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The Mel Brooks Webring

Playboy February 1975 (Part 4)

by Brad Darrach
Originally published in Playboy February 1975

Part 1|2|3|4

PLAYBOY: Which you promptly tore up and –

BROOKS: No way! A lot of crickets said the film was chaotic – kitchen-sink school of drama. Not true. Every scene and damn near every line in the film were in the script. Even the farts were in the script. It was calculated chaos. Something a lot of people don’t yet realize about me: I am a very well-trained maniac. Making a movie is like making an ocean voyage, and the script is your ship. Blazing Saddles was a breakthrough comedy. It carried the audience into territory that film comedy had never entered before – kinds of satire, kinds of special vulgarity – and some critics felt confused and disoriented. So they thought that because they were confused, we were confused. We weren’t.

PLAYBOY: What was the point of the vulgarity – the farting scene, for example?

BROOKS: The farts were the point of the farting scene. In real life, people fart, right? In the movies, people don’t. Why not? When I was in high school, I knew a kid, won’t mention his name – Robert Weinstein – who when he let one go, you could get in it and drive away, that’s how firm. But before Blazing Saddles, America had not come to terms with the fart. Wind was never broken across the prairie in a Ken Maynard picture. In every cowboy picture, the cowboys sit around the campfire and eat 140,000 beans, and you never hear a burp, let alone a bloozer. For 75 years these big, hairy brutes have been smashing their fists into each other’s faces and blasting each other full of holes with six-guns, but in all that time, not one has had the courage to produce a fart. I think that’s funny. I think the farting scene in Blazing Saddles is funny because farts in our world are funny. Farts are a repressed minority. The mouth gets to say all kinds of things, but the other place is supposed to keep quite. But maybe our lower colons have something interesting to say. Maybe we should listen to them. Farts are human, more human that a lot of people I know. I think we should bring them out of the water closet and into the parlor, and that’s what I did in Blazing Saddles.

PLAYBOY: At the end of the farting scene, the character called Mongo, the super brute who later knocks out a horse with one punch, takes a huge mouthful of beans – but he never farts. Think what a climax that would have made.

BROOKS: Please. That would have been in bad taste.

PLAYBOY: Oh. Was anything else cut out in the interest of good taste?

BROOKS: Yes. A scene between Cleavon Little, the black sheriff, and Madeline Kahn. The scene takes place in the dark. "Is it twue vot zey say," Madeline asks him seductively, "about how you people are built?" Then you hear a zipper. Then you hear her say, "Oh! It’s twue! It’s twue! It’s twue! That much is in the picture. But then comes the line we cut. Cleavon says, "Excuse me, ma’am. I hate to disillusion you, but you’re sucking my arm."

PLAYBOY: Why did you use the word shit so often in Blazing Saddles? Isn’t it sort of a cheap laugh?

BROOKS: I got nothing against cheap jokes – if they work. Funny is money. Shit is good pepper. Loosens ‘em up, helps the next laugh. And the more unusual swearwords are still good for a huge laugh in the movies. In Blazing Saddles, we get a gasp and then a tremendous laugh when the preacher lifts his eyes to heaven and says, "Oh, Lord! Can we accomplish this great feat in one night? Or are we just jerking off?"

PLAYBOY: What happened when you previewed Blazing Saddles?

BROOKS: Disaster! We showed it first to the studio brass. Ten of them in a small screening room. Now, the first really big joke in the picture comes when the white cowboys say, "How ‘bout a good ole nigger work son?" And the black labor gang, as one man, begins to sing in a sophisticated style, "I get no kicks from champaaaagne…." That’s a tremendous joke. But in the screening room, nothing. Gornisht! Not a titter. I said, "We have just entered cabin 4C on the Titanic!" The next 90 minutes was a non-laugh riot. When the lights went up, I had sweat circles the size of Rhode Island under my arms. Two years of my life I had spent on this picture and now disaster! I said to myself, "This is the worst moment of my life. My talent and my judgement are gone!" I went back to the editing room and just sat for 20 minutes. Then Mike Hertzberg said, "We booked a public screening for tonight." I said, "Cancel it!" Mike said, "No! Invite more people. Let normal people see it. Then we’ll know."

