Showing posts with label Mel Brooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mel Brooks. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Contained explosions: the screen persona and refreshing honesty of Deceased Artiste Gene Wilder

There have been a flood of pieces written about Gene Wilder in the days since his passing. A handful of his film performances are so beloved (and rightly so) that the emotions unleashed by his death have been of the kind that usually accompany the passing of a pop star or an A-list movie star. Wilder hadn’t been in a box-office hit since the Eighties and yet viewers have a strong love for him, a love that was kindled by about a half-dozen truly great films and another half-dozen that are well remembered because of Wilder’s interaction with other great comic actors.

I would argue that anything Wilder was in from the late Sixties to the mid-Seventies is worth seeing — the Eighties much less so, and he gave up the ghost in the early Nineties, working in only a handful of TV movies and series before an unofficial “retirement” in 1999.

A quick commercial break…



The brilliance of his low-key performances, which often erupted into wonderful outbursts of hysteria, was showcased perfectly in the Seventies — that period in which so many performers and filmmakers made superb films and then it all disappeared in a Star Wars-fueled frenzy of crap.

Although most discussions of that era deal exclusively with dramas (or films that were both drama and comedy like The Long Goodbye), the “maverick” period was also exceptional for comedies. Three alumni of the Sid Caesar “school” of comedy writing — Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and (to a lesser extent) Neil Simon — crafted a number of truly excellent films that, in the case of Brooks and Allen, were as daringly original as the brilliant “revisionist” films of that period, and the best all-around comedies since the Golden Age of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Fields & West.

Wilder was an integral part of this, as he costarred in one of the most perfect comedies ever, The Producers (1967), and starred in and coscripted another flawless picture, Young Frankenstein (1974). During the period of “maverick cinema” he made his debut in Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (a prologue to the flood of brilliance provoked by the success of Easy Rider), made the three classics with Mel, starred in an underrated romance (Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx, 1970), made a memorably downbeat comic TV movie (Thursday’s Game), reunited with Le Grand Zero in the ambitious mess Rhinoceros (1974), distinguished himself in Woody’s anthology Everything You Ever Wanted to Learn About Sex… (1972, seen at right), played a rabbi in the Old West in the Robert Aldrich much-loved comedy The Frisco Kid (1979), and gave an unforgettable performance as the infinitely cool, refined yet cruel, Willy Wonka.

Two of the lesser known items above: first a scene from Quackser Fortune


and the entirety of Thursday's Game:


Like many, many others, after Jaws and Star Wars pushed Hollywood into the “blockbuster zone” from which is has never escaped, Wilder never got the same kind of roles after the mid-Seventies because those kind of comedies weren't being made any more. The two masters of American film comedy in the Seventies, Allen and Brooks, became, respectively, a fine filmmaker whose films were no longer overt comedies (and whose artsy ambitions were visible in every Bergman lift) and an unfortunately spotty, uneven director who eventually looked, sadly, like he was copying those (coughZuckerAbrahamsZuckercough) who had learned from him.

So the reason that Wilder's death was greeted with an outpouring of sadness was based on a handful of sublime performances he gave us in the span of a decade. He underplayed his roles beautifully during that period and thus, when the time came — as it so often did — for him to explode, the resulting hysteria was funnier. Willy Wonka might well have remained his best-remembered role because he is the one Wilder character who was utterly in control of his environment.

Wilder was a disciplined actor and, despite his repeated protests in interviews that he was not a funny person, he had perfect comic timing and was (let's be honest here) incredibly lovable. The maverick era saw Woody Allen and Elliot Gould at the two poles of Jewish masculinity in screen comedy — Woody as the uber-nebbish, Gould as the disaffected guy who was big enough to actually fight back if he wanted to.

Wilder was somewhere in between, since he was never as macho as Gould, but he was a more developed, well-adjusted, and more handsome nebbish than Woody. He could thus make Victor “Fron-kon-steen” both a convincingly debonair socialite and a raving madman.

