I had every faith in the fact that when the audience saw this Nazi spectacle the producers’ dreams of a big flop would come true.
Music infuses a film with the correct emotion that you need in the scene. You shade your film with the right colors while directing, but music is especially important. I needed another song at the end of the screenplay because even though crime never pays and our heroes are put in jail, they are undaunted in their zeal to produce another flop. So they come up with a new musical called Prisoners of Love, and once again raise more money than they need from convicts, guards, and even the warden to put it on. Once I had written “Springtime for Hitler,” “Prisoners of Love” came easily and I said to myself, “Maybe in addition to being a writer, director, and an actor, I’m also a songwriter?”
I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see the first copies of the sheet music of my songs and the credit in the upper-right-hand corner: “Words & Music by Mel Brooks.”
When the script was finished, someone I knew said, “I’ve got a friend who just produced The Eleanor Roosevelt Story and won an Academy Award for it.”
“Yes,” I said. “But this is about Hitler. I don’t think we should go to that guy.”
“No, go!” he insisted. “He’s good. He works with a company called UMC, owned by Louis Wolfson, who’s very rich and he has racehorses in Florida. They’ve got a lot of money.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s see this guy. What’s his name?”
“Sidney Glazier.”
I went up to Sidney Glazier’s office; he was eating a tuna fish sandwich and drinking coffee from a big cardboard cup. I congratulated him on The Eleanor Roosevelt Story. I started to prepare him, “This is kind of a crazy comedy. I’m not sure you want to be—”
“I love your stuff,” he cut me off. “I was the biggest fan of Your Show of Shows and Sid Caesar. Do me a favor—I don’t like reading. I read if I have to, but can you just tell me the story?”
So I began talking to him about Bialystock and Bloom. I described the blue blanket scene, in which Bialystock takes away Bloom’s little blue security blanket and Bloom becomes wildly hysterical. Sidney was in the middle of tuna fish and coffee and he exploded with laughter. Tuna fish and coffee all over the place, but he couldn’t stop laughing. When I finally finished telling him the story of the movie, he stood up from his desk and said, “I love it! I’m gonna get this movie made.”
It takes nine months to make a baby, which is exactly how long it took to make my baby. Sidney and I took Springtime for Hitler to every studio. We came close to real interest from Universal, but with one small caveat. They thought Hitler was just too offensive. They suggested Springtime for Mussolini. Mussolini was a much more acceptable dictator. I think they just didn’t get it.
The only studio head who seriously considered it was Joseph E. Levine of Embassy Pictures (which eventually became AVCO Embassy). Joe started as an exhibitor in Boston, owning theaters and showing movies, and he’d already been successful producing and distributing kind of spaghetti Westerns. At that time, he had made movies like Hercules Unchained (1959), and because it did so well he was thinking of a sequel called Hercules Caught and Chained Again.
They were called “Sword and Sandal” pictures and a lot of people went to see them. But he didn’t stop there, and later in his career he also went on to make really good movies like The Lion in Winter (1968), A Bridge Too Far (1977), The Graduate (1967), and my film The Producers.
Sidney and I met with Mr. Levine in his spacious, well-appointed office. When we entered the room, he gave us each an apple from a big bowl of them on his desk.
“Golden Delicious,” he said. “They’re thirty-five cents apiece. I only get the best.”
He might not have been well read, but he was well versed in what he thought was good commercial material and he really liked my script.
While we were eating our Golden Delicious apples he said, “What do you think it’ll cost?”
“About a million dollars,” Sidney replied. “But don’t worry, I can raise half of it. If you can come up with half a million, we can make the movie for a million bucks, with a forty-day shooting schedule.”
He agreed to do it. His first question was, “Who’s going to direct?”
My quick response was, “I’ll direct.”
He logically responded, “Have you directed before?”
I told him that I directed in the Catskills and I also directed the floor comedy on Your Show of Shows, basically a segment producer. I had also directed a play in Red Bank, New Jersey.
But I hadn’t yet directed a film.
“So what makes you think you can direct a film?” he asked.
“Because I’m the writer. I created it,” I confidently responded. “All those little scenes that I wrote, they’re in my head already. I can see them. It’ll save us a fortune! I don’t have to search for the setups and the lighting because I know what it should look like in advance. If you get another director, he won’t have those scenes in his head already; he’ll have to make them up.”
He said, “Nobody’s ever said that; that’s pretty smart. All right. If you don’t ask for too much, you can be the director.”
And then he said, “As you know, my background is in exhibition. I own theaters in Boston, New York, and Chicago. I know a lot of exhibitors. After reading your script I tried your title, Springtime for Hitler on all of them. I got a resounding no. They said they would never put ‘HITLER’ on their marquees. So you’ve gotta come up with another title.”
I instantly said, “Okay!”
If that was his only objection, I wasn’t going to stand in the way of writing and directing my first film because of a title. I immediately came up with, “How about The Producers? Bialystock and Bloom are anything but producers. It’s ironic.”
He said, “Great! I love it. Just one more thing…go out and direct something. A commercial, anything. Just so you have a little more directing experience under your belt.”
“Fine,” I said. “Done!”
We shook hands all around; it was a great day.
To make Joe feel more comfortable I reached out to a friend named Steve Frankfurt, who was a genius who worked at Young & Rubicam, the advertising agency.
I asked him, “What have you got that I can direct?”