The “flat-out perfect” actor who conned Mel Brooks in 1980: “I was so angry”
It sounds oxymoronic, but Mel Brooks nonetheless wasn’t best pleased that he’d hired an actor to do a job for him, and when he discovered that they’d done that job to perfection, he was left fuming.
Normally, a filmmaker would be thrilled when they’ve pushed the boat out, recruited a living legend to get involved in one of their productions, and been repaid in kind by a worthy performance. Not Brooks, though, since it hit him in the last place he wanted to be hit: the pocket.
Not to accuse the EGOT-winning comedy icon of being a penny-pincher, since he had every reason to be. After all, as the writer, director, producer, and frequent star of many of his feature-length endeavours, Brooks was putting his arse on the line every time he shot a new movie.
If it took flight at the box office, then he’d be rolling in the profits. However, if it bombed, he’d be the one to take a financial knock, since he had so much skin in the game. Look at what happened to Solarbabies; the ill-fated sci-fi flick almost ruined him, with Brooks admitting that he was considering jumping out of a very high window after funnelling millions into a film that lost a fortune.
If you want the best, you’ve got to pay, and that’s the way that Hollywood has always worked. Even though it had been a while since he was considered the best at anything, Orson Welles was still held in high regard by those within the industry in 1980, as you’d expect from the guy who made Citizen Kane.
Admittedly, his career had been reduced to what-ifs, near misses, phoned-in performances, and blatant paycheque gigs by then, but when Brooks was seeking someone to lend natural gravitas and dramatic heft to the narration of History of the World, Part I, he couldn’t think of anyone better for the job.
He even planned ahead for Welles’ wayward nature, setting aside five days of work for him to record the vocal interludes that would link the various skits together. Having agreed to a not-unreasonable $25,000, which worked out at $5,000 per day, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter was shocked to discover that the mercurial auteur had pocketed the cash for less than three hours in the recording booth.
“He was supposed to do five days of work, from 9 am to 5 pm, narrating scenes,” Brooks pointed out. “He started to test his voice out about ten minutes to 9 am. By 11.30 am, 12 o’clock, he had done all the narration. It was all perfect. He said, ‘I’ll do any changes, anything you want, Mel’. And I said, ‘It’s flat-out perfect. Oh my god, I could have paid you $5,000!'”
It was classic Welles, in a way; in his dotage, he enjoyed nothing more than being paid the most amount of money for the least amount of effort, and Brooks handed it to him on a plate with History of the World, Part I.
“I got so angry that I paid him so much, and he did it in ten minutes,” the Blazing Saddles mastermind sighed, but at least he got what he asked for, regardless of how much he overpaid for the privilege.
