It’s a Classic Case of Chutzpah

“Call me back in exactly eight minutes. Eight [pause] minutes.” Eight minutes later. “I’ll meet you in the lobby in 20--no, make it 25--minutes. Find a place to eat. I’ll have breakfast. You’ll have lunch.”

It is Mel Brooks, 74, the gravelly voice unmistakable, pitched somewhere between a whisper and a shout. And, sure enough, 25 minutes later, the man himself is there, still wiping the sleep from his eyes, but dapper in gray slacks and black sweater and ready to go.

It’s quiet in the hotel restaurant. Robin Wagner, the scenic designer who is one of the A-list Broadway professionals assembled in Chicago for the pre-Broadway engagement of the stage musical of Brooks’ “The Producers,” is finishing up his meal, so there’s a brief hello and a chat with him. But then the waiter arrives (“Domingo? Is that your name? Are you our waiter? You’re in for a lot of trouble”), and since breakfast omelets are off the menu at this hour, Brooks sails into a bowl of Thai noodle soup and lots of bread sticks. Between spoonfuls of soup, he talks about his life and times with “The Producers,” both the original 1968 movie and the new musical playing through the end of the month in the Cadillac Palace Theatre before moving to Broadway’s St. James Theatre for an April opening. He is, of course, enthusiastic about the makings of his “old-fashioned, traditional musical comedy,” he says. Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick are the stars; Thomas Meehan is the co-librettist; Susan Stroman is the director-choreographer; Wagner has designed the sets, William Ivey Long the costumes. They’re Tony winners all.

“Over the years, there’s always been talk of turning the movie into a musical, but it didn’t take hold until three years ago, when the producer David Geffen kept at me to do it,” Brooks says.

Yes, but before we get into that, let’s talk about “The Producers” movie, the comedy he wrote and directed that launched a string of Brooks film classics: “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” “High Anxiety.” It’s a show-business comedy, an Academy Award-winning movie that Brooks calls “my love letter to Broadway.” And it’s one of the funniest American movies ever made.

Question: Was the character of Max Bialystock--the destitute, unscrupulous producer played by Zero Mostel--based on a real person?

Answer: He was a real man, a man who shall remain nameless, an angel and a devil. Large, bald, always wore an alpaca coat and a homburg, no matter what the weather. And he literally took money from little old ladies to finance his shows. They would make their checks out to “cash.” In the musical, we’ve got a scene where one of the ladies says, “Cash. Hmmm. That’s a funny name for a show.” And Bialystock answers, “So was ‘Strange Interlude.’ ” But I owe him a lot. I worked for him a little while, and he gave me my first real job in the theater, as an actor and producer in a way off-Broadway play. A lovely man.

Q: When did you write the movie’s script?

A: Between 1964 and 1966. Buck Henry and I had gotten lucky writing “Get Smart” for television, and now I was looking to do something new. But the idea for the story had been there a long time. In my mind, that old producer of mine became Bialystock, and I was Leo Bloom, the little accountant who falls under his influence, the Brooklyn Jew whose dream was to get into show business.

Q: Did you have trouble selling the script?

A: I took it everywhere. Nobody wanted it. They couldn’t deal with a comedy called “Springtime for Hitler,” which was its original title. Frivolous, outrageous, sacrilegious. Someone suggested changing it from Hitler to Mussolini. I said, “No, that wouldn’t work.” Everybody hated the title, so I said, “OK, we’ll call it ‘The Producers.’ ”

Luckily, I finally met Sidney Glazier, a producer who hadn’t done much with features but who had won an Academy Award for his documentary, “The Eleanor Roosevelt Story.” “Don’t worry,” he told me. “We’ll get this made.” We took it to Joe Levine, the head of Embassy Pictures, and asked him to read it. “I don’t read,” he said. “Talk.” So I talked, and he liked it. Hitler didn’t bother him.

He was behind us all the way--except in the first preview. We played it in a theater with 1,600 seats, and six of them were filled, including one in the front row with a lady who slept through it. I saw Joe Levine walking out with his head down; he didn’t say anything.

But the movie was a hit. It ran a year in New York, a year in Chicago, a year in Los Angeles. In Sweden, they used the original title, “Springtime for Hitler,” and it played five years.

Q: What about casting?

A: I wouldn’t have done the movie without Zero. It was written for a rhinoceros. He was the one who I knew could play a charging, maddening crazy man who loved money more than life.

Q: And Gene Wilder as Leo Bloom?

A: He was appearing with my wife, Anne Bancroft, in “Mother Courage” on Broadway, and every time I saw him, I laughed. “What are you laughing at?” he asked me. “My lines are not funny.” I said, “You’re funny. I can’t help it.”

