And now we return to the Los Angeles Theatre for the fourth screening of this year's Last Remaining Seats program from the Los Angeles Conservancy. This is where they had the first screening of the series, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, three weeks ago. Tonight they showed the "newest" of this year's six selections, 1974's Young Frankenstein. While I've caught bits and pieces of this flick on TV, I hadn't yet seen the thing all the way through from start to finish. And of course I hadn't ever seen it on the big screen before, let alone a screen like this one.
As with George Takei last week, last night we were treated to a surprise guest before the show. Actually, two surprise guests. I shouldn't've been surprised at the whole guest thing, though. Pretty much every screening thus far has had someone of note come out beforehand to talk about the film and get the crowd all warmed up. However, while I was walking around taking pics before the show, I couldn't help noticing the three chairs set up on stage in front of the curtain. Now that was new. Okay, so I figure they're gonna do a Q&A or something, right? So one of the chairs would be for the interviewer, and the other two would be for famous people. Would it be random famous people not related to the movie, like George Takei last week talking about Goldfinger? Or could it be that you-know-who was going to come out? Dare I hope?
Sure enough, Mel Brooks was there! That's twice this year I've seen him in person, the other time being at the end of January for the double bill of Blazing Saddles and History of the World: Part I. Joining him on stage was Cloris Leachman, who plays the housekeeper Frau Blücher. Man, what a well-cooked ham she is. I lost count of how many times during the interview she got up and just, ya know, became the center of attention. That silver-haired gal was so full of life that I was no less than shocked afterward when I saw on IMDb that she's 82! As is Mel, which is also hard to believe considering how buoyant that little man is. Interviewing them was film scholar Harry Medved, who two years ago published Hollywood Escapes: The Moviegoer's Guide to Exploring Southern California's Great Outdoors. This book basically goes into exhaustive detail about the oodles of Southern Cal locations that have been featured in movies. Examples include the river from Stagecoach, the sand dunes from the original Star Wars, and the chapel from Kill Bill. Suffice it to say that when Harry introduced Mel and Cloris, all two thousand plus peeps in the audience got to their feet and clapped for a solid minute or so.
One of the first things Harry asked Mel was about the decision to shoot in black and white. 'Course it's impossible to imagine Young Frankenstein in color, but that's the way Warners wanted it apparently. Warners was the studio behind Blazing Saddles, which of course had been a hit. It was also still a very recent hit, having just come out in February of '74. Young Frankenstein came out in December of that year. The way Mel told it last night, his pitch to the Warners execs about his Young Frankenstein idea went perfectly...until the very end. As he was getting up to leave, he threw out, "Oh, and by the way, I'm going to do it in black and white." That's when the execs were like, "Wait a sec! Sit back down and run that by us again." Suffice it to say that Warners didn't want it to be in black and white. "Peru has color," was the way Mel made fun of their argument. Finally they agreed to disagree, and Mel decided to find his project a new home. That new home turned out to be Fox, where Mel has been making a comfortable living ever since.
The color debate didn't end right away, though. Fox tried to compromise. They said sure, you can create black and white prints, but the negative should be in color. Mel didn't trust them. If they had a color negative, what was to stop them from producing color prints for exhibition? Mel would've been powerless to stop them. They finally agreed to let him shoot in pure black and white, and that was thanks in large part to producer Michael Gruskoff. Mike was sitting in the audience last night, toward the front. Mel pointed him out, he stood up, and everyone gave him a round of applause.
Mel said that the story idea was Gene Wilder's, and then the two of them worked on the screenplay together. Part of their "research," so to speak, was to watch the five or so Frankenstein movies as well as read the novel. For their movie, not only the look, but the sound was important, especially the music. So Mel's composer John Morris had to do his homework. John, by the way, has scored a ton of Mel's stuff: The Producers, Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, you name it. Things did not go as smoothly between Mel and his director of photography, Gerry Hirschfeld. Mel insisted that the look of the film not be as perfect as the technology of the seventies could've allowed it. Gerry had a hard time grasping that. For instance, one shot saw the camera get bumped or whatever while tracking forward. Gerry wanted to do the shot over again, but Mel was like, nah, leave it. Apparently that took the cake for Ger, who decided he didn't want his name attached to the film. Mel was like, "Fine. Then your name won't be attached." Tempers cooled finally, and sure enough Ger kept his name in the credits. It's interesting hearing about all this drama now. The film's look is fine to me. Does the casual moviegoer notice things like a slight jarring of the image during a dolly. While watching the film last night, I paid attention as hard as I could and still couldn't figure out which scene Mel was talking about.
The backstory of Gene Hackman's cameo as the blind man is hilarious. Keep in mind that two years earlier he scored an Oscar for The French Connection. Indeed, Cloris Leachman won the Best Actress Oscar the same year for The Last Picture Show. Gene had also been in Bonnie and Clyde, The Poseidon Adventure. Dude was hot shit. Well one day, he and Gene Wilder were playing tennis. And Gene was like, "So Gene, baby. What movies do you have coming up?" And Gene Wilder tells him about Young Frankenstein. Gene Hackman went wild apparently, and wanted to be a part of it somehow. So he called Mel and asked about the blind man part. Mel told him it was just a tiny one-scene part and that Gene would have to audition for it 'cause other much less well-known actors had already been booked for auditions. Well guess what? Gene "Hot Shot" Hackman actually showed up and did a friggin' audition! To play a blind man! Knowing this as I watched last night made that scene even funnier. Go Gene!
To play Frau Blücher, Mel wanted Cloris to affect a German accent. Cloris said last night she didn't know the first thing about German accents. So Mel's ma became a permanent fixture on the set as Cloris's sort of dialect coach. Mel's ma's family came from Ukraine, but I guess she also knew a thing or two about German as well, 'cause having been a student of German for a good while, I have to say I was impressed by Cloris in the film. Cloris talked about how she would mess around with Peter Boyle while the latter was bound to that table during the scene where Gene Wilder "creates" him. She also remembered how scenes took much longer to shoot than they should've 'cause apparently Gene Wilder couldn't stop laughing. The way she described it last night was that, while trying to recite his dialogue, Gene would break into hysterics to such an extent that his face looked like it was broken into pieces. Again, as with the Gene Hackman deal, this kind of backstory makes watching the film that much more interesting.
As Get Smart was about to come out, Harry asked Mel if he'd seen it. Mel said he had and that he loved it and was amazed at all the stunts and what have you that they pulled off. The original TV show, which he co-created with Buck Henry, was never that ambitious. One of the scenes of the new film, interestingly enough, was shot at the intersection of Broadway and Sixth St. in downtown L.A., literally right outside the Los Angeles Theatre's doors.
It was great seeing Mel again so soon after the double feature at the Aero. With George Takei last week, that's two weeks in a row where I was surprised by the pre-show guests. You gotta give the Conservancy props for the way they turn these screenings into events. I enjoyed Young Frankenstein much more now that I had so much backstory from two of the people involved. It was also a bittersweet experience, too, watching the brilliant Marty Feldman as Igor (pronounced EYE-gor). He was actually the same age as Gene Wilder, but he didn't last long after Young Frankenstein. He was down in Mexico shooting Yellowbeard eight years later and contracted food poisoning from eating shellfish, which precipitated a massive heart attack. He was only 49, poor chap. And talk about irony, he died just before he had to shoot his last scene, where his character Gilbert dies.
