When The Shooting Stops Read online

  While Glazier learned patience, many of Mel’s subordinates became more alienated. When Mel displayed his insecurity or his ignorance, as first-time directors often do, it had a way of eliciting the very sort of sneering superiority that first-time directors fear. Joe Coffey, who had occasionally gotten into trouble with directors who had interpreted his enthusiasm as an affront to their leadership, was unable to play the diplomat. “There was one instance early in the film where Zero had to make an entrance into his office and sit down at his desk. So I said, ‘Why don’t we take the camera near the door, so that when the door swings open, there’ll be a nice big close-up of that incredible head and face. And as he moves toward us, we’ll dolly back and pull into this alcove and pan him over to the desk.’ So Mel thought about it for a minute, and he said, ‘He’s going to be speaking when he’s walking.’ I said, ‘Yeah, right.’ So he said, ‘But the camera will be moving when he’s speaking.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you know, we’ll start on a tight head, and we’ll get wider and wider and we’ll pan. . . .’ He said, ‘But you can’t have the camera moving while he’s speaking— they won’t pay any attention to the words.’ I didn’t quite know how to answer that. I said, ‘But you don’t understand, he’ll be close to the camera, and he’ll be talking, and it’ll only get to be a wide shot as he goes by in the middle of the room, and then we’ll pan to the desk.’ He said, ‘But the camera will be moving while he’s talking.’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And he said, ‘No, we can’t have that, they won’t pay any attention to the words.’ So I said, ‘What do you want to do? How should we bring him into the room?’ He said, ‘Let’s put the camera back in that alcove where you were going to dolly into and we’ll just make a little bit of a pan as he goes by.’ I said, ‘You’ll lose all the impact of that great face in a close-up!’ “

  Back and forth they argued, with Mel growing firmer and firmer in his determination to start the scene with a long shot and a stationary camera and apparently more and more certain that Coffey’s disagreement represented not a desire to make his best contribution to the picture but an effort to enhance the photography at the expense of the script. Incensed at Mel’s arbitrary rule, Coffey finally blew up. “There must’ve been fifty to sixty people. And I don’t use words like this very often, because I think it’s really kind of pretentious, but I screamed out, ‘You can’t do that, it’s not cinematic]’ And that was the end of our romance.”

  From then on the tone of their conversations worsened, and their relationship ground to a standoff. “I did my job,” says Coffey, “I lit the sets. But my heart wasn’t in it.”

  By the second week we had become aware of two Mels. There was the Mel who did five minutes of ad-lib routines in the morning for the grips and electricians until fifteen people had put their coffees down for fear of spilling them. The Mel who would jump out of the car in the middle of a traffic jam on the way to a location shoot, run over to a stranger’s car, knock on the window, point to himself and say, “Mel Brooks. The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man. Recognize Me)” The Mel who on the way to the studio in the morning with a earful of technicians, cameramen, and assistants would take everybody’s order with a pencil and paper, and then, with the car double-parked outside the Chock Full O’ Nuts at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, run inside, say good morning to the last person on line—“Do you recognize me? I’m Mel Brooks. The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man, famous comedian Hollywood director”—and, as the crew watched in hysteria, make his way, one by one, to the front of the line, telling the secretaries, the Con Ed men, the store clerks about his schedule and his budget, his distributor and his points, his men waiting outside, and emerge with a giant bagful of breakfast. And then there was the other Mel, the Mel who seemed to feel he was being ganged up on by the pros, who felt exposed and isolated, who with barely a transition would become angry and tyrannical, whose neck would stretch and tighten and eyes bulge until, as Sidney Glazier remembers, you were sure he would attack you.

  We were close to the end of the second week when I realized I was wasting my time on the set. There’s a widespread belief that the editor serves a function on the set, but I’ve always found this untrue—my only contribution during the shooting of the film comes during the dailies, and I’d prefer to look at them with a fresh mind, unencumbered and unprejudiced by the high spirits or conflicts that dominated the shooting. Until now I had witnessed all the tirades, but none of them had involved me, so I was still relatively balanced when I said, “Mel, don’t you think I should be putting some film together?” He quickly agreed, and I spent the next two weeks assembling a rough cut of the first twenty minutes of the picture. Since this was a very primitive film in which everything depended on the words and acting, the editing was very basic and uncomplicated. Choices were few; in most cases the scene was funniest with full shots of both characters, and I think almost any editor would have cut it the same way. Indeed, when the movie was finished, 90 percent of the first two reels remained just as I’d put them together in the initial assembly.

