Spaceballs: The Interview
Vogue Magazine
the
cosmos
according
to
mel brooks
by E. Graydon Carter
(Originally published in Vogue June 1987)
Mel Brooks is a taut, compact, slightly bow-legged walnut, with clean, fine hands and a broad,
animated mouth. His hair, it is fair to say, has gone the way of the rumble seat; and what remains,
agrizzled grey wisp, is swung from one side of his head to the other in a valiant attempt to stave off
the appearance of aman whose hair has gone the way of the rumble seat. At the Twentieth Century
Fox commissary, a cool dining room with a canopied terrace that has some of the flavor of an officer's
club in the days of the British Raj, Brooks bustles along, Fiorello LaGuardia with a deal memo,
grabbing the hands of minor studio people, the maitre d', waiters, busboys. "Alphonse!" "Tony!" He
moves too fast, thinks to fast, and eats too fast, sprinkling himself and his lunch companions as little
pieces of food fly from his mouth. He prefers monologue to dialogue , and he can be funny ,
endearing, brilliant, infantile, vulgar, hopelessly corny, boastful, winning, and wise all within the space
of a few mouthfuls of seafood salad.
At his offices on the back lot, he is scrambling to complete the editing of Spaceballs, the first film he
has directed in six years and, at $22.7 million, his most expensive film ever. It is yet another parody,
this time a lampoon of the Star Wars/Aliens/Star Trek axis. It's a paradoxically risky venture; on the
one hand, to parody a film genre, the genre has to have been around long enough to become a genre,
and yet in the case of the space films, although there centerianly is much to parody, interest in the
genre seems to be on the wane. Even George Lucas has stopped making them.
Brooks's "dossier," as he calls his body of work, is substantial, if spotty , with great heights and
best-forgotten lows. He is responsible for one of the most memorable American comedies ever, The
Producers; a revered comedy album, The 2,000-Year-Old-Man; a string of intermittently funny
parodies - Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, and High Anxiety; The Twelve
Chairs, an arty, early-seventies cult favorite; and Oscar-winning short, The Critic; a truly bad
movie, The History of the World - Part I; a good television series, Get Smart; and a string of fine,
high-minded, non-Mel Brooks Brooksfilms - The Elephant Man, Frances, My Favorite Year, and
84 Charing Cross Road(starring his wife, Anne Bancroft). At the beginning of it all, and paramount
to Mel Brooks's being Mel Brooks, was his time spent writing for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Show
in the fifties, seminal television, and still considered by those who worked on the show to be among
the greatest television ever produced, but which when viewed today can seem neither funny nor
particularly inventive.
Show Business made Mel Brooks, and he flavors his talk with great heaps of "I Love This
Business" industry schmaltz. He talks of the great respect he has for George Lucas. How he loves
Laddie - his old friend, MGM President, Alan Ladd, Jr. David Begelman, when he was helping to
get Blazing Saddles into production, told Brooks he loved him. Brooks tells about the time he wrote
a parody of Death of a Salesman for a Broadway revue, New Faces of 1952. "I thought that
Arthur Miller would kill me. And then I got a lover letter from him, and we've been friends ever
since." When he did High Anxiety, Brooks says, "I went to Alfred Hitchcock and I begged an
audience with him and he said, I'd love you to produce this, I loved Blazing Saddles. I trust you. I
trust your intelligence. And please, no holds barred. Do it all.' And I said, 'I'm going to do The
Birds, I'm going to do the shower.' And he said, 'Please. Do it all.' So I did a rough cut and showed
it to him. He sat there and when his name came on the screen. He Actually Dabbed Hi Eyes." When
the talk turns to Kenneth Tynan, who wrote an adoring profile of Brooks for The New Yorker,
Brooks says: "Kenneth Tynan, by the way, if I can digress for a minute, was one of the best, most
talented, loveliest guys I ever met in my life." Mel, you big beautiful person, you. If you need me
for anything-anything-I'll be in my trailer.
With Spaceballs, Brooks hopes to get back the stride he had before History of the World -Part I.
