originally slated to finance and distrib-
ute the film. “The meeting was fine,”
Brooks wrote. “They loved the script.
They loved the idea. They wanted us to
make it. We love you, you love us, blah
blah blah. On the way out, I shouted,
‘Oh, by the way, we’re going to make it
in black and white.’ Then we shut the
door. A thundering herd of Jews fol-
lowed us down the hall from the meet-
ing room. They were screaming ‘no, no,
wait, come back! No black and white!
Peru just got color!’”
After jumping to Twentieth Century
Fox, Brooks and Wilder began the
casting process. For starters, Wilder
insisted that Brooks, who had hammedhis way through Blazing Saddles, not
perform in the film. “You have a way of
breaking the fourth wall, whether you
want to or not,” Wilder told the direc-
tor. “I don’t want too much to be, you
know, a wink at the audience.”
Brooks agreed, and this guiding
idea informed the casting of the other
actors—most of whom were relatively
unknown. It was Marty Feldman’s first
Hollywood movie, for one thing. Cloris
Leachman, who played Frau Blücher
(based on the sinister Mrs. Danvers in
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca)
was then best known for playing
the acerbic Phyllis on The Mary
Tyler Moore Show. Madeline Kahn,
who played the doctor’s love inter-
est, Elizabeth, had been a supporting
actor in What’s Up, Doc? (1972) andAlmost 90 years after
Universal unleashed
Frankenstein,
it has created a
“Dark Universe”
franchise to unite a
series of classic
monster movie
remakes.91© (^) U
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