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Saturday Review July 1983

Brooks' Bookshop
by Marc Kristal
Originally published in Saturday Review July 1983

    For a major corporation, Twentieth Century Fox, nestled among the condominiums of Century City, evinces considerable whimsy. A "Gay Nineties New York Set," built during the 1960s for filming of Hello Dolly, adorns the studio's main entrance, giving it an appearance of a theme park. In the elevator of the faded pink Executive Building a small sign promises that "there is little danger of running out of air or of the car dropping uncontrollably." In room 377 is Mel Brooks who seated at the far end of his elegant, oversized office, begins the interview by barking "Test! Test!" into the tape recorder, then promises "to try to act like a serious Jewish person."

    Brooks' kidding gives us incomplete a picture of him as does the frilly Fox facade. Of the Mel Brooks known to the general public, three things are certain: his most successful comedies, which include Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, are the epitome of "popular art" - usually irreverant, frequently vulgar, and never subtle; he is one of Hollywood's most evident "hyphenates" (writer-producer-director-star); and, as his friend and one-time collaborator Carl Reiner puts it, "Mel lives loud." Much of this noise is devoted to self-advertisement. But Brooks says, "My best friends know me as a more critical and complicated person." This serious side is expressed through his company, Brooksfilms. The contrast between Brooks and Brooksfilms is so striking as to seem deliberate. Of the four films bearing the company name to dare, only one, My Favorite Year, is a comedy; Fatso is at best bittersweet; Frances and The Elephant Man are disturbing dramas. Brooks did not write, produce, direct, or appear in any of them; all four, in fact were guided by directors making their major motion picture debuts. First timers were also involved in such capacities as writing and producing. Glaring in its absence from the credits is the name Mel Brooks. What appears is only "Brooksfilms."

    Brooks has no intention of abandoing comedy. Yet he says, as he inflates with his hyperbolic, mockpompous style, "I need to describe things of a more exquisite and subtle nature. And Brooksfilms is a wonderful vehicle for me to convey my own more muted and complicated passions." In fact, the company represents the fulfillment of deeply felt needs and old desires. Gene Wilder, a friend since the middle 1960s, recalls that "Mel once said what he really wanted to do the most was to own a bookshop. He couldn't think of any better life than to sit with friends and passerby, and talk about Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and sip tea. Through Brooksfilms, he has opened his book shop."

    Bristling with the energy, confidence, ambition, and utter immodesty that typify him, Brooks says, "If you see Brooksfilms on that screen, the worst it can be is a very good picture. What we hope is that it will be a classic ." The company, like the man, is small and efficient, featuring a pared-down permanent staff and the participation of Brooks; lawyer, accountant, and a loyal group of creative people. The aim is a limited number of what Ingmar Bergman, in reference reference to his own work, calls "handmade" films. To achieve this end, some standard industry attitudes and practices have been jettisoned.

    His company's independence enables Brooks, a restless impulsive man, to quickly approve or reject any project himself, eliminating the interminable, and often terminal decision-by-committe process upon which studios rely. The Elephant Man became a Brooksfilms project when Brooks, seeking to fill an idle hour, read a copy of the script which had been left in his office. By page thirty, he was sold. For Jonathan Sanger, who had taken a option on The Elephant Man in the hope of making it his producing debut, "it was the best news I had ever imagined." Sanger says, "It would have been very difficult to get a studio to agree to all the difficult things about the proejct. Mel said, 'With me you'll be able to do it your way, and it's something I would be proud to be involved with'."

    Brooksfilms is distinguished by this willingness to take risks. The Elephant Man had been rejected by most of the major film companies before Brooks read it. Says Eric Bergren, co-author of the script "Nobody really wanted to do a movie about the ugliest man in the world." The same was true about Frances, the relentlessly grim story of actress Frances Farmer. "If it hadn't been for Mel," says its director, Graeme Clifford, "the picture wouldn't have been made." Neither had apparent commercial potential, but Brooks didin't care; he is not in business "just to be in business," as he says. He undertook the projects, both biographies, because he was moved by them and believed audiences would be. Brooks feels that such pictures, by their expression of human triumph and endurance, perform "a true service." He is perhaps the only motion picture executive in Hollywood - in the world? - who would justify a $5 million expenditure by saying, "Maybe it's part of the whole Jewish thing - 'I pledge two dollars anonymous for the crippled children.' It makes you feel good when you do something like that."

