I first met Gene Wilder in 1963 when he was in a production of the Bertolt Brecht play Mother Courage and Her Children, starring Anne. When I saw the play, this particular actor playing the chaplain caught my eye. He had something. There was a radiant innocence in his performance. Like Chaplin, he could be sad and funny almost at the same time. I asked Anne about him. She thought he was one of the best actors in the play.
I would go to the Martin Beck Theatre almost every night to pick up Anne and grab a bite to eat. I asked her to introduce me to Gene. When I met him, I immediately was thinking, Leo Bloom, Leo Bloom. I asked him to come out with us a couple of nights so I could get to know him. He would ask me for advice on how to play his role in the play—he was disturbed by all the laughs he got when he wasn’t asking for them. I told him, “Look in the mirror. Blame it on God.”
The more I got to know him, the more I thought, I’m not wrong. He was definitely a consideration for Bialystock’s partner in crime, Leo Bloom.
When the play’s closing notice went up, Anne and I invited Gene to spend a weekend with us on Fire Island. I had thirty pages of the screenplay finished. After dinner, I read the first three scenes of Springtime for Hitler, almost verbatim as they eventually appeared onscreen, and told Gene that I definitely had him in mind to be my Leo Bloom. He was absolutely thrilled. He loved the character, he loved the script, and he was flattered and honored that I would choose him.
I told Gene not to take anything on Broadway or Off Broadway or anywhere else without checking with me first. He said, “You’ll never get it made. This is too crazy, too wild. And besides, we’re too close to what’s happened. The world isn’t ready for a comedy featuring Adolf Hitler. Maybe in ten years.”
I said, “Never mind. If I ever raise the money, you’re gonna be Leo Bloom.”
He smiled and said, “I’m really touched and flattered, but it’s too good. Nothing really good ever gets made.”
Thank god, for once in his life he was wrong.
* * *
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When Joseph E. Levine came up with the money and I knew we were actually going to make the movie, one of my first stops was the Broadhurst Theatre backstage. Gene was replacing Alan Arkin in the lead role of Murray Schisgal’s play LUV.
I entered his dressing room when he was taking off his makeup. He was startled to see me.
“What? What?” he exclaimed.
I flung the script for The Producers down on his makeup table and said, “We got the money, we’re going to make it, and you’re Leo Bloom.”
At first, he couldn’t speak, and then he burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying.
“I can’t use you if you keep crying!” I told him. I held him in my arms until he relaxed and then I said, “Just one small favor…Zero Mostel, who is playing Bialystock, has casting approval in his contract and he wanted to make sure he would work with whoever was going to be playing Leo Bloom.”
Gene said, “Of course. I’d love to meet him.”
I was a little nervous, but I didn’t have to be. When Zero met Gene he immediately took to him. As a matter of fact, he frightened Gene a little when he swooped him up in his arms and kissed him on the lips screaming, “You’re my Leo Bloom!”
Zero was crazy—good crazy.
* * *
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For Franz Liebkind, I had originally considered a young actor named Dustin Hoffman. He wasn’t famous yet. He actually lived on my block in Greenwich Village on Eleventh Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues. My lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz (who has been my lawyer all my life in showbiz), told me that he was a brilliant stage actor. Dustin read Franz Liebkind for me, and he was absolutely spot-on. He got the craziness and the love of Hitler right from the start, and his German accent was pretty damn good. But life is funny and, like the cliché says, often stranger than fiction.
One night at about two in the morning I was awakened by pebbles being tossed against my bedroom window. I opened my window to see what was going on. When I did I got hit with a few. There, down on the street, was Dustin Hoffman. Before I could say “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted, “Come down! We have to talk.”
Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock desperately begging Gene Wilder as Leo Bloom to launch their criminal scheme.
I threw on some clothes, came down, and we sat on my stoop.
Dustin said, “You won’t believe this. I just got a call from Mike Nichols in L.A. He wants me to fly out tomorrow to do a screen test.”
I said, “For what? Mike Nichols is in Hollywood doing The Graduate with my wife, Annie.”
He said, “Yes. That’s it, that’s it! He wants to audition me for the part of Benjamin Braddock.”
I said, “This can’t be happening! But anyway, I’m not worried. No offense, but you’re not the handsomest guy in town. The minute they see you they’ll send you flying back into my arms and back into The Producers.”
Boy, was I wrong.
Two days later he called to tell me he got the part. He had already signed a contract with me, so I could have bollixed up everything by legally stopping him, but I let him go and wished him luck. I added one small caveat: “You’re going to be playing opposite my wife—don’t fool around.”
* * *
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Now, what to do, what to do? I needed a new Franz Liebkind. So for the next week I auditioned about a dozen actors for the role. Some of them near misses, but nobody perfect. And then, Kenny Mars came through the door wearing a pigeon-splattered German helmet.
Sometimes in show business, something bad happens but then you take a good bounce. Let me explain…I lost Dustin Hoffman, who probably would have been a wonderful Franz Liebkind. But because of it I took that good bounce and got Kenny Mars, who would turn out to be a truly memorable Franz Liebkind.
I’ll never forget the laugh he got when he was ranting about what a bad painter Winston Churchill was: “Churchill! With his cigars. With his brandy. And his rotten painting, rotten! Hitler, there was a painter. He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon! Two coats!”
Nobody could have delivered those lines as sensationally as Kenny Mars.
* * *
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I was then blessed with a remarkably funny duo—Christopher Hewett as the hilarious Roger De Bris, the world’s worst director, and playing his “roommate,” the over-the-top Carmen Ghia, was Andreas Voutsinas. In my back pocket I already had the wildly funny Dick Shawn in mind to play LSD—Lorenzo St. DuBois, our hippie Hitler. His Eva Braun turned out to be Renee Taylor, who came to the part with an original idea: Eva Braun would come from the Bronx. And Lee Meredith was the icing on the cake as Bialystock and Bloom’s beautiful and sexy secretary, Ulla.
Bloom says, “A secretary who can’t type?”
And Max lecherously replies, “Not important.”
* * *
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On the first day of shooting, everybody was nervous—a crazy story and a director who had never directed a movie before at the helm.
After the assistant director said, “Quiet on the set!”