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Mel On-line

The Mel Brooks Webring

New York Oct 6 1997

by Judith Stone
Originally published in New York Oct 6 1997

PEOPLE LAUGH JUST SAYING THE NAMES OF THEIR MOVIES: A FULL RECITATION
of their credits generates and endorphin rush. But the creation that's earned Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks the most slavish cult following is the 2000 Year Old Man, a character Brooks improvised in a mock interview with Reiner in 1950, when they both worked on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. At parties, then on records, Reiner's canny questioning elicited ad lib classics from the bimillennarian with the shtetl accent ("I'm gonna wash up," he told his girlfriend, Joan of Arc. "You save France.") TTYOM, as he self-abbreviates, hasn't been heard from on record since 1973. Now he's back The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000(to be released in October by Rhino) and a book by the same name (out next week from Cliff Street Books/HarperCollins). Even wiser (and still a wiseass) at 2,037, Brooks as sage takes on a newly discovered commandment ("Thou shalt not squint") and the Crime of the Century ("That those idiots gave Julie Andrews's part to Audrey Hepburn in the movie My Fair Lady - I'm upset to this day!"). Reiner the dogged interrogator and Brooks the antic ancient bear a crucial similarity to the haimish pair who riff with serence ease as they speak with New York's  Judith Stone in Brooks's office at the Culver Studios. After 49 years of friendship, Brooks and Reiner still clearly tickle each other. "You know what Carl does every once in a while?" says Brooks, 71, jolly and jaunty, as he once described TTYOM. "He sings a song called "Princess Papuli Has a Lot of Papaya." Reiner, 75, the veteran of Broadway musicals, oblingly croons, still a smootie, "Princess Papuli has plenty papayas, she like to give it away... She give you the fruit and hold on to the root."
    "I love it," Brooks says. "Who else would know about Princess Papuli and how many papayas she had?" Reiner shakes his head. "He gets a kick out fo the silliest little things."

New York Magazine: Take us back to the moment in 1950 when the 2000 year Old Man was born.

Carl Reiner: I had seen an eyewitness interview on a television show called We, the People:[In a Mad Russian accent] "Man was in Stalin's toilet, heard Stalin say he was going to blow up world on Thursday." It was absolutely impossible and inflammatory. And I turned to Mel at the office, and I said, "I understand you were actually at the scene of the Crucifixion."
Mel Brooks: I didn't expect the question.
Reiner: However, I knew I would get a funny answer because Mel Brooks had gotten up in the office many times without questions and just regaled us. He did a Jewish pirate who had trouble getting sailcloth at a good price that I'll never forget as long as I live. And his first answer was:"Ooooooooh, boy." Yes, he knew Christ; he was a thin lad, always wore sandals. Came into the store but never bought anything.
Brooks: Sot that's how it started. We did it at parties for our own amusement, many parties, and we enjoyed it tremendously.
Reiner: Parties would be built around it.
Brooks: Then Steve Allen said, "Why don't you make a record of it?" And we let the world in.
Reiner: And now we don't get invited to parties.
Brooks: We never thought it was marketable.
Reiner: We thought it might be considered a little anti-Semetic, using a Jewish accent.
Brooks: I was portraying my mother, my Uncle Joe, and doing a lot of Yiddishkeit cliches that only people who grew up in the Bronx and Brooklyn would know.
Reiner: We thought. We thought. But how about Cary Grant? He grew up in Staten Island. [They laugh at that idea.] I don't know where he grew up.
Brooks: Somewhere in Liverpool?
Renier: We had no idea that people like Cary Grant would get it. He'd pick u two dozen records a week and give them to his friends. He took the record to Buckingham Palace and he played it for the royal family. He told us they loved it.
Brooks: Everyone says that Cary Grant was cheap, but he was very generous as far as our records were concerned. He bought tons of them and sent them all over the world.
Reiner: No, he didn't. He was my neighbor at Universal, and he'd call and say, [in Grant's swank staccato] "Carl, I could use another dozen or two." And I'd send them.
Brooks: He didn't pay for them?
Reiner: He never paid for them. He'd say, "I could use a few more. If it's not too much trouble."

We know a lot about the 2000 Year Old Man, but not so much about the reporter.

Reiner: He's really the audience; he's asking the questions that anybody in the audience would ask of this man.
Brooks: Carl is doing something now that is self-effacing. No one in the audience would ask the kind of questions he asks. No one would pursue the 2000 Year Old Man -
Reiner: Well, I'm really a reporter at hear; I do that even with people who don't give me laughs.
Brooks: But it's a genius. Carl is sculpting the piece as it emerges. As I rave on about Jesus and Joan of Arc and all these people, he's making a little playlet out of it. Let me show you Carl's genius: On the new album he says, "I hear you're an avid reader," and I hear "avid" and think he means the great Roman writer Ovid. So because of that mistake, we got a lot of comedy. Then at the end, I tell Carl that Ovid was summarily dismissed from the royal court for writing about sex too graphically. I've come up with this headline: OVID OUSTED, AUGUSTUS DISGUSTED. And Carl says it sounds very much like a Variety headline, and he brings in the Michael Ovitz thing. It hadn't been on my mind at all. And then I came up with, "But my Ovid didn't get such a good departure package."

People are able to quote from your work verbatim years after hearing it. It sticks in people's heads like a catechism.

