And he curtly replies in a slightly hysterical voice, “All right. I’ll get your paper. I’ll get your paper!”
Which leads to one of the most important scenes in the movie. Shot by shot I begin to re-create Hitchcock’s famous shower scene from Psycho. Instead of Janet Leigh’s naked back, you see Mel Brooks’s naked back. And just as Hitchcock did in Psycho, we cut to the showerhead bursting with hot water. Through clouds of steam, we see past the translucent shower curtain to the bathroom door beginning to open. As the famous Bernard Hermann’s memorable score for Psycho builds ominously, we see a figure with an arm raised approach the shower. And again, faithfully shot by shot we see the shower curtain ripped open and instead of the wacky mother with a huge knife from Psycho we see our wacky bellboy Dennis stabbing me with a rolled-up newspaper and in a crazy high-pitched voice he screams, “Here! Here! Here! Here’s your paper! Here’s your paper! Here’s your paper! Happy now? Happy? Happy now!”
And then as I fall just the same way Janet Leigh did, I pull the curtain and all the little rings that held up the shower curtain pop one by one. Instead of blood, the dark print from the newspaper slowly trickles down the drain.
When I showed Hitchcock this scene, he first corrected me by saying, “You’re two rings short on the shower curtain, but you’re absolutely remarkable on your using newsprint for blood going down the drain.”
High praise indeed, coming from the Master of Suspense himself.
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Rudy De Luca turned out to be a marvelous addition to the movie. He asked if he could play the killer, and if he could wear aluminum teeth to make his evil smile and laughter crazier. I agreed; he was an inspired choice. One of the things he did that really tickled me was that as he was ominously stalking me from the end of the hotel bar, he was having a highball topped with a little Japanese umbrella.
Together Rudy and I did a phone booth scene, which was one of the funniest bits in the movie. We built a pay phone booth that overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge, which was a salute to Hitchcock’s famous shot of the bridge in Vertigo. It starts with me calling Madeline in her hotel room, but when I begin to speak, Rudy smashes the phone booth glass behind me and wraps the telephone cord around my neck. Madeline just hears me making strange sounds and gets the wrong idea. She thinks it’s one of those weird, inappropriate phone calls. The strange sounds begin to turn her on and she says, “I am not going to listen to any more of this, I mean, I’ve had just about enough!…What are you wearing?”
As Rudy’s still choking me, I manage to squeak out, “Jeee! Jeee!”
And Madeline, obviously excited, responds with, “Jeans? You’re wearing jeans? I bet they’re tight.”
Madeline’s sexy enjoyment of the “dirty phone call” made the scene hilarious. When I fight Rudy off and he is unwittingly stabbed by a huge shard of glass I’m finally able to talk.
When she knows it’s me, Madeline quickly switches from heavy breathing to utter reality saying, “Richard! I knew it was you all the time. Did you laugh? I laughed.”
Rudy De Luca as “Braces” trying to choke me to death. Unfortunately, it was hard to say “Cut!” with the phone cord wrapped around my neck.
Madeline was also wonderful in a scene at the hotel piano bar. Like I have done with most of my movies, I wrote the title song: “High Anxiety.” I decided that I would sing it in the movie. I found a perfect spot for it in the hotel’s piano bar. The genial piano player asks me to sing something, but I explain I’m a doctor not a singer…although I do sing in the shower. Madeline urges me to sing a song. I ask the pianist, played by the wonderful comedian Murphy Dunne, if he knows “High Anxiety.”
It’s amazing; in a flash I go from being a conservative psychiatrist to Frank Sinatra. Handling the microphone like only Frank would, I flip the mic cord over my shoulder as I sing and move around the crowd like I’ve done it all my life. When I come to the second chorus, instead of singing “High anxiety…” I belt out “Oooh ’ziety…” à la Sinatra. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun performing in a film. To this day I often sing it onstage when I’m doing my act. I’ve always been a closet singer, but with this film I came out of the shower.
Singing the title song, “High Anxiety,” and handling the microphone like I think I’m Frank Sinatra.
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As always, I brought John Morris in from the beginning to craft the score, which was a tribute to Bernard Hermann, Miklós Rózsa, and all the other composers in Hitchcock’s repertoire. We wanted the audience to recognize the familiar suspenseful terrain and ambience. There was not one piece of music I could refer to from Porter, Gershwin, Bartók, or Berlioz that John Morris didn’t know. He loved music as much as I did. As he usually did, John used my title song as a main theme for the score. And when I sang it, he came up with a perfect orchestration; it was pure Nelson Riddle.
Before we started filming, I had watched every Hitchcock film over and over again. And one strange thing occurred to me: In addition to all the great characters that Hitchcock peopled his films with, he also seems to cast the camera as another one of his characters, endowing it with a mind of its own. While filming High Anxiety I tried to emulate that as well as the way Hitchcock often moved his camera in slow, stealthy push-ins, and yet still add a satiric Brooksian touch. One good example is a slow camera move from outside into the institute’s dining room through a glass door. Slowly but surely, the camera gets closer and closer to the dining room. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop, and crashes through the glass door. Everybody in the dining room—myself, Harvey, Cloris, Dick Van Patten, etc.—all look to where the camera crashed through the glass. The camera guiltily withdraws, absolutely mortified by its mistake. The cast goes back to eating as if nothing happened. It always gets a great laugh.