    Equally unusual, in an industry that puts a premium on the known quantity, is Brooks' willingness to gamble on newcomers. His motivation stems from his own past difficulty in establishing himself as a director. The company's track record with new people is startling. Brooksfilms' first-time directors have included Anne Bancroft (Fatso), who is Brooks' wife, Richard Benjamin (My Favorite Year), Graeme Clifford (Frances), and David Lynch (The Elephant Man); producer Jonathan Sanger and writers Eric Bergren and Christopher DeVore debuted with The Elephant Man and continued with Frances. Most of this "young talent," of course, possessed impressive resumes. Decisions that seem risky have been, in fact, matters of good judgment and faith, both rare qualities in the movie business.

    Brooksfilms combines its patronage with a supportive working environment. "Mel gives me more latitude than anyone I've ever worked with," says Sanger, who speculates that, had The Elephant Man been studio-made, Lynch's methods would not havebeen comprehensible or acceptable to the brass. Brooks took particular pains with his young writers. "He always went out of his way to make us feel confident," Bergren recalls, "and made it very clear to us not to sell ourselves short." Not that he and DeVore were spared teh truth about their work. He says, "We were afforded the chance to be wrong. A lot of people get fired the first time they make a mistake, because the producers get very scared. But Mel always gives you the opportunity to learn."

    Brooks also encourages his people to take chances. Before shooting began on The Elephant Man, Brooks told Lynch of a conversation with Warner Brothers executive John Calley during the making of Blazing Saddles, Brooks had said to Calley, "Is that scene too macabre? Am I being too frivolous?" Calley replied, "Mel, if you're going to go up to the bell, then ring it." So Brooks' instructions to Lynch were: "Go to the limits of your vision. Otherwise, you're not being true to yourself."

    One must remember that Brooks would have had far less control of the making of The Elephant Man had he hired someone more experienced to direct it. Veteran filmmakers, as Carl Reiner ponits out, "have difficulty catering to or accepting outside influences and suggestions." He adds, "Mel's very needful of things being done hi way." But Brooks, and astute judge of talent, finds excellent people to send his message, and he does not dominate them. "I'm incredibly stimulated in a room with him," says Richard Benjamin. "And I being to perform better, and think faster, and come up with better stuff."

    As Brooksfilms' executive producer, Brooks combines ceaseless energy, comprehensive creative knowledge, an unstinting devotion to hard work, and what his attorney Alan Schwartz describes as a "concentrated, very intense intelligence." He is demanding of employees and co-workers. "Mel believes that the difference between most folks and artists is that folks work until it's time to quit, and artists don't quit until they get it right," DeVore says. With the exception of the actual shooting, which he takes pains to avoid, Brooks involves himself in most aspects of the picture-making process, including editing and casting. His comprehension of film language - his ability to accurately translate ideas and emotions into images - makes him an effective critic at each stage of the game.

    Brooks' most active role, owing perhaps to his strong literary bent, is that of script supervisor, "There's nothing more important than the word," he says. "A good script is a raft you can float a lot of disaster on. A poor script, even with the greatest stars and the most money, will sink in a minute." Though uncredited, he had susbstantial input into the writing of The Elephant Man, creating a new dramatic structure from the overlong first draft. He says he has worked "long, hard, and diligently" on the company's other scripts as well.

    Ironically, Brooks' principal contribution to Brooksfilms is rooted not in art but commerce. What Graeme Clifford descrives as "his rather awe-inspiring track record" commands respect and attention from distributors, studios, and exhibitors. Nor does Brooks, generally viewed as fearless, balk if getting his way requires a fight. "There were lots of little instances when he stood up for me," says Clifford. "You don't usually find that sort of loyalty in someone in his position, because it can get him into compromising situations." His humor has helped to diffuse tension. Benjamin says, "When he's on a 'Mel Mission,' he uses one of his greatest tools, his ability as a performer. To get things done [in Hollywood] is hard. But it's very hard to say no to Mel."

    Of all his business abilities, one clearly pleases Brooks the most: "I tell you," he states with Churchillian confidence. "I'm a better saleman than I am anything else. I should have worked on Allen street, on the Lower East Side, selling dark blue suits to Jews who didn't need them. I can dazzle people with the right set of lies." The stellar example of this is the way Brooks raised $4 million for The Elephant Man by a sale to NBC. The network purchased the television rights, says Sanger, "for a picture that was in black and white, about a deformed man, starring John Hurt, and that was all we had."

