I
n 1931, Melvin Kaminsky was five
years old and probably too young to
see Frankenstein. But his widowed
mother was raising four boys on
her own in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Needing the break, she encouraged
him to go, which was fine with movie-
loving Melvin, who later changed his
last name to Brooks. “At the local movie
theater I could go anywhere—Arabia,
the West, Transylvania,” he later wrote.
“Nothing nourished our dreams like
the movies.” Not to mention his night-
mares: Seeing Frankenstein scaredMelvin so much that he insisted on
sleeping with the window closed—
even in the summer heat. “If you leave
the window open,” he told his mother,
“Frankenstein will come and eat me.”
This memory helped inspire the
making of Brooks’s Young Frankenstein
four decades later—“when I was finally
a little less scared,” the director said. It
all started in the early 1970s, when the
actor Gene Wilder was vacationing
in the Hamptons, a group of seaside
communities on Long Island, New
York. Inspired by an idea for a movie,he began jotting notes on a yellow legal
pad after lunch one day. “At the top of
the page, I wrote, Young Frankenstein,”
he stated in his 2005 memoir, Kiss Me
Like a Stranger, “and then wrote two
pages of what might happen to me if
I were the great grandson of Beaufort
von Frankenstein and was called to
Transylvania because I had just inher-
ited the Frankenstein estate.”
Wilder wasn’t sure why he’d used
the word young, though it may have
stemmed from his memories of hav-
ing seen the 1940 Mickey Rooney movie80 LIFE FRANKENSTEINMA
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