Reiner: That's the difference between reading a book and listening to comedy albums. Comedy albums you listen to more than once, and people can learn them. You wouldn't say those things if you saw them in a book.
Brooks: Don't knock the books;we have a book out, too.
Reiner: Well the book is the best thing, because then you can refer to it anytime you want. You just open it up. You don't need a machine to listen to it.
Brooks: Nice save.
Reiner: And what a present for Christmas to give to somebody!

What are you working on at this very moment, the two of you?

Mr. Brooks, there's a rumor that you're thinking about bringing The Producers to Broadway, retitled Springtime for Hitler.

The Nazi playwright? Get out of here.

Brooks: I'm telling you! We lived on 11th Street between Fifth and Sixth, and so did Dustin Hoffman. He came down the block one day and he yelled up, "Mel,Mel!" and I said, "You know, it's not a tenemant here;stop yelling from the street up to the window." He yells, "I'm auditioning for Mike Nichols, for The Graduate opposite Annine [Brooks's wife, Anne Bancroft]." So I said, "Audition all you want. They'll see you're a funny-looking little Jewish mutt, you'll never get it. I'm not worried, you're Liebken." He flew out to the coast and did a screen test, and he came back a week later and said, "I got it." So I had to get another Liebken. I got Kenny Mars, and he did a great job.
Reiner: Dustin might have had a whole different career.
Brooks: He might have been a comic.

Do you still feel a connection with New York?

Brooks: Oh, yes.
Reiner: Sure. I still talk New York. He doesn't have a New York sound anymore.
Brooks: He's 75 years hold and he still makes early New York pronunciatory errors. For instance -
Reiner: "Central Park"
Brooks: Not "Central Park" - "Central Park." He also says "Mercedes." Not "Mercedes." He learned it in New York as "Mercedes."

But Mr. Reniner says "infamous." On the new record, he corrects the 2000 Year Old Man, who says "infamous."

Brooks: But I refuse to say the word "famous."
Renier: You know what's wonderful? It's got a Yiddishkeit to it. Famous is famiss is farmisht - all mixed up.
Brooks: There are some words in the English language, mostly detergents, that I think are Yiddish words. Like Draft.
Reiner: Epicenter is Yiddish word. And far-fetched. It's a game a lot of people play, finding words in English that are Jewish words.

I hear you were in Germany recently.

Reiner: He's a big hit in Germany.
Brooks: They like my stuff. There was Jewish film festival in Berlin, and the first movie was The Producers. I wasn't there for that, but I went back later to congratulate them and see a hotel in East Berlin that Billy Wilder has raved abuot called the Adlon. It was burned to the ground by a drunken Russian soldier after ithad survived World War II. Billy used to be gigolo and he danced there. I was in Paris, and instead of coming back here, I said, "It's an hour and ten minutes to Berlin, I'm going to get a pair of slippers for Billy Wilder" - because they had just reopened the hotel.
Reiner: Did you bring him the slippers?
Brooks: I did. I had lunch with him, and he was a little tearful when he saw them.

How was Germany?

Brooks: I like the Germans. I don't -
Reiner: You don't like the Narzis.
Brooks: These kids had nothing to do with what their fathers did. They like his movies. They loved Robin Hood, they loved Dracula - the kids are wonderful.

[The men are called from Brooks's office to the reception area of Brooksfilms for a photo shoot.]

Brooks: This is very important to us, because everyone's going to buy our book to find out what to do in the year 2000. We give you a lot of advice: how to dice vegetablees, who to pray to - very important advice. 

Where did the 2000 Year Old Man spend the New Year's Eve 999?

Brooks: It's a toss up between Eilat, which is on the Red Sea in Israel, and Vegas.
Reiner: That's where he was in 999?
Brooks: Oh. That's where he's going in 1999. Not where he was in 999. There was no Vegas then.
Reiner: Where were you when it turned 1000?
Brooks: When it turned 1000, I was -
Reiner: You lost your accent
Brooks: I'm not going to do the accent.[Then, in unreconstructed, full-frontal 2000 year Old Man-ese] It don't come out in print. Why the hell do I gotta do the accent for the print?
Reiner: You'll think better with your account.
Brooks: I think I was in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. Wait a minute. In the year 1000? Oh, no, the Waldorf Astoria came much later.
Reiner: Where were you on New Year's Eve 999?
Brooks: I think I was in a large cave, not a ballroom, in the land of Ur. There was a wonderful partyuntil the lions came in and then we all went out. We said, "It's your cave, we won't argue with you."
Reiner: Wait a minute. The idea of kissing your loved one at the stroke of midnight - did that exist then? When did that start?
Brooks: That started in 1122.
Reiner: Who started that?
Brooks: Bernie.
Reiner: Why?
Brooks: Because he loved to kiss.
Reiner: Who did he kiss?
Brooks: He kissed everybody, including many men. It's coming out now. Ellen DeGeneres is opening up the floodgates.

[The photographer interrupts and asks them to move closer together. They mug, they hug, the kiss]

Reiner: Let's do "surprise." Holy Shit![Their mouths are bagels of astonishment]
Brooks: How about "How dare you."
Brooks and Reiner:[In unison, bellowing] How dare you!
Brooks: Now what shall we do?
Reiner: Let's do like monkeys.[They pick imaginary ticks from each other.]
Brooks: How about plain, just looking into the lens. No jokes now - into the lens, two guys.

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