So eight o’clock that night, the place was packed. Two hundred and forty people in the screening room. Seating only on the floor. First big joke: " I get no kick from champaaaagne." Children were thrown into the air. The most laughing you’ve ever heard in a movie house. Non-stop screaming. The following night, a big sneak preview in Westwood. The place went bananas. The more people you got together with this picture, the more insane the reaction was. Eleven hundred people dancing in the aisles. One guy was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. As he fell under the seat, he told his wife, "G’Bye, honey, the policies are in the top drawer." Almost two years later, the picture is still running.

PLAYBOY: What happened to your life and your career after Blazing Saddles?

BROOKS: I became John Carradine. Aquiline nose, face long and aristocratic, voice deep and vibrant. Thinking of running for the U.S. Senate…. Frankly, I’m in demand and it’s great. I can take my best shot and take it under the best conditions. I have a three-picture deal at Fox that gives me everything I want.

PLAYBOY: Which brings us to Young Frankenstein. But first, a little bone to pick. Why, why do you always have so little sex in your movies?

BROOKS: What? Who? Avoid sex? Oh, that word! To whom are you speaking, sir? My name is Kaminsky.

PLAYBOY: In The Producers, for example, the closest thing you had to sex was a Swedish secretary with big boobs.

BROOKS: Ya gotta admit that’s pretty close.

PLAYBOY: And looking at Twelve Chairs, you’d think the Soviet Union was populated by 250,000 people without glands. Even in Blazing Saddles, which is obviously intended as a comic saturnalia, there are plenty of anal jokes but hardly any genital jokes.

BROOKS: What about Lili von Shtupp? We almost called the picture She Shtupps to Conquer.

PLAYBOY: German sex is the best you can do? Mr. Brooks, some people say your humor is prepubescent. What do you say to that?

BROOKS: I say, if I may quote a comedy writer named Joe Schrank, I can hardly believe my hearing aid. I say in a couple hundred years cabs will be so low to the ground you’ll have to step over them and get in from the other side.

PLAYBOY: We say let’s talk about Young Frankenstein.

BROOKS: I’ve got a better idea. I’m surprised you haven’t asked me. Let’s talk about sex! Are you ready out there, all you goys? Lock the bathroom door! The Jew is going to talk dirty! Speaking of pornographic movies, the trouble with them is, you’re watching them do all these wild things on the screen, six girls with big tits and a guy with a schwanstucker like the Chrysler Building, and you get all hot and bothered, but you can’t do anything about it. I’d like to see a porno flick if I could do something about it. Like, if there was an intermission at dirty movies, so you could go get your Goobers –or Raisinets, for that matter. Tell me, have you every considered the possibilities of a Raisinet as a sex object? Think what you could do with a ton of Raisinets. Doesn’t tempt you? No? Incredible! Are you impotent?

PLAYBOY: We’re into M&M’s. Moving right along, do you consider sex a serious matter – or is it funny?

BROOKS: Both. I don’t want to laugh when I’m really excited. But before and after, yes. I think there should be a lot of jokes during foreplay and a lot of postcoital laughing. "Ha-ha, wasn’t that funny when you missed? That was a riot! Next time tell me, I’ll help ya."

PLAYBOY: Did your mother ever discuss sex with you boys?

BROOKS: Never. Completely taboo. There was no sex. Children arrived because of affection. You had a terrific bout of affection with each other and suddenly in the kitchen was a baby at the table, eating. Wonderful! A miracle! I really believed that until Morris Steinberg told me in seven B. His nose is not the same, because I gave it a punch and said, "Not my mother! No, sir!" It was a tough thing to hear. But once I knew the score, I got busy.

