Print

Interviews

Articles

Books

Miscellaneous

Always...

Mel On-line

The Mel Brooks Webring

Playboy February 1975 (Part 3)

by Brad Darrach
Originally published in Playboy February 1975

Part 1|2|3|4

PLAYBOY: So much for you offscreen material. What did you write for the show?

BROOKS: Masterpieces. Best work I ever did. We did eight comedy items a week. Live. No taping. Big classy items.

PLAYBOY: Would you run through a skit?

BROOKS: I remember the first one I wrote for Sid. Jungle Boy. "Ladies and gentlemen, now for the news. Our roving correspondent has just discovered a jungle boy, raised by lions in Africa, walking the streets of New York City." Sid played this in a lionskin, right? "Sir, how do you survive in New York City?" "Survive?" "What do you eat?" "Pigeon." "Don't the pigeons object?" "Only for a minute." "What are you afraid of more than anything?" "Buick." "You're afraid of a Buick?" "Yes. Buick can win in death struggle. Must sneak up on parked Buick, punch grille hard. Buick die."

PLAYBOY: Who were the show's other stars?

BROOKS: Imogene Coca, brilliant lady. Carl Reiner, greatest straight man in the world. And Howie Morris! Howie had the best nose ever given to a Jew. No job. His own nose. A miracle! On the nose alone he could pass. Also a genius. Didn't know a word except in English but could speak any language - German gibberish, Italian gibberish, Russian gibberish. Amazing ear for accents. You'd think it was the real thing. But the best thing about Howie was that he was the only guy on the show who was shorter than me! Gave me this incredible feeling of power.

So one night, just after he came on the show, we were walking along MacDougal Alley in the Village, chatting about the show, getting acquainted. Lovely evening, just getting dark. So I decided to rob him. No, really. I slapped him around, knocked him against a yellow Studebaker. "This is a stick-up!" I said. I had my hand in my pocket with my finger pointed like a pistol. "Gimme everything you got or I'll kill ya!" My eyes were glittering, I looked crazy. He went white. I took his wallet, his watch, even his wedding ring. Cleaned him out. Then I ran away in the night. He staggered to a phone booth, called Sid. Sid said, "Oh, he's started that again, has he? Whatever you do, don't call him up or go to his house, he'll kill ya." Howie said, "But when do I get my stuff back?" Sid said, "Ya gotta wait till he comes to his sense."

Well, for three weeks, Howie waited. No wallet, no watch. He had to buy another wedding ring. I'd say hello to him every morning like nothing had happened. "Hi, Howie. How ya doing? D'ya like the sketch?" He'd say, "Very good, Mel. Like it a lot." Then he'd go to Sid and say, "When's he going to remember? My license was in my wallet. I haven't been able to drive for three weeks." And Sid would say, "Wait." And then one day I stared at Howie and hit my head. "Howie! Oh, my God! I robbed you! I'm so sorry! Here's your wallet! Here's your money! Here's your ring!"

Well, it was the longest practical joke in history, because three years later - by now we're the best of friends - we're rowing on the lake in Central Park at lunchtime. Lovely sunny day. Butterflies making love, the splash of the oars. Howie is rowing. We go under a secluded bridge. Perfect place for a holdup. I stand up, put my hand in my pocket, slap him in the face. Howie's smart. The prey always respects the predator's prerogatives. So without a word, he forks over his wallet, his watch, his ring, takes off his shoes, ties them around his neck, jumps overboard - the water's up to his chin - and wades ashore. Well, that time I gave him his stuff back in a few days. But I intend to rob him again someday, ladies and gentlemen, because robbing Howie is what I do best.

PLAYBOY: Over the years, what was your main contribution to the show?

BROOKS: Energy and insanity. I mean, I would take terrifying chances. I was totally willing to be an idiot. I would jump off into space, not knowing where I would land. I would run across tightropes, no net. If I fell, blood all over. Pain. Humiliation. In those pitch sessions, I had an audience of experts and they showed no mercy. But I had to go beyond. It wasn't only competition to be funnier than they were. I had to get to the ultimate punch line, you know, the cosmic joke that all the other jokes came out of. I had to hit all the walls. I was immensely ambitious. It was like I was screaming at the universe to pay attention. Like I had to make God laugh.