  I screened the segment for Mel and Sidney at the Movielab screening room. For the first time in Mel’s directorial career, he was about to see a fantasy of his in somewhat finished form. For most directors this is a difficult moment because what they see on the screen after the editor has assembled it almost never lives up to their dreams. I realize now that this was a major factor in Helen van Dongen’s frustrations with Robert Flaherty, who stalled and stalled and sometimes even took the uncut film away from her. In addition to revealing the inherent shortcomings of the picture, the first rough cut lacks the refinements—the sound editing, the opticals, the finishing touches—that do so much to make a movie come alive. And if just one line doesn’t work, if just one transition is weak, it weighs the picture down, deadening everything for the next four or five minutes. But for the beginning director, watching this first assembly is even more painful, because he can’t allow for the enormous difference that the refinements will make—he’s never had the experience of transforming a dragging first cut into a dazzling finished film.

  When the screening was over, Mel stomped to the front of the room to make a statement. I was about eight rows back and Glazier was somewhere behind me. “You just listen to me” he growled. He was furious. He was pointing his finger at me with hideous intensity. “I don’t want you to touch this fuckin’ film again! You understand? I just finished with Coffey this afternoon—I told him I don’t need his help, and I don’t need your help either! I’ll do it all myself! Don’t you touch this film—you hear!—don’t touch it, until I finish shooting!”

  I was very shaken. No one had ever spoken to me like that. I trembled with anger most of the way home, which at this time consisted of a drive to New Rochelle. I gave a lift to Glazier, who was certain he’d never see me again. All the way he shook his head and mumbled, “I don’t know why Mel has to do this. Why does he have to make it so difficult?” To Glazier’s disbelief, I didn’t quit. Quitting never occurred to me. I stayed on like everyone else. And like everyone else, I harbored a thickening knot of resentment.

  For several weeks I sulked. I stayed off the set and only appeared for the dailies. And even after I began feeling even again, I had no work to do. I hung around, watched Mel lose his temper, chew out Wilder, chew out Coffey, saw the cast and the crew looking and behaving more and more like whipped dogs, and had plenty of time to imagine what our weeks in the cutting room would be like.

  On the first day of editing, Mel arrived in the cutting room at about nine-thirty, a quarter to ten, preceded by an enormous white bag full of coffee, crullers, and doughnuts, and began a ritual that was repeated every day thereafter. With my two assistants and me seated at our benches, Mel pulled out coffees and sugars, napkins and stirrers, and bustled about the room serving us. Each day he brought twenty or thirty extra packets of sugar, which he forbade us to throw out. He stuffed them into all accessible drawers, and there they accumulated until the picture was completed and I had s
ome two hundred pounds of sugar to dispose of.

  The mornings were slow because Mel had a hard time waking up. As he worked on his two cups of coffee, he’d free-associate, improvise little skits, tell jokes, do word games, and generally carry on. An intuitive and compulsive entertainer, he would come alive before an audience of three hundred or just three. He’d put on his hilarious Russian Jewish accent—“Did you maybe hear da vone about . . .”—and we’d start to smile, anticipating the antics to come. His eyes would twinkle, he’d cock his head, he’d look like a dirty old man with suspect candy. He’d become manic, fly around the room with his arms waving and eyes bulging, suddenly become a little old man again, a vendor on Orchard Street, a weaseling schemer, a pontificating rabbi, a sleazy seducer, or Super-Jew with a J on his pajamas. He would carry on this way for about an hour, and, as far as I could tell, he had no memory whatever of the tongue-lashing he’d given me two months earlier. The only thing that would spoil his show would be an unexpected intrusion, a messenger or someone from the lab, at which point he would draw back, looking a bit disturbed and mistrustful.