    Financially as well as artistically, The Elephant Man seems the quintessential Brooksfilms effort: it was inexpensively produced, independently funded, had advantageous domestic and foreign-distribution deals, was a critical success, and returned $70 million worldwide on an investment of $5 million. "These are not altruistic ventures," Brooks says. "I think there's a lot of money in art, and my goal for Brooksfilms is that it be self-funded." It would require a string of films as successful as The Elephant Man for that to happen. Of the other company projects, Fatso barely broke even, and Frances and My Favorite Year shows no signs of becoming blockbusters. Brooks' approach, which combines high creative standards with rigid cost controll and limited outside participation, worked very well once. Whether or not it will click often enough to float so expensive an enterprise as a film company, time will tell.

    The question remains: Why, given the apparent pride he takes in The Elephant Man and Frances, did Brooks not put his name on them? A part of the reason is practical: "It would be confusion," he explains. "You put the name Mel Brooks on something, the public experts a riotous comedy, and they end up with something that has cellos and violins in it." Brooks understandably has no wish to disappoint the hard-won audience that has made him rich. While this might seem to show little faith in the public's intelligence, Sanger raises the case of Woody Allen, whose films "have done less well the more serious he gets." Instead of understaking the uncertain task of reeducating his audience, "Mel has separated that aspect of his life and said. 'The serious statements I can make through Brooksfilms, and still continue to fulfill the public's expectations'."

    This unwillingness to risk mass displeasure may be a result of Brooks' past creative and financial difficulties. His early success in television, as a $5,000-per-week writer for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, has been well documented, and his string of hits, beginning with Blazing Saddles (1974), is familiar to most moviegoers. Between 1959 and his successful third film, however, only two Brooks projects did well at all: the four "Two-Thousand-Year-Old-Man" albums improvised with Carl Reiner, and Get Smart, the TV series he created with Buck Henry. When lawyer Schwartz met him in 1962, "Mel had just written a play called All-American, which was a disaster. He had no money - zero. He was getting a divorce. He had three kids. And he would come to my office in New York with a cup of tea and a walnut-and-cheese sandwich from Chock Full o' Nuts and " - this with an ironic, slightly amazed chuckle - "talk about the future. Our law firm carried him for a long time; he couldn't pay his bills." At the time he made The Producers, "he still wasn't making any money," despite the success of Get Smart.

    Brooks' frustrations also concerned his creativity. Gene Wilder, who first met him in those years, recalls that "he'd be up till 3 or 4 in the morning, foaming over - up to the brim and beyond. He was gushing with passion and impatience; he had so many ideas he wanted to put on paper and film."

    Many of Brooks' plans had little to do with making people laugh. Clifford says of him : "Mel is a very perceptive, thoughtful, sensitive, private man. The comedic aspect of his personality is just the public face. Behind that is a totally different individual." To some degree, this is evident in his film comedies. Brooks describes his first film as a writer-director, The Producers, as being about "the ego and the id, and launching oneself toward glory"; much of its humor derives from a satire of Nazism. Blazing Saddles dealt with racial hatred, albeit hilariously. And Brooks claims to have been motivated to make History of the World, Part I by the inequity at Versailles. As a young man, however, Brooks hoped to express his concerns through the medium he loved best, literature. "Mel's fantasy of success, believe it or not, was to write the Great Russian Novel," says Reiner. "He was a collector of rare books, and he read an awful lot; Gogol and Dostoyevsky were his gods."

    Brooks came closest to unifying his comic gifts and artistic yearnings with The Twelve Chairs (1970), his second film. Adapted from a novel by the Russian satirists Ilf and Petrov, the work's bittersweet nature is manifest in its theme song, "Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst." Its almost complete failure was particulary painful, Wilder thinks, "because Mel wanted it to be so much more than it was perceived as." The experience may have contributed to Brooks' present preference for issuing his "serious statements" from behind Brooksfilms' shield of anonymity. "I think he got stung," Wilder says, "and withdrew back into what he knows better than anyone else in the world."

    The company also enables Brooks to receive the kind of critical regard - and, by extension, the recognition as an intellectual - denied him for his comedies. Brooks is extremely conscious of how he is perceived. To further explain the absence of his name from Brooksfilms' dramas he says, "I knew the critics would take offense if there was a property they felt was sacred and the bean-farting wacko from Blazing Saddles was going to put his grimy paws on it." Indeed, nowhere is his ambivalence more apparent than in his remarks about critics, which show both hatred for what they have done to him and a desire to win their regard.

