Mel Brooks

[hedwig]

 

[cine]

Mel Brooks Creating A Young Frankenstein Musical?

After turning his film The Producers into one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time, it's being rumored that Mel Brooks might be looking to do the same thing with Young Frankenstein.

page 2..

I guess this is a good time to say that Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan are currently writing the book for Young Frankenstein!

[MacGuffin]

Mel Brooks thinks it time for Frankenstein to dance

Mel Brooks thinks it is almost time for Frankenstein to sing and dance on Broadway.

The comic filmmaker, who made a monster hit musical out of his 1968 movie "The Producers" says he is adapting another of his classic film comedies for the stage -- this time the 1974 "Young Frankenstein," a spoof on the Frankenstein saga which he says is perhaps the best movie he ever made.

With no deadline set, Brooks says he is in the middle of writing the score, including a song for scary Frau Blucher, the caretaker of the Frankenstein castle still madly in love with that late, unlamented mad scientist.

When the whole musical is completed, Brooks says he will make a formal announcement to raise money.

"It is going to be wonderful," Brooks said in a telephone interview, just before he burst into a German-accented version of his Frau Blucher song:

"He vus my boyfriend; He vould come home in a snit; He vould have a terrible fit; I am the first thing he vould hit but I didn't give a shit; He vus my boyfriend."

How could a show like this miss? In fact, you might ask, how can anything that the 79-year-old Mel Brooks writes, directs or stars in miss?

To find out just how much of a national treasure he is, the Mel Brooks DVD collection has just been issued by Twentieth Century Fox Home entertainment, containing eight of his films from "Blazing Saddles to "Young Frankenstein." All that is missing are the two film versions of "The Producers," which will be issued in May in a separate collection.

A FAVORITE

Brooks says his favorite film in the collection is "To Be or Not to Be," a remake of the old Jack Benny classic which he neither wrote nor directed but rather starred in alongside his wife, the actress Anne Bancroft, who died last year of cancer.

"I miss my wife. We had such a good time making that movie and she was so damned good in it. But listen (the boxed set) is a treasure trove. People should buy 20 at a time and use them for Christmas presents. They make incredible gifts," he said.

The set contains five films never before issued on DVD, including "The Twelve Chairs," a film some critics consider Brooks' neglected masterpiece. "I was damned good in it," Brooks said of his performance as a serf who loves to be beaten by his Russian aristocratic master.

The set also contains an unspoken reminder: the man many consider one of the funniest filmmakers in American history pretty much does not make movies any more.

He produced last year's musical film version of "The Producers," but did not direct it. His last film directing effort was in 1995, "Dracula: Dead and Loving It."

As far as Brooks is concerned, Broadway is more fun, especially since movies have become too much of a big business.

"I never had trouble getting films made. But when things got rough. I got involved on Broadway because there is a modicum of art still alive there. The movies today are a big, tough, cut and dried business. A movie opens on a Friday and it either makes its money or it doesn't. They don't let films build word of mouth any more," he said, adding:

"Broadway is like it was 50 years ago. You can get the money for a show, you can take the show out of town and try it out. The only reason I made a movie of the musical version of 'The Producers' was so we'd have a record of it."

When he made "Young Frankenstein" in 1974, Brooks said he did everything he could to emulate the 1930s James Whale movie, from shooting the whole film in black and white to using many of the same shoots that Whale did.

Now Brooks says his challenge is to do the musical on Broadway with a black and white set, with all the mists and moodiness of the original movie plus laughs and songs. As he said in one of his movies, "It's good to be the king."

[hedwig]

Where's the Artistic Freedom?
Funny man Mel Brooks laments the lack of humor in Hollywood these days.

By Ramin Setoodeh, Newsweek

April 2, 2006 - Hollywood legend Mel Brooks has too many credits to name, but here goes. He directed 1968's "The Producers" and was the producer of the 2005 remake. He was creator of the 1965 series "Get Smart" and returned to TV in a recurring part on "Mad About You." His films are classics: "Blazing Saddles," "High Anxiety," "The Twelve Chairs," "To Be Or Not To Be," "Young Frankenstein," "Spaceballs," "History of the World: Part I" and "Robin Hood: Men In Tights." With the Mel Brooks DVD boxed set coming to stores this week, he spoke to NEWSWEEK's Ramin Setoodeh. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Hi Mel. Where are you today?
Mel Brooks: You're talking to me from sunny Southern California. This is where my office is, in Culver City. This is where I make my movies, develop my Broadway shows. This is good territory—just a few blocks away from the old MGM.

What are you working on now?
I'm working on a Broadway show. It's called "Young Frankenstein." I'm writing the songs for it and a new sparkling book based on the movie.

Did you expect "The Producers" to become a huge hit?
Getting 12 Tony's—the most ever. Still running today, geez, no.

I have your new box set sitting right here. Why does "Blazing Saddles" still resonate today?
It's politically incorrect—and it's so refreshing. You could never have those scenes today, where you beat the s--- out of an old lady. There's a kind of artistic freedom that we yearn for that we don't get today. We get dirty stuff, sexy stuff, but we don't get racial stuff ever.

Yes. But we have "Crash."
You can't laugh at it, but you can laugh at the fact that they gave it the Academy Award. You know, the Academy Awards were so crazy they should've called it the Independent Film Festival. It lost all the glitz and glamour. That politically correct s--- was going on again—let's do the right thing, these are important movies, good movies. There's no flare, no sweep, no Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

I was bored.
It was absolutely dull. They should ask Billy Crystal to come back. He was funny and he had production numbers at the beginning.

Are you doing a "Get Smart" movie?
Leave it alone! It's a perfectly good series. We don't need the movie. "Bewitched," wasn't that terrible? Why not do a comedy about finding Osama bin Laden? Is he here? Is he there? Let's have fun. Let's do a little White House scene with Bush and Condoleezza Rice and Cheney going, "Why the f--- did we go there?"

What else should we talk about?
Where did you grow up?

Fresno, California.
I know where that is.

Now you're interviewing me!
That's OK. It's not cheating. I'm an observer, a writer—I observe humanity and get the best of them and put them in my movies. Can you write about my son's book? It's called the "Zombie Survival Guide." If you run into a zombie, you need this dense manual that has to deal with zombies. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree—but zombies? The apple fell down and rolled all the way to Cincinnati.

Have you ever needed to fight off zombies?
A lot of people I work for in the studios were zombies, they just didn't know it.

[MacGuffin]

You should be aware that readers are reporting that SOME copies of the Fox's recent Mel Brooks Collection DVD box set contain a version of Young Frankenstein that's non-anamorphic widescreen, while other copies contain an anamorphic widescreen version. All of the films in the set SHOULD be anamorphic widescreen. If you get a non-anamorphic copy of the film in your set, we suggest you take it back to the retailer it was purchased from and try to exchange for one with the correct version. We're trying to determine if there's any way to identify the correct version on the outside of the package. If there is, we'll let you know. By the way, we should also let you know that the set includes the movie-only version of Blazing Saddles, so don't sell your existing 30th Anniversary Special Edition thinking you'll get a even trade-up on the extras.