Funny, I remember one year at the Emmy-awards ceremony, they gave the award for comedy writing to the writers of The Phil Silvers Show, and they had never ever given an Emmy to the writers of Your Show of Shows. So I jumped up on a table and started screaming, right there in front of the cameras and everybody. "Coleman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen won an Emmy and Mel Brooks didn't! Nietzsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!"

PLAYBOY: You know, you've described a lot of really weird behavior. Are you sure some of it wasn't actually a little crazy?

BROOKS: I'm sure it was. I went through some disastrous times when I was a young man. After I was hired by Your Show of Shows, I started having acute anxiety attacks. I used to vomit a lot between parked Plymouths in midtown Manhattan. Sometimes I'd get so anxiety-stricken I'd have to run, because I'd be generating too much adrenaline to do anything but run or scream. Ran for miles through the city streets. People stared. No joggers back then. Also, I couldn't sleep at night and I'd get a lot of dizzy spells and I was nauseated for days.

PLAYBOY: What brought on all this anxiety?

BROOKS: Fear of heights. Look at what had happened. I was a poor kid from a poor neighborhood, average family income $35 a week. I felt lucky to be making $50 a week, which is what Sid was paying me. And then, on top of that, I got a screen credit! "Additional dialog, Mel Brooks." Wow! But when I was listed as a regular writer and my pay went to $250 a week, I began to get scared. Writer! I'm not a writer. Terrible penmanship. And when my salary went to $1000 a week, I really panicked. Twenty-fours old and $1000 a week? It was unreal. I figured any day now they'd find me out and fire me. It was like I was stealing and I was going to get caught. Then, the year after that, the money went to $2500 and finally I was making $5000 a show and going out of my mind. In fact, the psychological mess I was in began to cause a real physical debilitation. To wit: low blood sugar and under-active thyroids.

PLAYBOY: You - under-active thyroid?

BROOKS: Everybody thinks, Mel Brooks, that maniac! The energy of that man! He must be hyperthyroid. Au contraire, mon frere. To this day, I take a half-grain of thyroid - and an occasional Raisinet. Now, seriously, have you got kids? How's about taking a couple boxes Raisinets for the kids? They'll love 'em, and -

PLAYBOY: But chocolate is terrible for their teeth.

BROOKS: Are teeth so good for chocolate? Let's be fair.

PLAYBOY: Thanks, but -

BROOKS: Take your time. It's a big decision. Maybe you should call your lawyer. Use my phone, OK? Where were we?

PLAYBOY: What straightened you out emotionally?

BROOKS: Mel Tolkin sent me to an analyst. Strictly Freudian. On the couch - no peeking. But the man himself was kind and warm and bright. Most of my symptoms disappeared in the first year, and then we got into much deeper stuff - whether or not one should live and why.

PLAYBOY: Did you find any answers to that?

BROOKS: The main thing I remember from then is bouts of grief for no apparent reason. Deep melancholy, incredible grief where you'd think that somebody very close to me had died. You couldn't grieve any more than I was grieving.

PLAYBOY: Why?

BROOKS: It was connected with accepting life as an adult, getting out in the real world. I was grieving about the death of childhood. I'd had such a happy childhood, my family close to me and loving me. Now I really had to accept the mantle of adulthood - and parenthood. No more cadging quarters from my older brothers or my mother. Now I was the basic support of the family unit. I was proud of doing my bit, but it meant no longer being the baby, the adorable one. It meant being a father figure. Deep, deep shock. But finally I went on to being a mature person.

You often hear, you know, that people go into show business to find the love they never had when they were children. Never believe it! Every comic and most of the actors I know had a childhood full of love. Then they grew up and found out that in the grown-up world, you don't get all that love, you just get your share. So they went into show business to recapture the love they had known as children when they were the center of the universe.

PLAYBOY: Are you saying that analysis changed you from the wild man who did a Pepper Martin slide at Max Liebman into the mature man who wrote and directed Blazing Saddles?

