Mel Brooks in the Cultural Industries: Survival and Prolonged Adaptation [1 ed.] 0748649581, 9780748649587

Citation preview

MEL BROOKS IN THE

CULTURAL INDUSTRIES SURVIVAL AND PROLONGED ADAPTATION ALEX SYMONS

Mel Brooks in the Cultural Industries Survival and Prolonged Adaptation Alex Symons

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This book is dedicated to my son Zachary, born in the summer of 2011.

© Alex Symons, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4958 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 6448 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 6450 4 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 6449 8 (Amazon ebook) The right of Alex Symons to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

1

2

3

v

Introduction A New Perspective on Mel Brooks Mel Brooks: ‘Multimedia Survivor’ in the Cultural Industries Materials and Methods

7 12

Rethinking Adaptation Studies: Survival Strategies in the Cultural Industries Adaptations in the Modern Cultural Industries Adaptation Terminology Remediation Hybridisation Intermediality Synergy Prolonged Adaptation Conclusion

20 21 28 29 30 32 33 35 41

From Sitcoms to ‘Parody-coms’: Writing for American TV, 1949–89 The Intermedial Origins of the American Sitcom, 1949–57 Get Smart: Reviving the American Sitcom, 1965–70 The Modern Transformation of the American Sitcom, 1975–89 When Things Were Rotten (ABC, 1975) The Nutt House (NBC, 1989) Prolonged Stardom: Audio Records, TV and Film, 1961–2004 Adapting the 2000 Year Old Man, 1961–83 Hollywood Film Actor, 1974–87 A Transitional Performance: Life Stinks (1991) Comedy Legend and Sitcom Actor, 1995–2004

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48 50 55 60 63 67 79 83 89 93 97

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c o nte n t s Recycled Hollywood for the TV Generation: The Rise of Parody and the Fall of Mel Brooks the Director, 1974–95 Rethinking New Hollywood: Intermedial Blockbusters in 1974 Blazing Saddles (1974) Young Frankenstein (1974) A New Film-Focused Strategy: The Fall of Mel Brooks, 1987–95 Spaceballs (1987) Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

110 115 118 124 127 130 136 141

The Integration of the Film and Theatre Industries: The Producers, 1968–2007 The Producers (1968) The Modern Revival of The Producers (1968) The Broadway Adaptation: The Producers (2001) Remade in Hollywood: The Producers (2005)

154 156 161 163 173

Conclusion

185

Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Julian Stringer for his insightful suggestions throughout the development of my research, and Jacob Smith for his very useful input. I would also like to give special thanks to the organisers and delegates of the conferences where I have presented my research over the years, in particular, those of the International Comedy Conference run by Chris Lee and Andy Willis at the University of Salford, and the Playing For Laughs Comedy Conference run by Tracy Cruickshank and Roger Clegg at De Montfort University. These conferences provided unique opportunities to share ideas with others studying comedy. I would also like to thank the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media for their engaging research community, as well as the very helpful staff of the British Film Institute National Library and the Nottingham City Library for their kind assistance during my research. I would also like to thank the peer reviewers and editors who assisted in the development of parts of this book as journal articles, in particular the editors of the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Richard Hand and Katja Krebs. Most important of all, I would like to thank my loving wife, Regina, for all her faith in me, and my parents for bringing me up the way they did, especially for instilling in me a love of film and the importance of education from an early age. I also thank my sister Emma for her support. Part of Chapter 2 first appeared as an article in the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 5:1 (forthcoming). The author thanks the journal editors (Richard Hand and Katja Krebs) and the publisher (Intellect) for permission to reproduce the essay. Part of Chapter 3 was previously published as ‘The Prolonged Celebrity of Mel Brooks: Adapting to Survive in the Multimedia Marketplace, 1961–2004’ in Celebrity Studies 2:3 (2011), pp. 335–52. The first part of Chapter 5 was developed from an article titled ‘An Audience for Mel Brooks’s The Producers: The Avant-garde of the Masses’, by Alex Symons, published in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, copyright, reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd.

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a c kno wle dg e m e n t s

The last part of Chapter 5 first appeared as an article in the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 1:2 (2008), pp. 133–46. The author thanks the journal editors (Richard Hand and Katja Krebs) and the publisher (Intellect) for permission to reproduce the essay.

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Introduction

This is the first book-length study examining the career of Mel Brooks as part of an academic dialogue – looking specifically at how he has survived working within the cultural industries from 1949 to date. While the various critical studies, biographies and the scattered academic articles about Brooks have so far discussed his perceived ‘bad taste’ comedy, his Jewish ethnicity and have discussed his work as ‘parody’, this study examines Brooks from a new perspective – that of a long-term survivor in the cultural industries and as a specialist in adaptation. By studying his projects in film, theatre, audio records and television, this book suggests that Brooks has survived in what are regarded to be competitive and historically changing industries, primarily as a result of his own personal strategy – most simply understood as that of recycling content through adaptation. While other artists have practised adaptation, Brooks has taken this production strategy to the extreme, sometimes by repeatedly adapting the same material. These strategies have allowed Brooks to inordinately prolong the commercial life of his inventions, as well as those of other artists, thus getting the most out of his ideas over an extended period of time. This book suggests that Brooks has made a significant, and so far unrecognised, contribution to the historical development and transformation of production trends in the cultural industries through his adaptation strategies. He has produced adaptations between different media, mixing and moving content between different traditions of production, and so has contributed towards the establishment of new production trends that have been repeated by other artists. Most notably, Brooks’s strategies include adapting films for television since the 1950s, adapting television content into films since the 1970s, adapting audio records for television in the 1970s, and most recently, adapting content from film, television and theatre together to make his Broadway shows in the 2000s. These numerous adaptations in different media together make Brooks a significant contributor to the modern-day integration of the cultural industries – in

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some respects, predating the work of modern multimedia artists such as Will Smith, as studied by Geoff King,1 or the Wachowski Brothers and George Lucas as studied by Henry Jenkins.2 In addition, this book suggests that Brooks’s adaptation strategies have had some profound consequences for his reputation. In short, these numerous adaptations have not always been entirely successful. His projects have sometimes been treated with harsh condemnation by critics, and have sometimes enjoyed only limited commercial success. At the same time, he has also earned critical praise for some works, and some of his projects have been significant commercial hits. Through this mixed reception over the years, Brooks has emerged with a unique reputation. He has not crafted the reputation of a prestigious auteur akin to that of Alfred Hitchcock, as studied by Robert E. Kapsis in his book Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (1992), and neither has he been celebrated in the way that Charlie Chaplin is today, as studied by Charles J. Maland in Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (1989).3 Instead, the sheer volume of his adaptations across a range of different media, combined with his ability to ‘survive’ the, sometimes, mixed reception of his projects over so many years, have together resulted in his unique reputation today – best captured in the term that I define as a ‘multimedia survivor’.

A New Perspective on Mel Brooks This study offers a new perspective on Brooks in contrast to what I would argue are the often limited and sometimes misrepresentative observations of his contribution to the cultural industries to date. Throughout Brooks’s career, several critical studies and biographies have been produced. These books have frequently told his story in anecdotal form, starting with his humble upbringing in Brooklyn, his brief Catskills experience as a standup, through to his career in the US army, his success in Hollywood, television, and most recently Broadway – almost entirely with only minimal attention to the critical condemnation his work has sometimes received along the way. Mostly, these books have treated Brooks as a comic, focusing primarily on his reputation for social, cultural and political ‘bad taste’ jokes rather than addressing his contribution to production trends in the cultural industries. While critics and scholars have sometimes written about Brooks for his contribution to ‘spoofs’ or ‘parody’, none of these books have accurately captured Brooks’s adaptation strategies, or the extent and historical significance of his many adaptations between different media.

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The perception of Brooks as a ‘bad taste’ comedy-auteur started early, in the reviews of his notorious, Nazi-orientated showbiz comedy film The Producers (1968). It was in reviews of The Producers that many film critics characterised Brooks as a controversial comic.4 This perception has also been reflected in Brooks’s biographies, starting with William Holtzman’s Seesaw: A Dual Biography of Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks (1979), in which he describes Brooks’s contribution to the writers’ room in Your Show of Shows (NBC, 1950–4). Amid the group of otherwise well-read and respected writers, Brooks was an outsider, contributing more madcap ideas than the others – leading Holtzman to capture Brooks as a ‘comic terrorist’.5 A similar assessment of Mel Brooks as a rebellious, comic personality is evident in The Comic Art of Mel Brooks (1981) by Maurice Yacowar, in which he writes about a range of Brooks’s works up to 1981. His perception of Brooks as a kind of anarchic comedian is best captured in his closing, in which he summarises what he perceives as Brooks’s ‘comic art’, noting that he ‘challenges the myths and restrictions with which we have been afflicted and subdued’.6 Brooks’s subsequent films, specifically Blazing Saddles (1974), which featured ‘controversial’ racial jokes, and History of the World: Part I (1981), which featured an extended satire of Catholicism, both fuelled further discussion of Brooks as a comic with a social purpose. Notably, this perspective on Brooks is evident in Neil Sinvard’s The Films of Mel Brooks (1988), in which he describes Brooks’s films produced before 1987, and again focuses on what he perceives as a thread of political intention running through Brooks’s comedy. As Sinvard notes, ‘when he ridicules Nazism in The Producers, greed in The Twelve Chairs [1970], racism in Blazing Saddles and persecution in The History of the World – Part One, there is a seriousness beneath the surface [sic]’.7 Again, the focus on Brooks as a rebellious or even anarchic comic is also reflected in Frank Manchel’s book The Box-Office Clowns: Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen (1979), in which he opens his chapter on Brooks, noting concisely: ‘Hollywood’s most controversial comic today is a man who gives bad taste a good name . . . Offensive to minorities, crude, flooded with sick jokes and off-color language, these movies have made Mel Brooks an American Rabelais.’8 My perception of Brooks as a ‘multimedia survivor’ has only recently been better reflected in his two latest biographical books, which have stressed both Brooks’s history of perceived successes and perceived ‘failures’. However, these books have only delivered superficial overviews of his career – again with more attention to his successes. This kind of summary is made by Robert Alan Crick in The Big Screen Comedies of Mel

