“Yes,” he said. “But it was provided to you by the people.”
In a much lower voice, he whispered in my ear, “Mel, you’re in a communist country. Everything here belongs to the people.”
I said, “Djordje, please tell them I’m sorry. Tell them I apologize profoundly for throwing the people’s chair into the sea. I will never do anything like that again.”
He told them that, and they broke into applause. Djordje suggested we all have a drink to celebrate our restored friendship. We poured Vinjak (a powerful Yugoslavian brandy) into shot glasses and toasted one another, embraced one another, and that was the end of work for that day—we were all drunk as skunks. But we ended the day on a good note.
Another benefit I got out of making The Twelve Chairs was that I saw places and met people and learned things that I probably never would have if I didn’t make a movie in Yugoslavia. Most Americans, when they go overseas to Europe they may visit “important” cities like London, Paris, and Rome. Very rarely would they sidetrack to places on the other side of the Adriatic like Yugoslavia or Albania. It really expanded my knowledge of the world.
I even learned a little of their language. For instance, within Yugoslavia there were differences in language for even simple words like “bread.” In Serbian bread is gleb. However when I went to Dubrovnik, which is in Croatia, the Croatian word for bread is kruch. It also helps to learn simple words like “please,” which is molim in both languages. In America, before we say “Action!” when shooting a movie we sometimes say “Roll ’em!”
So when I was in Yugoslavia, to the delight of the crew, before I said “Action!” I would yell, “Roll ’em, molim!”
There were other phrases like “give me more” or “give me less” that were very important when ordering dinner. For more you’d say vi?e and for less it’s manje. But I think the most important word that I learned above all was polako, which probably saved my life every time I took a taxi. The minute you got into a Yugoslavian taxicab, the driver would floor it and you’d be flying at eighty miles an hour in a tin can with wheels.
I’d often shout at the driver at the top of my voice, “POLAKO! Molim! Polako!”
Which means, “SLOWLY! Please! Slowly!”
And sometimes, they would actually listen and slow down.
* * *
—
I am particularly proud of one shot in the film that I personally captured. It’s Ostap and Vorobyaninov trudging their way across Russia on their quest to find the chairs. I was belly-down in a Serbian potato field, and as the sun was setting like a big fried egg through the bare trees, I captured the poignant quality of the film in this magical image. When it appears in the film, we hear in the background John Morris’s beautiful, eloquent, and haunting theme. It ended up being one of my favorite moments in the film.
There’s a strange similarity in character development between The Producers and The Twelve Chairs. It seems that in the beginning, the leading characters in both movies really don’t care for each other. They’re complete opposites. I mean Vorobyaninov, who was born an aristocrat, looks at Ostap Bender as just a street boy—nothing but a scoundrel, a thief. And in The Producers, Bialystock looks at Leo Bloom like he’s just an amateur and an idiot. And little by little, they get to change each other until in the end they get very close, almost like brothers. And maybe since I am one of four brothers, I was attracted to both stories because they had some underlying emotional connections of what brothers often feel for one another.
The Twelve Chairs cost nine hundred thousand dollars to make and I’m not sure, but through the years I think it just about broke even. The picture did pretty well in New York, where people went to art house theaters to see special little movies like The Twelve Chairs. But it never made it across the George Washington Bridge.
* * *
—
In between the release of The Twelve Chairs and my next movie, an exciting event took place. Anne and I had been married for a little over seven years and we were trying to have a child but weren’t having any luck. Then one night when I got home to our townhouse in Greenwich Village on Eleventh Street, Anne was on the stairway leading from the parlor floor to the bedrooms, and when she heard the door open, she stopped and waited for me to come up the stairs. When I was halfway up the first landing, she stuck her head out, looked down at me, and said, “Mel?”
I said, “Yeah?”
With a warm glow on her face she said, “I’m pregnant.”
Wow, I couldn’t believe it! We hugged and kissed and cried—we were in heaven.
It was an easy pregnancy until the last month, when things got a little dicey. She was told not to do anything strenuous, and to stay in bed most of the time. So we dutifully listened, and thank god things went well. She splendidly gave birth to a beautiful seven-pound, nine-ounce baby boy we named Maximilian, after my father.
Soon after, we packed up Max and made the big move to California. We realized that was where our work was, and that’s where we should be. We found a little house on Rising Glen in Hollywood and settled down. We missed New York a lot, because that’s where our roots were: me in Brooklyn and Anne in the Bronx. But we were both busy with our careers and our new baby boy.
Max was a great kid. He liked to wear a little hat with the brim turned up. For a while when I saw him in that hat, I called him “Chick” because I thought he looked like a reporter, and that was usually a reporter’s name in an old black-and-white movie. He smiled every time I said it, so I was thinking of changing his name from Max to Chick, but then I had a burst of sanity and left it alone. Our neighbors on Rising Glen had a beautiful German shepherd named Jenny. And Jenny would often stick her nose through the fence that separated our backyards and lick Max’s face, which prompted Max to yell: “Jenny loves me! Jenny loves me!”
I didn’t want to break his heart by telling him that Jenny really loved the peanut butter and jelly that he left all around his mouth when he last ate!
To this day, I get letters from people who have just seen The Twelve Chairs for the first time on television somewhere and they are always moved and delighted by the film. I’m so glad I made it, because I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.
Chapter 12
Blazing Saddles
In terms of my career, by 1971, I had the artist part figured out. I had two Oscars and lots of critical acclaim.
The starving artist part was starting to get to me.
I had worked for close to two years on both The Producers and The Twelve Chairs and only made fifty thousand dollars for each film to write, direct, and act. I had my doubts about making a living in the movie business. I still hadn’t had a real commercial hit. The Producers and The Twelve Chairs together didn’t make me enough money to buy a new car.