Most sex in Brooklyn was in the back of a Buick; a Ford was too small to move around in. And most sex was petting. A lot of hallway jobs. Banging against each other in those hallways was terrible and you gotta watch hitting the bells, because you’d get the whole tenement shouting down the stairs at you. So we sneaked up to the roof. My first affair was on the roof of 365 South Third Street. And there was a guy flying pigeons who we saw later watching us. It was late at night, but I heard – ha-ha-ha – a little laughing. Very embarrassing. But there wasn’t very much sex for teenagers. We were shy and it was taboo. You got married and had sex.

PLAYBOY: What years are you talking about?

BROOKS: Late Thirties, early Forties. In the clubrooms, we used to try feeling up girls. "Did she let you feel her boob?" "Well, she did and she didn’t." "What do you mean?" "Well, we did it, but we didn’t realize it."

PLAYBOY: Everything but.

BROOKS: Not really. There was never any unzipping. Everything in pants, in dresses, never showing. Just a lot of pain and torture. Going home and being unable to walk. Struggling into your bed and crying. Terrible. And it’s hard to masturbate, because your brothers are in bed with you. You’re in between Bernie and Lenny, and at four in the morning, even Lenny looked pretty good!

PLAYBOY: Was there anything kinky going on in those days?

BROOKS: Not that I knew or heard of. Nothing hip or weird or sensational like today. It was thrilling because we were very young, but it was very straight. I mean, not two guys and a girl, none of that.

PLAYBOY: Do you think Jewish sex to this day is generally straight?

BROOKS: American sex is generally straight. It happens at 11 o’clock on Saturday night. In the rural areas, it happens at nine and it happens pretty fast. Got to get up the next morning, especially if there’re kids. Can’t make noise, either, wake the kids. Don’t want the kids finding out.

PLAYBOY: What about Jewish girls – are they puritanical?

BROOKS: The best thing about Jewish girls is, they can tell real jade. No, I don’t go for those jokes about "What do you mean, she’s dead? I thought she was Jewish!" Jewish women are very exciting, as exciting sexually as any other group. Even so, my advice to a young man marrying a Jewish girl would be to have three and a half years of foreplay. Of course, most girls in every group are reserved about getting down to it. They don’t usually do it right away. But once they do it, women are bananas. They don’t wanna do it, you can’t make them do it, there’s no way they’ll do it – but once they do it, they don’t let you alone. Then it’s "OK, Murray, let’s do it till we die!"

But PLAYBOY readers, I think are different. I think they’re either single or have single dreams. Singles bars, single girls. They have sultan fantasies, 26 chicks coming at them, screaming and biting them. In real life, I mean, you’re luck if your wife will do it with you.

PLAYBOY: You don’t like sexual fantasies?

BROOKS: Depends on the kind. When the poets clean sex up, it’s bullshit. I have no patience for it. "Ah, yon bough and that white breast and body, that I could love and fuse together, that an orgasm of shiny friendliness…" I don’t want that. I want gardens of filth. I grew up poor and even analysis didn’t break down my conditioning. There are neurograms in my brain, and they say that when it’s dirty, it’s good. And only when it’s dirty and when there’s a lot of yelling and cursing and filth and all the other things that I thought were taboo – then it’s very sexy and very hot for me. I must be arrested sexually, because panty hose I hate. Can’t stand panty hose. I’m into that old, wonderful French look. Black stockings with garters. That’s terrific for me. If it’s clandestine, it’s good. If it’s a little dirty, a little immoral, a little irreligious, it’s exciting. I mean, walking naked through the meadows should be the best. But who gives a shit? I want to meet at the Dixie Hotel in New York, with a bottle of Southern Comfort. I want to get drunk, and then yell at each other across the room. And maybe a dirty book so we’ll both read it together. I’m 14 years old sexually – and it’s terrific!

PLAYBOY: What about orgies?

BROOKS: No, I’m Jewish. Besides, at orgies there are too many people. You’re naked and you hardly know each other. "Are you Mel Brooks?" "Yes." "I loved Springtime for Hitler." "Thank You." "Did you write the lyrics as well as the music?" Who cares? And orgies would be embarrassing. You meet somebody later that you’ve seen at an orgy; you don’t want that. Maybe in Romania you’d never see anybody again. But think of the plane fare.