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Brooks (2002), in which he makes mention of the perceived poor qualities of many of Brooks’s films, ultimately describing his films as ‘hit and miss endeavors’.9 Notably, the mixture of perceived ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ throughout Brooks’s unique career is best captured in the most recent biography to date, It’s Good To Be The King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (2008), by James Robert Parish, in which he describes Brooks’s ‘amazingly bumpy, zigzagging, and colorful life’s journey’.10 Parish characterises Brooks as a dedicated, hardworking, resilient individual, noting: ‘Many times Brooks miraculously pulled a creative iron out of the fire in the midst of failure and climbed back into the highly competitive show business race once again.’11 However, in Parish’s biography, as with the other similar books, there is no thorough attempt to capture Brooks’s overarching strategy for overcoming these suggested ‘failures’, or indeed, how and why they occurred so regularly in the first place. Ironically, the most useful biography towards understanding Brooks’s strategy, as I would characterise him, is the earliest – which was written shortly after his first blockbuster film, Blazing Saddles. In their book Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman (1976), Bill Adler and Jeffrey Feinman discuss Brooks’s motivations in his work – stressing his intention to create broadly appealing works rather than focusing on Brooks as a ‘bad taste’ comic. In short, they assert that Brooks is motivated more by commercial success than any ‘artistic’ incentives that are often associated with comics, filmmakers and other artists – for example, noting, ‘Brooks loves the idea that his work has mass appeal. Better to have a blockbuster commercial hit than a classic “art” film that is shown occasionally at special film festivals.’12 They also offer some deeper insight into Brooks’s commercial interest, in their assessment of his outlook on life, as a result of his upbringing. As such, Brooks’s attitude to his work is affected by what they refer to as his ‘lingering poverty mentality’,13 which came about because of his impoverished childhood, his wartime career in the US army, and his initial difficulty in getting into show business as a writer for Sid Caesar, during which time he was not treated with the prestige allotted to his colleagues. With this ‘poverty mentality’ considered, it is easy to understand the motivations behind his strategy, as I describe it, namely to prolong every successful idea – seemingly, in case his next big idea is not quite so successful. These overviews of Brooks’s career offer only superficial observations on his methods, and these are often cinema-centric in their understanding of Brooks’s output over the years. Most commonly in his coverage in the press, Brooks is often identified for his contribution to the ‘parody’ film genre. This perception is reflected in Mel Brooks and the Spoof Movie

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(1982) by Nick Smurthwaite and Paul Gelder, in which they identify Brooks’s contribution to the rise in popularity of the ‘parody’ film genre in Hollywood during the 1970s. As such, they note: ‘While other directors have dabbled in spoofery, Brooks has made a career of it. His reputation is built on it. And his films have undeniably inspired a revival of spoofing.’14 However, there is no focused examination of the way Brooks produced these films, and in fact, the book itself largely continues the discussion of Brooks as a ‘vulgar’ comic, typically noting that the ‘Spanish Inquisition’ number in History of the World: Part I was ‘a song and dance spectacular of mind-boggling vulgarity’.15 Here, Brooks is simply recognised as just another ‘parody’ filmmaker – along with other directors as varied as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – and his contribution to entertainment is primarily asserted to be his ‘bad taste’ comedy. Even when authors have written about Brooks’s audio records, of which there were several, his practice of adapting those projects in order to renew them, and the way Brooks has adapted his content between different media, has not been discussed. This is notably evident in the chapter ‘Bawdy and Soul: Mel Brooks’, in Gerald Nachman’s Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (2004), in which he studies Brooks’s early performances of his 2000 Year Old Man routine from the 1950s through to the 1970s. Nachman demonstrates the way Brooks’s routine with Reiner was ‘a perfect open-ended sketch and a textbook example of the art of fifties and sixties improvisation’.16 With this focus on improvisation, Nachman describes the history of Brooks’s routine with Carl Reiner from the 1950s through to their third record Two Thousand and Thirteen (1973). However, the study does not consider the way Brooks adapted this material for the different eras and, most significantly, he makes no account of Brooks’s repeated adaptation of this piece in the thirty years since. Necessarily, this history also neglects the way Brooks adapted this routine for other media including television and film. The academic studies of Brooks have equally neglected his astonishing prolonged survival and the significance of his projects in the rise of adaptation between different media as a production strategy in the cultural industries. Instead, these studies have also mostly focused on the cultural and social impact of his comedy, looking at themes and perceived political discourse instead of his production strategy itself – often focusing on his Jewish ethnicity. This is particularly evident in the chapter ‘Mel Brooks: Farts Will Be Heard’ in David Desser’s and Lester D. Friedman’s book American Jewish Filmmakers (1993), where they examine the way Brooks uses his Jewishness to portray his ‘outsider status’.17 In particular, they

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describe the way his films, including Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety (1977) and others, are part of a tradition of Jewish comedy, noting for example, ‘All of Brooks’s films are parodies, but his particular mediation of this process springs from a distinctly Jewish perspective.’18 This assessment of Brooks as a Jewish filmmaker, engaging with Jewish issues in his work, is also reflected in the article ‘Racial Camp in “The Producers” and “Bamboozled” ’19 by Susan Gubar, published in Film Quarterly. By examining the storylines of Brooks’s film The Producers (1968), in particular the grand ‘Springtime for Hitler’ musical number, Gubar suggests that Brooks’s film made a political comment about ‘bad taste’, in that Brooks was using comedy to expose the ‘mediocrity, profit motive, and vulgar tastes governing the entertainment industry’.20 While Gubar’s article is certainly useful in understanding the cultural significance of The Producers, and understanding Brooks as a comic, there is much more to be said about this film. For example, my research suggests Brooks’s film The Producers has an ongoing and changing relationship to the Broadway theatre industry. Indeed, my 2006 article ‘An Audience for Mel Brooks’s The Producers: The Avant-garde of the Masses’, published in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, also examined Brooks from a similar socio-cultural angle. In that article, I studied the press reception of Brooks’s film The Producers in 1968 from a sociological perspective, looking at how critics differently interpreted ‘bad taste’. That article examined the revulsion of some in the American press, in particular the New York critics, including the reviews by the New Yorker, the New York Times and the Village Voice. By examining these reactions from a sociological perspective, I then suggested that Brooks was a kind of cultural anarchist or people’s champion, delivering comedy that titillated audiences by alienating those high in American cultural capital – namely America’s prestigious critics. Following this analysis, I suggested that The Producers was part of a movement of ‘bad taste’ comedy films that together belonged to ‘a burgeoning leftist culture’.21 However, as I now realise, although this may well be the case, there is far more to Brooks than his ethnicity and the perceived ‘bad taste’ of his comedy. More recently, this same kind of cultural approach was developed in a subsequent article by Kirsten Fermaglich, titled ‘Mel Brooks’ The Producers: Tracing American Jewish Culture Through Comedy, 1967– 2007’. Fermaglich assessed my own study, and summarised my argument in her words, stating that The Producers delivered ‘an attack on elite critics’ self-understanding’.22 Fermaglich adopts a focus on issues of ethnicity in her study of Brooks – looking at his ‘Springtime for Hitler’ concept

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from a perspective of Jewish culture, with references to people and events as broad as Sarah Silverman and the Israeli Six Day War. For example, Fermaglich notes that when The Producers was first released cinematically, America’s Jewish community ‘still perceived itself as being outside the mainstream of American culture’.23 It is Fermaglich’s assessment that Brooks was able to capitalise on a shift in public attitudes, whereby he was able to make his ‘Jewish’ film The Producers into a ‘mainstream’ success as a Broadway play in 2001 because Jews had moved ‘decisively, if quietly and unobtrusively, into the white mainstream’.24 Again, while ethnicity is a significant factor in the changing reception of The Producers, there is far more to the success of this text than that which is so far recognised, especially in terms of the many production decisions made by Brooks relating to film and television culture. While there have been some useful academic studies of Brooks’s films and television in industrial terms, these studies have not adequately represented the relationship of his projects to those in different media. For example, Wes D. Gehring, in his book Parody As Film Genre: Never Give a Saga an Even Break (1999), describes Brooks as an ‘off-the-wall comedy auteur’.25 Gehring provides an overview of Brooks’s career in television and film, whereby he suggests that Brooks has predominantly worked within the ‘umbrella of parody’.26 In his discussion of the films Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, Gehring accurately identifies numerous parodies of ‘classic’ Hollywood Westerns and 1930s horror films respectively. Similarly, Brooks is given credit for his contribution to the film parody genre in Dan Harries’s book Film Parody (2000), in which he notes that Brooks’s films ‘serve as signposts for a period of increased parodic film-making’27 in the 1970s. However, in both these academic studies, the use of non-film media within Brooks’s films is broadly neglected. As with the other literature on Brooks, these studies thus do not adequately identify his adaptation strategies, and also underestimate the historical significance of his contributions.

