“Unheard-of behaviour”: Arrogance, nepotism, and the movie Mel Brooks couldn’t stay out of
There are certain golden rules of filmmaking that you should never break, regardless of who you are. Unfortunately, Mel Brooks didn’t get that memo, and the crew almost paid the price for it.
As an awards-laden writer, director, producer, and actor, Brooks is entitled to be as hands-on as he deems necessary when he’s heavily involved as a film’s creative driving force. However, when he’s claiming to be hands-off and does the exact opposite, issues are inevitably going to rise.
When the EGOT-winning veteran founded his production company, Brooksfilms, it was done with the intention of staying in the background. He intentionally kept his name away from movies like David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, so as not to create any ideas in the audience’s head.
His thinking was simple: if they saw ‘Mel Brooks’ attached, they might assume it was one of his signature comedies. It was solid thinking, but the first-ever Brooksfilm venture could have gotten the company’s name and reputation off on the wrong foot when he committed one of cinema’s cardinal sins.
As Anne Bancroft’s feature-length directorial debut, for which she also wrote the screenplay, the air was thick with nepotism on the set of 1980’s Fatso from the beginning. On one hand, you can understand why Brooks would be so protective of his wife’s first effort from behind the camera, but it was to the detriment of everyone else.
Cinematographer Brianne Murphy, who was making history as the first female DP on a major American studio picture, revealed that only Brooks and Bancroft were allowed to watch the dailies. “I guess he told her what he liked,” she recalled. “Word had gotten around that he was very controlling.” He’d pick her up from the set every day, too, which led to his flagrant disregard for accepted etiquette.
“Mel goes over to the video assist to look at it, and in the middle of the shot, he says, ‘That’s no good, that won’t work, cut it,'” Murphy explained. “The camera operator, Bob Lamar, a big man, took his eye from the camera, looked down at Mel, and asked, ‘Who the fuck is the little guy?’ All hell broke loose. That’s unheard-of behaviour. No one ever says ‘cut’ except the director.”
He might have been the director’s husband and the founder of the production company behind Fatso, but that’s a big no-no, and Brooks’ arrogance didn’t end there. The next day, Bancroft informed Murphy that “Mel says you have to fire Bob, the operator.” He claimed that Lamar was “potentially dangerous,” but the DP wasn’t buying it, and it sounds an awful lot like he wanted him gone for standing up to him.
In the end, Lamar wasn’t fired, and the rest of the shoot went ahead without further incident. Still, Brooks stepping on Bancroft’s toes, calling ‘cut’ in the middle of a scene in a movie he wasn’t directing, and then suggesting the guy who stood up to him get the boot reeks of arrogance and someone unable to recognise that their influence has its limits.
