The movie nobody wanted Mel Brooks to make: “Please get out of here before you get hurt”
Just because hindsight is always 20/20, it doesn’t make it any less bizarre that cinema would have missed out on countless classic movies if certain studio executives had stuck to their guns. Mel Brooks is responsible for several all-timers, and he struggled to even get his foot in the door.
This is the same industry that viewed Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather with derision, predicted James Cameron’s career would be over when Titanic hit theatres, baulked at Martin Scorsese’s black-and-white boxing drama Raging Bull, and turned their noses up at Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future.
With that in mind, Brooks was right to fight his corner. He was already a proven and successful talent on the stage with Primetime Emmy and Grammy nominations under his belt, but he was a relatively unknown commodity in Tinseltown. Of course, history remembers the victors and the filmmaker wouldn’t back down from his desire to jump into features with one story and one story only.
Brooks had been developing the idea for what would become The Producers for years before he even began pitching it around town, and when he did, he quickly discovered that his enthusiasm for the project wasn’t exactly matched by the people he was trying to convince to fund it.
“I went to all the big studios with Sidney Glazier, my producer, and said, ‘I’m going to have to direct this,'” he told Playboy. However, as a first-time film director, nobody was willing to bite. “They said, ‘Please get out of here before you get hurt’. There were physical threats.”
Even when he found a willing backer, those in the boardroom requested some changes. “Finally, someone at Universal Pictures said, ‘You can direct, but it has to be called Springtime for Mussolini. Nazi movies are out,” he continued. “I said, ‘I think you missed the point.'”
In the end, philanthropist Louis Wolfson stumped up half of the million-dollar budget, with the rest coming from Embassy Pictures’ Joseph E Levine, who also handled distribution. His sole request was that the movie change its moniker from Springtime for Hitler to The Producers to make it more palatable to mainstream audiences.
Understatedly describing Levine as “a plain person from the street” who helped make his dream a reality, Brooks admitted he “woke up in a cold sweat” when he realised he actually had to direct the thing now. He might have been nervous at first, but any doubts that The Producers wasn’t a risk worth taking were handily dismissed when he took to the stage at the Academy Awards to collect his Oscar for ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
It’s been regarded as one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever comedies for decades and enjoyed added longevity thanks to the stage musical and the feature-length adaptation of that stage musical, an impressive legacy for a movie that nobody had any interest in making.
