Twentieth Century Fox thought December 1974 was a good time to release the film. We would be piggybacking off the success of Blazing Saddles. When Fox told us we would open on December 15 and be up against The Towering Inferno, which opened on December 14, and The Godfather: Part II, which opened on December 20, it sent shivers down my spine.
But there was no need to worry. The picture was great, our reviews were great, and the audience came out to see it in droves. The studio thought they were maybe going to get in trouble with the big theater chains because Young Frankenstein was in black and white. But as Gertrude Stein would say, a good picture is a good picture is a good picture.
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For our ads, we once again grabbed the talents of Anthony Goldschmidt and his longtime artistic collaborator John Alvin, who had done the arresting poster for Blazing Saddles. They came up with a remarkable poster featuring Gene Wilder as a wild-eyed Dr. Frankenstein and the monster sporting a top hat.
One day I was driving down Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood when I passed a tall structure with a magnificent expanse of blank space on the side. I thought, What a great place to put up a huge movie poster. It turned out that the structure was the Playboy Building. So I called the late Hugh Hefner and he graciously allowed us to paint the entire side of the Playboy Building on the Sunset Strip as a billboard for Young Frankenstein. It was five thousand six hundred square feet, took eighty-six thousand gallons of paint, and was lit up by fourteen huge klieg lights. It was remarkable; it took your breath away. Every time I drove past, I was in seventh heaven.
This was one of the first times somebody used the entire side of a building as a billboard. Nothing like that had ever been done before, and the only complaint we got was that it slowed down the traffic on Sunset Boulevard!
The reviews for Young Frankenstein were wonderful. I was thrilled with Charles Champlin’s review in the Los Angeles Times:
The movie may be slapstick, but it is not slapdash. It has been conceived and completed as a coherent whole, done in luminously perfect black and white. Everything, most particularly the music, is poignantly faithful to the spirit of old times…. There are Vaudeville jokes that may well be older than Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley herself…but they are spaced along a carefully developed story line which is executed by a team of hugely talented comic actors rather than one-lining comics.
Young Frankenstein was a certified hit at the box office and was also released in twenty-one other countries. Not only were we happy for ourselves, but for Laddie as well. Young Frankenstein, which he brought in to Fox, helped elevate him and put him in a position to green-light over three hundred films during his illustrious career, including High Anxiety (1977), Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and Thelma and Louise (1991).
So looking back at that fateful year of 1974, which started with Blazing Saddles in February and ended with Young Frankenstein in December, I can honestly say, it was a great year.
And I can also honestly say that 1974 was a much better year for Mel Brooks than it was for Richard Nixon.
Our huge, magnificent Young Frankenstein poster painted on the side of the Playboy Building on Sunset Boulevard.
Chapter 14
Silent Movie
After Young Frankenstein was launched and became a certified hit, both critically and financially, I went in search of my next movie. As luck would have it, I got a call from Ron Clark, a dear friend. Ron was a terrific comedy writer who had written for the famous Jackie Gleason TV show and also wrote a play with Sam Bobrick called Norman, Is That You?, which has become a comedy classic.
Ron had a crazy idea for a movie and wanted to talk to me about it.
I invited him to come to the Fox commissary. It turned out to be a most fruitful lunch. Not only did I enjoy my cottage cheese with fruit on top, but Ron’s idea was bold and dangerous—I loved it.
He proposed that I make an old-fashioned silent movie in the year 1975.
Even though, like I said, it was a dangerous and iffy idea, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It appealed to me on many levels. One, it was wild and different. Nobody had made a silent movie for god knows how long. So in that regard, it was in keeping with Mel Brooks breaking cinematic celluloid ground. I had taken the Western apart in Blazing Saddles, and in Young Frankenstein I had a party with black-and-white classic horror films. I was satirizing specific genres, but I was also paying tribute to them at the same time. Here was another genre that I dearly loved, and I knew I could have so much fun both satirizing and saluting it at the same time.
When I was a little kid, my older brothers would take me to see Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd in those zany slapstick silent movies. They would have to drag me home. I loved them so much I wouldn’t leave the theater.
To this day I remember clearly how much I laughed when Charlie Chaplin was eating his shoe in The Gold Rush or brilliantly dancing behind the referee in a boxing match or getting caught up in the huge wheels of machinery in Modern Times. Chaplin was truly an amazing all-around cinematic artist. Like Andreas Voutsinas used to say: “Or you got it or you ain’t.”
Well, in the case of Charlie Chaplin, he certainly got it.
And then there was the angelic face of Buster Keaton, who in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) had an entire house fall on him but somehow was standing in the doorway unhurt. And Harold Lloyd famously dangling in midair from one of the hands on a clock face in Safety Last! (1923).
I knew it would be a great challenge, but that was also part of its appeal. I loved a good challenge. My first hurdle was selling the idea of making a modern-day silent movie in the year 1975 to Laddie, who was then running Twentieth Century Fox.
“Really? A silent movie?” he said incredulously.
I said, “Yes. Nobody talks. The only dialogue is on title cards, which can be very funny. It’s a salute, like what we did with James Whale. This will be a tribute to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, Mack Sennett, and the Keystone Kops. All the great stars of silent movies. But it will be funny. Just like Young Frankenstein was funny. I won’t do anything that’s just a salute. It will always be funny.”
Laddie said, “So with Young Frankenstein you take away color and now you’re coming to me and you say you want to make a movie that takes away sound? What else are you gonna take away? If I let you go unrestrained, you’re liable to turn Twentieth Century Fox into a vaudeville house!”
I said, “I promise this is the end of my bizarre fight against real films. It will just be Silent Movie. It will be the end. After that, I promise I will make regular movies like everybody else.”
And so, Laddie agreed.
“Okay, I’m going to finance a script and if I like the script, we’ll make the movie.”