It is a joy to explore Wilder through the Seventies, doing the occasional scene-stealing cameo (as in The Little Prince) while also starring in a string of features that range in quality from absolutely perfect to ambitious misfires like the American Film Theater version of Rhinoceros, which found him reuniting with Zero Mostel:


After the maverick Seventies turned into the blockbuster Eighties, Wilder's career did truly slow down. The films he directed in the style of Young Frankenstein didn't take off, and he was too "neurotic" to play in more conventional rom-coms. His films with Richard Pryor and The Woman in Red (1984) were the only box office successes in his later career (more on those below).


Having invested wisely and never a part of the Hollywood “industry” he stopped making films in the early Nineties, and subsequently appeared in only a handful of TV movies and sitcoms, like the rather bleak Something Wilder (1994-’95), which did have one interesting guest-star:


What interested me about the interviews with Wilder is that, while some of his anecdotes were indeed stories he'd told time and again —how cheering up his ill mother made him a comic performer (best discussed in the interview below), how he met Gilda Radner and his widow Karen — he was also incredibly honest about the relationships with the three individuals that interviewers and members of the public wanted to know about.


The first was, of course, Mel Brooks. Wilder often cited Mel as the one person who got his acting career going for real, after a few years of working in supporting roles in theater and TV. In the process of talking about The Producers Gene also spoke about how welcoming Zero Mostel was to him.


Even though Wilder was Brooks' first choice for Leo Bloom, he found out that he had to audition for Mostel, which made him incredibly nervous. Zero's way of calming him down was to kiss him on the mouth upon meeting him.

The other reminiscences of Zero that Wilder offered were pleasant memories of having lunch with him. When the rest of the cast and crew would be out, he and Zero would sit together eating their sandwiches, with Zero telling him about his past, including his years of being blacklisted as a “Red.”

An animated tangent: Zero and Gene worked together on two films (Producers and Rhinoceros) and the “Letterman” cartoon segments on The Electric Company (the narrator is none other than Joan Rivers).


Back to Mel: Wilder spoke affectionately of him in interviews, discussing the fact that (in spite of Brooks' reputation as an ad-libber), his films contain little to no improvisation; what he wanted performed was the script as written. In various interviews, particularly the Biography episode below, Gene discusses the scrapped project the two were to make after Silent Movie was completed — a comic take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that was dropped when Wilder read that John Cleese had announced a similar project.


Wilder was polite in his interviews in the 2000s (done to promote the five books he wrote), but he was also uncommonly honest (perhaps because he had nothing to lose, having essentially retired from performing). In interviews like this one from 2005 with WNYC's Leonard Lopate, Gene declared that Brooks' films became less interesting when Mel took the starring roles in them.

A bold pronouncement, though sadly true, because as funny as Brooks was and is, his two absolutely perfect films are ones he didn't appear in, while the films he starred in range from uneven but still fun (High Anxiety) to abysmal (Life Stinks). He didn't star in his last two films (the Robin Hood and Dracula spoofs), but by that point his films had indeed started to look like copies of the work of those who were inspired by, or simply imitating, him.

Wilder could be equally blunt about his own work. I was surprised to hear him say in the Biography program above that he wasn't a very good director, as he had spoiled his comedies with untold amounts of “schmaltz.” While I have affection for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975) and The World's Greatest Lover (1977), it is very true that they needed some of Brooks' over-the-top comic approach, while Mel's post-Young Frankenstein films could have used a dose of Wilder's restraint.

Wilder was also very honest in his statements about his four-time screen “partner” Richard Pryor. He maintained that he had fond feelings for Richard, but that they never really socialized. He was also quick to say that Richard was hard to take during the making of Stir Crazy (1980) because he was always arriving on-set late (that being the time when Pryor was heavily into cocaine).

I'm a major fan of both gentlemen but have felt for years that those movies in which they were paired as a team are unfortunately well below par for both of them. I confess I avoided the final film, Another You, but the other three are indeed meager fare for very talented screen comedians. 

Silver Streak (1976) is an action comedy into which they were shoehorned (pleasant to watch, but not very funny). Stir Crazy is a disappointment for all involved but was incredibly popular at the time it was released (by the point where a prison rodeo has taken over the picture, you tend to forget why you love Gene and Richard so much). 

