Young Frankenstein: A Mel Brooks Book

INTRODUCTION

You have to really know a genre to make fun of it, and to really know it, you have to love it. When I was young, I loved the movies because they saved my life. I was so grateful to cinema for opening up worlds that were not open to me as a poor Jewish kid from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I was born in 1926, and everybody in my building was headed for jobs in the Garment District in Manhattan. I assumed I'd be working in the shipping department somewhere on 7th Avenue. I never dreamed I would do something else—let alone make my living in the movies. Nothing else was open to us.

But at the local movie theater, I could go anywhere—Arabia, the West, Transylvania. We played street games to keep busy in Williamsburg—punchball, baseball, roller hockey—but nothing nourished our dreams like the movies. Those movies gave us lovely worlds to inhabit. When I was a teenager and I saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on shiny, big black-and-white floors, oh wow! You never saw shiny black-and-white floors in Williamsburg. There was just oilcloth and sometimes Jewish newspapers covering them when your mother would wash them. We never had money for anything. But for one thin dime, you got three feature films, a race, some newsreels, some shorts. My mother would send me to the theater with a salmon and tomato sandwich, wrapped in wax paper—'cause it's a long day, you know?

I was five years old in 1931 when James Whale's Frankenstein came out. The following summer the movie played at a theater in Williamsburg and my older brother, Bernie, took me to see it. My father had died of tuberculosis when he was only thirty-four and I was two. And there was Mama, thirty years old, with four little boys. Mama had to clean. She wanted me out. Bernie said, "I'm going to see Frankenstein, maybe he will get scared." My mother said, "I don't care! Take him." So Bernie took me, and that movie scared the hell out of me. I was really terrified. It was a big mistake. It was the scariest thing I saw in my life.

That was a hot summer in Brooklyn, and in our two-bedroom apartment, I slept right by the fire escape. I said to my mother, "Mom, please close the window." She said, "It's a hundred degrees in here, I can't close the window. What's the matter?" I said, "If you leave the window open, Frankenstein will come and eat me." (We called the monster Frankenstein because we didn't know the difference.)

My mother said, "OK, let's talk about this. First of all, the monster lives in Romania, in Transylvania. Romania is not near the ocean. So he's going to have to get to Odessa. He's going to have go a long way to get to a boat. Then he has to have money to pay for his passage. He may not have any money if he is just a monster. He may not have pockets. Let's say he makes his way to Odessa and he gets a boat to America. The boat may go to Miami. It may go to Baltimore. It may not go to New York. If it goes to New York and he gets off there, he doesn't know the subway system. If he finds the BMT (what we called the subway back then) and he gets to Brooklyn, he doesn't know our street. Let's say he does find our street. But remember, the people on the first floor have their window open. He is not going to climb way up. If he's hungry, he is going to eat who's ever there on the first floor."

And you know, Mom made sense. So I said, "OK, leave the window open." But it haunted me. Actually, it haunted me for years. I mean, it was the scariest thing. I was always worried. Then to add insult to injury, this guy James Whale kept making more Frankenstein movies.

More than forty years later, when I was finally a little less scared, Whale's movies would inspire me and my friend and collaborator Gene Wilder to make Young Frankenstein. I first met Gene in 1963, when he was starring in a Broadway production of Mother Courage with Anne Bancroft, whom I was dating at the time and would later marry. Gene and I would go on to make three movies together—The Producers in 1967, Blazing Saddles in 1974, and Young Frankenstein, also in 1974, which I consider our biggest achievement.

Gene played a chaplain in Mother Courage. He'd come off stage and say, "Why are they laughing at me?" I said, "Look in the mirror! The chaplain is just blessed by God. He's funny. Don't fight it. Just be sincere. And always be amazed by the fact that they're laughing at you. It'll be good for your career." We used to go out for dinner, and I'd tell Gene all about what I was then calling Springtime for Hitler—it wasn't called The Producers yet. I'd tell him about this character Leo Bloom. He's silly, he's angelic, he's the most brilliant accountant who ever lived. But as a human being he's lost, he doesn't know how to behave. He's never been kissed. He doesn't know anything. Gene said, "I could play that." But he thought we'd never get it made.

Gene was growing as an artist. One day he replaced Alan Arkin on Broadway in a Murray Schisgal play called Luv. He was in his dressing room taking off his makeup between a matinee and an evening performance when Sidney Glazier, the producer of The Producers, and I walked in. I threw a script down on the makeup table and said, "OK, never do it, huh? In two months we're gonna be at Mende Brown's studio on 26th Street, and you're gonna be Leo Bloom." And Gene wept and he wept and he wept. I said, "I can't use you if you just keep crying!" Gene is the most natural actor who ever lived. I said, "You're free to do anything you want in this, Gene."

That's how we started working together. And as much as I had wanted Gene for The Producers, I didn't want him to be the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles. I was shooting for the stars. I wanted the eloquence of a John Gielgud in a Western outfit. A leather face. A guy who was beaten down. I didn't want him to be funny. I wanted the black sheriff to be funny, and a couple of other people to be funny, but I wanted the Waco Kid to be serious. I was dead wrong, but I didn't know it yet. I hadn't realized if you can find a funny actor who can be serious, then you've got heaven. You've got the best. That was Gene Wilder, who never knew how funny he was, who always played things seriously.

Instead I cast Gig Young as the Waco Kid. Gig had been starring in movies going back to the 1940s and had recently been in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? with Jane Fonda. He had a serious alcohol problem—his agent said, "Gig's way over it!"—but on the first day of shooting it became clear that wasn't true. We hung him upside down in the jail cell, and green stuff started spewing out of his mouth. We called an ambulance, and they took Gig to the hospital.

That night, with my star in no shape to film, I called Gene to cry to him. He said, "Mel, I know every line." I had sent Gene a script six months earlier, and he had memorized everything immediately—he had an amazing ability to do that. Gene came out the next day, tried on a costume, and picked out a horse. That was Saturday. On Sunday we did one rehearsal. And on Monday morning at nine o'clock we were shooting, and he was a perfect Waco Kid!

Little did I know that when Gene showed up to film Blazing Saddles, he was plotting to get me on board Young Frankenstein. Lucky for me it worked! Of all of my films, I am the proudest of this one. We set out to make a beautiful period picture, with all of the craftsmanship of James Whale's 1930s films. And, of course, this time with laughs. My hope was that Young Frankenstein would transport audiences the way I was transported as a kid sitting in the dark in Williamsburg. I think we succeeded, and in this book I will show you how we did it.