BROOKS: I'm saying that you should stop trying to be funnier than the Jew. What changed me was success and having to solve the problems of success. At that time of life, no matter what you do, you're getting your education, what Joseph Conrad called the bump on the head. I got mine from the analyst and Mel Tolkin. Between them, they were the father I never had. Sherreeeeee! Bring me some Trident gum! I gave up smoking, folks, on January 3, 1974. In lieu of eating my desk, I chew gum. 'Cause the mouth still wants to inhale. Already I've inhaled a Bell telephone; that's how fierce that desire is.

PLAYBOY: Can you give some advice to someone who is trying to quit smoking>

BROOKS: Suck somebody else's nose.

PLAYBOY: Thank you. Now about Tolkin…

BROOKS: Tolkin is a big, tall, skinny Jew with terribly worried eyes. He looks like a stork that dropped a baby and broke it and is coming to explain to the parents. Very sad, very funny, very widely read. When I met him, I had read nothing - nothing! He said, "Mel, you should read Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, Gogol." He was big on the Russians. So I started with Tolstoy and I was overwhelmed. Tolstoy writes like an ocean, in huge, rolling waves, and it doesn't look like it was processed through his thinking. It feels very natural. You don't question whether Tolstoy's right or wrong. His philosophy is housed in interrelating characters, so it's not up for grabs. Dostoievsky, on the other hand, you can dispute philosophical points with, but he's good, too. The Brothers Karamazov ain't chopped liver.

PLAYBOY: What about Gogol?

BROOKS: Now that you've said it. Perfect. Comedy and humanity, and he knew what he was talking about. Dead Souls is a masterpiece. I love Gogol's great eye for idiot behavior. Gogol said that life is so tragic, so stupendously sad that we'd better laugh a lot and enjoy ourselves. You either get a sense of humor going or you go under.

PLAYBOY: So there's big Russian influence in your work.

BROOKS: Big. The Russian novelists made me realize it's a bigger ball park than the Bilko show. Right from the moment I read them, I knew I wanted to achieve more than Doc Simon and Abe Burrows did. I wanted to be the American Moliere, the new Aristophanes.

PLAYBOY: Were you influenced by other comedians as well as by great writers?

BROOKS: Powerfully. I thought Chaplin was wonderful. Liked Laurel and Hardy even more. Keaton was the greatest master of physical comedy. Fields was a genius at skit construction. And Fred Allen showed me new kinds of irony.

PLAYBOY: So you got rich, cultured, secure - then what happened?

BROOKS: And then the roof fell in. There I am, strolling around in silk shirts and thinking, I'm cut out for greatness. Television's too small for me. How am I going to get out of this lousy racket? And suddenly I am out of it. The show is off the air. One day it's $5000 a week, the next day it's zilch. I couldn't get a job anywhere! Comedy shows went out of style and the next five years I averaged $85 a week. Five thousand a week to $85 a week! It was a terrifying nose dive.

PLAYBOY: What about the money you had saved?

BROOKS: What money? Are you kidding? I was married! I was so much in debt I couldn't believe it! All I had was a limited edition of War and Peace and an iron skate key. I kissed the skate key four times a day just to have something to do.

PLAYBOY: How about the record? Didn't you and Reiner record The 2000-Year-Old Man not long after the show folded?

BROOKS: A year later, the record came out. Saved me. Sold maybe 1,000,000 copies. And we did two others, 2001 and the Cannes Film Festival. We'd been doing the act for nothing at parties. We'd go to Danny's Hide-A-Way in New York and Carl would say, "Sir, I understand that you were living at the time of Christ." I'd say, "Christ? Can't place him. Thin, nervous fella? Yeah. Came in the store, never bought anything. Little beard, cute. Wore sandals, right?" We did it once at a big party at Carl's house and Steve Allen said we ought to make a comedy record, there was money in it. "What? Money in it?" So we got a shipment of black Russian health brean - you know, the round, flat kind. Ripped the shit out of it trying to make grooves, but the reproduction is pretty good, don't you think? And if you don't like the jokes, you can put cream cheese on them and eat them. Anyway, it was a good thing the record took off. In the meantime, my marriage had fallen apart and alimony and child support were eating me up.

PLAYBOY: What was your first wife like?