See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) was the grimmest of the bunch. Wilder proudly noted that he rewrote the screenplay (which was significant to him because it was how he met his wife Karen), but the film is as sad as hell. The villains are interestingly cast (Kevin Spacey and Joan Severance, straight from their stint together in the TV series Wiseguy), but there's an air of tragedy hanging over the film. At the time it was shot, Gene was dealing with Gilda Radner's terminal cancer and Richard was starting to look ill (he was later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis).


So both men look haunted throughout this light comedy and, to make matters worse, it's a farce about a blind man and a deaf man who stumble onto a criminal conspiracy. Like the other Pryor-Wilder films, it made a lot of money but was just another mediocre comedy vehicle picture.

Wilder's life was indeed filled with many triumphs, but as he got older, there was a vibe of tragedy that viewers associated with him. This was due in no small part to his “dream relationship” with Gilda Radner. Everyone was so smitten with both of them that their real-life romantic union seemed like a comedy dream come true — the love story of Leo Bloom and Roseanne Rosannadanna.


The details of their relationship were chronicled in countless interviews, Gilda's memoir It's Always Something, and Gene's autobio Kiss Me Like a Stranger. It did seem like a perfect romantic comedy partnership — although the three movies they made together were as meager as the Pryor-Wilder comedies. Their love story was doomed to a tragic end because of the return of Gilda's cancer (which she celebrated beating in her memoir), which lead to her death in May 1989 (a week after See No Evil... was released).

The amount of affection the public had for both of them, and still has (those of us who remember and love 'em both), ensured that Wilder was to be forever thought of as “the tragic widower of Gilda Radner” long after her death. His involvement in founding the charity Gilda's Club further identified him with her.

Thus, it's fascinating to hear him say in the very informal and informative interview below (which isn't dated by the 92nd St Y on YouTube, but which took place in 2007) that Gilda was definitely “not the love of my life.”

He clearly had loved her, but the chronological truth of the situation is that he began dating his widow Karen less than six months after Gilda's death, and he and she remained married until his death from Alzheimer's last week (their union having lasted 27 years; he and Gilda were a couple for seven years).


The honesty that Wilder exhibited in these interviews is not just endearing, it's rare to find in chats with movie stars, who spend most of their time walking on eggshells when asked about their feelings for a collaborator or a loved one.

Wilder's most notable characteristics as a performer were his lovable-nebbish quality and his tendency toward hysterical explosions. The fact that he was uncommonly blunt in conversation makes him even more lovable in my estimation.



"I want everything I've ever seen in the movies!"

Friday, February 18, 2011

"A riot is an ugly thing!": Deceased Artiste Kenneth Mars

Show biz folks die all the time, but it does seem like a lot of people whose work I really loved are dying these days. I was introduced to the brilliance of stalwart comic actor Kenneth Mars by my dad, who would tell me of the wonders of The Producers before I finally got to see it and memorize it (the recent-vintage musical remake is an abomination I won’t even comment on).

Mars did play normal characters quite often (he was the dad in a Molly Ringwald comedy, fer chrissakes), including a lead part in a Frank Gilroy picture I’ve yet to catch up to, Desperate Characters with Shirley MacLaine (1971). But it’s for his absolutely brilliant comic turns he’ll be remembered, most especially the two for Mel Brooks (see below).

In reading Mars’ obits, I became aware of how much work he did as a voice talent for cartoons. It makes perfect sense — in his best comic performances, he was most definitely cartoonlike but played the characters with a sincerity that was gorgeous (and made the characters even funnier). Besides his prolific work on sitcoms, I want to point to two of his performances that absolutely blew me away.

The first is in the overambitious and sadly underwhelming Woody Allen film Shadows and Fog (1991). The film, Woody’s last for Orion Pictures, is his homage to German Expressionist silents and also the work of Franz Kafka. It is a confused picture that has way, way, way too many celebrities in supporting roles and cameos (it could be seen as the Expressionist Mad, Mad, Mad World) — John Malkovich, Madonna (who received prime placement in the Spanish poster, as you can see on the right, although she’s barely in the picture), Jodie Foster, Kathy Bates, Donald Pleasence, John Cusack, David Ogden Stiers, Philip Bosco, Fred Gwynne, Kate Nelligan, Wallace Shawn, William H. Macy, and of course Woody’s main squeeze at the time, who now threatens to sue if her clips are shown in documentaries about him.