  Once he paused in the middle of one of his routines and looked intensely at the ashtray sitting beside him on an end table. I was at my desk, drinking my coffee and expecting another funny line. Suddenly Mel’s hand tightened around the ashtray, his face got very tense, and he looked up and screamed, “Next time it’s going to be my ashtray, GODDAM IT! It’s going to be my desk, my telephone, my couch, my Moviola, my equipment, my supplies! Next time you’re going to be in my office goddamn it!” Then his face relaxed, he glanced casually about the room, and went back to drinking his coffee and thinking up jokes.

  By eleven o’clock Mel would be ready to look at some film. But not with the cold eye of an experienced director. This was his first movie, the project he’d been pampering for three years, and he could not find the proper distance. He was unable to look at the film he’d shot as the new given, the material out of which he would now create his movie. Instead he griped about how Joe Coffey screwed him here by taking too damn long, or how Zero never did get that line right, or why didn’t he think to do it this way with that actor. This would go on for a couple of hours and then we’d go to lunch. No film was ever cut in the morning.

  My cutting rooms were now on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, so we’d usually end up going to the nearby Carnegie Delicatessen to eat. There, on the average day, you can bump into Marshall Brickman or Paddy Chayevsky or Herb Gardner, any number of show-business writers and entertainers that Mel knew and with whom he’d schmooze and exchange bits. He threw funny lines at the waiter, fooled around with a new waitress, and let everybody know he’d arrived. He was really on now, bursting with playfulness, competitiveness, aggression, and a lusty satisfaction at being recognized by one and all.. During one of the early lunches, he ordered a whitefish salad, nudged the waiter, and said confidentially, “Tell ‘em it’s for Mel Brooks.”

  We usually returned from the Carnegie by two o’clock, and now Mel was fully awake. Awake enough to know he had frittered away the morning. Awake enough to feel the dissatisfaction over all the flaws that were going to keep this film from looking like a major-league production. Awake enough to realize that he had some very boring hours and weeks of work ahead, moving at the torpid cutting-room pace that was anathema to him. Awake enough to remember and resent his dependence on me. In any case, the fun and games were over. He was ready to “kill.”

  Mel hated to be told that he could cut directly from a to c and do without b altogether. He couldn’t stand the thought that a line, a glance, or, worse, an entire scene was superfluous. Statements of this sort were a direct attack, a suggestion that he’d been a fool to shoot the way he’d shot in the first place. Perhaps he really did not know that every director goes through this process in the editing stage, that material that once seemed essential was trimmed away like so much fat, that favored lines or moments often proved pointless or redundant. In any case, he became angry, raucous, combative. Although his belligerence was rarely aimed directly at me, I felt sullied by it and withdrew into a tighter, colder, more severe professional stance that could only have increased his resentment. It was not in me to say, “You’re right, Mel, Zero really did screw you there.” I refused to behave like a servant, to give in to his extreme emotional demands. The very thought of moving in that direction brought forth all the secret professional hurts I harbored. I felt I was being invited to play the time-honored role of the editor as the director’s valet. In defense, I became impatient with Mel’s ignorance and hesitance, and, I imagine, Mel saw in this all the arrogance that embittered him against the veteran pros.

  Bialystock and Bloom spot Franz Liebkind on the roof of his tenement talking to his pigeons. Liebkind is the author of Springtime for Hitler, the play that the partners are convinced is their “guaranteed-to-close-in-one-night beauty.”

  BLOOM (quietly to Bialystock): He’s wearing a German helmet.

  BIALYSTOCK: Shhh. Don’t say anything to offend him. We need the play. . . . Franz Liebkind?

  LIEBKIND (startled, cringing against his pigeon coop): I vas never a member of the Nazi Party. I am not responsible. I only followed orders. Who are you? Vhy do you persecute me? My papers are in order. I luf my adopted country! (He salutes and starts to sing.) Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber vaves of grain . . . Vat do you vant?

  BIALYSTOCK: Relax, relax, Mr. Liebkind. We’re not from the government. We came here to talk to you about your play.

  LIEBKIND: My play? You mean Springtime for You-Know-Who?