BROOKS: Nice person. Florence Baum was her name then. A dancer. She was dancing in a Broadway show and I was dating a friend of hers who went off to Europe for the summer. Florence consoled me and I married her. She liked my jokes. We had three children together, but we had married too young. I excepted I would marry my mother and she expected she would marry her father. It reached the point where it was irreparable, and the best thing to do for the entire family was to separate. It was done mutually. I think she did a splendid job with the children. They're healthy, terrific kids and it's all due to their mother's upbringing. Stefanie's 18, Nicky's 17, Eddie's 15 and they're all very gifted and lively.

PLAYBOY: How often do you see them?

BROOKS: That's the thing that sickens my heart the most. I live in California and my three children, who are of an age now to really be my friends on a more adult level, are living in New York and I can't see them enough. We're lucky if we see one another three times a year for a week or so at a time. It's not enough. I really enjoy being with them. They've helped me with everything I've written. I bounce ideas off their good, young, supple minds and they say "bullshit" or "sensational." They don't think I'm a kook. They know I'm a serious human being who is a humorist.

PLAYBOY: You wouldn't be happy without children?

BROOKS: Certainly not. Think what a barren existence it would be without the constant asking for money and the sarcasm and the laughing at you and telling you, "Pop, there's all kinds of stuff hanging out of your nose."

PLAYBOY: How many children would you like to have?

BROOKS: Eight. That's enough to carry me to my grave comfortable when I die of the heart attack they've brought on. No. So far, the kids have turned out good. But sometimes I think I'm getting a little old. "Run out for a pass, Dad." "Sure, kid. Wait till I get the car started."

PLAYBOY: What did you do with yourself after you and your first wife broke up?

BROOKS: Like a schmuck, I said, "Take everything. I don't need a penny. All I need are my Tolstoy and my skate key. Give me these and I can live." Ha. I could live about half an hour. I forgot that a haircut cost two dollars, that your heels wore out - that's one-fifty. God forbid you should get a rip in your pants - that's the end. Eight-fifty for dungarees. I moved into a fourth-floor walk-up on Perry street for $78 a month. And I couldn't furnish it, my alimony and child support were too high. I got fruit boxes. That's how poor I was. I used to go through garbage cans. "Hey, there's a cup! Just chipped a little. Clean it up. What the hell, how many germs could it have? I really lived like a bum.

PLAYBOY: How did you meet Anne Bancroft?

BROOKS: Anne Bancroft? Never heard of her.

PLAYBOY: Famous actress, beauty of the stage and screen, star of The Miracle Worker, Tow for the Seesaw, The Pumpkin Eater, featured in the forthcoming version of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, married to some Jewish comedian.

BROOKS: Ok, that Anne Bancroft. Yes, I am a great fan of hers - and of her husband's. When did I meet her? Let's go back to February 5, 1961, four o'clock in the afternoon. I went to the rehearsal of a Perry Como special, and there she was, singing in a beautiful white gown. Strangely enough, she was singing Married I Can Always Get and when she finished the song, I stood up and clapped loudly in this empty theatre. "Bravo!" I shouted. "Terrific!" Then I rushed down the aisle and up onto the stage. "Hi," I said, "I'm Mel brooks." I was really a pushy kid. And I shook her hand and she smiled and laughed.

Anyway, she said she was going to the William Morris office to see her agent, so I said, "Oh, by chance I happen to be going there, too." Big lie. "Let's all take a cab together." Vrrrrrreeeeeet! I gave the great New York whistle. It stopped a cab. Later she said that really impressed her. We went to her agent's office. I said, "I haven't seen The Miracle Worker yet, but I hear it's great." She said, "Want me to do it for you?" I said, "The whole play?" She said, "Yes." She obviously liked me, too. Well, she did the whole play! A one-hour version right there in the office! The fight scene and everything. And the Waaaa! Waaaa! The screaming at the end, the buckets of water, she did everything. I was on the floor. I was in tears, screaming with laughter, stunned.

I called and called her that night. She wasn't in. Next day I called her and went over with my record album and we sat for six hours in the living room and talked. That night she was going to Village Vanguard. I managed to be there. Then I went to a closing party for The Miracle Worker. Everybody was crazy about her. Me, too. I really loved her. I just fell in love. I hadn't fallen in love since I was a schoolboy. She was just radiant and beautiful and when we talked, I saw how bright she was. And her humor!

