The bad review that made Mel Brooks lash out at Roger Ebert: “Listen, you, I’m very talented”
As much as filmmakers claim they’re not interested in what the critics think, a bad review will always get under their skin. The best way to avoid the indignation is to avoid them entirely, but Mel Brooks has always been so protective of his filmography that he often can’t help himself.
He’s made several of the greatest comedies in Hollywood history, but he’s also been responsible for a few clunkers. Instead of rolling with the punches, sticking his fingers in his ears, and pretending that his movie isn’t being savaged, he opted to go straight to the source and call them out for panning his picture.
In this instance, the person he decided to lambast was Roger Ebert, the pre-eminent critic of his era. People who analyse and critique films for a living aren’t going to walk back a bad review because the writer, director, and producer who made it cornered them and asks why, which led to a tense, awkward, and altogether unfortunate situation.
Brooks wasn’t one of those directors who needed to win Ebert over; The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein had all gotten the full four-star treatment, but the EGOT winner’s comedy mastery had been gradually deserting him on the big screen, and things reached their nadir with 1995’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
Focusing on another film that had terrified him as a child and skewering it in the same vein as Young Frankenstein wasn’t the worst idea on paper, but the execution let him down. It ended up as the last feature that Brooks ever helmed, tanked at the box office, and earned the unwanted distinction of being the worst-reviewed directorial effort in his entire back catalogue.
This being the bullishly confident comedian, though, he refused to believe it. “There’s a great quote: ‘Critics are like eunuchs at an orgy; they just don’t get it,'” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I ran into Roger Ebert. He didn’t like Dracula. He made no bones about it; thumbs, pinkies, every digit that he had.”
Instead of accepting that he didn’t like the picture, Brooks went on the offensive: “I said to him, ‘Listen, you, I’ve made 21 movies. I’m very talented. I’ll live in history. I have a body of work. You only have a body.'” That wasn’t going to magically change his mind, because if he didn’t like Dead and Loving It, he didn’t like it, and the barrage left a bad taste in Ebert’s mouth.
“I was saddened by my encounter with Mel, because I have been a supporter of his work (when it deserved it) since The Producers in 1967,” he responded. “I was one of the few critics who liked Life Stinks. I was surprised he didn’t realise himself that Dracula: Dead and Loving It just didn’t work.”
He was fully aware of Brooks’ all-important “body of work,” but he also noted how “I would not be doing him a favour if I did not tell the truth” and call out his cinematic swansong for its obvious deficiencies.