PLAYBOY: What about the sexual apparatus – such as vibrators and dildos and electrical –

BROOKS: Please, you’re talking to a Jewish person. Electrical apparatus would scare me. God gave us enough apparatus to get the thing done. I understand in Japan, though, they make rubber people you can go to bed with. A whole rubber person, supposed to be sensational. Costs as much as a Toyota, but you can’t back up in it. OK? Enough sex? Would you like me to expose myself, Mr. Filth?

PLAYBOY: Thank you, no. But there is one side of sex we haven’t discussed. Your pictures all have happy endings, but you may have noticed that boy never gets girl.

BROOKS: True. At the end of the first three pictures, boy gets boy. Zero Mostel gets Gene Wilder, Frank Langella gets Ron Moody, Gene Wilder get Cleavon Little. It’s a remarkable coincidence, and I’m not sure what it means. But I’m pretty sure my need to have my male characters come together and be close is not some sort of sexual need I’ve displaced into these people. I think it goes back a lot further than sex. All the way back to my father, whom I never really knew and can’t remember. I can’t tell you what sadness, what pain it is to me never to have known my own father, who died when I was two and a half. All I know is what they’ve told me. He was lively, peppy, sang well. Isn’t it sad that that’s all a son should know about his father? If only I could look at him, touch his face, see if he had eyebrows! Maybe in having the male characters in my movies find each other, I’m expressing the longing I feel to find my father and be close to him.

PLAYBOY: But in one side of sex we haven’t discussed. Your pictures all have happy endings, but you may have noticed that boy never gets girl.

BROOKS: True. At the end of the first three pictures, boy gets boy. Zero Mostel gets Gene Wilder, Frank Langella gets Ron Moody, Gene Wilder get Cleavon Little. It’s a remarkable coincidence, and I’m not sure what it means. But I’m pretty sure my need to have my male characters come together and be close is not some sort of sexual need I’ve displaced into these people. I think it goes back a lot further than sex. All the way back to my father, whom I never really knew and can’t remember. I can’t tell you what sadness, what pain it is to me never to have known my own father, who died when I was two and a half. All I know is what they’ve told me. He was lively, peppy, sang well. Isn’t it sad that that’s all a son should know about his father? If only I could look at him, touch his face, see if he had eyebrows! Maybe in having the male characters in my movies find each other, I’m expressing the longing I feel to find my father and be close to him.

PLAYBOY: But in Young Frankenstein, even the monster gets a girl.

BROOKS: Yes. I’m turning straight. In fact, there’s a lot of heterosex in Young Frankenstein. There’s lust on a lab table, rape in a cave and a big double-wedding-night sequence. But sex isn’t the point. What we had in mind was a picture that played on two main levels. One, we wanted to make a hilarious pastiche of the old black-and-white horror films of the Thirties. Two, we wanted to offer sincere and reverent homage to those same beautifully made movies.

Young Frankenstein is nothing like Blazing Saddles. It’s in black and white; the photography by Gerald Hirschfeld is magnificent. Everything is back-lit and bathed in antique radiance. So often, the image on the screen looks like a Rembrandt. And the story is very strong, very serious and noble. It’s based on Mary Shelley’s book and it’s the story of a scientist who challenges God by creating life; you could also interpret it as a story about womb envy. This creator loves his creature so much that he risks his sanity and his life to help his brain child survive. In our picture, Dr. Frankenstein starts out like Yahweh and winds up like Christ.

That’s the serious side. But the funny side is terrifically funny, though not in the same way as any other movie I’ve made. There’s a lot of dangerous laughing in this movie. You got to have good strong veins to watch it. And when you’re not laughing, you’re shivering. But everything is done in the grand manner. The actors move like singers in a grand opera. I take my time and work for the big moments. What can I tell you? I really think we’ve delivered a landmark film, a never-to-be-forgotten movie. Maybe even good.

PLAYBOY: How much of it is you, how much is Wilder?