The film doesn’t wind up working well as an Expressionist update or as a Kafka-esque comedy. Kenneth Mars shows up at the film’s end as a magician in a circus that Woody has run to, in order to escape a killer. Mars proceeds, with a beautifully understated performance that seems intended to evoke Bergman actor Erland Josephson, to steal the entire movie. I was already a firm fan of Mars’ when I saw the film upon its initial release, but I was very impressed that a really talented character actor could just steal an entire film away from its unnecessarily star-studded cast. Someone has posted the entire film on YT, here is the very end:



The other Mars performance that is indelible for me is his semi-regular work as William W.D. “Bud” Prize on the terrific Fernwood 2-Night and its follow-up program America 2-Night. In that character, Mars achieved something quite unique: he actually made hardcore deadpan comic actors Martin Mull and Fred Willard break up. Unfortunately, the scene in question isn’t on YouTube, but it occurred when “Bud” Prize began to lecture “Barth Gimble” (Mull) and “Jerry Hubbard” (Willard) about why parents shouldn’t let their children transform themselves into pirates. The show was written by brilliant comedy writers, but one could see that Mull and Willard were always “sweetening” their bits with toss-off lines. Mars was the only guest I can remember whose riffing got Mull and Willard to smile broadly on camera (and Mull to hide his face behind a prop, so as not to be seen laughing).

As for clips of Mars, I offer a late Sixties Prell ad he appeared in:



And, from around the same time, the charming low-key sitcom He and She with Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Mars played their Greek fireman neighbor:



Kenny’s introductory sequence in The Producers ranks among the funniest scenes ever. Ever!



An outtake from Young Frankenstein that introduces his Inspector character:



And the classic “a riot is an ugly thing!” bit:



The best for last: Mars as “ambassador-at-large for the Fernwood Chamber of Commerce” William W.D. “Bud” Prize on Fernwood 2-Night. Here he talks to Barth and Jerry about his environmental preservation (which he calls “conservatage”) and his terminal underbite:



Bud Prize debates “Sylvia Miller” (Fannie Flagg) on whether or not she’s having sex with aliens. He also discusses his mentor and “chin-odontist,” the great Cletus Emmett Wheelwelker (Fernwood 2-Night was so goddamned good for several reasons, among them the fact that even the smallest characters had a demented back story):



Bud Prize came back on America 2-Night as Barth’s “interview coordinator.” Here he presents in the flesh the great aviatrix Amelia Earhart… kinda:

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

The Mark Twain Prize to... Tina Fey?: A list of far more deserving candidates for a lifetime achievement award

[The pics used to accompany this blog post are meant to illustrate a point. A pretty obvious one.]

The American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award shows were really something to watch back in the 1970s and ’80s. The folks receiving the prize were bona fide A-list talents who were without question worthy to get a lifetime achievement award. Two-hour award presentations were made to performers and filmmakers on the order of Ford, Welles, Hitchcock, Capra, Huston, Astaire, Cagney, Gish, Davis, Stanwyck, and Fonda.

In the 1990s, as U.S. culture and entertainment took its precipitous slide toward the utter soulless crap that is extremely popular in today’s mainstream, the AFI Award began going to performers and filmmakers whose careers were still in full flourish, but who could guarantee a solid audience for the TV airing of the award show. What had been amazing about the AFI was that, even though the usual “mavericks” (Ray, Fuller, Sirk, and on and on) were going to be ignored, in the '70s and '80s you were treated to CBS (I believe that was the network) presenting a two-hour show saluting the work of Lillian Gish or John Ford or Orson or some Golden Age star who worked in the era of black and white that network television wants to stay far, far away from (the opening and closing moments of Wizard of Oz aside).

Then, with the sole exception of Robert Wise, the AFI turned to honoring only those who would attract TV ratings and a roster of current-day Hollywood names to salute him/her. Nicholson, Eastwood, Spielberg, Scorsese, Streep, and others whose careers were still moving along at a steady clip were then honored, and the result was similar to the many, many moments in the Oscar ceremony when Hollywood slaps itself on the back and reminds us all what wonderful movies used to be made, and how the pap that comes out these days is the obvious continuation of what came before. The most interesting thing about the list of winners that can be found here is that the recipients have gone from being in their 70s and 80s to 45 for the extremely charming but oh-SO-non-versatile Tom Hanks (45).

