“Flat-out genius”: Mel Brooks names the greatest directorial debut in cinema history
As far as directorial debuts go, Mel Brooks made a doozy, so he knows what he’s talking about when he points to one picture as the unattainable benchmark for a first-time filmmaker.
He wasn’t a novice at the time, having almost two decades of experience in the entertainment industry as a writer and performer by the late 1960s, but Brooks still faced an uphill battle to convince Hollywood that his vision for his maiden feature was worthy of making it to the silver screen.
For one thing, the title Springtime for Hitler gave many studio executives cause for concern. Then there was the content, with the debutant relentlessly poking fun at Adolf Hitler, a little over two decades removed from the end of World War II. Even as The Producers, there were still hoops to jump through.
Brooks was petrified that his labour of love would be buried upon release, but thanks to an assist from the inimitable Peter Sellers, word of mouth began to spread, he won an Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’, and the film has been lauded ever since as a watershed moment for mainstream comedy.
The EGOT-winning veteran hasn’t looked back since, but he did suffer from second album syndrome when The Twelve Chairs wasn’t as enthusiastically received. Even the endlessly self-assured Brooks wouldn’t call himself the greatest first-time director of all time, but he was nonetheless happy to mention himself in the same breath as the person responsible for a similar reason.
“The whole movie is an incredible mystery of why he behaved the way he behaved,” the actor, comic, and filmmaker said, explaining his deep love of Citizen Kane. “It’s a psychological explanation: he behaved that way because of his sled when he was a little kid, and the name of his sled was Rosebud. Orson Welles was a flat-out genius. Too bad it was his first movie.”
In keeping with the guy who titled his autobiography All About Me, Brooks then made it all about him. “When your first movie makes such a wave, it’s so hard to do the next one and be saluted,” he opined. “It happened with me with The Twelve Chairs. It was overlooked because the first one, The Producers, was seen as a little comic masterpiece.”
Fortunately, Brooks felt “restored” when his third movie, Blazing Saddles, placed him back on the mountaintop, a grace he felt that Citizen Kane‘s chief architect was never afforded. “Orson Welles was never restored,” he added. “He never came back with another big movie like Citizen Kane.”
To be fair, regardless of how the rest of Welles’ career unfolded to give him the oxymoronic and dubious distinction of changing cinema forever while never truly realising his potential to the fullest, there’s only realistically one way to go after writing, directing, producing, and starring in Citizen Kane, and it’s not up.
