Paper Moon (1973), while Teri Garr
was a dancer on The Sonny and Cher
Comedy Hour. In fact, Garr was hired in
part because of the German accent she
“stole” from Cher’s hair stylist, though
she later claimed the part was “really
all about boobs.” (“With the girls, with
Madeline and with Teri, I asked her
to show as much cleavage as we were
allowed, whatever I could get away with
in 1974,” Brooks said. “They got away
with a lot more in ’31 than we did in ’74
believe it or not.”)
Boyle was perhaps an unlikely
choice to play the monster, having
made his name in 1970’s Joe, about a
bigoted factory worker, but he proved
perfect for the part—as did dramatic
actor Gene Hackman, who played the
blind hermit. “We’re making a riotous
comedy here,” Brooks told his cast, “but
it’s got to be very sweet and sad, and at
times very scary. And it’s got to be very
real—no heightened acting. When it’s
funny, your character doesn’t know it’sfunny... So don’t you ever play funny.”
(To that point, “Gene [Wilder] didn’t
know he was funny,” Brooks said, “and
Teri didn’t know she was sexy.”)
After three weeks of rehearsals, it
became clear that—like its movie mon-
ster—the project was alive. “There was
a certain indefinable chemistry on the
set, a magic in the way this ensemble of
gifted misfits worked together,” Brooks
said. “I’ve never seen it before, and I’ve
never seen it since.” It was, Wilder
added, “the happiest I’ve ever been on a
film... It was like taking a small breath
of heaven each day.” In fact, he loved the
experience so much that he didn’t want
to go home when it was over. “I don’t
want to leave Transylvania,” he said.
In December 1974, Young
Frankenstein premiered in New York
City and was an immediate hit. Sure,
some critics carped (“It is good-
natured, lowbrow, backlot, hit-or-
miss humor,” the Hollywood Reporter
wrote), but Roger Ebert, for one, calledJUST TWO RECENT ITERATIONS
of the Frankenstein story:
Benedict Cumberbatch
(opposite) played the Creature
in Frankenstein, a play directed
by Oscar-winning director Danny
Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) and
performed at London’s National
Theatre in 2011. Above, a 2018
opera version of Frankenstein
opened in Hamburg, Germany,
and featured the creature as an
enormous puppet, here lording
over Dr. Viktor Frankenstein.93ALA
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