Mel Brooks: ‘Multimedia Survivor’ in the Cultural Industries Brooks’s long career has a unique utility for furthering two fields in particular, that of ‘adaptation studies’28 as it is presently constituted, and studies of the ‘cultural industries’,29 as discussed by David Hesmondhalgh. In terms of adaptation studies, by focusing on Brooks, this book employs an artist-centred approach that has been broadly neglected by adaptation scholars to date. From the earliest studies of adaptation, including those

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of George Bluestone and André Bazin,30 through to the most recent, including those by Thomas Leitch, Christine Geraghty, Julie Sanders, Linda Hutcheon and Robert Stam,31 the common approach of adaptation studies has so far been to focus on the texts themselves, not the adapter. These approaches have often focused on examining notions of fidelity and issues relating to literature-to-film adaptations. Furthermore, these studies have commonly examined adaptations as a ‘phenomenon’, looking at patterns of adaptations – for example, including the numerous film and theatre adaptations of William Shakespeare’s plays. Apart from notable exceptions, including Richard Schickel’s book The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (1968),32 adaptation studies have broadly comprised a collection of case studies, without a focus on the strategies employed in their production, and without a focus on any individual adapter. By rethinking adaptation with a focus on Brooks’s career, this book thus contributes towards the development of the commonly neglected artist-centred, industrial approach to the study of adaptation. In terms of the cultural industries, Brooks’s six-decade career provides a useful opportunity to examine the significance of adaptation as a production strategy – in particular, the contribution of adaptation production strategies to the historical development of production trends. Whereas the studies by David Hesmondhalgh,33 Paul Grainge,34 and Henry Jenkins35 have all made reference to adaptation in various forms – for example in the form of ‘formatting’,36 as described by Hesmondhalgh – adaptation production strategies themselves merit further study in this context. In addition, while each of these books makes entirely useful claims about the modern transformation of the cultural industries in the 1980s – in particular, the integration of industries described by Jenkins as ‘convergence’37 – they offer relatively minor earlier historical examinations of exactly how this change came about. This considered, Brooks’s career of adaptations since the 1950s provides useful cases to study the historical development of the cultural industries, with a specific utility towards examining the way modern ‘convergence’ developed in the preceding decades. Throughout this book, I use the term ‘multimedia survivor’ to describe Brooks’s unique reputation as a consequence of his adaptation strategy. I have selected this term because it best captures Brooks’s modern-day reputation following his long career. The first part, ‘multimedia’, identifies his reputation for working in multiple different media, sometimes at the same time, including film, television and theatre. The second, ‘survivor’, refers to Brooks’s unique reputation for overcoming adversity in the form of the sometimes harsh critical condemnation of his work, and his sometimes limited commercial success. My research suggests that

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Brooks’s resilient ‘survivor’ reputation in particular sets him apart from the reputations of the other Hollywood filmmakers and artists as they have been captured by existing academic case studies. My case studies together demonstrate the way Brooks’s unique mixture of commercial ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ has culminated in his unique ‘survivor’ reputation today. To examine his projects together, it is evident that Brooks’s adaptation strategy has resulted in a perceived fluctuating success rate commercially – some of the figures of which are detailed in my case studies at various points, when applicable to my discussion. For example, Brooks contributed towards the writing for television shows that are now recognised as part of the American ‘Golden Age’ of television, following which, he created the long-running 1960s sitcom Get Smart. However, Brooks’s subsequent two sitcoms, When Things Were Rotten (NBC, 1975) and The Nutt House (ABC, 1989), were quickly cancelled. Similarly, his films Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein were blockbuster successes, but his success petered out rapidly with his subsequent films, ending with Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Most recently, Brooks’s hit-and-miss history was repeated again with his adaptations of The Producers. The Broadway show was a gigantic hit internationally, but his subsequent 2005 film adaptation was a relative flop commercially – thus yet again repeating the pattern of ‘hits’ and perceived ‘misses’. The same mixture of ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ is reflected in the critical coverage of Brooks’s projects throughout his career. First, it is important to acknowledge that Brooks’s adaptation strategy has led to his being acclaimed for his contribution in each field, winning a record-breaking number of Tony awards for his work in the theatre, several Emmys for his performances in sitcoms, an Academy Award for best original screenplay, and a Grammy for his audio records. Brooks reached a new level of institutional acclaim in 2009 when he was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor by President Barack Obama, where the president credited the cultural value of Brooks’s work, praising his achievements in the respective fields of theatre, film and television, and his variety of different roles in each, noting: ‘he is one of the few people to receive an Emmy, and a Grammy, and an Oscar, and a Tony’.38 This success was followed by another notable achievement in 2010 when Brooks received a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. The ceremony was covered by news networks with the usual summary of Brooks’s accolades, with some high praise, as when Sky News described him as the ‘legendary film maker’ and ‘comedy genius’.39 However, at the same time, Brooks’s strategies have also resulted in numerous projects that have been condemned by some critics, most famously seen in the often savage press criticism of his Hollywood films

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as a director. This unrelenting criticism started in the 1960s with his first film project, The Producers. That film defined Brooks’s reputation for critical condemnation early on, having been described by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker as ‘amateurishly crude’.40 Even in reviewing his most commercially successful film in cinemas, Blazing Saddles, Beau in Variety noted that Brooks’s direction: ‘lacks fundamental charm and comic purpose’.41 This kind of criticism has often been repeated in coverage of his subsequent films, from his least commercially successful projects to his biggest hits. For some examples, Life Stinks was described by Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard as ‘the grossest miscalculation of Mel Brooks’s career’,42 and more recently, Dracula: Dead and Loving It was described by Time Out as having achieved ‘unsuspected depths of pointlessness’.43 With this history of condemnation behind him, Brooks’s reputation is defined by surviving his perceived ‘failures’ as much as by his success. In order to understand how this chequered history produced Brooks’s unique ‘survivor’ reputation, it is worth comparing Brooks to the other significant artists in existing academic reputation studies. It is especially useful to consider the work of Robert E. Kapsis in his book Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, in which he examines Hitchcock’s ‘creation of reputation in the art world’.44 In this study, Kapsis examines the way Alfred Hitchcock made various calculated appearances, and tailored his films in order to transform his reputation with film critics ‘from popular entertainer to distinguished auteur’.45 As Kapsis’s demonstrates, Hitchcock was able to craft his own reputation by making a campaign of press interviews and even giving lectures, which together successfully styled him as the ‘master of the suspense thriller’.46 The contrast with Brooks could not be clearer. While film critics arguably associate Brooks with the ‘parody’ genre to the same extent that they associate Hitchcock with the ‘thriller’, Brooks is a parody-failure just as much as he is a parody-master. In effect, the association of Brooks with ‘parody’ has a doubled significance for critics and commercial audiences – serving as a reminder of both the successes and the perceived ‘failures’ that Brooks has necessarily overcome in order to sustain his long career. Another useful comparison can be made with Charles J. Maland’s study of Chaplin in Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image, in which he describes the various shifts that occurred in Chaplin’s reputation, ultimately making him into the respected artist he is today. As Maland characterises his career, Chaplin’s reputation was made and unmade by press coverage of his political activities. For one example, in the period 1943–9, Chaplin showed public support for

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a Soviet-American alliance. As Maland notes, press coverage ‘gave him attention that would be seen as suspicious to many Americans after the political climate changed in the late 1940s’.47 It was through such experiences that Chaplin ‘learned that his success and failure were closely tied to his relationship with American culture’.48 Following negative coverage in the press for his perceived Leftist political attitudes, as well as the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s, Chaplin significantly altered his production strategy. As Maland notes, Chaplin then ‘seemed to have two choices: either stop making films or reconcile himself with his audience by making a film more palatable to public taste’.49 It was after this realisation that Chaplin catered to his critics by making the film Limelight (1952), which was his first film since City Lights (1931) ‘without an overt expression of progressive politics’.50 Whereas Chaplin quickly learned how to avoid ‘failure’ by making a significantly different kind of film in order to cater to the taste of critics – in a similar strategy to that of Hitchcock – Brooks’s career demonstrates no such consideration. In contrast, Brooks has remained dedicated to his strategy of adapting content, seemingly irrespective of the critical condemnation that frequently follows. As my case studies demonstrate, in both television and in the cinema, Brooks has run his ideas into the ground. Even now, Brooks looks set to repeat this pattern in the theatre. It was after the massive success of his stage show, The Producers, that Brooks then produced another Broadway adaptation, Young Frankenstein (2007– 9). That show ran a third as long as The Producers on Broadway, and was critically less popular – typically described by Jeremy McCarter in New York magazine as ‘longish and dullish in its own right’.51 Somewhat predictably, at the time of writing, Brooks is reported to be working on his third theatre adaptation, this time, his film Blazing Saddles. In fact, the critical backlash has started, again best captured by New York magazine, which wrote: ‘Mel Brooks is reportedly considering following up Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein: The Somewhat Disappointing Musical with a Broadway adaptation of Blazing Saddles. To which we must throw up our hands and say: enough, mel!’52 As this comment suggests, sometimes less successful outcomes – which Brooks has consistently endured – are an expected result of his strategy. Of course, Brooks’s reputation is not entirely of his own making. Barbara Klinger has recently demonstrated the way reputations can be made by historical trends of film production, trends in academia, and the changing attitudes of film critics, in her book Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (1994). In that study, Klinger charts the way Sirk’s reputation was elevated by critics, leading

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to the perception of him as ‘a European intellectual working within the formulaic system of Hollywood filmmaking’,53 primarily as a result of ‘the powerful nostalgia of the 1970s [that] transformed Sirk’s films into “classics” ’.54 Klinger’s research demonstrates the way an artist’s reputation can be remade by critics according to socio-cultural shifts in attitudes, even going from low-level filmmaker to prestigious artist. As Klinger notes, ‘this approach helps us grasp the dialogic relation between artistic reputations and history – the dynamic circumstances under which an author’s status and the status of her or his works are established, sustained, transformed, unappreciated, or even vilified’.55 These kinds of shifts in critical attitudes have also contributed towards remaking the reputation of Brooks. However, this was again with very different results. Brooks’s first film The Producers was severely condemned by critics on its original release in cinemas – even though it won an Academy Award for best original screenplay. The film later underwent a significant critical reappraisal following a historical shift in critical attitudes over the next thirty years, and became one of America’s most highly regarded films – including being hailed by the American Film Institute as the eleventh greatest comedy film of all time. However, given the extreme contrast in attitudes, this reappraisal did not lead to Brooks’s straightforward canonisation by film critics. Instead, the dramatic shift in attitudes means that The Producers today embodies both the memory of Brooks’s notorious criticism in the press along with the prestige of modern-day coverage. In this respect, The Producers also serves as a powerful reminder of those two qualities throughout all other aspects of Brooks’s long career, further adding to his reputation as a ‘survivor’.