I asked her about dates and she said that very few men asked her to go out. And I realized that a man had to be pretty sure of himself, because she was quite an illustrious person. Just normal males who wanted to be big shots, wanted to hold their own, the couldn't deal with that. She was a very hard woman to dominate if you wanted to be Mr. Male. But I wasn't interested in dominating.

So we started going out and I told her, "OK, you're very bright. You're going to be my foreign-movie date. We'll go see foreign movies together." We went to the Thalia because it was 99 cents, and to dozens of recordings sessions. All I could get into for nothing was recording sessions. Sometimes we ate in Chinatown for a buck-twenty-five. We walked, we held hands. I saw her every day. She would cook a lot, to save money. Great cook. Eggplant parmigiana and lasagna, wonderful Italian dishes. After a while, we just didn't see anybody else. Not because we said, "Let's go steady" but because nobody else was as fascinating as we were to each other. Finally, I got a couple of TV spectaculars, as they were called then. An Andy Williams show, a Jerry Lewis show. Then the record began to save my life. But it was Get Smart! A TV series I did with Buck Henry, that made it possible for us to get married.

PLAYBOY: Was it tough to bring yourself to the point of asking?

BROOKS: I never did. We were staying out at Fire Island and my mother had come to visit us, and her parents, too, and we were staying in separate rooms but still living in the same house. Didn't look nice for the parents. So suddenly Annie said, "Why don't we get married? It'll be so much easier for the folks to deal with our relationship." And I said, "Oh, absolutely. Fine." And she nearly fainted. Then she got scared. "Well, I don't know if I want to do this - really get married." She had been married before and it hadn't been good.

Anyway, we got married in 1964, on my lunch hour. It was a civil ceremony. Annie is Italian and I'm Jewish. We were married by a Presbyterian. There was a black kid waiting in the anteroom and I asked him if he would stand up for us. His name was Andrew Boone. He had no idea that it was Mel Brooks marrying Anne Bancroft, because her maiden name is Italiano and she was married under that name. I didn't even have a wedding ring for her. Annie had an old earring. It was made of very thin, bendable silver, looked like a piece of wire. I just twisted that around and gave her that. The clerk was very upset about that; he liked regular rings. Afterward, I had to go back to work and that night I went to her apartment for our wedding dinner. Annie made me spaghetti. It was great. Just the two of us.

It's been like that to this day. My wife is my best friend, and I can't think of anybody I'd rather be with, chat with. We live way out here in California now, in a foreign place, so we need each other a little more. We're even closer. We have plenty of fights; I mean, we're married, right? But for me, this is it.

PLAYBOY: Do you have an active social life?

BROOKS: Only on weekends, and then not that much. Week nights we stay quietly at home and worry about how we're going to get rid of all our Raisinets. Sometimes a little jai alai in the living room with ripe guavas for balls and live pelicans for baskets.

PLAYBOY: And so to bed?

BROOKS: In New York it was five A.M. In California I'm asleep by one-thirty, two o'clock. L.A. is a sleepy town. Whatcha gonna do at night - go to Wilshire and Hauser and walk around? In New York I'd go to Chinatown, have a bowl of noodles. Call the guys. There are 17,000 cafes in the Village where we'd have some espresso and talk all night. Or we'd walk around and get mugged a little. Sometimes out here I long to see a cat pee in the street. Something real.

PLAYBOY: Speaking of reality, isn't it about time we discussed sex?

BROOKS (rising indignantly): I beg your pardon. We hardly know each other and besides, I'm already married. You were proposing? Anyway, I'm not in the favor of miscegenation. Later for sex. Let's keep that guy on the toilet turning the pages. I think I'd rahthah discus AHT. Why don't we talk about The Producers?

PLAYBOY: Your first movie, 1967. What made you decide to get into movies?

