This Script Is Packed With a Lifetime of Laughs

Instead of dozing off through summer reruns on television, a suggestion: rent some Irving Brecher films.

Who? Irving Brecher, the only screenwriter to have written two Marx Brothers movies by himself: “Go West” and “At the Circus.” Plus the musicals “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Yolanda and the Thief,” “Summer Holiday” and “Bye Bye Birdie.”

Now that’s replacement entertainment!

Eighty-seven years funny, living with his wife, Norma, in Westwood, Brecher gets residual checks for these classics, from Europe. In the States, Writers Guild members receive no residuals for movies made before 1960. So perhaps it’s no wonder he supported the guild’s recent efforts to win a new contract.

He’s a member of the Directors Guild too--for films such as “Sail a Crooked Ship,” featuring Robert Wagner and Ernie Kovacs, and “The Life of Riley,” starring William Bendix.

“We had strikes back then too,” he says of the 1940s. “Writers who never wrote a thing to speak of hurt their colleagues by caving in.”

At the Friar’s Club in Beverly Hills one recent afternoon, in that huge dining room of comical old men, Brecher ruminates over a strange, dark pastrami sandwich and offers this advice to guilds facing corporate negotiating teams: “I always hope we won’t cave.”

Venerable wisdom, the kind that can only come from a writer who punched up “The Wizard of Oz.”

“The Wizard of Oz” needed punching? “Yes,” Brecher says of the uncredited assignment. “The straw man, the tin man, the lion--Mervyn Leroy said, ‘They’re not funny enough.’ ”

Leroy was the producer who first hired him, because he thought Brecher looked a lot like Irving Thalberg in a portrait behind Leroy’s desk. Brecher was just one of many writers--credited and uncredited--to have a hand in the final product.

Brecher began writing at age 19, selling gags to Milton Berle, who then brought him from Yonkers to Hollywood in 1937.

“When I first got here, the orange blossom scent would knock you down in Pasadena,” Brecher says.

He tells his stories with an uncanny Groucho intonation, and why not? Marx and S.J. Perelman called Brecher one of “the three fastest with the quick witty retort” they’d ever known. (The others: George S. Kaufman and Oscar Levant.)

Of the seven musicals Brecher wrote at MGM--”a haven for writers”--”Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944) remains his favorite. Judy Garland, he says, at first refused her role.

“L.B. Mayer called me in and said, ‘I can’t do anything with this goddarn stubborn Judy. She thinks this kid [Margaret O’Brien] is gonna steal the picture.’ ” Mayer asked Brecher to read his script to Garland.

“I was friendly with Judy,” says the writer. “She came to our house with songwriters when we had parties and, of course, she was sweet.”

But the way the writer read, Brecher confides now, “was terribly deceitful. When I got to O’Brien’s lines, I would kind of throw them away. Then I would emphasize what Judy’s character, Trudy, was doing. At the end I kind of nudged her and nudged her. Well, it became the biggest picture she ever did, which is no thanks to me.”

His screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award--it lost to “Going My Way”--and “Meet Me in St. Louis” became MGM’s biggest moneymaker in 25 years.

Twenty years later for “Bye Bye Birdie,” Brecher rewrote playwright Michael Stewart’s script.

“They didn’t know how to end it on a humorous note,” Brecher explains. Workmanlike as a tailor at a fitting, he adjusted the Dick Van Dyke character to make him a chemistry professor, and altered the denouement by adding Russian ballet. “The end of the film was ‘Swan Lake.’ And Van Dyke had invented some kind of pill that made turtles speed up, and fed one of these pills to the Russian conductor, who increased the tempo to such a point that all the dancers on the stage went wild, and the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ audience got hysterical.”

But Brecher was a mere 24-year-old in the presence of his idol the first time he met Groucho Marx in 1938. “I’m sure that my voice and knees were shaking,” he says. “Mervyn Leroy introduced us, and Groucho nodded and I said, ‘Hello,’ and he turns to Leroy and he says, ‘Hello? This is the writer you’re gonna put on the picture, a guy who ad-libs hello?’ ”

Brecher found it easiest to write for Groucho, who became one of his closest friends. “I’m a complainer, a dissenter and a put-downer,” the octogenarian says with no trace of regret. “He was my alter ego. I liked the anarchism.”

The last two reels of “Go West” were called by the critic Bosley Crowther among the 10 best sequences in motion picture history. They included a crazy, Keaton-esque human cartoon of a train ride, “shot in the San Fernando Valley,” says Brecher, starting to laugh. “The train went off the tracks, it went under a house. . . . It took great liberties.”

When he laughs his old man laugh, Brecher’s whole body grins, head sinking into his chest like a turtle, arms fluttering over crossed-and-uncrossed skinny legs, like someone is tickling him. “I had them burn up the train to keep it going,” he continues, illustrating how Harpo and Chico chopped all the wood they could find, including the seats, floor and ceiling of the club car.

He’s still writing. One of his letters was printed on the editorial page of this newspaper recently. In the “funny box” at the bottom was this punchy gag: “I join my fellow citizens in wishing Dick Cheney good health. If anything serious happened to him, George W. Bush would become president.”

*

Hank Rosenfeld is a comedy writer--looking for work, of course.