BROOKS: A big, big part is Gene. He wrote the screenplay in collaboration with me and he plays Dr. Frankenstein.

PLAYBOY: How did you write together?

BROOKS: We holed up in the Bel Air Hotel, where Gene was staying, and we acted all the parts out. Sometimes he’d be the monster, sometimes I’d be the monster. "Rraawwrr!" "No!No! Back! Back!" We really had fun, we were like a couple of kids. When I’m writing a script, I don’t worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters – what they need, what they want, what they should do. That’s what gets the story going. Like a child, I listen to the characters. "Oh, so that’s what they want! I hope they get it. I love them!" You can’t just have action, you’ve got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.

I think every human being has hundreds of separate people living inside his skin. And the talent of a writer is directly related to his ability to give them separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living within him. That’s why we like Tennessee Williams’ plays so much. He does all this very well. But I think Gene and I did it pretty well, too. Anyway, only after the characters are developed and the main action laid out is it safe to add the gimmicks: Kenny Mar’s wooden arm, Cloris Leachman’s wart – which , by the way, she ate. Fell in her tuna-fish salad and was swallowed in a glob of mayonnaise.

Anyway, Gene and I worked very hard and the rewrite took about three months. Then we showed the script to Peter Boyle and Marty Feldman and they said count them in. Peter plays the monster and Marty plays Igor, Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant. Then we got Madeline Kahn and Teri Garr and Cloris and Kenny.

PLAYBOY: How do you pick your people?

BROOKS: I like people with big talents and small neuroses – not always an easy combination to find. I’ve discovered that if the neurosis is too big, it diminishes the talent and you wind up working too hard for what you get. I reserve the right to be the only psychotic on the set. I also try to surround myself with the people I love – make a family out of the company. So I tend to use the same people over and over. There’s a sort of Mel Brooks Repertory Company. Gene has been in three of my four pictures. Madeline and Kenny have been in two.

PLAYBOY: Do you direct each performer differently?

BROOKS: Completely. Gene is a natural. Gene acts like a bird flies. Learns all his technique and then leaves the earth and flies around the set like a crazy Jewish bird. And his instincts are always right. Gene as Dr. Frankenstein is Promethean! He is still the great hysterical prey that God made him, the victim in all of us, but he is also a great leader, a great genius. His acting is very big and thrilling and Chagaliian.

PLAYBOY: And Peter?

BROOKS: Peter had a difficult and special problem. As the monster, he had to wear extremely complicated make-up, which limited his facial expressions, and on top of that, he had to try to look like the walking dead. Also, he wasn’t allowed to speak. For 90 percent of the time, his speech consisted of "Hmmmmmmmmmmm!" But Peter managed wonderfully to communicate the love, fear, wonder and astonishment of a seven-and-a-half-foot newborn baby having his first experiences of the world.

PLAYBOY: Why is there a zipper in Peter’s neck?

BROOKS: Why not a zipper? It’s as good as a metal rod. And it really works.

PLAYBOY: You can get in there?

BROOKS: That’s right. There’s a lot of diodes and things you can fix in his neck. Don’t let this get out, but we also found mascara in there when we opened him up. Something for his lashes. One of those wonderful little Revlon combs.

PLAYBOY: Hmm. And how did you direct Feldman as Igor?

BROOKS: First I tried to find out where he was looking. His eyes stare in about 19 different directions. They look like hardboiled eggs that somebody painted eyeballs on and didn't paint them on right. So first I'd get in the path of his vision and try to signal him down. Then I'd say, "Marty, be very good." He'd say, "All right." And he was. After Marty, there will never be another Igor. They'll have to retire the part. He's it.

PLAYBOY: What's the difference between directing comedy and directing a serious picture?

