CONTENTS COVER TITLE PAGE FOREWORD INTRODUCTION READING YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN CHAPTER ONE: A FIERCE COLLABORATION CHAPTER TWO: A PERFECT CAST CHAPTER THREE: A CRACKERJACK CREW CHAPTER FOUR: “I DON’T WANT TO GO HOME” CHAPTER FIVE: IT’S ALIVE! THE MARKETING & RELEASE NEWSLETTERS COPYRIGHT Mary Shelley, who at only nineteen years of age conceived her immortal Gothic novel, Frankenstein. Needless to say, Gene Wilder and I will always be in her debt. FOREWORD Mel Brooks is the funniest. That we all agree on. There is no need to debate it. All of us who try to make comedy know we will never be the best. Mel wins. What we can debate is which is the best Mel Brooks movie. Yes, this is a subjective question. If you choose Blazing Saddles or The Producers or High Anxiety, I can’t prove you wrong. But allow me to make the case for Young Frankenstein. Young Frankenstein is perfect. It’s the comedy equivalent of Sgt. Pepper, or The Great Gatsby, or the ’86 New York Mets. The pace and joke compression are off the charts. The laughs are huge. The jokes land like the punches of a prize fighter: in furious volleys from all different angles, the big ones landing when you least expect them. What modern comedy doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Young Frankenstein? The physical comedy is both precise and insane. The genre parody is spot-on and meticulously detailed. There have been a million spoof movies since, but none of them even comes close. You don’t need to know a thing about Frankenstein to love this movie. Plus, Marty Feldman’s looks-to- camera are so well-timed and iconic, he’s basically inventing The Office in 1974. Gene Wilder (the co-writer) is on fire throughout the movie. He’s a like a comedy cheat code. It’s unfair. One second he’s screaming at the top of his lungs, mania in his eyes, and the next second he’s teasing extra laughs with just the tiniest look or smile or gesture. The casting is perfect. The women in Young Frankenstein are historically hysterical. What is funnier than Frau Blücher slowly turning to Dr. Frankenstein and asking him if he’d like some Ovaltine? Or Inga’s roll in the hay? Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn. Mel directed these brilliant women in some of their finest performances. OK, their finest performances. My opinion. Even Gene Hackman is funny in it. When has Gene Hackman ever been that riotously funny? Sure he was funny in Superman III (or was it IV?) but the spilled soup bit is as good as comedy gets. Every part of Young Frankenstein is perfect. When Gene Wilder is lecturing the class at the beginning of the movie, the science kind of makes sense. He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. And the movie is genuinely scary sometimes. The monster’s speech at the end is emotional and touching. The sets and photography are gorgeous. Even without these things, it would still be one of the funniest movies of all time, but the fact that it succeeds in so many arenas is what makes it the absolute high-water mark. Its credibility makes everything funnier and more impactful. Another thing to keep in mind: Mel Brooks made Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles in the same year. Has a director ever had a better year than Mel Brooks in 1974? Victor Fleming made Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz in 1939, but Gone with the Wind isn’t funny at all. Mel wins again. A few years ago I went to see Young Frankenstein at a revival house, and it got the loudest, most sustained laughs I have ever heard in a theater. I was jealous, but then I realized, I will never fight as well as Ali, I will never paint as beautifully as Picasso, and I will never be as funny as Mel Brooks. But even if you are only a third as funny as Mel, that still will make for a comfortable living! I am so glad that this book of beautiful photographs and information about this classic film is out. Maybe I will learn something. If I work hard, hopefully I can get to forty percent. RESPECTFULLY, JUDD APATOW I’m seven years old. I’m the little guy in the middle with my brothers Lenny, Irving, and Bernie behind me, and my first cousin Merril to my right. I’m still happy… everything changed when I was nine. They gave me homework. INTRODUCTION Y ou have to really know a genre to make fun of it, and to really know it, you have to love it. When I was young, I loved the movies because they saved my life. I was so grateful to cinema for opening up worlds that were not open to me as a poor Jewish kid from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I was born in 1926, and everybody in my building was headed for jobs in the Garment District in Manhattan. I assumed I’d be working in the shipping department somewhere on 7th Avenue. I never dreamed I would do something else—let alone make my living in the movies. Nothing else was open to us. But at the local movie theater, I could go anywhere—Arabia, the West, Transylvania. We played street games to keep busy in Williamsburg— punchball, baseball, roller hockey—but nothing nourished our dreams like the movies. Those movies gave us lovely worlds to inhabit. When I was a teenager and I saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on shiny, big black-and-white floors, oh wow! You never saw shiny black-and-white floors in Williamsburg. There was just oilcloth and sometimes Jewish newspapers covering them when your mother would wash them. We never had money for anything. But for one thin dime, you got three feature films, a race, some newsreels, some shorts. My mother would send me to the theater with a salmon and tomato sandwich, wrapped in wax paper—’cause it’s a long day, you know? I was five years old in 1931 when James Whale’s Frankenstein came out. The following summer the movie played at a theater in Williamsburg and my older brother, Bernie, took me to see it. My father had died of tuberculosis when he was only thirty-four and I was two. And there was Mama, thirty years old, with four little boys. Mama had to clean. She wanted me out. Bernie said, “I’m going to see Frankenstein, maybe he will get scared.” My mother said, “I don’t care! Take him.” So Bernie took me, and that movie scared the hell out of me. I was really terrified. It was a big mistake. It was the scariest thing I saw in my life. That was a hot summer in Brooklyn, and in our two-bedroom apartment, I slept right by the fire escape. I said to my mother, “Mom, please close the window.” She said, “It’s a hundred degrees in here, I can’t close the window. What’s the matter?” I said, “If you leave the window open, Frankenstein will come and eat me.” (We called the monster Frankenstein because we didn’t know the difference.) My mother said, “OK, let’s talk about this. First of all, the monster lives in Romania, in Transylvania. Romania is not near the ocean. So he’s going to have to get to Odessa. He’s going to have go a long way to get to a boat. Then he has to have money to pay for his passage. He may not have any money if he is just a monster. He may not have pockets. Let’s say he makes his way to Odessa and he gets a boat to America. The boat may go to Miami. It may go to Baltimore. It may not go to New York. If it goes to New York and he gets off there, he doesn’t know the subway system. If he finds the BMT (what we called the subway back then) and he gets to Brooklyn, he doesn’t know our street. Let’s say he does find our street. But remember, the people on the first floor have their window open. He is not going to climb way up. If he’s hungry, he is going to eat who’s ever there on the first floor.”