BROOKS: Lacking work in television, I had to find another outlet for my God-given brilliance. Even while I was still in TV, Paddy Chayefsky was always encouraging me to write a longer piece, a play or something, and I really thought it would work out this way - Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller and Mel Brooks. The mantle would fall on my shoulders and I would carry it till a younger Jewish-American would take over. But what happened was that somewhere in the Fifties, Broadway began reducing itself to musicals and five-character, one-set- comedies, and to an audience whose intelligence, taste or numbers I could no longer take seriously.

Still, I did fool around with Broadway. For New Faces of '52, a landmark revue, I did a satire on Death of a Salesman and Elia Kazan's superheavy direction. Then a show I'm very proud of, Shinbone Alley, based on the Archy and Mehitabel stories of Don Marquis. Talked about social inequity, social hypocrisy. Rather Brechtian. But then, in the Fifties, the great foreign movies began to arrive. Rossellini's Open City, De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, films by Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, the French New Wave. The power and greatness of the medium were revealed to me and I began to see my future as a film director. I went out and bought a beret and a paperback entitled How to Direct le Film.

PLAYBOY: How did you get The Producers off the ground?

BROOKS: With 12,000 German slaves and lots of ropes. I had this idea about two schnooks on Broadway who set out to produce a flop and swindle the backers, and the flop was to be called Springtime for Hitler. I wrote the script in nine months, with the help of my secretary, Betty Olsen, and then couldn't think of anybody to direct it. So it had to be me. But I hated the idea of directing, and after four pictures I hate it even more. Directing is a terrible, anxious process. It's all collaboration, and if you have a dream, it's diluted very quickly by the slightest ineptness in any of your collaborators. They're supposed to help you into your grave. Your vision can never achieve perfection. If you want to be a moviemaker, you've got to say, "All right, I'll chop the dream down. I'll be very happy if I get 60 percent of my vision on the screen."

PLAYBOY: Why do you direct if you don't like it?

BROOKS: In self-defense. Basically, I'm a writer. I'm the proprietor of the vision. I alone know what I eventually want to happen on the screen. So if you have a valuable idea, the only way to protect it is to direct it.

PLAYBOY: Hod did you get to direct The Producers?

BROOKS: I went to all the big studios with Sidney Glazier, my producer, and said, "I'm going to have to direct this." They said, "Please get out of here before you get hurt." These were physical threats. Finally, someone at Universal Pictures said, "You can direct, but it had to be called Springtime for Mussolini. Nazi movies are out." I said, "I think you missed the point." Then I met Joseph E. Levine, a plain person from the street. "You think you can direct it?" "Yes." "OK." Shook hands. That was it! In the middle of the night, I woke up in a cold sweat. "Foolish person! You had to open your big mouth."

One play was all I'd directed. In Red Bank, New Jersey. But simply seeing movies, you pick up a good deal. I always knew what actors should say to each other and how they should look, and I always understood stage business. That is, should they have a pencil in their hands or be brushing their teeth or peering up a drainpipe when they say "I love you"? As a kid in the street, I'd say, "Benjy, take your finer out of your nose. You look like a jerk." I'd say, "Izzie, don't be plebeian. Iron your shoelaces." I was a born director. I would put warm water on two dogs making it. I knew. Cold water, they'd bite some kid the next day to get even. Hot water, they'd never screw again. Why give them a trauma? Where are we going to get our dogs from?

PLAYBOY: Did you make a lot of beginner's mistakes?

BROOKS: Only the picture itself. No, I did dumb things, even though I had tremendous help from my assistant director, Michael Hertzberg. First day on the set, first scene, sound men are ready, cameras are rolling, the director is supposed to say "Action!" But, being a little nervous, I say "CUT!" Everything stops. They all look at me.

PLAYBOY: Still, you brought it in on schedule.

BROOKS: And under budget" $941,000. I won an Oscar for the Best Screenplay of 1968. And the picture died at the box office. Anyway, that's what Avco-Embassy said. Their motto is emblazoned in Hebrew letters on the office wall. WE MAKE THE MONEY, YOU TRY AND FIND IT.

PLAYBOY: But The Producers was a critical success, wasn't it?

BROOKS: Never believe it. Today everybody calls The Producers a classic. But at the time, you never saw such vitriolic reviews. What can I tell you? Some critics are emotionally desiccated, personally about as attractive as a year-old peach in a single girl's refrigerator. It's easy to say shit is shit, and it should be said. But the real function of a critic is to see what is truly good and go bananas when he sees it.