    Brooks has a strong desire to receive acknowledgement from respectable quarters; this perhaps is inevitable in someone of Brooks' generation and background. Schwartz characterizes him as "a street kid," Brooklyn-born and ghetto-bred, "with a 'little-Jew' mentality about the way the big WASP world feels about him." Schwartz says, "Here's a guy with very little education and sophistication who's become a wine expert" - though, as Wilder points out, he was a devotee of Pepsi several years ago. In his mind, respect and understanding depend upong the proper facade. Explaining the evolution of the Producers from novel to play to film, Brooks says, "I didn't want to write a movie, because I thought they wer classless. I thought the best thing you could be was an off-Broadway playwright; Broadway was already too crass and commercial, and I wanted to be Samuel Beckett at parties." While Brooks understands, says Sanger, "that successful comedy is about the hardest thing you can do, he does also recognize that, critically, comedies tend to get less acclaim because they're not thought of as being important." Thus The Elephant Man has gotten him something that Blazing Saddles never did.

    Brooks is not the sort to brood, or to quit. In his hardest years, says Schwartz, "Mel was surprisingly resilient. My impression was that he felt rejected, but expected that"; a strong part of his childhood legacy is "a very realistic view of the way the world behaves." At bottom, Brooksfilms is a creative solution to a dilemma that is both artistic and personal. "Ninety percent of the reviews on The Producers," Brooks says, "called it disgusting, horrible, stupid, indept, etc. And if I took those reviews to heart, I never would have made another movie. So a good lesson is, when the critics sit you on their shoulders and say you're the greatest thing since cranberry juice, take it with a grain of salt; and when they crush you, go somewhere, suffer your pain in your little dark emotinal cave, come out, and work again."

    Brooksfilms, at present, has several projects in various stages of development, including an adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel Tar Babby, to star Howard Rollins, Jr.; a comic reworking of the Robin Hood saga; and Solar Babies, which Sanger calls "a cross between E.T. and The Road Warrior." Brooks is also negotiating with South African playwright Athol Fugard to write an epic film about apartheid. "Brooksfilms is open for business," he says. "Any time we see a flag about the human condition that appeals to us, we're going to see if we can't surround it with the right help and nourishment."

    All the company's films to date, dramas and comedies alike, have in common centreal figures who are misunderstood, and to some extent brutalized, by the societies in which they live. Yet, they endure and ultimately triumph. If Brooks has a theme, it is this. "One of the purposes of art," he says, his voice for once natural, " is to make things right that are eternally wrong. And the job of the artist is to paint a picture of life as truly and honestly as he sees it, and add that extra dimension of hope, and of fantasy, and of dream."

    In life as in his movies, Brooks has a penchant for the underdog, for righting wrongs: "People he doesn't have to be nice to, he goes out of his way to be nice to," Schwartz says. Brooks does not so much hire people as take them under his wing; he advises them, and often bullies them. "He gives people what he thinks they need," Reiner says, "even if they don't want it," Brooksfilms is without question his second family.

    "The back side," says Brooks, "is that I'm a pretty spiteful, mean, sometimes stupid, insulting, angry man." Yet virtually all of those who have been involved with Brooksfilms would readily work there again. The reason is simple. Says Reiner: "Mel is quick to anger, quick to judge, he's volatile, he's a pain in the ass - he's all things." But most of all, "he's a very, very nourishing human being." A story told by Bergren and DeVore captures teh particular nature of his generosity. Once, before the filming of The Producers had begun, producer Sidney Glazier had treated Brooks to a weekend in London. The fledging director had been installed in a four-star hotel, ministered to in the finest restaurants, and otherwise dazzled. A dozen years later, just before The Elephant Man went into production, Brooks took his two 24-year-old screenwriters for a weekend in Paris. "He put us up at the Plaza Atenee," says Bergren, smiling at the memory, "and we drove out to the coast of Normandy, to see where he had been billeted as a soldier, during the war."

    When I first ask Brooks why he began Brooksfilms, he replies, rippling his brows like a contemporary Tevye, "Somewhere in the Talmud, it tells you that you must return a portion of your gain in this world. You must give back." It is a response which, with its patriarchal pomposity, conviction, and charm, reveals as much about the man as does the company that bears his name.

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