I bring up all this about the valuelessness of the AFI awards, and the shameless grab for TV ratings (or even a network to air the event — for a bit it was relegated to cable from its original network home), to bring up the subject of yet another valueless encomium, the Mark Twain Prize for Humor. The Kennedy Center presents this honor, and it has been sort of dubious since its inception — what makes the Kennedy Center board experts on humor in America? Whatever their qualifications are or aren’t, the award has followed the same trajectory as the AFI award, except it has been even more singularly pathetic in its choice of honorees, its ignoring comic legends who deserve appreciation, and its craving for viewers (especially since the show airs on PBS, and not a commercial network).

The prize jumped the shark when it made its first fourth honoree, and its first female, Whoopi Goldberg, in 2001. I’m not going to debate Goldberg’s comic pedigree — she did do great accents and voices back when she did standup, but that was a very long, long time ago. In any case, they leapfrogged over the first modern female standup, Phyllis Diller, the second, Joan Rivers, and the many women who populated variety television (never mind the women comedy writers) to move on to Whoopi, after having saluted two national treasures and comic innovators — Richard Pryor and Jonathan Winters — and one gent who had a good run in the Fifties and Sixties, Carl Reiner.

Probably the next horrific honoree was Lorne Michaels in 2004. Michaels spearheaded a show that was brave, bold, and innovative for five years, and has been a walking-dead example of everything that is dull, boring, and formulaic in TV sketch comedy since then (with the exception of the sterling 1984-85 season, which was cast almost entirely with “ringers,” meaning people who were already proven commodities as sketch/character comedians). There have been others whose contribution to American comedy is indisputable (Neil Simon, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin), but the obvious mandate is to interest TV viewers in the ceremony, and so this year the winner of the prize is none other than the pin-up of snarky sketch and fake-news comedy, Tina Fey.

I am not going to debate the merits of Tina Fey as a comedian here. I find her stuff pleasant but not memorable. The hubbub that surrounded her Sarah Palin imitation in 2008 was fascinating, in that there were other comic actresses on the Web doing equally good impressions of the Brainless One, and Fey’s “material” was essentially direct quotes from Palin’s own verbal missteps. Fey is a good-looking woman (never let that slip out of the equation), and she is currently a powerhouse to be reckoned with in terms of reputation, paycheck, and drawing power. But is she the 2000s equivalent of Dorothy Parker? Not on your life. Except, of course, to those who consume only contemporary mainstream culture, and are not familiar with anything old, foreign, or even slightly "alternative."

In any case, since the Mark Twain Prize has now irredeemably jumped the shark, I would like to submit for public view a list of the people they’ve forgotten to honor (in case you haven't been looking at the pics I've scattered throughout this post). Maybe they feel these people wouldn't be “ratings bait” — then again, on PBS you’d think an older name would be ratings bait, but PBS is as dull and lifeless as the rest of American broadcasting these days.

I’m leaving out the names of such folk as Professor Irwin Corey and Bob Elliott, as I think that, though they richly deserve the prize, a mainstream board like the Kennedy Center’s would never be that hip. I also leave out the solid gold name of Woody Allen (who was without doubt in the top rank of American humorists of the second half of the 20th century), since I have the feeling that he has already turned the honor down. I can’t help but feel that they’ve never asked Mel Brooks, though, since I don’t think he would turn it down (not a man who revisits an item like Spaceballs). I know that they’re probably already prepping the Twain Prizes for Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, and Jack Black, so let me remind everyone who is still alive and deserves the Prize. If it really had any meaning.


  • SID CAESAR
  • Mort Sahl
  • Shelley Berman
  • Nichols and May
  • Dick Gregory
  • The Smothers Brothers
  • Mel Brooks
  • the aforementioned grandma of women standups, Phyllis Diller


And after all that, I’m not even going to mention that Mark Twain was a WRITER for fuck’s sake, and that breed of humorist hasn’t even been given a second thought. Then again, when your comedy prize is little more than a joke, well… it writes itself, doesn't it?