  Bialystock tells him that the play is a masterpiece and that he wants to produce it on Broadway. Liebkind screams, “Oh joy of joys!” and rushes to tell the birds: “Otto, Bertz, Heintz, Hans, Volfgang, do you hear? Ve are going to clear the Fuhrer’s name!” He then begins singing “Deutschland ber Alles” very boisterously until Bloom reminds him that people may be listening, whereupon he switches abruptly to “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The trio then repair to Liebkind’s apartment to celebrate the occasion with a Schnapps.

  LIEBKIND (as he passes Bloom and Bialystock their drinks): Gentlemen, with your permission, I would like to propose a toast to the greatest man that ever lived. Let us say his name quietly to ourselves. The walls have ears. (He whispers) Adolf Hitler. (He downs his drink.)

  BLOOM (whispers): Sigmund Freud. (He downs his drink.)

  BIALYSTOCK (whispers): Max Bialystock. (He downs his drink.)

  LIEBKIND: I vas vit him a great deal, you know.

  BIALYSTOCK: With whom?

  LIEBKIND (astonished by the question): Vit the Fuhrer, of course. He liked me. Out of all the household staff at Berchtesgaden, I vas his favorite. I vas the only one allowed into his chambers at bedtime.

  BIALYSTOCK: No kidding?

  LIEBKIND: Oh, sure. I used to take him his hot milk and his opium. Achhh, those ver the days. Vat good times ve had. Dinner parties vit lovely ladies and gentlemen, singing and dancing. You know, not many people knew about it, but the Führer vas a terrific dancer.

  Rosenblum (approximately): That’s your opening line, Mel. You bring them from the roof into the apartment and right to Liebkind telling them what a wonderful dancer the Fuhrer was.

  Brooks (approximately): Those goddamned sons of bitches. They ruined it. That fat pig! He had to play it his way. If I ever get ahold of him I’ll kick his head in!

  The material shot in Liebkind’s apartment worked magnificently on paper, but, for whatever reason, turned out flat on film. It killed Mel to lose a word. And here he lost over a hundred.

  Liebkind goes into a tirade about Allied propaganda, reaching a crescendo on the subject of the disgusting adulation it paid to Winston Churchill.

  LIEBKIND: But let me tell you this, and you’re getting it straight from da horse. Hitler vas better looking dan Churchill. He vas a better dresser dan Churchill, had more hair, he told funnier jokes, and could dance the pants off Churchill!

  BI
ALYSTOCK: Yes, yes. (Mock snarl) Churchill! That’s exactly why we want to do this play. To show the world the true Hitler, the Hitler you knew, the Hitler you loved, the Hitler with a song in his heart!

  Liebkind is so touched by Bialystock’s speech, he begins to sing. The partners join in as Bialystock pulls out a contract and Bloom a pen.

  BIALYSTOCK: Here, Franz Liebkind, sign here and make your dream a reality.

  Rosenblum (approximately): That’s where you want to cut, Mel. We’ll drop the Siegfried oath, the Wagner music, the blood-ritual, and go straight to Mostel and Wilder on the sidewalk gloating over the contract.

  Brooks (approximately): But that’s half the scene. You’re talking about half the fuckin’ scene!

  Mel could not stop thinking about the wonderful laughs the Siegfried oath had always gotten when he performed it. About Liebkind, Bialystock, and Bloom in their outlandish Wagnerian helmets, complete with horns, horns that no one would ever see now. No matter what portion of the film had to come out—and ultimately everything that needed to came out—he was neither appreciative nor cooperative, but behaved as if he were losing a relative, like an hysterical aunt at a Jewish funeral who throws herself onto the coffin as it’s going into the hole. His clutching and resistance stretched an eight-week editing job into six months.

  Once I came up with a transition that transported Mostel and Wilder from Bialystock’s office into the street and on their way to lunch, a transition that eliminated some unnecessary geography and created a piece of visual humor in its place. Mel was placated for only a moment. Only until it registered that someone was taking his film away, that he was losing control. When he found his response—“Who wants a joke by a fuckin’ editor?”—he said it as if he wished to see the whole editing profession exterminated.