By Gerald Peary

In the New Hollywood Era of the 1960s and 1970s, as weakening studio control granted directors more artistic freedom, the auteur theory, which regards the director as the primary artist among all those who contribute to filmmaking, gained traction. It was embraced by both the media and by directors themselves, who were glad to see their contribution so glorified. One positive was the discovery of filmmakers whose work was under the radar but virtually all the feted directors were white and overwhelmingly heterosexual—only in recent decades have the contributions of marginalized auteur filmmakers been recognized.

“Mavericks: Interviews with the World’s Iconoclast Filmmakers” amplifies the voices of a wide-ranging group of groundbreaking filmmakers, including Mel Brooks, Samira Makhmalbaf, Roberta Findlay, Howard Alk, Ousmane Sembéne, and John Waters, whose identities, perspectives, and works are antithetical to typical Hollywood points of view. Author Gerald Peary, whose experience as a film studies professor, film critic, arts journalist, and director of documentaries culminates in a lifetime of film scholarship, presents a riveting collection of interviews with directors—including Black, queer, female, and non-Western filmmakers—whose unconventional work is marked by their unique artistic points of view and molded by their social and political consciousness. With contextualizing introductions and insightful questions, Peary reveals the brilliance of these maverick directors and offers readers a lens into the minds of these incredible and engaging artists.

At the end of the interview with Mel Brooks, I had acquired a Hebraic uncle. We took a Jewish photograph—that’s when you squeeze with a relative into the snapshot. And I assured Uncle Mel that we’ll get together the next time he’s in New York. And, of course, I’ll write a nice story about this 5’7 ½ inch sweetheart of a man. At least he’d been a sweetheart to me. Brooks had reciprocated the warm feeling. “I feel good about this interview,” he’d confided, when, earlier, we sat at our table at the Russian Tea Room. “How can I tell? Because I wiped up my food with bread. If I’m uncomfortable, I won’t do that.”

Luckily for our intimacy, we consumed fine victuals without, for a time, confronting the subject of deepest concern to the filmmaker: the merits of High Anxiety, his newest film. I avoided confessing that the film is only mildly pleasurable, neither as sustained conceptually as Brooks’ earlier brilliant Young Frankenstein (1974) nor filled with the belly laughs of Blazing Saddles (1974). Instead, we talked spiritedly about food. Of where to get the best sturgeon in New York, or the best smoked salmon in the whole world, or whether it makes sense to drive all the way to Nova Scotia to get lox almost off the boat. The cinema was totally forgotten. Until Brooks suddenly interrupted the feasting, declaring, “You haven’t asked me one stinkin’ question about High Anxiety.”

I pretended I didn’t hear him. We continued eating, and soon Brooks was deep into Jewish relative stories about his Lower East Side grandfather who pushed a herring cart and spoke fluent Norwegian, about his big brother Irving who patented some scientific invention that sounds like a million dollars, about his 81-year-old mother who, at 75, moved to Florida by herself. But probes into his own psyche or questions about his marriage to Anne Bancroft [1] drew blanks from Brooks. “I don’t want the audience to understand me, just my pictures. I am essentially a shy and private person. What I say is meaningless. What I make on the screen is everything.”

Like many in show business, Brooks compensates for his shyness with a forced buoyancy. He sang to our waitress, Louise, “Every little breeze…” with a Maurice Chevalier Gallic accent, and, at first, punctured our conversation with jokes (Tolstoy as a TV writer: “Leo, we need a belly laugh!”) and more jokes (“They don’t fool around here, they make hot coffee here.”) But when Brooks understood that this interviewer didn’t demand one-liners, he visibly relaxed. The adrenalin slowed down. He could talk cinema shop and explain how he operates as a film director. “I’m going to tell you the truth,” he straight-faced. “I don’t tell everyone the truth, but the name of your paper is REAL.”

So what is he like on the movie set? “No visitors are allowed. The sessions are hard and tough.” Sometimes he has to sit on manic comedians like newcomer Ron Carey, the chauffeur in High Anxiety, who would entertain the crew instead of keeping his shenanigans for the camera. “It doesn’t mean there isn’t a good giggle going on,” Brooks said, “When you have people like Dom DeLuise, Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, you’re going to pinch each other, bite each other, and laugh. But you aren’t going to be bullshitted. The most desperately evil thing that happens is silly compliments from sycophants and parasites: ‘That was wonderful, Mel!’ I think the death of pictures is the set celebrating all that phony baloney bullshit.”

Many films are born dead, Brooks continued, because of “phony baloney” at the moment of conception. “A movie about mosquitos? WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Fellini is a genius, but when he made Satyricon [1969], I walked out in the middle.” He turns his ire on his good friend and collaborator, Gene Wilder, a Brooks star since The Producers (1967) and screenwriter of Young Frankenstein.  Recently, Wilder has turned to directing with two trivial farces, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975) and The World’s Greatest Lover (1977). “Gene is one of the best directors who ever lived,” Brooks asserted, pure hyperbole. “But his milieux are tired clichés.”

On the other hand, Brooks claimed to have persuaded a dubious Herbert Ross to make the successful dance melodrama, The Turning Point (1977).  “I said, ‘Schmuck, they will love it! Go to Akron, Ohio. Even there, you can’t get a ticket to the ballet.’”

