The most devastating moment of Mel Brooks’ career: “I’m finished, I’m just finished”
When he wasn’t busy writing, producing, and directing some of American cinema’s greatest-ever comedies, Mel Brooks often lent his expertise to films that, on paper, were as far outside of his wheelhouse as they could get.
The most prominent examples of the EGOT winner’s unsung contributions came when he produced David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, two filmmakers who exist at the complete opposite end of the filmmaking spectrum from Brooks’ signature style of razor-sharp and raucous comedy.
However, things couldn’t have gone much worse when he ventured into sci-fi for the first time. Of course, Brooks would find a home in the genre several years later when Spaceballs attained instant cult favourite status, but Alan Johnson’s 1982 intergalactic escapade, Solarbabies, almost ruined him completely.
It was supposed to be a relatively low-budget picture, with principal photography taking place in Spain to save even more money. What started as a fairly risk-free investment soon snowballed into a shitstorm of epic proportions, leaving Brooks staring financial destitution and the end of his career in the face.
When the cameras started rolling, $1.5 million of the $5 million budget had come directly from his pocket. That’s a fair chunk of change to begin with, only for delays and disagreements to force Brooks to raise ten times his initial investment from the banks, which left him at rock bottom when the cursed Solarbabies continued to haunt his nightmares.
“I’m broke,” he recalled to Slash Film. “People are coming to my house, and my wife is saying, ‘Who are these people in our kitchen?’ I said, ‘No, I’m just getting a little more insurance’. But really, I’m getting a second mortgage on the house. I mean, I’m practically ready to jump off a roof, you know? I mean a roof like the Empire State Building, I’m ready to go.”
His repeated returns to the bank for more investment left him “legally broke and in debt for the first time in my life,” and there were no signs that Solarbabies would dig him out of the hole. “I hear the death knell,” Brooks admitted. “I hear a bell tolling late at night. I can’t sleep. Everything is mortgaged. I’m finished, I’m just finished.”
In desperation, Brooks even cut together a proof-of-concept trailer with the available footage and brought it to Paramount to see if the studio was interested in acquiring the distribution rights. It wasn’t, but his old friend Alan Ladd Jr at MGM helped save the day when he agreed to a $14 million deal.
Still, it wasn’t enough to put Brooks back in the black. He spent $9 million of his own money on a movie that cost upwards of $20 million to make from beginning to end and earned a measly $1.5 million at the box office, placing him on the precipice of bankruptcy and leaving him terrified that one disastrous decision had undone the decades of good work and goodwill he’d built in the industry.
Remarkably, Brooks eventually made his money back on Solarbabies, even if it took a quarter of a century. Aptly describing it as a “miracle” given the constant misery it caused him, the filmmaker revealed that home video sales had made the unthinkable a reality: “That goddamned picture finally broke even.”