Materials and Methods In my case studies of Brooks’s career, I have incorporated several different kinds of materials, focusing mainly on Brooks’s television shows, performances, films, and theatre shows themselves – having attended the latter in both the USA and UK. This has primarily included looking at adaptations of performance routines, production techniques (including cinematography, sets and costumes), jokes and storylines. In some cases, I have also examined publicity materials, including theatrical trailers and Brooks’s interviews in the press. I have also examined documentary programmes, including the various cast and crew commentaries that have been released in the more recent editions of Brooks’s projects on DVD. These retrospectives, through their dialogues between the makers of the projects, and in the fluid way they allow their speakers to expand on details, memories

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and anecdotes at their own discretion, provide a valuable resource for understanding the production choices, and often the industrial context of production. This has a particular application to Brooks himself, who is prone to long but insightful tangents in his monologues. It is important to note that in terms of method, my study examines the economical reuse of ideas and concepts rather than physical materials. Notably, measuring the actual ‘economic’ or market value of creative ideas by measuring cost and profit in the cultural industries is complex and in most cases, is not possible to measure with any accuracy, as discussed in John Howkins in The Creative Economy: How People Make Money From Ideas (2001).56 Apart from some reference to economic indicators, such as production costs and box-office sales as they have been reported in the press, I have chosen not to study the ‘economy’ of adaptation in detailed financial terms; and I have not attempted to measure the exact costs of sets, props, actors’ wages, and the costing that is associated with the reproduction of intellectual property, such as copyrights and trademarks, in order to measure profit. Instead, in keeping with the existing studies in the field of adaptation studies, my book theorises an ‘economy of ideas’, looking at how ideas can be maximised through adaptation, towards producing new texts with an increased potential to be profitable. In my method, I have chosen not to focus on the kind of archival research into production details that could potentially determine a finite understanding of Brooks’s individual authorship in his collaborative projects, as well as other creative issues such as his ownership of copyrights. Brooks has always worked in collaboration with others – for example, in writing his television sitcoms. This means that in most cases, it is very difficult to determine his exact contribution. Given this difficulty – as well as similar difficulties in Brooks’s other roles as director, producer and actor – I have instead chosen to focus my study on the adaptation processes as they are evident in the texts and their critical reception. This approach allowed me to develop an accurate and detailed examination of the texts on which Brooks has worked and the way critics have interpreted them. I deemed this approach to be essential since all of these texts have contributed towards Brooks’s reputation, whatever the precise nature of his, or his colleagues’, influence. It is important to note that my approach acknowledges Brooks’s different models of authorship in different media. For example, during the 1950s, Brooks was only one of several writers for Sid Caesar in television, starting with Your Show of Shows, with the material then being vetted by Sid Caesar and network executives.57 In these respects, Brooks’s authorship was minimal, his creative control was limited, and his exact

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contribution is very difficult to assess. This differs significantly from how Brooks’s authorship has operated in his Hollywood film career. In contrast, Brooks has frequently worked simultaneously in multiple roles including that of film director, writer, and actor. Furthermore, ever since Joseph E. Levine first allowed Brooks control over the final cut of his film The Producers (1968),58 Brooks has maintained that privilege in all his subsequent film projects, thus also overriding the influence of other producers, and editors. When this is considered, Brooks’s authorship in his Hollywood films is in some ways more discernible than in his work as a television writer. In order to understand how Brooks’s adaptations appeal to audiences in their historical context of production, I have examined both the commercial success of his projects, and their reception with critics. For some indication of his commercial success, I have documented the box-office sales of his films and theatre shows, and the duration of his television shows. To examine the reception of Brooks’s projects with critics, I collected a substantial range of articles and reviews from newspapers, magazines and periodicals, and in some cases, the comments of online communities. These materials were primarily gathered at the British Film Institute National Library, but also from other resources including the Nottingham City Library. I employed this approach since interviewing the ticketbuying public of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and even the 1990s, would be highly unreliable today. Such a method would severely test the memories of the individuals involved. In contrast, critical coverage provides a wealth of high quality historical data. For example, reviews and other press coverage typically describe exactly what combination of then-current texts were recognised as having been adapted within Brooks’s projects, and often entail comparisons with other similar texts, thus placing his projects within a historical-industrial context. In some cases, I have taken the approach of employing the critical coverage of Brooks’s projects in order to theorise on their reception with the public. I have done this because in Brooks’s case there is often a strong correlation between the critical judgements of his projects and their degrees of commercial success. In some cases, both were very positive, and in others, both were very negative. For example, Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), among his parody films, was the most harshly condemned by critics in largely consistent terms, and also made the lowest sales at the box office. Having examined those critical reactions in the historical-industrial context of the film’s production, I am inclined to believe that the reaction of critics provides some useful indicators towards understanding the film’s poor commercial success, albeit not a finite explanation.

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Throughout my research, I have collected a substantial range of critical coverage in print from the USA and UK. While it is possible for UK critics to miss references to US culture, and for UK and US critics to have different interpretations of Brooks’s projects, my own research suggests this difference is in reality only minimal. In fact, the examination of both US and UK sources is highly important considering the international dynamic of production in the cultural industries, whereby only an international approach can give an accurate picture of the overall strategy.59 This is certainly the case with Brooks since, throughout his career, he has worked in the UK and USA, including making appearances on UK television programmes, such as The Frank Skinner Show (ITV, 1995–), and producing some projects in the UK, such as An Audience With Mel Brooks (ITV, 1983). More importantly, Brooks has adapted content from UK television shows and films, and has employed UK artists, such as Marty Feldman, who reprised material from his UK television programme Marty (BBC, 1968–9) in Brooks’s film Young Frankenstein. It is also important to note that my study of Brooks’s career does not engage with the modern rise of audience participation, described by Jenkins as ‘grassroots convergence’60 – for example, the way home audiences vote for contestants in the case of American Idol (Fox, 2002–), thus ‘shaping the outcome of the competition’,61 or as ‘grassroots creativity’,62 whereby fans produce ‘fan fiction’ based on their favourite texts. This ‘grassroots’ aspect of convergence culture does not play a role in my case studies of Brooks for two reasons. First, none of Brooks’s projects have been designed for audience participation through text voting or other means. Second, I have found no evidence of any fan-produced adaptations of Brooks’s texts, and only very limited fan communities. Those fan sites which do exist online are underdeveloped.63 My study is divided into five chapters. Following a chapter which examines the principles of my approach – namely, the utility of adaptation towards understanding production trends in the cultural industries – my subsequent chapters are case studies of Brooks’s career. Instead of examining his career in chronological order, jumping between his projects in television, film, theatre and other media – as is common to his biographies – I have designed my case studies around specific industries. These case studies have been designed to best demonstrate the significance of Brooks’s adaptations to each respective industry, looking at the industry production trends when his career began, and placing his contribution within a pattern of changing production trends. Since Brooks commonly adapts content between different media, each of these case studies also

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includes examination of other related industries to varying degrees. These studies include examinations of Brooks’s work as a writer in the American television industry, as a performer in audio records and other media, as a director in the Hollywood film industry, and as a producer in the Broadway theatre industry. In order to historically contextualise Brooks’s projects in each case study, I have also examined the contribution of other significant adapters, including Woody Allen, Ricky Gervais, Larry David, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, Bob Fosse, Will Smith, and most recently, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Notes 1. See Geoff King, ‘Stardom in the Willennium’, in Thomas Austin and Martin Barker (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Stardom (London: Arnold, 2003), p. 73. 2. See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 3. See Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), and Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 4. For a study of Mel Brooks’s reputation for ‘bad taste’ in 1968, see Alex Symons, ‘An Audience for Mel Brooks’s The Producers: The Avant-garde of the Masses’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 34.1 (Spring 2006), pp. 24–32. 5. William Holtzman, Seesaw: A Dual Biography of Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1979), p. 112. 6. Maurice Yacowar, The Comic Art of Mel Brooks (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 201. 7. Neil Sinvard, The Films of Mel Brooks (New York: Exeter Books, 1987), p. 6. 8. See Frank Manchel, The Box-Office Clowns: Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen (New York: Franklin Watts, 1979), p. 62. The notion of Brooks as an ‘American Rabelais’ has a particular significance since Mikhail Bakhtin is broadly acknowledged to have first inspired modern comedy theory, through his study of Rabelais and the ‘carnivalesque’, in which he privileged comedy for its quasi-anarchic social purpose. As Bakhtin notes, ‘carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order’. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 10. This approach has commonly been adopted in comic theory since the 1970s when Gerald Mast suggested that the social comment made by film comics is not designed to be ‘constructive’ but rather ‘anarchic’. As Mast notes, film comics primarily raise ‘social and human problems that have no solutions’.

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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See Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., 1973), p. 320. Robert Alan Crick, The Big Screen Comedies of Mel Brooks (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Company, 2002), p. 1. James Robert Parish, It’s Good To Be The King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), p. 283. Ibid., p. 4. Bill Adler and Jeffrey Feinman, Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976), p. 163. Ibid., p. 185. Nick Smurthwaite and Paul Gelder, Mel Brooks and the Spoof Movie (New York: Proteus Books, 1982), p. 91. Ibid., p. 46. Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Back Stage Books, 2004), p. 474. David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 112. Ibid., p. 119. Susan Gubar, ‘Racial Camp in “The Producers” and “Bamboozled” ’, Film Quarterly 60.2 (Winter 2006), pp. 26–37. Ibid. p. 35. Symons, ‘An Audience’, Popular Film and Television, p. 31. Kirsten Fermaglich, ‘Mel Brooks’ The Producers: Tracing American Jewish Culture Through Comedy, 1967–2007’, American Studies 48.8 (2007), p. 85. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 60. Wes D. Gehring, Parody As Film Genre: Never Give a Saga an Even Break (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 1999), p. 131. Ibid., p. 142. Dan Harries, Film Parody (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 21. George Bluestone’s book Novels into Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957) is often regarded by scholars as the first significant work in adaptation studies. This includes a citation in Mireia Aragay, ‘Reflection to Refraction: Adaptation Studies Then and Now’, in Mireia Aragay (ed.), Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship (Amsterdam: Rodopi BV, 2005), p. 11. Bluestone’s study is also recognised as the first significant adaptation study in Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), p. 1, and by Thomas Leitch as the ‘founding text in adaptation study’ in Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 3. However, it is only recently that adaptation studies has emerged as a recognised discipline of its own. By all accounts, 2008 was a seminal year for the rise of adaptation studies, marked by Intellect publishers, which started the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, and also by the

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29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

me l b r o o ks in the cu l t u r a l i n du s t r i e s Oxford University Press, which started publishing the journal Adaptation. The emergence of adaptation studies as a discipline was also reflected by the opening of the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University, which offers an MA in Adaptations. See the De Montfort University website at: http://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/humanities/adaptations/index.jsp (accessed 18 May 2010). David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries (London: Sage Publications, 2002). See Bluestone, Novels into Film, and André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume II, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). In the order that I have mentioned them, see Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents; Geraghty, Now a Major; Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), and Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 54–78. Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney, third edition (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, [1968] 1997). Hesmondhalgh, Cultural Industries. Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (London: Routledge, 2008). Jenkins, Convergence Culture. Hesmondhalgh, Cultural Industries, p. 21. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 18. Barack Obama, speaking at the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors, available to view on ‘Obama at Kennedy Center Honors: I Think Fake ID Got Me Into First Mel Brooks Film’, Huffington Post (6 December 2009), http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/06/obama-at-kennedy-center-h_n_382035. html (accessed 29 December 2009). Elizabeth Scott, ‘Film Maker Mel Brooks Gets Hollywood Star’, Sky News (26 April 2010), http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Showbiz-News/ Mel-Brooks-Blazing-Saddles-Director-Gets-Star-On-The-Hollywood-WalkOf-Fame/Article/201004415620332?f=rss (accessed 30 April 2010). Pauline Kael, Going Steady (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 80. Beau, ‘Blazing Saddles’, Variety (13 February 1974), p. 18. Alexander Walker, ‘Rough and Fumble’, Evening Standard (19 September 1991), p. 37. ‘Dracula Dead and Loving It’, Time Out (4 December 1996), p. 79. Kapsis, Hitchcock, p. 2. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 2. Maland, Chaplin, p. 254. Ibid., p. xiii.

