It takes place in Russia soon after the revolution. In czarist Russia, there was a rigid class system. At the top were the aristocrats, the upper class—royalty, nobility, and the clergy. Following that came the middle class of professionals, merchants, and bureaucrats. Then came the working class—factory workers, soldiers, sailors, etc. And last, at the bottom were the peasants or the serfs. After the revolution, the aristocrats, royalty, and the peerage had to give up their big fine houses and their silverware and all the other trappings of their wealth. In one of those grand houses lived Vorobyaninov. There was a dining room, with beautiful chairs from London covered in gold cloth brocade. Vorobyaninov is flattened out. He’s no longer an aristocrat. He’s no longer a count. He’s just a plain clerical worker—very sad.
On her deathbed, his mother-in-law shares a secret: She hid her diamonds in one of the family’s chairs that subsequently was appropriated by the Soviet authorities.
“How could you do such a thing? Why didn’t you give them to me?” he asks.
“Why should I have given them to you when you had already squandered away half my daughter’s estate with your parties and your horses!” she replies.
Vorobyaninov explodes. He shouts at her, “Well, why didn’t you take them out? Why did you leave them there?”
“I didn’t have time,” she says. “You remember how quickly we had to flee? They were left in the chair.”
Vorobyaninov moans, “Fifty thousand rubles’ worth of jewelry stuffed in a chair! Heaven knows who may sit on that chair. If it’s still a chair, it may be firewood by now!”
She says, “I know I did wrong. Please forgive me!”
Vorobyaninov relents and hugs her face in forgiveness, completely forgetting that he still has his clerk’s rubber stamp in his hand. When he removes his hands, we see the words “Cancelled—August 17, 1927” stamped on her cheek.
From there the plot of The Twelve Chairs is very straightforward. Vorobyaninov is joined by a young crook named Ostap Bender with whom he forms a partnership, and together they proceed to search for these chairs. The partners have a competitor in a Russian Orthodox priest who has also learned of the secret of the diamonds in a chair from the confession of his dying parishioner, Vorobyaninov’s mother-in-law. The competing treasure hunters travel throughout Russia desperately looking for the chairs, which enables the authors to show us glimpses of little towns, and big cities like Moscow, and also to have the three central characters meet a wide variety of people: Soviet bureaucrats, newspapermen, survivors of the pre-revolutionary propertied classes, provincials, and Muscovites.
Could I write this movie? I said yes. It’s all about greed or love. My kind of movie.
Once again, my wonderful girl Friday, Alfa-Betty Olsen, was sitting at the typewriter and cheering me on. I would say things like, “Can I do this? Is it too crazy?”
And she’d say, “No! Never too crazy for you.”
When I finished a rough draft of the screenplay, I showed it to Sidney Glazier, the producer of The Producers. He said, “Why not? It’s a wonderful adventure and it’s hilarious. We took a chance on The Producers, and we came out on top. So let’s do it!”
One of my first challenges was the title song. The film needed a song that captured the vast emotional upheaval of Russia during that stressful period. It had to be both funny and moving. I knew I could do funny, but I questioned whether I could write the song that I knew the opening of the film needed. Once again, Anne stepped into the breach.
“Nobody else could write that song but you. Besides, your mother was born in Kiev. You are a Russian! It’s in your blood. So a good part of you is definitely a Russian peasant.”
“I beg to differ!” I said. “I was never a peasant. Maybe not an aristocrat, but I was never a peasant.”
But she was, as usual, absolutely right. No one could write, “Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst” but me: a Russian peasant.
Here’s a sample:
Hope for the best, expect the worst
Some drink champagne, some die of thirst
No way of knowing which way it’s going
Hope for the best, expect the worst!
I am especially proud of the lyrics I wrote for the release, or interlude, of the song.
It went like this:
I knew a man who saved a fortune that was splendid
Then he died the day he’d planned to go and spend it
Shouting “Live while you’re alive! No one will survive!”
Life is sorrow—here today and gone tomorrow
Forgive me patting myself on the back, but I felt it fit the spirit of the film perfectly. I heard a Hungarian folk song one afternoon and based the melody on that. I later found out that Brahms had based a piece on the very same tune. One day a guy came up to me and accused me of plagiarizing from Brahms. “No, no,” I responded. “Both Brahms and I stole it from some long-gone Hungarian tunesmith.”
That’s me as Tikon, a Russian peasant, holding my broom.
One of the great things about doing The Twelve Chairs was once again working with film composer John Morris. He did a wonderful job on my first film, The Producers. His arrangement of “Springtime for Hitler” was absolutely perfect and he used my melody as the basis for his score of the film. So here we are again, and I’ve given him “Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst” as a musical structure for the score of The Twelve Chairs. In addition to that whimsical arrangement, John also had the opportunity to display his extraordinary range as a composer of sensitive and haunting lyricism. He came up with his own beautiful melody called “Vorobyaninov’s Theme,” which carried Vorobyaninov and Ostap through their journey across the mountains, streams, villages, and fields of Russia.
I got pretty lucky with the casting of the film. For Vorobyaninov, the aristocrat who has fallen on hard times, I got the remarkably talented Ron Moody, who was so splendid in the part of Fagin in the wonderful film adaptation of the Broadway musical Oliver! I knew he would be perfect. He had an angry, soulfully expressive face that made you feel exactly what he was feeling.
Me with Ron Moody as Vorobyaninov and Frank Langella as Ostap Bender; they were pummeling me with questions, both desperate to find out where the twelve chairs went.
For the role of his partner, Ostap Bender, the young con man who joins him in his search for the chairs, Anne suggested a young promising actor that she had worked with doing summer theater in Stockbridge—Frank Langella.
For the part of the crazy Russian priest, I was blessed with the talents of the one and only Dom DeLuise—a gift from the comic gods! One of the funniest actors who ever walked the planet, Dom would bless the movie with an occasional funny ad-lib. For instance, there’s a scene with Dom running away with one of the chairs on his head. Vorobyaninov spots him out of the corner of his eye and gives chase. They struggle over the chair and together they rip out the seat, spraying the contents everywhere only to discover that nothing is hidden in the bottom—no jewels. Ron Moody as Vorobyaninov fixes Dom with a contemptuous look and says, “You’re a priest. You took a dying woman’s last confession for personal gain! You’re not worth spitting on!”
And that would have been the end of the scene, except that Dom impetuously ad-libbed, “Well, you are!” Then he spits in Vorobyaninov’s face and runs away shouting, “Finders keepers!”
Thanks to Dom, it was hilarious.