PLAYBOY: With your first picture a financial flop, how did you finance The Twelve Chairs?

BROOKS: Minimally. I got $50,000 for writing, directing and coproducing the picture and it took three years to make. After the tax bite, I got about half of the $50,000, so that means I was living on $8000 a year and the good nature of several banks. We shot the picture in Yugoslavia, which saved us a lot of money but gave us a lot of headaches. When I went to Yugoslavia, my hair was black. When I came back, nine months later, it was gray. Truly. To begin with, it's a very long flight to Yugoslavia and you land in a field of full-grown corn. They figure it cushions the landing. The first thing they tell you is that the water is death. The only safe thing to drink is Kieselavoda which is a mild laxative. In nine months, I lost 71 pounds. Now, at night, you can't do anything, because all of Belgrade is lit by a ten-watt bulb, and you can't go anywhere, because Tito has the car. It was a beauty, a green '38 Dodge. And the food in Yugoslavia is either very good or very bad. One day we arrived on location late and starving and they served us fried chains. When we got to our hotel rooms, mosquitoes as big as George Foreman were waiting for us. They were sitting in armchairs with their legs crossed.

The Yugoslav crew was very nice and helpful, but you had to be careful. One day in a fit of pique, I hurled my director’s chair into the Adriatic. Suddenly I heard "Halugchik! Kakdivmyechisnybogdanblostrov!" On all sides, angry voices were heard and clenched fists were raised. "The vorkers," I was informed, "have announced to strike!" "But why?" "You have destroyed the People’s chair!" "But it’s mine! It says Mel Brooks on it!" "In Yugoslavia, everything is the property of People." So we had a meeting, poured a lot of vodka, got drunk, started to cry and sing and kiss each other. Wonderful people! If they had another ten-watt bulb, I’d go there to live.

PLAYBOY: What happened when Twelve Chairs was released?

BROOKS: The movie was released at Meyer Roberts’ apartment in Evanston, Illinois. Sixteen people attended the world premiere. Meyer himself couldn’t make it; he had a date. We were all fingerprinted and booked by the police. No, the picture did pretty well in New York, but it couldn’t get across the George Washington Bridge. Taught me something. There is no room in the business now for a special picture. You either hit ‘em over the head or stay home with the canary.

PLAYBOY: And Blazing Saddles was designed to hit ‘em over the head.

BROOKS: No. Actually, it was designed as an esoteric little picture. We wrote it for two weirdos in the balcony. For radicals, film nuts, guys who draw on the washroom wall – my kind of people. I had no idea middle America would see it. What would a guy who talks about white bread, white Ford station wagons and vanilla milk shakes on Friday night see in that meshugaas?

PLAYBOY: How did you hit on the idea for Blazing Saddles?

BROOKS: It’s an interesting story; I don’t think I’ll tell it. Can I interest you in a Raisinet? No? Maybe you’d like a chocolate-covered Volkswagen? Do you have a dollar on you? I hate to answer questions for nothing. (Accepts a dollar). Thank you. For two more I’ll sell you my T-shirt. See this little alligator on the pocket? I understand that in the Everglades, there are alligators with little Jews on their shirt pockets.

We were talking about Blazing Saddles. It was Andy Bergman’s idea. He sent Warner Bros. a rough draft of a screenplay called Tex-X. What grabbed me were the possibilities of a modern black man arriving in the traditional West. Like, he’d say, "Right on, baby!" And they’d say, "Consarnit!" Then I realized that at the same time I could make fun of Westerns and the West. So I called Bergman and said, "Do you mind if I despoil your script?" And he said, "Can I help?" David Brown at Warner’s called me and I told him I wanted to write it the way we wrote Your Show of Shows – lock a bunch of weirdos up together and come out with a great script. We called in Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, a Jewish comedy team, and Richard Pryor, a black person of outre imagination. Then we turned on the tape recorder and started bullshitting. Pryor wrote the Jewish jokes, the Jews wrote the black jokes. Nine months later, we had a finished script.

Part 1|2|3|4

Please click here for corrections.