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49. Ibid., p. 273. 50. Ibid., p. 290. 51. Jeremy McCarter, ‘Come On, Feel the Noise’, New York (9 November 2007), http://nymag.com/arts/theater/reviews/40640/#ixzz0avaflPTP (accessed 27 December 2009). 52. ‘Please, Mel Brooks, Skip ‘Blazing Saddles: The Musical’, New York (24 April 2008), http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/04/please_ mel_brooks_skip_blazing.html (accessed 2 June 2010). 53. Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. xi. 54. Ibid., p. xi. 55. Ibid., p. xiii. 56. See John Howkins, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money From Ideas (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001). 57. For an account of this, see Sid Caesar and Eddy Friedfeld, Caesar’s Hours: My Life in Comedy with Love and Laughter (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), p. 67. 58. Brooks describes his right to the final cut in ‘The Making of Blazing Saddles’. Disc 1. Blazing Saddles, 30th anniversary edition. DVD. 1974. Directed by Mel Brooks. London: Warner Home Video UK, 2005. 59. David Hesmondhalgh has identified ‘internationalisation’ as a common production strategy for those working in the cultural industries, also noting that the increase in exports, especially from the USA, in the post-Second World War period resulted in ‘much higher levels of transnational flows of texts, genres, technologies and capital’. See Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, p. 63. 60. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 18. 61. Ibid., p. 20. 62. Ibid., p. 257. 63. For examples of Mel Brooks fan sites, see http://www.brookslyn.com/, http://www.ladyofthecake.com/mel/mel.htm, and http://mel_brooks. justsuperstar.com/ (accessed 9 January 2011).

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Rethinking Adaptation Studies: Survival Strategies in the Cultural Industries

Recent studies have identified the increasing prevalence of adaptations in modern entertainment, especially in film, television and theatre. However, the modern surge towards this current ‘adaptation culture’ – described by James Naremore in his introduction to his book Film Adaptation (2000) as a ‘media saturated environment dense with cross-references and filled with borrowings’1 – is not yet thoroughly understood. It is my suggestion that by rethinking adaptation from a new perspective, that of the ‘cultural industries’,2 as described by David Hesmondhalgh and others, the modern increased production of adaptations can be, in part, explained. According to these studies, since the late 1980s, artists and companies have increasingly adopted strategies of adaptations of various kinds in order to maximise their chances of survival in a competitive and unpredictable marketplace. Furthermore, there is convincing evidence to suggest that developments in industrialisation have accelerated the production of adaptations between different media.3 This corporate drive towards multimedia franchises has fostered the increased production of adaptations, culminating in what Henry Jenkins has described as the ‘convergence culture’.4 In this historical-industrial context, the study of adaptations presents a useful new opportunity for rethinking the development of production trends, in particular, for examining exactly how this modern ‘convergence culture’ came about. As I explain, by looking at existing adaptation case studies, including those by Thomas Leitch, Ina Rae Hark and others, it is evident that producing adaptations has historically allowed artists to capitalise on ‘presold’5 content – following similar survival strategies to that of modern companies, albeit on a smaller scale.6 In particular, these studies suggest that it is useful to rethink the history of cultural production in terms of three main adaptation practices. These include the adapting of texts through remediation, the hybridisation of content from different media, and a practice of repeatedly adapting the same texts, which I refer

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to as ‘prolonged adaptation’. As I explain, there is convincing evidence to suggest that the use of these practices by various artists has, over the years, contributed towards the rising prevalence of adaptations, ultimately bringing the different cultural industries together in a way that scholars are just now beginning to uncover, and that still requires further research.

Adaptations in the Modern Cultural Industries Despite the long history of adaptations in cultural production, recent studies have identified an increasing prevalence in modern times, typically including films adapted from literature, but also from videogames, theatre, animations, and a variety of other combinations between these and other different media.7 As Naremore notes, the apparent rise of this modern-day ‘adaptation culture’ has increasingly made adaptation practices the norm: ‘Books can become movies, but movies themselves can also become novels, published screenplays, Broadway musicals, television shows, remakes and so on’.8 Concurrently, Naremore also suggests that, because of its prevalence, adaptation in its broadest sense is an essential area for study in any examination of modern media production: The study of adaptation needs to be joined with the study of recycling, remaking, and every other form of retelling in the age of mechanical reproduction and electronic communication. By this means, adaptation will become part of a general theory of repetition, and adaptation study will move from the margins to the center of contemporary media studies.9

Indeed, as I suggest, adaptation studies are very important to media studies, in that adaptations are quickly becoming the predominant strategy of production in the cultural industries today.10 In the studies so far, minimal effort has been made to examine adaptations within the industrial context of their production. Their commercial potential is notably addressed by Linda Hutcheon in her book A Theory of Adaptation (2006), in a chapter sub-section titled ‘Why Adapt?’,11 in which only a brief subsection is dedicated to what she describes as ‘The Economic Lures’.12 Hutcheon’s study presents some useful insights into the economic incentives for artists to adapt content, including her suggestion that ‘videogames of movies proliferate and can be found on many platforms. It is obvious that on one level they are attempts to cash in on the success of certain movies and vice versa, as the popularity on film (2001; 2003) of the Tomb Raider game character, Lara Croft, has shown’.13 Similarly, Hutcheon notes that ‘expensive collaborative art forms like operas, musicals, and films are going to look for safe bets with a ready

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audience – and that usually means adaptations’.14 However, while these observations are important and accurate, the actual means of this ‘cashing in’ is yet to be thoroughly understood. In order to understand, and indeed to verify, the potential appeal of adaptations, their production needs to be examined closely in an industrial context; and in order to examine how industrial developments have led to the increasing frequency of adaptations, it is necessary to take a new approach, which examines adaptations within the historical context of their production. There is no better framework than that prepared by David Hesmondhalgh in his book The Cultural Industries (2002). In this comprehensive study, Hesmondhalgh charts the history of academic thinking on the industrialisation of entertainment, which he traces back to the first conceptions of mass culture, described then by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer as the ‘culture industry’.15 Hesmondhalgh sets out a more nuanced understanding of cultural production than that seminal essay, whereby he separates out the monolithic culture industry into various separate and related cultural industries. He defines the ‘core cultural industries’16 as those that have become most industrialised through the 1980s and 1990s as producers attempt to maximise profitability and minimise risk. These include the advertising and marketing industry, broadcasting, the film industry, internet industry, the music industry, the print and electronic journalism industry, and the video and computer games industry.17 As Hesmondhalgh notes, these all create products that are designed expressly to be commercially successful, which he defines simply as ‘texts’.18 Following this approach, I have adopted a uniform way of thinking about texts, whatever the cultural industry of their production. Hesmondhalgh’s study also provides a historical context for thinking about the increased frequency of adaptations in the cultural industries. As Hesmondhalgh notes, since the 1980s, companies in the cultural industries have increasingly adopted production strategies designed to minimise risk in this unpredictable marketplace, and in doing so, ensure their continued survival. While creativity and diversity are both essential to the production of marketable texts, companies in the cultural industries have largely relied on reusing presold content, most notably, through a technique he describes as ‘formatting’.19 This practice, in short, means producing new texts in the same tradition as those that were commercially successful before, reusing old concepts, stories, and characters. It is Hesmondhalgh’s suggestion that since the 1980s, this formatting strategy has been manifested in the reuse of content by three different methods, including the reuse of ‘star’ performers in a series of texts, the production of texts within a commercially popular ‘genre’, and the production

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of ‘serials’, meaning the production of sequels, whether Hollywood films, albums, books or any other media.20 In effect, this means the increased production of adaptations. The rising frequency of adaptations, or formatting production strategies, through the 1980s and 1990s is also partly explained by a major industrial shift in production which Hesmondhalgh describes as ‘multimedia integration’.21 As Hesmondhalgh notes, companies in the cultural industries during this era were increasingly investing in ‘other related areas of cultural-industry production, to ensure cross-promotion’.22 This strategy resulted in the emergence of ‘cultural-industry conglomerates’.23 These companies then produce associated texts synchronically in various media, designed to serve as publicity for one another. In short, Hesmondhalgh’s study suggests that production trends since the 1980s have changed quite dramatically, as is evident in the increase of adaptations between different media, and the partial integration of the cultural industries. The primary obstacle to sustained profit for artists working in the cultural industries, Hesmondhalgh notes, is the unpredictability of audience consumption.24 In short, it is difficult to know which films or books or theatre shows will sell and which will flop. This unpredictability is amplified by the complex networks in which texts are discussed and reassessed once released. As Hesmondhalgh notes, ‘it is difficult to predict how critics, journalists, radio and television producers and presenters, and so on are likely to evaluate texts’.25 The incredible unpredictability of consumption in the cultural industries is broadly reflected in other studies, such as Arthur De Vany’s Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (2004), in which he examines the way the development of the film industry and the tastes of audiences are subject to frequent change: ‘The process of many individuals choosing among movies and transmitting their knowledge to others amid a changing slate of competing movies induces a very complex dynamical behavior that leads to wildly diverging outcomes.’26 It is because of this unpredictability that producers in the film industry, and all the cultural industries, make great efforts to minimise the risk and increase the potential for commercial success, and it is in reaction to this competitive marketplace that artists and companies in the cultural industries have increasingly employed adaptation strategies as a means of production. Most recently, strategies employed by modern companies in order to cope with this unpredictability have been discussed by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006). In this study, Jenkins describes the way each cultural industry is increasingly dependent on content appropriated from all others, engineered in part

