I started yelling at him, “Get to an emergency room! Call the emergency room!”
It turned out it wasn’t a stroke, but just a passing seizure. When people would later ask him, “Why on earth would you call Mel Brooks when you think you’re having a stroke?”
He responded, “Maybe I was just looking for one last laugh on the way out.”
My old friend and colleague from Your Show of Shows, our third banana Howie Morris, played my mentor, who I named Dr. Lilloman, which was just a funny shortening of his description “little old man.” Like having Sid Caesar in Silent Movie, having Howie Morris in High Anxiety gave me a nice feeling of repaying old friends for helping me get to where I was.
Directing the opening airport sequence of High Anxiety.
Another wonderful comic actor was Ron Carey, who played Brophy, my sidekick in the film. Edward Brophy was a character actor in the 1930s and ’40s. He always played a sidekick or henchman against William Powell or Edward G. Robinson in a lot of Warner Bros. and MGM movies. His character would say things like, “Gee, boss, I couldn’t find a cab anywhere.”
The brim of his hat was always up. As opposed to Lee Tracy and Warner Baxter, other actors of that time, whose brims were always down. (You have to know who wore hats with the brim up or the brim down.)
Ron was laugh-out-loud funny in the opening scene when he meets me, his new boss, at the airport. He grabs my large trunk and begins to lift it to get it into the back of the car. In the famous scene he says, “I got it! I got it! I got it!…I ain’t got it.”
It crashes to the ground. He does it again and then again, always with “I got it! I got it! I got it!…I ain’t got it.”
Ron Carey as my sidekick, Brophy: “I got it! I got it! I got it!…I ain’t got it.”
Finally, after the third “I ain’t got it,” I pick it up and put it in the car. Lots of people have told me they quote the “I got it! I got it! I got it!…I ain’t got it” line from the film in their own lives whenever they have to pick up something heavy.
For the love interest I naturally once again turned to the marvelous Madeline Kahn, who did a great takeoff of Kim Novak, one of the well-known “Hitchcock Blondes.” Madeline came up with a brilliant idea; not only would she be carrying an expensive Louis Vuitton handbag, but she would be dressed in a jumpsuit made of matching Louis Vuitton material, and to top it all off, she would arrive in a Cadillac Seville that was entirely covered in the Louis Vuitton design. It tickled me no end! Her character was called Victoria Brisbane, whose father was Arthur Brisbane, a patient held captive by our money-hungry villains. Which brings me to an interesting story. Albert Whitlock, who had never been an actor, played Madeline’s father, Arthur.
I met Albert Whitlock in Hitchcock’s office when Hitch suggested that Whitlock could do for me what he did for him. He could create wonderful “matte paintings.” They are panes of glass on which scenery and settings are painted, leaving the center of the glass free for the camera to shoot through. So when the film was put together our heroes were surrounded by what looked like a beautiful pictorial setting that would have cost a fortune to actually go on location to get. But through the talents of Albert Whitlock and his magic paintbrush, we could go or be anywhere and save a fortune! Albert painted “the Institute for the Very, Very Nervous” and put it on a big cliff overlooking the ocean. We were actually shooting at Mount St. Mary’s College, which was nowhere near the ocean, but in the opening shots of the movie it looked spectacular.
Upon meeting Whitlock, I liked his look and his mild English accent. So I cast him as Madeline’s rich father, who was trapped in the institute.
At first, he said, “No, no. Out of the question. I’m not an actor. I can’t do that.”
But I eventually wore him down. I explained that he only had ten or twelve lines to say in the whole movie, and that afterward, he’d have something to show his grandchildren. I also thought it was a good inside joke that I could spring on Hitchcock.
As the script came along, we also found natural parts for my fellow writers, Ron Clark, Barry Levinson, and Rudy De Luca. Ron Clark played Mr. Zachary Cartwright, a recovering patient due to soon be released from the institute. He comes to my office for a final checkup. With me was Harvey Korman as the wicked Dr. Montague. In the scene, a seemingly recovered Cartwright turns insane again before my very eyes because unseen behind my back is the devious Harvey Korman, scaring the hell out of him with fake vampire teeth and a rubber band shooting paper clips into his neck. I was so alarmed by his loud screams every time a paper clip hit him from Harvey’s rubber band, that I immediately sent him back to his room. Ron, who was a wonderful writer but certainly not an actor, actually pulled it off!
Barry Levinson, on the other hand, was not only a terrific comedy writer, but also a pretty good actor. He took to the part of Dennis the high-strung bellboy as if he’d been acting all his life. I named him Dennis after Dennis Day, who was a regular on the Jack Benny radio show. Jack Benny had a running bit where he would call for Dennis Day to do his song with Jack’s famous catchphrase, “Oh, Dennis? It’s time for your song.”
We cast Jack Riley, who like Dick Van Patten I used in many of my films, to play the front desk manager. Jack Riley (just like Jack Benny) said, “Oh, Dennis? Can you take Dr. Thorndyke to his room, please?”
Barry (as Dennis) collects our bags and dutifully takes Brophy and me to the bank of elevators. The hotel we chose, the Hyatt Regency, had a brand-new lobby, replete with perfect glass elevators that would terrify my character, Dr. Thorndyke, because unbeknownst to the other characters, but well knownst to the audience, he has an enormous fear of heights. (Hence the title, High Anxiety.) As the elevator rapidly ascends you can see my character having a bad anxiety attack, not helped by Barry as Dennis in his high-pitched voice chanting, “Here we go. Straight to the top! Quite a view, isn’t it? Here we are. Top floor. Top of the hotel. You can’t get any higher! We’re pretty high!”
Somehow, I keep it together. On the way to the room I remind Dennis in an insistent tone, “I want that newspaper. It’s very important!”