The filmmaker who despised Mel Brooks for decades: “Of course I was furious”
It’s almost impossible to spend seven decades in show business without making at least an enemy or two, even for someone as affable as Mel Brooks. He’s never come across as the kind of guy that people would hate, but to paraphrase the saying, a comedy hero is only as good as their comedy villain.
The most famous creative collaboration of the EGOT winner’s professional life was with Gene Wilder, his partner in crime on The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, but they didn’t always see eye to eye. The latter film was only made on the condition that Brooks didn’t star in it, which didn’t prevent them from having a furious confrontation.
They weren’t enemies, though, which can’t be said of the veteran writer, director, actor, producer, and playwright’s fractious relationship with Buck Henry. An Academy Award nominee as both a filmmaker and a screenwriter, before either of those accolades, which he earned for co-directing Heaven Can Wait and co-writing The Graduate, respectively, he co-created Get Smart with Brooks.
That was precisely why they were at loggerheads for so long; in the show’s credits, the spy spoof was listed as ‘Created by Mel Brooks with Buck Henry’, and based on his contributions, Henry thought he was being slighted by being given a ‘with’ instead of an ‘and’, especially when he more than pulled his weight behind the scenes for less money than his opposite number was being paid.
Henry once made a bet that Brooks’ ego was so large he’d bill himself five times in his Hitchcockian parody, High Anxiety, to which he responded with a barb: “Tell him from me he’s wrong,” he informed the famed theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan. “The correct number is six.”
In another public shot fired across the bows, Henry once mused that, “Hollywood writers take themselves too seriously; it is the only place where someone like Mel Brooks could be called a genius.” The Spaceballs creator would get in some digs of his own, though, claiming that “what Buck couldn’t bear was the idea of this wacko Jew being billed over him,” saying, “He’s not an intellectual, he’s a pedant.”
The two eventually mended fences as the years passed, but things got awkward when they were paired together for a bonus feature on the DVD box set of Get Smart. As the infamous credit that drove a wedge between them flashed on the screen, Brooks tried to shift the blame away from himself.
“I’m so embarrassed that my lawyer or agents stuck the word ‘with’ and I didn’t see it, I never saw it in the contract, I knew it was you and me writing it, until I saw it on the screen,” he alleged. “They were protecting me. They wanted to make me a big star. And I didn’t apologise to you profusely enough.”
As for Henry, he told it like it was: “Of course I was furious and blamed you,” but he bought Brooks’ version of events. He accepted that he wasn’t the one responsible, and they remained on decent, if not as friendly as they once were, terms until he passed away in January 2020.