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by the rise of digital technology, the internet, and the rise of multimedia conglomerates. By citing examples of contemporary texts such as the book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1998), the television show Survivor (CBS, 2000–), the film The Matrix (1999), and the videogame The Sims (2000), Jenkins suggests that the cultural industries, especially since 1998, are increasingly interconnected in terms of financing and shared content, driven by the fact that ‘convergence represents an expanded opportunity for media conglomerates, since content that succeeds in one sector can spread across other platforms’.27 In a similar industrial trend to that described by Hesmondhalgh, Jenkins suggests that companies, motivated by profit potential, are now expanding into other cultural industries more than ever before. For example, he notes that: ‘Whereas old Hollywood focused on cinema, the new media conglomerates have controlling interests across the entire entertainment industry. Warner Bros produces film, television, popular music, computer games, Web sites, toys, amusement park rides, books, newspapers, magazines, and comics.’28 The corporate strategies of ‘convergence’ effectively also result in the increased production of adaptations. The way artists have recently benefited from producing adaptations in various media is most clearly apparent in Jenkins’s case study of the film The Matrix, where he examines the way this one film was transformed and resold to audiences in a variety of different media adaptations, all of which are designed to be interpreted together as part of one synergetic multimedia experience. As Jenkins notes, ‘The Matrix is entertainment for the age of media convergence, integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium.’29 However, while Jenkins’s study does not thoroughly examine the exact method by which such texts are adapted, he provides evidence of the way individual artists can profit from the transferring of content between different media. For example, Jenkins credits the screenwriters and directors of the original Matrix film, the Wachowski brothers, for their contribution to producing calculated adaptations of their project in various media, each text capitalising on the version before. As Jenkins notes, The Wachowski brothers played the transmedia game very well, putting out the original film first to stimulate interest, offering up a few Web comics to sustain the hard-core fan’s hunger for more information, launching the anime in anticipation of the second film, releasing the computer game alongside it to surf the publicity, bringing the whole cycle to a conclusion with The Matrix Revolutions, and then turning the whole mythology over to the players of the massively multiplayer online game. Each step built on what has come before, while offering new points of entry.30

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Whereas Jenkins’s case studies are mostly focused on contemporary multimedia convergence, his study of the film Star Wars (1977) presents a useful first insight into the historical development of production which led to the modern convergence culture.31 As Jenkins notes, it was back in the 1970s – more than twenty years before the rise of the modern ‘convergence culture’ – that the cinematic release of the film Star Wars was followed by a series of adaptations in a broad range of media. These adaptations capitalised on the popularity of the source film: ‘Lucasfilm continued to generate profits from its Star Wars franchise through the production of original novels and comic books, the distribution of video tapes and audio tapes, the continued marketing of Star Wars toys and merchandise, and the maintenance of an elaborate publicity apparatus.’32 This considered, Jenkins’s study of Star Wars provides important evidence that adaptations, including multimedia adaptations, have been significant in cultural production since the 1970s. While few studies within the field of adaptation studies focus on individual adapters in a historical, industrial context, there is notably some precedent for this approach in studies of Disney – in particular, the work of Richard Schickel in his book The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (1968), in which he examines what he describes as Disney’s ‘beautiful machine’.33 As Schickel notes, Disney’s vast corporation was designed to capitalise on the shared audiences between different media: ‘All its parts – movies, television, book and song publishing, merchandising, Disneyland – interlock and are mutually reciprocating.’34 Disney’s strategies of appropriation and adaptation were notably varied, including not only the appropriation of whole texts, such as the animated film Sleeping Beauty (1959), but in production values and techniques. As Schickel notes, such adaptations remain part of the corporation’s production strategies, even after the passing of its creator: Since Walt Disney died, the executives, directors and writers in his studio have been foregathering weekly to see films – ranging from Georgy Girl [1966] to Blow-Up [1966] – to study the techniques of the new film makers from abroad just as Disney’s animators studied the techniques of the great silent film comedians: to learn what they might borrow and put to their own use. A camera angle here, a shrewd piece of editing there, will perhaps be incorporated into the studio style, which is notably conventional in its filmic techniques.35

More recently, scholars have produced some very useful studies of Disney’s adaptation strategies in focus – including his practice of adapting fairy-tale literature into animated films for the cinema. For example, the adaptation strategies employed by Disney in the production of Snow

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White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) have been usefully examined by Terri Martin Wright in her article ‘Romancing the Tale: Walt Disney’s Adaptations of the Grimms’ “Snow White” ’. As Martin Wright notes, Disney himself planned Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) as an adaptation of the Snow White fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, together with other content appropriated from ‘a rich menu of film types’,36 including Hollywood’s serious romance films and ‘screwball’ comedies of the 1930s. Martin Wright also notes that as a part of his adaptation strategy, Disney subjected the fairy tale to ‘a revolutionary treatment that embodied important social commentary’,37 which was designed to update the material for the current social context, and so make the film appealing to American audiences in the 1930s. In some cases, Disney’s adaptations of Snow White meant major changes to the storyline and characters of the Grimm fairy tale. For example, in the animation, Snow White meets her prince and falls in love in the first scene of the story, whereas in the fairy tale, the prince first stumbles on Snow White only at the end of the story, once she is already asleep, under the spell of the Witch. This adaptation created a theme throughout the animation of love, destiny and ‘the one’38 that was not present in the original. Martin Wright suggests that this adaptation was designed by Disney in order to make the character more like ‘the popular heroines of the 1930s’.39 In another socially-conscious adaptation, Martin Wright argues that Disney’s extended portrayal of the seven dwarf characters in the animated film, who worked together as miners and lived together, was designed to deliver ‘themes of solidarity and co-operation – basic tenets in the socialism that swept the United States during the depression’.40 This, again, was designed to make the animation more consistent with what Disney perceived as the American public’s attitudes and desires. Furthermore, there has also been very useful study of the Disney corporation’s non-film adaptations, including merchandising and theme parks based on his animated material – thus demonstrating a substantial convergence between the various industries. These adaptation strategies employed by the Disney corporation have been usefully studied in Aviad E. Raz’s article ‘Domesticating Disney: Onstage Strategies of Adaptation in Tokyo Disneyland’. In that study, Raz examines the way that attractions originally designed for Disney’s US theme parks, Disneyland and Walt Disney World, were adapted for their reproduction in Japan, in Tokyo Disneyland. As Raz notes, since the park opened in 1983, Disney’s marketing strategies have consistently identified the park as a ‘100% copy of the American original’, making it seem as if the park is ‘in line with the common view of Disney as a symbol of global Americanization and cul-

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tural imperialism’.41 However, Raz suggests that in fact the various attractions within the park have undergone differing degrees of ‘Japanization’.42 Whereas the Jungle Cruise attraction is a ‘traditional Disney ride that has changed little over the years’,43 Cinderella’s Castle Mystery Tour is a slightly adapted ‘imported-modified model’ constituted by ‘a story of Disney heroes and villains written for and told by the Japanese’.44 Most significantly, however, Toyko Disneyland also includes an entirely new attraction called Meet the World, described by Raz as ‘a show on Japanese history’, which, in contrast to the other attractions, amounts to ‘an extreme case of Japanization’.45 As such, Raz’s study of Disney demonstrate the sometimes unexpected results of convergence between cultural industries in different nations. Last, it is also important to note that according to some studies, there is a further layer to the historical impact of industrial convergence, in that convergence is bringing about a merger of perceived ‘high’ and ‘low’ traditions of cultural production, and associated changes to the way ‘class’ determines audience consumption. To explain, sociological studies did at one time tend to suggest a significant cultural difference of production and consumption in the cinema and theatre industries. In the bluntest terms, theatre was seen as the ‘high’ culture industry, and cinema as the ‘low’ culture industry, while at the same time accounting for the exceptions to the rule – for example, the Broadway musical at the ‘low’ end of theatre, and ‘art house’ films at the ‘high’ end of cinema. This was explained in 1970 by Herbert J. Gans, who suggested that musical theatre is, in broad terms, an entertainment for the ‘upper-middle’ class, and, in contrast, film musicals are a pursuit of the ‘lower-middle’46 class. A similar case was argued by Pierre Bourdieu, who suggested that French upper-middleclass audiences were more inclined towards theatre attendance whereas the ‘lower’ class public were more inclined to go the cinema, noting that ‘cultural consumption also entails an economic cost: theatre-going, for example, depends on income as well as education’.47 The same kind of cultural judgements have been applied to the television industry. The previously ‘low’ cultural status of television, as perceived in scholarly studies, has been very usefully described by Paul Attallah, in his article ‘The Unworthy Discourse: Situation Comedy in Television’. In particular, Attallah suggests that the American television sitcom provides entertainment that ‘has long been considered inferior to the entertainment provided by books or films or plays’.48 Furthermore, Attallah extends this criticism to the whole television industry, noting that ‘in the classic dichotomy between high art and low art, television definitely occupies the region of low art. And, as innumerable books proclaim,

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television is a “mass” medium, a business and not an art.’49 Thus considered, in the broadest possible terms, it is possible to interpret a cultural hierarchy applying to the television, film and theatre industries. If such a hierarchy could be applied, it would position theatre as the ‘high’ culture entertainment, then film as the ‘middle’, and television as the ‘low’ of these three industries. However, more recent studies have since described the shifting and even blurring of these ‘high’ and ‘low’ distinctions in the cultural industries – not simply as a means of undermining the previous studies, but because of industrial and social changes that have occurred in recent years. As Celia Lury notes in Consumer Culture (1996), over the last two decades ‘working class’ audiences have increasingly adopted ‘middle class’ tastes, including going to the theatre in greater numbers, rapidly expanding audience numbers.50 In particular, Lury describes the increasing expansion of the audience for Broadway theatre shows, which she suggests have begun to appeal to an even broader market constituted by those who, until recently, exhibited ‘working class’ tastes, and so tended not to find the theatre appealing. More generally, Lury suggests that these kinds of shifts in consumption are reflective of broader industrial shifts, resulting in ‘a change not only in what can be accumulated as cultural capital, but in the nature of the organization of the art-culture system as a whole’.51 This considered, the increasing ‘convergence’ of the television, film and theatre industries potentially has profound consequences for the perceived blurring of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural traditions. As such, these studies provide another useful context for thinking about the historical-industrial impact of adaptations.

