the fact that they’re laughing at you.
It’ll be good for your career.”
A former nightclub comic and
writer for Sid Caesar’s 1950s ground-
breaking television show, Your Show
of Shows, Brooks was then best known
as the 2,000 Year Old Man, a comic
part he played opposite straight man
Carl Reiner. But Brooks really wanted
to be a director, and over a series of din-
ners he told Wilder about his idea for a
film called Springtime for Hitler. “I’d tell
him about this character Leo Bloom,”
Brooks wrote. “He’s silly, he’s angelic,
he’s the most brilliant accountant who
ever lived. But as a human being he’s
lost, he doesn’t know how to behave.
He’s never been kissed.”
“I could play that,” Wilder said,
though privately he thought the film
had little chance of being made—his
friend was, after all, an unproven
director. But Brooks eventually found
financing for the film, which became
1967’s The Producers, starring Wilder
as Bloom. The film won Brooks a Best
Screenplay Oscar but made very little
money. In 1970, the director followed it
up with The Twelve Chairs, which was
appreciated by critics but bombed at
the box office. Now Brooks’s career was
at an impasse. “To the studios, I was just
an interesting guy to meet for lunch,”
he later wrote.
Flash forward to the Hamptons,
where Wilder was still toying with his
Frankenstein idea when Mike Medavoy,
his Hollywood agent, called to suggest
that he make a film with British comic
Marty Feldman and the actor Peter
Boyle. Why? Medavoy represented
both of them, which Wilder initiallydismissed as a crass reason for collab-
oration. Still, he had been impressed
by Feldman’s 1971 TV show The Marty
Feldman Comedy Machine, so that night
he wrote a scene with Feldman in mind
as Igor (pronounced “eye-gore”). He
sent it to Medavoy, who called a few days
later. “I think I can sell this,” he said.
“How about Mel Brooks directing?”
You’re whistling Dixie, Wilder
thought, knowing that Brooks only
directed his own material. At the
time, the director was working on a
script called Tex X, which would later
be called Black Bart and Purple Sage
before becoming Blazing Saddles. That
film’s success was anything but cer-
tain at the time, of course, so Brooks
listened to Medavoy’s idea—and then
called Wilder. “What are you getting
me into?” he asked.82 LIFE FRANKENSTEIN
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