When she saw my expression, she broke into laughter and said, “Of course!”
We wrote a musical number for Anne based on the ever-popular Spanish song “Jealousy.” It was a crazy number in which Dom DeLuise does a furious flamenco tap dance on a tabletop, driving it into the floor. With Marty, Anne did an amazing thing with her eyes where she moved the right one to the center and back and then with the left one did the same. Marty followed suit with his own wild eyes. The bit really worked.
Anne Bancroft and Marty Feldman in Silent Movie. The eyes have it.
The next star was James Caan, the unforgettable Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), who at the time, happened to live only a block away. I would often run into him on our morning runs.
(I was actually running in those days!)
When I told Jimmy about Silent Movie, he thought it was a great idea and immediately said, “Count me in.”
He also told me that his dog had just given birth to five new pups and said, “If you need or want a dog, come over and pick one out.”
Anne and I took him up on that. We went to his house and one of the pups left the pack and made his way over to us. So instead of picking out a pup, he picked us!
We called him Pongo, after Pongo the main dog in Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). He was tan with a white chest and two white front paws. We had no idea that we were getting a pit bull terrier. We just thought he was beautiful. Later we were worried that he would do what pit bulls are stereotyped for doing, but he never ever bit anyone and was a sweetheart of a dog.
Enid, our housekeeper who would sometimes walk him, had an extra-long leash because when he saw other dogs, he wanted to know them in a hurry. So she’d quickly wrap the long leash around a sturdy palm tree so she wouldn’t go sailing after him.
Our son, Max, was a toddler then and he absolutely loved Pongo. He’d often thrust the end of a beach towel into Pongo’s mouth and then hang on for dear life, screaming with laughter at the top of his lungs while Pongo dragged him across the living room’s shiny wooden floors at sixty miles an hour.
Pongo had one habit that used to drive me crazy. When we lived just north of Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, the roof of our living room was close to a hill. Pongo would climb up the hill and jump onto the roof! No matter what I did, no matter how much I begged and pleaded, he wouldn’t come down. But Anne had a magic secret. Cheerios! He loved Cheerios. She’d shake a box of Cheerios and he’d come flying down.
Pongo lived with us for a long, long time—almost fifteen years. And I still miss him.
* * *
—
Back to Silent Movie, the next star we went after was Burt Reynolds. I knew that he was good friends with Dom DeLuise so I asked Dom to make the pitch to Burt. And it worked! Burt came over to talk about what he would do in the picture.
I proposed a few things, but he cut me off and said, “Why don’t I play myself? A big egotistical movie star!”
I loved the idea.
We talked about the fact that he actually had BR monogrammed on everything in his house—shirts, ashtrays, towels, even his door handles. I suggested, in keeping with his ego, we put his name in two-foot-tall letters right on top of his house—movie fans couldn’t miss it! He loved the idea. We also added a bit about him not being able to pass a mirror without stopping and adoring his own wonderful face.
In Burt’s scene, we see him in his stall shower happily soaping himself up. When suddenly, Dom, Marty, and I rise from the bottom of the frame and appear right next to him. We take over the job of soaping him up and scare the hell out of him! But in the end, he falls hook, line, and sinker for starring as Burt Reynolds in the movie within the movie. He was terrific.
Our next star happened to be eating in the commissary at the table right next to us at Fox. I was having lunch with the writers, Barry, Rudy, and Ron.
Rudy kept saying, “Look! Look!”
“What? What?” I said.
Rudy cupped his hand and whispered, “There! Sitting right there at the next table is Liza Minnelli!”
Talk about good luck! Without being invited, we all moved to her table and never stopped talking about our crazy silent movie until she broke into laughter and said yes.
In the movie we decided to do the same thing, except that Dom, Marty, and I would be in suits of armor as Knights of the Round Table, but still eating in the commissary. We spot Liza Minnelli and try to get to her table to ask her…but it’s not an easy thing to do in armor and chain mail.
The scene was hysterical. Liza kept breaking up in the scene by laughing every time one of us fell down, and we kept that in the final cut of the movie. Having her in the movie was wonderful.
Our final star cameo was really a huge star at that time—the great Paul Newman. I found out that he loved a beer called St. Pauli Girl. So I sent him ten cases of it, together with a letter that explained why I wanted him to guest star in our film. We knew that Paul was an avid racing fan, and even drove his own race car in real high-speed races.
We explained that we wanted to do a wheelchair chase, and we would find him as he sat in a wheelchair recovering from a racing-car mishap. We had motorized wheelchairs and it was ambitious and a little crazy if not actually dangerous. But he went for it! He loved the idea of speeding ahead of us in his motorized wheelchair. In a P.S. response he explained that I didn’t have to send him those ten cases of St. Pauli Girl beer to get him to say yes—but he wasn’t going to send them back, just in case my check bounced.
Shooting the Paul Newman wheelchair chase scene was one of the happiest on-set movie experiences of my life. We actually sped flat out doing our best to catch him in his chair, but we never could. Really! He was too damn good.
Every once in a while, I would hear a crash of wheelchairs followed by Marty Feldman’s cockney-accented voice shouting, “I’m all right, love!”
Silent Movie also gave me an opportunity to work with enduring comedy icons that I had loved all my life. There were a number of classic bits that were even funnier in the silent format.
Fritz Feld was the ever-present headwaiter in every fancy dining room scene ever filmed. In order to summon another waiter, he would make a popping sound by slapping his hand against his open mouth.
So in Silent Movie when he did that, we gave him a title card that said just one word:
POP.