When we got the go-ahead to make the movie, he was playing in the comedy “Luv.” Sidney Glazier and I went to his dressing room; I threw the script on the table and said, “That’s it. You’re Leo Bloom.” He started to cry. We were so happy.

Q: How did you come across Kenneth Mars, who was so perfect as Franz Liebkind, the nut case who has written the world’s worst, most offensive play, “Springtime for Hitler”?

A: Not my first choice. First choice was Dustin Hoffman, who wanted the part and had agreed to do it. Then one night, I wake up because he’s throwing pebbles at my bedroom window. I tell him, “Hey, I’m not Roxane. You’ll break the glass. What do you want?”

He says he’s got to talk to me, so I get dressed and go out and I sit on the steps with him. It’s cold. And he says, “You’ll never believe this, but Mike Nichols wants me to audition with your wife for a movie he’s doing. Will you let me go to Los Angeles for the audition?”

“Sure,” I say, because there was no way he was going to get the part. Well, he auditions brilliantly, he gets the part, he makes “The Graduate” with Anne, and the rest is history, as they say. After that, we searched and searched, and I thought we were never going to find somebody; then one day Kenny Mars walks in and that’s our man.

Q: Were you nervous about directing your first movie?

A: No. I was like a bird that was flying. It’s what I do. Anyway, as a writer, all the pictures are already in your head.

Q: Had you always intended to direct the movie yourself?

A: That was absolutely part of the deal. I had given too many scripts to too many people who had interpreted them into the toilet, and I wasn’t going to let that happen to this one. This script was stamped, “Play as written.” There wasn’t an ad lib or improvised moment in the movie. Except Gene wrote his own speech in the courtroom scene where he says how much Leo owes to Bialystock and how much he loves him. I’ve written a love song, a ballad, “ ‘Til Him,” based on that speech, for the musical. And I’m told it’s pretty good.

Q: Speaking of songwriting, was turning out the new songs for the musical hard for you?

A: Don’t forget, I wrote a lot of songs before “The Producers.” When I worked on the “Show of Shows” on television in the ‘50s, I wrote songs like the “Towers Trot.” [He sings.] “You walk across the floor, and then you do that step. You walk up to the door, and then you do that step.” I wanted to write the score for this musical, but nobody was sure I could write songs. They knew I could write lyrics, but they didn’t know I could write music.

When we first started working on the musical, one idea was to use “Springtime for Hitler” and “Prisoners of Love,” which I had written for the movie, and then have [Broadway composer] Jerry Herman write everything else. So, I went to see Jerry. As soon as he heard the proposal, he sat down at his piano and played about eight songs, all of them mine. “I’m Tired,” from “Blazing Saddles.” “High Anxiety.” And so on. “Write it yourself,” he said to me. “You’ve already done ‘Springtime for Hitler.’ That’s your ‘Mame.’ That’s your ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Just go ahead and write more.”

Q: So what did you write?

A: I don’t want to give away any state secrets, but there’s one called “We Can Do It,” which comes in the scene where Leo and Bialystock hit on their plan to make a fortune on a flop Broadway show. The first new song I wrote was “Where Did We Go Right?”--which comes after their awful play becomes a big hit. And there’s that song I wrote for the scene in the movie where the singing actors are auditioning for the role of Hitler. One of them sings, “Have You Ever Heard a German Band?”

It goes like this. [He sings.] “Haben sie ge-heard of das Deutsches Band? With a bang, with a boom, with a bang, bang, boom, boom, bang!” For the musical, I wrote more lines for it: “Polish folk songs and French oo-lah-lah / Can’t compare with German oom-pah-pah.”

Q: Did these new songs come easily to you?

A: Once I started writing them, I couldn’t stop. And I had encouragement from Ronnie Graham, a comic genius whom I first met when he played in a skit I wrote for “New Faces of 1952.” It was a satire of Arthur Miller--who wrote me a lovely note about it--called “Fathers and Sons,” about a son who was a failure in the family business, which was lying, stealing and cheating. Ronnie was something of a genius. Exactly. Often inept in life, but always ept in art.

And I’ve had the help of Glen Kelly, a lapsed Mormon and a musical genius. Let me put it this way. I write [he sings], “I’m singin’ in the rain, just singing in the rain,” and he writes the arrangement--”doo-dee-doo-doo, doodle doo-dee-doo-doo.”

Also Patrick Brady, another genius, who did the vocal arrangements and is our conductor.

Q: So you’re happy with “The Producers” as a stage musical?

A: I’m loving it. I’m getting to work on a big Broadway show, a musical comedy like they made before Andrew Lloyd Webber came along with all that Sturm und Drang.

That’s not real life. Now, “Guys and Dolls.” To me, that’s real.