It's Good to Be the King by James Robert Parish

Author:James Robert Parish [Parish, James Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Rich & Famous
ISBN: 9780470225264
Google: WM8ZEm2KRZoC
Amazon: B00H2VFAKU
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2008-02-02T08:00:00+00:00

22

Flaunt It, Baby

The best way to stay alive as a good writer is to run a bulldozer through your conditioned values, learn to live frugally—which I haven’t—and take all the time you need to develop your ideas. You can’t do that if economics are smashing you to the wall. Movies and television are so mechanized now that if you’ve got a little bit of talent there are a lot of fellas in shiny suits waiting to grab you and chain you to a typewriter. Pretty soon you’re thinking the way they’re thinking. Or a television producer wants you to write a story about a bird with a broken wing or some other piece of idiocy which people don’t have to watch at all—they can just hear it kind of subliminally. This is what you’ve got to resist.

–Mel Brooks, 1966

By the mid-1960s, Mel Brooks had gained cult status as the 2000 Year Old Man and was enjoying high visibility in the entertainment industry and with the public as the cocreator of the thriving Get Smart TV series/franchise. Mel’s elevated professional status allowed him the luxury of being more selective in choosing his projects. Meanwhile, he and Anne Bancroft were enjoying the fruits of their respective professional successes. In late 1965, the Brookses purchased a summer home at Lone-lyville on Fire Island. When asked what inspired the new real estate purchase, Anne explained, “There are no autos and few phones on Fire Island. If I stayed home [in Manhattan] I couldn’t get any rest. I’ll do nothing for an entire month. Fire Island has the best beach I’ve ever seen. It is a narrow island with the bay on one side and the ocean on the other. From our house you can see both.”

Bancroft also updated the media on life with the zany Brooks: “I’m a moody person. When I’m in a bad mood anything can make me angry: if I’m in a good mood nothing bothers me. I’m hard to live with and so is Mel hard to live with. But my husband is one of the funniest men who ever lived. Sometimes I laugh at him until the tears roll out of my eyes.”

• • •

In the mid-1960s, Brooks occasionally found himself hired as a “script doctor” for floundering Broadway plays. It was the type of task that meshed with Mel’s then helter-skelter work habits. Such assignments generally required no protracted commitment on the part of the consultant, but only to step into the fray and spew forth ideas that others on the production team would execute. If the last-minute counsel proved at all helpful, it enhanced the script doctor’s behind-the-scenes reputation; if the efforts failed, no serious fault could be attributed to the consultant, who had merely tried to salvage what proved to be an untenable situation.

For Kelly, which cost nearly $650,000 (a whopping sum at the time), Mel was one of three writers (including Leonard Stern of Get Smart fame) brought in during the messy pre-Broadway tryout. The

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