The one and only Mel Brooks movie you’ll never see: “I wasn’t happy at all”
Even though he’s remained remarkably active as a voiceover artist and producer, it just goes to show how long Mel Brooks has been around that he hasn’t written or directed a movie since 1995, and he’s still firmly in the cultural spotlight.
His cinematic swansong, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, wasn’t a fitting way to bow out. At the time, nobody knew that Brooks would never step behind the camera again, and it’s almost cruel that his last tilt turned out to be the worst-reviewed picture he ever helmed, even if he refused to believe it and got into an argument with Roger Ebert as a result.
The comedy legend’s penultimate effort, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, would have been a more fitting way to bid farewell, since it actually made money, wasn’t panned into oblivion, and has found its place as an enduring favourite, placing it more in line with his best work than his woeful Dracula spoof.
However, in between those two pictures was an unreleased project, which Brooks had been writing and recording for the better part of a year. It sounds like the setup to one of his parodies, but he was genuinely hired to script a more comedic version of one of the most successful French movies ever made.
Released in January 1993, co-writer and director Jean-Marie Poiré’s comedy, Les Visiteurs, starred Jean Reno as a 12th-century knight who ends up in the present day after a botched spell from a wizard, obviously. A fish-out-of-water caper with a historical twist, it became the highest-grossing film ever released in the country, earning almost $100 million at the global box office.
Instead of simply adding subtitles and sending it to American screens, the production companies wanted to make the movie’s comedy more palatable to Stateside audiences so it would appeal to local viewers and, theoretically, increase its chances of finding success. They thought Brooks was the ideal man for the job, but what they didn’t account for was Poiré fucking hating the idea.
“I wasn’t happy at all,” the filmmaker shared. “Instead of remaining a comedy, which involved a French knight, the film had become a parody, with the knight’s accent so French that it was almost impossible to understand.” That sounds like Brooks, but he believed it was scrapped for other reasons.
“It was an experiment,” he explained. “I love the film, and I’m very proud of the dubbing, but [marketing and research firm] NRG tested it mostly on young people, and I don’t think this film is for them; it’s a great film for Francophiles, not 12-to-15-year-olds.”
After the poor test screenings, the Brooks-penned and redubbed version of Les Visiteurs was canned, and when it finally landed on US screens in 1996, it was as the very thing the production companies paid the Blazing Saddles creator a reported $500,000 to expressly avoid: the exact same film, but with English subtitles.
