

Mel: I did know him. Tom Meehan is a genius in his own write, I'm not kidding. He wrote for the New Yorker. And he wrote that Yma Dream. Abba Uma Iba Mia, ya know, the party. He wrote a thing about a party with strange first names, so Anne Bancroft did it on her first special. She said "Yma Sumac had a dream. And the dream is she threw a party. And she invited everybody with a great first name and said "no last names please, let's be intimate." So in walks uhm, Mia [Sowa] and Gia Scala. So Mia Farrow, Mia, Gia. And then Ulu Grosbard walks in with Abba Eban. So it's Ulu, Abba, Mia, Gia. I mean.. and it was just... the mathematics of it are just histerical. So there, no slouch, Tom Meehan. And then he wrote Annie on Broadway and I knew he, I said to him, "Tom I need you to write this with me, I don't know when people should stop talking and start singing," ya know. And he told me.

Leonard: What about the movie version? You're now doing a movie version?

Mel: Ya know that may be a sin in the Torah. There's something incestuous about making a movie, having it become a musical, and then metamorphize, metamorphose once again into a movie. So ya know, it's like something in the family that maybe you shouldn't do.

Leonard: Are you doing it alone?

Mel: No, I'm writing it with Tom. I'm writing with Tom, we wrote the show together, we're writing the movie together. I'll do all the songs like I did on Broadway. We've got some people, strangely enough, Matthew Broderick was doing a movie last year called Stepford Wives, and the star of it was Nicole Kidman. Chance conversation, Matthew says to Nicole "Hey you know they're looking for Ulla, you look like a good Ulla. You're tall, you're blonde and your delicious and you can sing and dance. And she said "are you kidding I mean I'd love..." and so she called Stro, Storma, Susan Storman, that briliant lady, that director. "Could we see the show together and talk about the possibility of my being Ulla?" Stroman said "sure," so they saw the show together, they had dinner, and she said "I want to play this part." Stroman said "well we can't, ya know, you're Nicole Kidman, you can't play that..." She said, "I want to play this part." So she's going to do it. She's signed. Wil Ferrell likes the Nazi, he likes the Neo Nazi playwright. He says I'm, nobody's heard my German accent. so Will Ferrell is in it.

Leonard: Can you imagine doing that on Broadway? You couldn't keep the show going for a week, there aren't enough people coming into the theatre to pay for that.

Mel: Right, even if you charged people 1000 dollars a seat you couldn't run with that cast.

Leonard: So when does this come out?

Mel: Well it's going to come out for Christmas, in limited, I'm sure in limited play and then it'll break some time in January, ya know, in 2006.

Leonard: And meanwhile we have Squeezebox, which your wife is working on right now, to make another film. Anne Bancroft is the producer of Squeezebox, which is a new play written and performed by Ann Randolph, directed by Alan Bailey. And it's currently playing at the Acorn Theatre on West 42nd St just off of 9th Ave. A wonderful little theatre.

Mel: Theatre Row, it's great. they have about five little theatres there.

Leonard: In the same little building.

Mel: In the same building. And it's a wonderful place to fall into. Ya know, you finish... it's like when you were a kid, and you went to see... you never left the movie house. I mean the they showed you three features anyway, a chapter and a short. Ya know, I mean it's great, you could just go from one theatre to another. Unfortunately, I think they charge you for each show.

Leonard: It's like going to the Marcie or the Commador.

Mel: The Marcie.

Leonard: Or The Astor.

Mel: Or The Republic.

Leonard: Or the Williamburg. Thank you so much Mel Brooks.

Mel: Or the new Broadway! Leonard Lopate, a pleasure.

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