Spaceballs is headed by two very wining young stars, Bill Pullman (the dazed kidnapper in Ruthless
People) and Daphne Zuniga (who played the Claudette Colbert part in Rob Reiner's sublime film,
The Sure Thing. Pullman plays a character named Lone Starr. His space ship is an interstellar
Winnebago. Zuniga plays "Her Spoiled Highness" Princess Vespa from planet Druidia ("the first
Druish Princess"). John Candy plays a Mawg ("Half man, half dog. 'I'm my own best friend,'"), and
Rick Moranis plays the villain, Dark Helmut. Brooks wisely changed the movie's name from his
original choice; Planet Moron. One of Spaceballs cast's chief assets is Brooks himself. Mel Brooks
always writes well for Mel Brooks, and as a performer in his films he can be superb. In Spaceballs,
hi President Skroob (unfortunate motto: "Skroob the people") is a frantic megalomaniac, borrowing
equal parts from Brooks's own performance in Blazing Saddles and Groucho Marx's Rufus T.
Firefly. He also plays a two-foot-high Yoda - and 2000-Year-Old-Man-like character named
Yogurt, who "dispenses wisdom with fruit at the bottom."
If Brooks has a parallel in movies, it is Woody Allen. They're both short. They're both Jewish. Both
have had special deals with studios (Brooks at Fox; Allen at U.A. and now Orion); both write,
direct, and star in many of their own movies; both began by writing gags for others; both, in fact,
worked on Your Show of Shows; both have developed ensemble groups of actors whose faces pop
up regularly in their movies; each plays a musical instrument appropriate to their styles of comedy -
Allen, the clarinet, and Brooks, the drums; and both are known for their habit of bringing their own
wine into good restaurants.
Mel Brooks would like to thank Woody Allen for making Radio Days. The film crystallized a
childhood very similar to Brooks's own, a life of dreaming about Manhattan skyscrapers
and
listening to the great radio comics Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, George Burns and Gracie
Allen. Brooks, like Woody Allen, was born in a Brooklyn tenement. (Born Melvin Kaminsky, he
changed his name first to Brooman, his mother's maiden name, and finally to Brooks.) His father, a
Russian, worked as a process server and died at thirty-four of a kidney disease - when Mel was two
and a half. Brooks lived a life out of a Malamud short story, raising pigeons on a rooftop and fending
off bullies with hokes. Buddy Rich, a neighbor, taught him to play drums; and, in 1942, Brooks
headed to the Catskills for summer work as a drummer and part-time tumbler, an entertainer who got
the guests laughing by doing things like jumping into the pool with a suitcase full of rocks in a mock
suicide attempt. That summer he met a young saxophone player working nearby: Sid Caesar.
Caesar, says Brooks, was a major influence on his style of comedy. Other, earlier influences were
teams - Laurel and Hardy, the Ritz Brothers, Groucho et al. "The Marx Brothers," says Brooks, "had
the most influence on me, because they were a pastiche of strange physical comedy and very brave
comedy. I mean, Harpo jumping on a big fat lady and sexually assaulting her, fighting with her, I
mean punching her! In the middle of it all, they're making sharp political comments on war and peace,
and it's a brilliant combination of things that I love. And when I was still a young man, I loved Martin
and Lewis."
"The Roots of my humor," says Brooks, "are in very old-fashioned Yiddish comedy as well, which is
based on some failure-making fun of the inept, which is cruel. There was a great Jewish comic named
Aaron Lebedeff, a forerunner of Danny Kaye. He did a song called "Rumania," imitating a guy who
stuttered a lot. So Jews taking off on unfortunates, it's always compelling. Because you're saying in a
strange way, 'Oh thank God, it's not me.' You enjoy the humor because you are not the butt of the
joke. It's cruel, but effective." Charlie Chaplin used to say that tragedy was slipping on a banana
peel; humor was seeing someone else slip on it.
A Mel Brooks movie can be expected to have upwards of one hundred gag, one a minute, of which
maybe three or hour will hit a high note. What often keeps his movies from being completely
delightful is the sheer broadness of much of the humor - too often he will go for the easy laugh. He
describes two scenes that mercifully didn't make it into his films. "One of the
clichés I nearly used [in
High Anxiety] was, I was going to open with a small Swiss village and you see a train
that is
obviously a toy train. And I was going to have a big foot crush the village and say, "Oops, I'm sorry."
