Young Frankenstein

225 Pages·2016·85.95 MB·English

by  Mel Brooks

CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
READING YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
CHAPTER ONE: A FIERCE COLLABORATION
CHAPTER TWO: A PERFECT CAST
CHAPTER THREE: A CRACKERJACK CREW
CHAPTER FOUR: “I DON’T WANT TO GO HOME”
CHAPTER FIVE: IT’S ALIVE! THE MARKETING & RELEASE
NEWSLETTERS
COPYRIGHT
Mary Shelley, who at only nineteen years of age conceived her immortal Gothic novel,
Frankenstein. Needless to say, Gene Wilder and I will always be in her debt.
FOREWORD
Mel Brooks is the funniest. That we all agree on. There is no need to debate it.
All of us who try to make comedy know we will never be the best. Mel wins.
What we can debate is which is the best Mel Brooks movie. Yes, this is a
subjective question. If you choose Blazing Saddles or The Producers or High
Anxiety, I can’t prove you wrong. But allow me to make the case for Young
Frankenstein.
Young Frankenstein is perfect. It’s the comedy equivalent of Sgt. Pepper, or
The Great Gatsby, or the ’86 New York Mets.
The pace and joke compression are off the charts. The laughs are huge. The
jokes land like the punches of a prize fighter: in furious volleys from all different
angles, the big ones landing when you least expect them.
What modern comedy doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Young
Frankenstein? The physical comedy is both precise and insane. The genre
parody is spot-on and meticulously detailed. There have been a million spoof
movies since, but none of them even comes close. You don’t need to know a
thing about Frankenstein to love this movie. Plus, Marty Feldman’s looks-to-
camera are so well-timed and iconic, he’s basically inventing The Office in 1974.
Gene Wilder (the co-writer) is on fire throughout the movie. He’s a like a
comedy cheat code. It’s unfair. One second he’s screaming at the top of his
lungs, mania in his eyes, and the next second he’s teasing extra laughs with just
the tiniest look or smile or gesture.
The casting is perfect. The women in Young Frankenstein are historically
hysterical. What is funnier than Frau Blücher slowly turning to Dr. Frankenstein
and asking him if he’d like some Ovaltine? Or Inga’s roll in the hay? Teri Garr,
Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn. Mel directed these brilliant women in some
of their finest performances. OK, their finest performances. My opinion.
Even Gene Hackman is funny in it. When has Gene Hackman ever been that
riotously funny? Sure he was funny in Superman III (or was it IV?) but the
spilled soup bit is as good as comedy gets.
Every part of Young Frankenstein is perfect. When Gene Wilder is lecturing
the class at the beginning of the movie, the science kind of makes sense. He
sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. And the movie is genuinely scary
sometimes. The monster’s speech at the end is emotional and touching. The sets
and photography are gorgeous. Even without these things, it would still be one
of the funniest movies of all time, but the fact that it succeeds in so many arenas
is what makes it the absolute high-water mark. Its credibility makes everything
funnier and more impactful.
Another thing to keep in mind: Mel Brooks made Young Frankenstein and
Blazing Saddles in the same year. Has a director ever had a better year than Mel
Brooks in 1974? Victor Fleming made Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of
Oz in 1939, but Gone with the Wind isn’t funny at all. Mel wins again.
A few years ago I went to see Young Frankenstein at a revival house, and it
got the loudest, most sustained laughs I have ever heard in a theater. I was
jealous, but then I realized, I will never fight as well as Ali, I will never paint as
beautifully as Picasso, and I will never be as funny as Mel Brooks. But even if
you are only a third as funny as Mel, that still will make for a comfortable
living!
I am so glad that this book of beautiful photographs and information about
this classic film is out. Maybe I will learn something. If I work hard, hopefully I
can get to forty percent.
RESPECTFULLY,
JUDD APATOW
I’m seven years old. I’m the little guy in the middle with my brothers Lenny, Irving, and Bernie
behind me, and my first cousin Merril to my right. I’m still happy… everything changed when I was
nine. They gave me homework.
INTRODUCTION
Y
ou have to really know a genre to make fun of it, and
to really know it, you have to love it. When I was young,
I loved the movies because they saved my life. I was so
grateful to cinema for opening up worlds that were not
open to me as a poor Jewish kid from Williamsburg,
Brooklyn. I was born in 1926, and everybody in my
building was headed for jobs in the Garment District in
Manhattan. I assumed I’d be working in the shipping
department somewhere on 7th Avenue. I never dreamed I
would do something else—let alone make my living in
the movies. Nothing else was open to us.
But at the local movie theater, I could go anywhere—Arabia, the West,
Transylvania. We played street games to keep busy in Williamsburg—
punchball, baseball, roller hockey—but nothing nourished our dreams like the
movies. Those movies gave us lovely worlds to inhabit. When I was a teenager
and I saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on shiny, big black-and-white
floors, oh wow! You never saw shiny black-and-white floors in Williamsburg.
There was just oilcloth and sometimes Jewish newspapers covering them when
your mother would wash them. We never had money for anything. But for one
thin dime, you got three feature films, a race, some newsreels, some shorts. My
mother would send me to the theater with a salmon and tomato sandwich,
wrapped in wax paper—’cause it’s a long day, you know?
I was five years old in 1931 when James Whale’s Frankenstein came out.
The following summer the movie played at a theater in Williamsburg and my
older brother, Bernie, took me to see it. My father had died of tuberculosis when
he was only thirty-four and I was two. And there was Mama, thirty years old,
with four little boys. Mama had to clean. She wanted me out. Bernie said, “I’m
going to see Frankenstein, maybe he will get scared.” My mother said, “I don’t
care! Take him.” So Bernie took me, and that movie scared the hell out of me. I
was really terrified. It was a big mistake. It was the scariest thing I saw in my
life.
That was a hot summer in Brooklyn, and in our two-bedroom apartment, I
slept right by the fire escape. I said to my mother, “Mom, please close the
window.” She said, “It’s a hundred degrees in here, I can’t close the window.
What’s the matter?” I said, “If you leave the window open, Frankenstein will
come and eat me.” (We called the monster Frankenstein because we didn’t know
the difference.)
My mother said, “OK, let’s talk about this. First of all, the monster lives in
Romania, in Transylvania. Romania is not near the ocean. So he’s going to have
to get to Odessa. He’s going to have go a long way to get to a boat. Then he has
to have money to pay for his passage. He may not have any money if he is just a
monster. He may not have pockets. Let’s say he makes his way to Odessa and he
gets a boat to America. The boat may go to Miami. It may go to Baltimore. It
may not go to New York. If it goes to New York and he gets off there, he
doesn’t know the subway system. If he finds the BMT (what we called the
subway back then) and he gets to Brooklyn, he doesn’t know our street. Let’s
say he does find our street. But remember, the people on the first floor have their
window open. He is not going to climb way up. If he’s hungry, he is going to eat
who’s ever there on the first floor.”