Adaptation Terminology In order to examine how adaptation production strategies have contributed towards the historical rise of the modern convergence culture, and to explain the appeal of adaptation as a survival strategy for artists, it is necessary to employ appropriate terminology. Fortunately, most of these terms have been introduced already by today’s pioneering scholars of adaptation and media studies. It is by consulting these studies that the principals of adaptations – in their appeal to artists as a survival strategy and their industrial significance – can be better understood. These established terms include remediation, hybridisation, intermediality and synergy. However, I also employ my own term for describing Brooks’s most striking production strategy, that of ‘prolonged adaptation’. Before beginning a historical analysis, these terms, of course, first need to be defined and explained.

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Remediation I use the term remediation to mean the practice of transferring content from one medium to another, as well as the adaptation of that content as a feature of that transference – thus creating a ‘new’ text. This is a practice employed by Brooks, for example, in adapting his first film The Producers into a Broadway show. I use this term as it has been employed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin their book Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), in which they explore remediation in many different industries.52 This term is especially important for thinking about the historical development of the cultural industries. As Bolter and Grusin note, every industry relies heavily on remediating content: ‘A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media.’53 They also note: ‘There may be or may have been cultures in which a single form of representation (perhaps painting or song) exists with little or no reference to other media. Such isolation does not seem possible for us today.’54 In this context, Brooks’s remediation practices are useful for furthering the study of these highly important relationships. For example, by studying how Brooks remediated his film The Producers as a Broadway show, it is possible to examine the relationship between the film and theatre industries. Notably, the practice of remediation has already proved to be a dependable way for artists to recycle content and to capitalise on established audience groups in the production of Hollywood films. For example, in her essay ‘The Wrath of the Original Cast: Translating Embodied Television Characters to Other Media’, Ina Rae Hark examines the way that 1960s television series were remediated into films. In the case of Star Trek (NBC, 1966–9), for instance, the majority of the original actors from the television series were re-cast, again playing their same characters in the films from 1979 to 1993.55 Hark describes the way reusing the same cast members meant that films’ producers were able to capitalise on audience memory of the 1960s television series – or in Hark’s words, they were ‘tapping veins of nostalgia’.56 As Hark notes, Star Trek underwent several significant adaptations in remediating the television show as a film. For example, the film’s makers replaced the ‘1960s day-glo colours, clumsy model shots and the plywood construction’57 of the television series, instead updating the text with a whole new range of production values. In particular, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) ‘features a completely refitted Enterprise, new-style costumes and extensive special effects’.58 These changes were designed to meet the audience expectations for the budget of the cinema,

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and the developments in technology, make-up, set production and special effects in the years since the original television series was broadcast – thus at the same time, remaking the Star Trek content into a ‘new’ text. As Hark notes, ‘The film announced its intention to differentiate itself from the television series in its opening sequence . . . by introducing Klingons that were radically altered in appearance thanks to a sufficient budget to take advantage of advanced make-up technology.’59 Hark also examines the impact of the Star Trek adaptations on the future of production in the film industry, specifically the consequential greater dependence of the film industry on adapting content from television. Hark describes the way the Star Trek projects set a new precedent, following which the practice of remaking 1960s television shows into films later emerged as a convention in Hollywood in the 1990s. However, these subsequent adaptations followed a slightly different strategy, in that new actors were often chosen to imitate those from the source texts, rather than reusing the original cast. Again, this practice also set a new precedent, whereby subsequent filmmakers would capitalise on audience familiarity with the bygone television shows with increasingly less accurate reproduction of the original texts. As Hark notes, The box-office success of at least some of these adaptations of old television series as feature films with new casts (The Addams Family [1991]; The Fugitive, 1993; Maverick, 1994; The Brady Bunch Movie [1995]; Mission: Impossible, 1996) proved that nostalgia for characters and situations can in fact suffice when nostalgia for the stars of the series cannot be satisfied.60

Hark’s study makes evident the way remediation is systematically practised in an era that predates the current ‘convergence culture’ and, furthermore, how it impacts on the traditions of cultural production, in this case, film.

Hybridisation The term hybridisation also refers to an adaptation strategy employed by Brooks and others. I define hybridisation as the combining of content appropriated from two or more sources, from different or the same media – again, creating a ‘new’ text. The use of the term hybrid has a long history in academic study, commonly in literature, most notably by Mikhail Bakhtin using the example of the twentieth-century novel, in which he suggests that novels combine ‘epic’ literature with modern cultural references and language – thus creating something effectively ‘new’ and appealing to a ‘modern’ audience.61 However, my use of the term is based

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on the strategies described by Thomas Leitch in Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (2007). For example, without actually using the term hybrid in this case, Leitch demonstrates the way Charles Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol (1843) has been hybridised with countless ‘popular’ television programmes to create special Christmas episodes for series such as Family Ties (NBC, 1982–9) and The Jetsons (ABC, 1962–3).62 Similarly, Leitch demonstrates the trend of production whereby Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol has been hybridised with ‘popular’ animated series in order to create special Christmas episodes in programmes such as Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962) and A Flintstones Christmas Carol (1994). As Leitch notes, hybridising texts in this way is essentially a labour-saving practice for television writers, allowing the creation of a new programme by simply lifting familiar material from another medium, ‘virtually giving the writers a week off ’.63 In effect, hybridisation enables artists first to produce a perceived ‘new’ text with only a minimal contribution of ‘original’ ideas, and second, the resulting texts potentially have a broad appeal, reaching both those familiar with the novels and the shows themselves. Again, when these adaptations are considered together in a historicalproduction context, they also make evident a new tradition of adaptation that was established early on, and then repeated by subsequent artists – ultimately connecting two perceived separate cultural industries. The practice is best described by Leitch in his observation that in all these cases, the television writer’s strategy is simply ‘to adapt Dickens’s story to the requirements of the franchise’.64 This process started with Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol, in which the lead character was hybridised with the character Scrooge from the novel, but with Magoo’s defining characteristics remaining intact, including his trademark blindness. This approach was repeated in A Flintstones Christmas Carol, in which the various Flintstones characters were matched up with their closest counterparts in Dickens’s novel. Since the Flintstones were similarly deemed to be the more current or perceived ‘popular’ characters, they remained largely intact. Fred Flintstone becomes Scrooge but keeps his appearance and retains most of his personality traits, as do the other regular characters who are similarly hybridised with the other characters.65 The appeal of hybridisation strategies to artists is just as evident in the film industry, whereby filmmakers have combined well-known material in new ways, sometimes starting new trends in production. This strategy is notably apparent in the career of director-turned-producer Roger Corman, described in his autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (1990). Even though Corman was and

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is still known for low-budget and ‘trashy’ films, often regarded as ‘exploitation’ or ‘B movies’ such as Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and Death Race 2000 (1975), he has sustained his career in this competitive industry as a producer and director, making around 300 movies, and establishing his own production company, New World Pictures. In Corman’s own words, he attributes his survival to his ‘passion for efficiency and discipline’,66 meaning that he designed his projects in strictly commercial terms, often hybridising content together so as to best appeal to the broadest market. An example of this strategy is captured when Corman recounts the making of his film Not of This Earth (1957): ‘Throwing in some tongue-incheek humour paid off: the picture took in close to $1 million in rentals. It was a definite turning point because it proved that mixing in some offbeat humor only increased the appeal of science fiction.’67 As with many of Corman’s projects, including It Conquered the World (1956) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), his film Not of This Earth was a commercially profitable amalgam of content, in this case hybridising the genres of sci-fi and comedy in order to appeal to a broad cross-over of audience groups. Notably, Corman’s approach of hybridising sci-fi and comedy is also part of an adaptation production trend in Hollywood, evident most famously in the work of director John Carpenter in his films including the comedyalien-invasion movie They Live (1988).

Intermediality The term intermediality describes the common result of remediation and hybridisation production strategies. In concise terms, I define an intermedial text as a text produced in one medium that includes content appropriated from another medium, and that exhibits characteristics of both. For example, a film that includes content appropriated from a Broadway show, and that displays some characteristics of that show’s production that are not typical to films, would be an intermedial text. I have taken this term from Andre Gaudreault, who defines intermediality as ‘a newly coined term for the mixing of mediums in cultural production’.68 Specifically, Guadreault uses the term intermedial to describe the way the early cinema industry ‘not only was influenced by other mediums and cultural spheres which were popular at the turn of the 20th century, but also was at once magic show, féerie, café-concert act, vaudeville act, magic lantern – tutti quanti’.69 As such, Guadreault proposes that in order to better understand the historical development of the cinema industry, it is essential to study it from such an ‘intermedial, transdisciplinary angle’.70 While Guadreault only used this term in his study of the development of early cinema, its

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application is far broader. In other words, by identifying and examining intermediality, it is possible to examine the way that different media that have contributed towards and influenced the development of any tradition of production. It is also important to note that the term intermedial has a specific use to the discussion of adaptations that differs from other similar terms such as transmedia as used by Jenkins. As Jenkins notes, by producing a series of texts in different media that are designed to be interpreted together, companies in the cultural industries engage in ‘transmedia storytelling’.71 Through this strategy, consumers experience texts in a variety of different ways, sometimes over an extended period of time, that together manufacture one transmedia ‘entertainment experience’.72 Certainly, intermedial adaptations offer some degree of transmedia experience. However, in order to understand the impact of ‘convergence’ on production trends in the cultural industries, and on critical attitudes, intermediality is a more useful term. To explain, Brooks’s television sitcom The Nutt House (NBC, 1989) was a hybrid of content from different media. The show exhibited qualities of performance and direction associated with Brooks’s Hollywood films, while at the same time exhibiting qualities associated with the ‘mainstream’ sitcom tradition. In this case, the transmedia experience is an important aspect of the show. However, the term intermedial captures the strange ‘convergence’ of qualities, and in doing so, also identifies the difference in production trends from that of the perceived ‘mainstream’ of American sitcom production.

