`Producers' pic gains stature as time goes by.
NEW YORK The latest word on "The Producers" is that ticket orders are now on sale for the Christmas season of 2002. Mel Brooks' Broadway adaptation of his own 1968 film has won a record-breaking slew of Tony Awards, and available seats are so hard to get that the voice mail of the show's press representative offers this stony injunction: "Do not leave requests for house seats. Any telephone requests for house seats will not be returned."Question: If "The Producers" is so great now, why wasn't it so great then? Though, like "Harold and Maude," it became an instant cult delight, it opened to generally dismal notices.
"I wasn't crazy about the original," says Andrew Sarris, ex-film critic for the Village Voice who now reviews films for the New York Observer. "I panned it. We were still too close to the real thing" (Nazi Germany and the Holocaust). "Things didn't work cinematically. It wasn't well-made. It was more like specialized cinematic vaudeville. The bad taste wasn't just about Hitler and gays, it was about women, too."
Against the grain
Timing may have had something to do with it as well. One of the most brutal, divisive decades in American history was drawing to a close, and with it the horrible televised spectacles of assassination, burning inner cities, campus revolt and body bags flown home from the war in Vietnam. The feminist slogan "The personal is political" was a public mantra completely lost on cinematic down-on-his-luck producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and his timid accountant Leopold Bloom (Gene Wilder) as they schemed to sell 25,000% of a sure-fire flop to a bunch of gullible old women "stopping off," as Bialystock says, "to get a last thrill on the way to the cemetery."
Memory doesn't serve that way anymore, despite "The Producers' "unretouched, unexpurgated presence in cable reruns and video. Notions of taste now seem either quaint or starchy edicts of a new kind of shock troop, the P.C. police. When a female moviegoer buttonholed Brooks with the charge that "The Producers" stooped to vulgarity, his memorable reply, "Madam, it rises below vulgarity," now seems the timely riposte, where earlier it would have been merely objectionable.
Don't ever change
"The Producers" on Broadway has meant rediscovery of a 75-year-old figure who stands against our ideal of self-reinvention by virtue of never having changed. Not through the late '40s and early '50s era of writing for TV's
"Your Show of Shows" and "The Sid Caesar Show" and the later TV hit, "Get Smart." Not through the classic record series "The 2000 Year Old Man" nor "Blazing Saddles," "Young Frankenstein," "Silent Movie," "High Anxiety" or "History of the World--Part 1."
"Much of Brooks' humor," the late Kenneth Tynan observed in "Show People," "... is inspired by fear: fear of injury, illness, sex and failure; and also of unfriendly Gentiles, especially large ones, and most particularly if they are Germans or Cossacks."
And in his stage review of "The Producers," The New Yorker's John Lahr celebrated comedy's defiance of death itself by quoting, from the same Tynan essay, Brooks as a PFC in war-torn Europe in WWII:
"Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier."
Before the rise
Before he convinced producer Joseph E. Levine that he could indeed direct "The Producers," Brooks had fallen on hard times, which included divorce from his first wife, a Broadway flop called "All American" and a failed screenplay called "Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud."
"He'd dropped off the screen," recalls Larry Gelbart, one of Brooks' Sid Caesar cohorts who'd gone on to other successes. "He was out of it. No one thought he'd direct." Gelbart also recalls Brooks touting a novel called "Springtime for Hitler," which later became "The Producers."
"But all he had was a title. There was no novel."
What Brooks had instead was what he's always had -- a matchless talent for madcap verbal improvisation. As conceived, Leopold Bloom, one of the main characters from James Joyce's "Ulysses," was to be a tidy, dutiful, timid Jewish accountant fully prepared "to play it straight and trudge right to his grave."
`Bite, kiss, take, grab ...'
Then he runs into Max Bialystock the producer. "Bite, kiss, take, grab, lavish, urinate--whatever you can do that's physical, he will do." The two catalyze each other. Mild Leo hatches a fraudulent scheme and their lives are never the same.
Ten years passed between a writer-director's handshake and delivery of "The Producers"' final cut, and 32 years more before it became a Broadway smash musical. A lot of people still don't think there's anything funny about fascism, and grim echoes of the Holocaust are still with us. But "The Producers"' audacious energy hasn't dated.
Isn't that one definition of a classic?
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| Title Annotation: | 'The Producers' film did not enjoy the success of the theatrical production |
|---|---|
| Author: | CHRISTON, LAWRENCE |
| Publication: | Variety |
| Article Type: | Brief Article |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Sep 10, 2001 |
| Words: | 842 |
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