As for his own film projects, Brooks takes no chances developing them. He begins with four writers voting on jokes, a secretary giggling or not giggling, a stenographer pool reacting to the material they are typing. “I will tell you something I haven’t told anybody,” Brooks said, and sailed into his behind-the-scenes revelation. “When we get a rough draft of the script, we send fifty copies out to friends, relatives, and we give them coding instructions. If you don’t like something, give it an X. If you hate something, give it two XXs. “ He wants only amateurs, private citizens, believing they care more about storyline than Hollywood executives. “The Producers lives because it is well-constructed and not because of ‘Springtime for Hitler.’”

At last, our plates were cleared and coffee was before us. It was the inescapable moment to discuss High Anxiety, so I began by noting the overt Hitchcockian setup: the young blonde heroine (a bewigged Madeline Kahn), the neurotic WASP hero (an agoraphobic Brooks as Phi Betta Kappa Harvard psychologist Dr. Richard Thorndyke), and parody scenes from various Hitchcock classics. Brooks told me that, before filming, he managed an audience with Hitch himself, and found Sir Alfred not only witty but worth squeezing. “He’s a hard man to hug because he is big and fat. His eyes get moist and he’s very sweet and emotional.”

Hitchcock wholeheartedly approved of the idea he would be spoofed, and suggested that Brooks would do best by ridiculing the most obsessive films in the director’s vast oeuvre. “He told me, ‘Play the tower scene from Vertigo [1958].” And with Psycho [1960]: “Do it seriously, but move a half inch to the left or right. It could be hysterical.” In High Anxiety, the Vertigo and The Birds (1963) jokes are cleverly executed and funny. Brooks’ recreation of the shower scene from Psycho is the transcendent comedy moment of the movie, with Mel’s own naked body replacing that of Janet Leigh.

The gags come from all the writers, three plus Brooks on High Anxiety; but Brooks takes credit for the visual execution. “Without tooting my horn too much,” he said, “I’m a little more cinematic than the other guys. The scene with [the man] dying in the car, I shot exactly like Hitchcock would shoot it—the rain, the truck passing, even the blood coming out of the ear.”

Skirting discussing its artistic merit, I confront Brooks about the politics of High Anxiety. Rather, it’s lack of politics. Why should a studio spend million of dollars making a movie as restricted in larger meaning as is High Anxiety? “Should I give the money to the United Jewish Appeal?” Brooks quipped. Then he balked at the idea that his films have not been socially responsible. “To say there is no message in them is, I think, to be unfair and shortsighted.” He ran through his repertoire. “The Producers was about love and greed, and it’s also about neo-Nazism. I thought it was the best way to handle Hitler. To treat him ludicrously is to do more damage than to get on a soapbox and rail.” The Twelve Chairs (1976) was an “anti-totalitarian film” showing “that share and share alike does not work in the Soviet Union. It’s a very serious picture: how much can the individual sacrifice for the collective?” And Blazing Saddles was the most “message” of all. “I treated racial intolerance, bigotry, homosexual love.”

Suddenly, Brooks exploded the case he was building for himself, perhaps realizing he was coming to Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie (1976), and High Anxiety in a row. “No, I agree with you,” he said. “I get paid money to make people laugh and I love doing it. I wasn’t put on earth to run a country. I use my film budgets to make frivolities instead of message pictures.” [2] He also has no interest in making incisive movies about modern love relations like Woody Allen films or the screen adaptions of Neil Simon. “No. I go to work. I don’t think they go to work. I think they sit in some corner of their mind or soul. I leave my heart and soul in my apartment. My job instead it to bring jellies and jams to your local theater.

“I never sign political statements. I never use my name for, quote, ‘good things.’ It’s a secret ballot. I always vote quietly. I never campaign for anybody. I may be wrong.” Brooks sensed that the interviewer was not placated, that I wanted more from the immortal 2000-year-old man.  Brooks sighed, eyeing his near-nephew. “You’re an idealist like my children. They think I can do anything.”

Notes:

1. Actress Anne Bancroft (1931-2005) was married to Brooks from 1964 until her death. She appeared in two films directed by her husband: Silent Movie and To Be or Not To Be (1983).
2. None of the films directed by Mel Brooks since High Anxiety would qualify as “message pictures”: History of the World, Part 1 (1981), Spaceballs (1987), Life Stinks (1991), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).

This interview originally appeared in “The Real Paper”, February 11, 1978

Thanks to the University Press of Kentucky for allowing this 1978 talk with Mel Brooks to appear in “EatDrinkFilms.” This is one of 28 director interviews in “Mavericks: Interviews with the World’s Iconoclast Filmmakers,” a new book by Gerald Peary.You can order it from your favorite local book store, straight from University of Kentucky (supporting an academic publisher), or their links to online sites.  

Hitchcock’s sense of humor was often as funny as Mel’s as you will see in his trailers for THE BIRDS and PSYCHO.

Click here to Laugh and Eat with Mel Brooks in this EatDrinkFilms bonus gallery.

Gerald Peary, an American filmmaker, professor, and critic, is the author of nine books on cinema. including works on John Ford, Rita Hayworth, Samuel Fuller, American animated cartoons, Quentin Tarantino He was a long-time film critic for the late Boston Phoenix and now writes film related articles for the New England on-line magazineThe Arts Fuse.His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Toronto Globe, Chicago Tribune, and The Boston Globe. Peary has directed feature documentaries, Archie’s Betty (2015), For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009), co-directed The Rabbi Goes West (2019) with his wife. Amy Geller. He acted in the cult independent feature, Computer Chess (2013) directed by Andrew Bujalski.

You can watch author Gearld Peary’s films online.