BROOKS: I'll tell you that after I call Sherry. Sherreeee! Take a letter, please, to this guy who calls Blazing Saddles "an artless and vulgar display" and says he and his wife saw it only because they were "unwary tagalongs." "Dear sir: Blazing Saddles has been rated R. The R is there to protect people like you and your wife from unwittingly attending adult movie fare. I don't think it's fair of you to walk into an R-rated film and then criticize it for containing sophisticated material. I also don't think that the excuse of tagging along relieves anyone of culpability. One doesn't wander into a brothel and then attack the establishment for not being Howard Johnson's. Sincerely yours, Mel Brooks." Where were we?

PLAYBOY: Directing comedy.

BROOKS: There's one thing you've got to understand before you can direct comedy. Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of hoke will help. And another thing, the more serious the situation, the funnier the comedy can be. The greatest comedy plays against the greatest tragedy. Comedy is a red-rubber ball and if you throw it against a soft, funny wall, it will not come back. But if you throw it against the hard wall of ultimate reality, it will bounce back and be very lively, Vershteh, goy bastard? No offense. Very, very few people understand this.

PLAYBOY: Does Woody Allen understand it?

BROOKS: Woody Allen is a genius. His films are wonderful. I liked Sleeper very, very much. It's Woody's best work to date. The most imaginative and the best performed. I was on the floor, and very few people can put me on the floor. He's poetic, but he's also a critic. He artfully steps back from a social setting and criticizes it without - I suspect - without letting himself be vulnerable to it.

PLAYBOY: And you?

BROOKS: I'm not a critic. I like to hop right in the middle, right into the vortex. I can't just zing a few arrows at life as it thunders by! I have to be down on the ground and shouting at it, grabbing it by the horns, biting it! Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. I mean you're just slowly drifting into death. So you've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively. My liveliness is based on an incredible fear of death. In order to keep death at bay, I do a lot of "Yah! Yah! Yah!" And death says, "All right. He's too noisy and busy. I'll wait for someone who's sitting quietly, half asleep. I'll nail him. Why should I bother with this guy? I'll have a lot of trouble getting him out the door." There's a little door they gotta get you through. "This will be a fight," death says. "I ain't got time."

Most people are afraid of death, but I really hate it! My humor is a scream and a protest against goodbye. Why do we have to die? As a kid, you get nice little white shoes with white laces and a velvet suit with short pants and a nice collar, and you go to college, you meet a nice girl and get married, work a few years - and then you have to die? What is that shit? They never wrote that in the contract. So you yell against it, and if you yell seriously, you can be a serious playwright and everybody can say, "Very nice." But I suspect you can launch a little better artillery against death with humor.

PLAYBOY: But it's a battle you can't win.

BROOKS: You can win a conditional victory, I think. It all boils down to scratching your name in the bark of the tree. I was here. When you do that - whatever tree you carve it in - you're saying, "Now, there's a record of me!" I won't be erased by death. Any man's greatness is a tribute to the nobility of mankind, so when we celebrate the genius of Tolstoy, we say, "Look! One of our boys made it! Look what we're capable of!"

So I try to give my work everything I've got, because when you're dead or you're out of business or you're in an old actors' home somewhere, if you've done a good job, your work will still be 16 years old and dancing and healthy and pirouetting and arabesquing all over the place. And they'll say, "That's who he is! He's not this decaying skeleton."

I once had this thought that was so corny, but I loved it. It was that infinitesimal bits of coral, by the act of dying upon each other, create something that eventually rises out of the sea - and there it is, it's an island and you can stand on it, live on it! And all because they died upon each other. Writing is simply one thought after another dying upon the one before. Where would I be today if it weren't for Nikolai Gogol? You wouldn't be laughing at Young Frankenstein. Because he showed me how crazy you could get, how brave you could be. Son of a bitch bastard! I love him! I love Buicks! I love Dubronovik! I love Cookie Lavagetto! I love Factor's Deli at Pico and Beverly Drive! I love Michael Hertzberg's baby boy! I love rave reviews! I love my wife! I love not wearing suits! I love New York in June! I love Raisinets! Which brings me, Mr. Interlocutor, for the last time, to the question: Would you or would you not care for a Raisinet?

PLAYBOY: Sure. Why not?

BROOKS: Sorry, kid. They're all gone.

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