But I thought that was a little too exquisite and a little too subtle and I never did it." In the same film,
he was to come out of Washington's nose on Mt. Rushmore wearing a green jumpsuit. His associates
talked him out of it. (Bless them.) Then there are the lame, Perelmanesque names he gives his
characters. Where Perelman was a master at making up actually funny names (Mot Juste, for
instance, the French grammarian), Brooks's are crude puns: Count de Monet; Marcus Vindictus,
Swiftus Lazarus.
Has Brooks influenced other comics in America? With The Producers, certainly. In sheer raving,
raging, loudness, Brooks's influence can be spotted in the routines of comedian/screamers like Bob
Goldthwait and Sam Kinison. And Brooks likes to point to david and Jerry Zucker, and Him
Abrahams, the trio responsible for Airplane and Top Secret, as examples of people he has
influenced. "I think their perspective is almost Brooksian," he says. "Was I seminal vis a vis
Saturday Night Live? Was Your Show of Shows seminal?" It may or may not be dispiriting to
Brooks that for all he has to offer, he may be most widely identified with a sketch in Blazing Saddles
about breaking wind.
Brooks told Kenneth Tynan that his major reason for going into analysis in 1951 was to learn how to
be a father instead of a son. When his father died, his three older brothers took over the paternal
duties and later, Sid Caesar did too. Beginning with Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks "the father" was
born. The traveling corps of Brooks comedy players is testament to his need to play father figure, as
ih hi willingness to give young and often inexperienced directors their first chance: Graham Clifford on
Frances, Richard Benjamin on My Favorite Year and Alan Johnson, a choreographer, on To Be or
Not To Be.
Is Mel Brooks The Funniest Man in America? He has been called that often. On the other hand, they
love him in France-never a good sign for a comedian. To put the epithet to the test, Mel Brooks was
given the following rigorous and exacting comedy examination.
1.QUESTION: Name a funny word?
HIS ANSWER: " 'Chicken .' It has the letter 'k', but also it's an image. You need harsh consonants,
but you need an image. 'Kumquat' is a funny word. A little orange thing. And also if it skirts good
taste - if it sounds dirty but isn't.
2. QUESTION: What is the funniest number?
ANSWER: "32 has always been my number. It lands for me. A single digit doesn't land. 3. 10.
Forget it. 32 - it lands. I use 32 a lot. I used to use it in Your Show of Shows all the time. They'd
say, "let's use Mel's number.' "
3. QUESTION: Funniest letter?
ANSWER: "The funniest letter for me is 'Q' because it sounds like screw, and 'Q' is weird. It has a
'kuh' and it has a very good vowel sound. 'Ooh' is a great sexy sound. These are crazy questions.
You know only comedy writers talk like this. I want you to know that.
4. QUESTION: Funniest Day?
ANSWER: "Tuesday."
5. QUESTION: Funniest Month?
ANSWER: "October."
6. QUESTION: Who is the least funny man in America?
ANSWER: "Well, it's a toss-up between Bush and Reagan. I'm not sure, but I think Bush."
7. ESSAY QUESTION: Who is the funniest man in America?
ANSWER: In 1982, Brooks told The New York Times that he was indeed the funniest man in
America. He must have thought better of it, for he later recanted his boast in a written announcement.
He says that the funniest man in America depends on the moment, and, that these days, those
moments belong to young men like John Candy, Jay Leno, and Rick Moranis. "It's always been very
important to me that I was not only funny, but that I was either the funniest person in the world, or
one of the funnier people in the world," Brooks says. "And that's hard to do. Because of Sid Caesar
and Max Leibman [the producer of Your Show of Shows], I learned to write not jokes, but
scenelets, playlets, little character pieces based on eternal human behavior. So I have never been
really out of vogue because funny is funny. I will always be in vogue. I can always spot the insane or
the bizarre in the commonplace. That's my job."
MEL BROOKS'S SCORE: 1. Correct. 2. Correct. 3. Correct. 4. Correct. 5. Incorrect. Correct
answer is February. 6. Substantially correct. Alternate answers: Ed Koch, the mayor of New York;
Steve Guttenburg, the actor. 7. B+.