Gene said I taught him the most important lesson he ever learned about screenwriting: “The first draft is just concepts. Then you take a sledgehammer and knock the pillars of the story line as hard as you can. If they hold up, you keep it in. If they start to crumble, you have to rewrite, because the structure is everything.”
Gene and I never stopped writing Young Frankenstein. We wrote and rewrote, then wrote and rewrote, then wrote and rewrote once again. We always went back to a scene until we were more or less satisfied.
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In addition to James Whale’s films, we also relied on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818, for inspiration. Gene and I had both read Mary Shelley’s book when we sat down to write this script. Only nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein; she was on a summer holiday in Switzerland with her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friend and fellow poet Lord Byron. They were part of a famous group of writers who gave birth to a literary period known as the Romantic Age. Legend has it that they had a contest to see who could write the scariest ghost story. We never found out what Shelley or Byron wrote, but the teenaged Mary’s tale lives on to this day. She ended up penning what would become one of the first true works of science fiction and the ultimate story about men playing god.
The concept that has made Frankenstein’s monster such an enduring character in film and literature is that at its core he is a deformed creature who has love in his heart, wants to be loved, but is misunderstood. Even though we were doing a crazy comedy, those important qualities were still there. That was no doubt key to the success and longevity of the film.
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You never know where and how a stroke of luck is going to cross your path. For instance, we thought about casting even before the script was halfway finished. Right from the beginning we knew that Gene had to be “Dr. Fronkensteen.” But who would play the monster, and who would end up playing the weird, funny, humpbacked Igor?
One day Mike Medavoy, who would eventually be running TriStar Pictures but was Gene’s agent at the time, called Gene and said, “I know you’re working with Mel on that Frankenstein picture, is there anything in it for Peter Boyle and Marty Feldman?”
Gene said, “What made you think of that combination?”
Mike replied, “Because I’m not only your agent, I also now handle Peter Boyle and Marty Feldman.”
Gene said, “Wow. As a matter of fact, as it happens, I think I do…”
And believe it or not, that’s how we got Peter Boyle to be our incredible monster and Marty Feldman to be our unforgettable Igor. Talk about a stroke of luck!
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God put Marty Feldman together. We had nothing to do with it. I met Marty in England, where he had a television show called The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, which my friend and former Sid Caesar writers’ room partner Larry Gelbart was writing. I fell in love with Marty instantly and when Mike Medavoy suggested him, I knew he would be absolutely perfect for Igor.
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As everybody who has seen Young Frankenstein knows, Marty Feldman has bulging eyes. It’s a condition called “Graves’ ophthalmopathy” in which his eyes protrude and he more or less sees out the sides of his face like a horse, rather than straight ahead.
I tell this joke about Marty in my stand-up routine: “Anytime I wanted to hide from Marty Feldman I’d put the tip of my nose against his…and he couldn’t see me!”
I was so lucky to get him to play the role of the mad humpbacked Igor. Marty came up with the funniest retort in the movie.
When Gene says, “You know I don’t mean to embarrass you but I’m a rather brilliant surgeon, perhaps I could help you with that hump.”
Marty came back with: “What hump?”
It was dynamite.
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I first saw Peter Boyle in the movie Joe, a tough political story in which he was wonderful in his portrayal of a terrible person. In Young Frankenstein, the monster is scary and miserable, but there is a sweet child in him. Gene said, “Peter can do both.”
Peter was a consummate artist, and the beauty of him came through, his soul shone through. He bestowed an absolute magnificence on the creature.
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We knew Young Frankenstein had to be in black and white if we were going to salute those great Universal Pictures that James Whale made in the 1930s, and we thought we needed at least two million dollars to do it (which was the going price to make a modest film in those days). When the script was finished, our producer Michael Gruskoff along with Gene and I went to a meeting to sell it to Columbia Pictures.
Now remember, as we were walking into this meeting Blazing Saddles hadn’t been released yet, so my reputation as a hit-producing moneymaker was not yet established. Still, the Columbia executives liked the script. They wanted to make it, but the most they would come up with was a million and a half.
(Had they known at the time about the future box office of Blazing Saddles they wouldn’t have quibbled about a half a million bucks.)
We needed two million, so Mike got them to split the difference and they said yes to 1.75 million dollars. We shook hands all around and said, “It’s a deal.”
On the way out, I turned back and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to make it in black and white.”
Then I closed the door.
A thundering herd of studio executives chased us down the hall from the meeting room.
They were screaming, “No, no! Wait, come back! No black and white! No black and white! Peru just got color! Everything is in color! Nobody makes movies in black and white anymore!”
The thing about satire is the walls, the floors, the costumes; everything surrounding the comedy has to be real. If we were going to satirize the classic 1930s Universal Frankenstein pictures, our film had to be in black and white.
The Columbia guys offered a compromise: “Shoot it in color, and we’ll diffuse it and take the color out for the U.S., but in the rest of the world it would have color.”
I knew they were lying. Studios have a way of promising the world and giving you zero. I said no, because I knew they’d somehow trick us and release it in color anyway.
I said, “There’s a stock called Agfa. It’s a German black-and-white film. It’s true, rich, thick black and white. That’s the only film stock I’ll make it on.”
The Columbia guys said, “We’re sorry. If it’s not in color, that’s going to break the deal.”
Mike, Gene, and I bravely yelled back, “Then break it!”
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On that very same afternoon our producer, Mike Gruskoff, said, “My friend Laddie has just become part of the new leadership at Twentieth Century Fox.”
Alan Ladd, Jr.—Laddie to his friends—was the son of the terrific forties film star Alan Ladd, who had played some memorable roles such as the lead in This Gun for Hire (1942) and the famous title role in Shane (1953). Laddie and Mike had been agents together and they were still good buddies.