Synergy I use the term synergy to mean the process by which texts can crosspromote one another and contribute towards the experience of one another for audiences. For example, this term is important for the study of Brooks since many of his performances, films, theatre shows and television shows capitalise on audience familiarity with other projects and so potentially benefit from synergy between them. Synergy is a commonly used term in the cultural industries trade press. For example, Ben Fritz, writing in Variety in 2005, discussed the way Sony Pictures then capitalised on the ‘corporate synergy’73 between their film Stealth (2005) and the videogame produced by Sony Computer Entertainment, Wideout Pure (2005). As Fritz notes, the film Stealth was released on the PSP home format along with a version of the game in which images from the film were inserted into the game in order to create a synergy

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between the two projects.74 More significantly, the potentially increased appeal of such synergy-based projects is endorsed by major figures in the cultural industries. This is apparent in the enthusiasm expressed by the president of Sony Entertainment, Ben Feingold, who was then quoted saying that he was ‘excited about the possibility’75 of future synergy-based projects. While the term synergy is also broadly used in media studies, I have used it in the way used by Paul Grainge in Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (2008). As Grainge notes, companies, especially since the 1980s, have capitalised on synergy by simultaneously producing content in different media, thus serving to ‘integrate and disseminate their products through a variety of media and consumer channels’.76 For example, by distributing Batman (1989) content as radio commercials, in press coverage, and on television, Time Warner set a new industrial precedent for producing a high volume of content in a range of different media synchronically, all designed for cross-promotion – thus making for one synergetic event. Many adaptations, including Brooks’s projects, are on a smaller scale – with less related texts in circulation – but in principle, they too have potential for synergy.77 For instance, in 2004, when Brooks appeared as himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 2000–), the storyline involved his behind-the-scenes casting of his then-running Broadway show The Producers. As such, there was potential for synergy between these two projects. Adaptations are not always designed to capitalise on synergy with the intention of creating a brand as the concept is developed by Grainge. When the diverse range of Batman content was synchronically produced in different media by Time Warner, all those texts culminated together making Batman into a ‘complex brand commodity’.78 In contrast, for one example, Brooks has replayed his 2000 Year Old Man performance routine numerous times over the years since 1961, mostly in audio records, with some performances in television and film. Each performance was an opportunistic project, whereby Brooks attempted to once more extend the life of his material. It is only today that these performances can be said to have contributed towards creating a ‘2000 Year’ brand, and only in recent years that this ‘brand’ has raised Brooks’s profile with critics. Similarly, it was only eight years after the release of his final audio record in 1997 that Brooks produced his first and only tie-in product, an illustrated book titled The 2000 Year Old Man Goes to School (2005).79 This considered, Brooks’s ‘2000 Year’ brand is a consequence of his long career of adaptations, rather than a purpose-designed branding enterprise from the start as was Batman.

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Prolonged Adaptation I define the term ‘prolonged adaptation’ as the cultural industries practice of repeatedly adapting the same content – for example, Brooks’s production of two adaptations of his first film The Producers. I also use the term ‘prolonged adaptation’ to refer to the result of that strategy – for example, I define Brooks’s three versions of The Producers together as a ‘prolonged adaptation’. While ‘prolonged adaptations’ are common in the cultural industries, for example, the numerous adaptations of the comic-book character Batman, they are mostly the result of numerous different artists subsequently adapting the same content. However, this practice has a particular importance to the study of Brooks since he has often repeatedly adapted the same content himself – thus prolonging the commercial life of content in a way that is untypical of artists more generally. In this respect, this practice makes him an important figure in the cultural industries. I developed the term ‘prolonged adaptation’ from the notion of prolonging as described by John Ellis in his essay ‘The Literary Adaptation: An Introduction’.80 In Ellis’s theory he suggests that the primary intention of adapters in the Hollywood film industry and the British television industry, during what he terms to be the ‘classical’ Hollywood era, was to recreate the experience of the original source text, and so to ‘prolong’ the audience pleasure of that text: ‘The adaptation trades upon the memory of the novel, a memory that can derive from actual reading, or, as is more likely with a classic of literature, a generally circulated cultural memory.’81 In this way, adaptation is designed to simply allow audiences to reexperience the source text in new packaging, enjoying it again by recreating the conditions of the ‘first viewing’ in a way that simply returning to the source text for a re-reading or re-viewing cannot achieve: The form of the narrative novel resists re-reading in our culture: the vast majority of novels are designed to be read once and once only, just as the narrative film is intelligible at one viewing. Re-reading or re-viewing the same text always threatens to disappoint: the process of production of the illusion becomes too obvious, the memory interferes. Adaptation into another medium becomes a means of prolonging the pleasure of the original representation, and repeating the production of a memory. The process of adaptation should thus be seen as a massive investment (financial and psychic) in the desire to repeat particular acts of consumption within a form of representation that discourages such a repetition.82

This notion of prolonging best captures Brooks’s strategy, that of extending the life of content, maximising ideas, and capitalising on content produced by other artists that is already in circulation. In researching his

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career, I have identified the way Brooks has repeatedly reprised and adapted characters, jokes, routines and writing formulas throughout numerous projects. In the chronological order of my case studies, these ‘prolonged adaptations’ include the recycling of jokes over five seasons in Brooks’s sitcom Get Smart, the decades of adaptations of his two-man performance routine, the 2000 Year Old Man, his adaptations of old jokes across his ‘parody’ films, and most recently, the two adaptations of his film The Producers. Together, these case studies demonstrate that this adaptation survival strategy has shaped Brooks’s whole career. The long-term benefit of his ‘prolonged adaptation’ strategy is similar to the practice of franchising, as discussed in recent studies. To explain, Eileen R. Meehan studied the Star Trek franchise in her book Why TV is Not Our Fault: Television Programming, Viewers, and Who’s Really in Control (2005). As Meehan notes, the television series Star Trek (NBC, 1966–9) was adapted as a series of novels from 1975 to 1977, and then into a film as Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), and also a series of novelty books including Star Trek: The Motion Picture Make-Your-Own Costume Book (1979). These products were part of Gulf and Western’s ‘coordinated approach to building a Trek product line’.83 However, it was only in 1989, after Gulf and Western became a ‘transindustrial conglomerate’,84 and was renamed as Paramount Communications, that company executives ‘started calling Star Trek “the franchise,” for its ability to feed operations and earn reliable revenues’.85 This franchise status became apparent when Paramount Communications had honed to a fine art the practice of corporate synergy. It built Star Trek into a major brand, with product lines in film, video cassettes, books, licensing, and the like. In a bold move, Paramount also generated a second brand, Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its own product line.86

As such, Meehan characterises franchises as multiple product lines in different media produced synchronically, in this case, by a multimedia, cultural industries conglomerate. A similar definition of franchising is notably proposed by Janet Wasko in her article ‘The Lord of the Rings: Selling the Franchise’, in which she defines a franchise as more than just sequels (or a series of adaptations) of a well-known text. As Wasko notes, a franchise is ‘a property or concept that is repeatable in multiple media platforms or outlets with merchandising and tie-in potential’.87 It is according to this definition that Wasko discusses The Lord of the Rings as a franchise, identifying the various strategies employed in its promotion, including the distribution of 26 million Lord of the Rings bookmarks to high-school students, as

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well as Lord of the Rings ‘ring tones, games, text message alerts, and other products’.88 In short, Wasko, like Meehan, characterises franchises as the creation of many product lines of promotional products, often produced synchronically. While ‘prolonged adaptations’ capitalise on presold content in a similar way to the Star Trek and Lord of the Rings franchises, my definition of ‘prolonged adaptations’ is not the same as that of franchises. This difference is best described in terms of Brooks’s projects. First, his adaptations are generally not designed to be produced synchronically. Instead, these adaptations are opportunistic one-offs, always produced individually in an effort to get extra mileage out of existing ideas. For example, Brooks’s film The Producers was released in 1968, and was only adapted into a Broadway show in 2001 after that film achieved high critical status. Then, it was only following the commercial and critical success of the Broadway show that Brooks prolonged it into another film in 2005. Second, Brooks’s adaptations are not accompanied by the same high volume of other associated texts or a ‘product line’, as Meehan describes it in the case of Star Trek. Despite the massive popularity of The Producers on Broadway commercially and critically, Brooks only contributed towards two tie-in products: a DVD documentary Recording The Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks (2001), and a ‘coffee table’ illustrated book The Producers: How We Did It (2001).89 This considered, Brooks’s ‘prolonged adaptation’ strategy has resulted in a much smaller network of texts, which, while they sometimes span different industries including the Broadway, Hollywood and television industries, have significantly less potential for synergy than the vast franchises such as Star Trek or The Lord of the Rings. In short, ‘prolonged adaptations’ are often a series of projects on a smaller scale, produced opportunistically and independently in order to capitalise on audience familiarity with previous texts – often without the synchronic product lines that constitute franchises. Of course, there are other artists, in addition to Brooks, who have practised ‘prolonged adaptation’. For example, Helen Fielding sustained her career, in part, through repeatedly adapting her own work, Bridget Jones’s Diary, which started life as a newspaper column in the Independent. That column was later adapted by Fielding into as a novel of the same name (1996) – which as of 2005 had sold ten million copies worldwide in thirty countries.90 Following the commercial success of the novel, Fielding then wrote a sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) – which, following the success of the column and the first novel, was anticipated from the start as having a high potential for commercial success. As John Walsh noted in the Independent, ‘Like the JK Rowling phenomenon, it was a

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rare sighting of a book launched with a guarantee that it simply could not fail. Everyone knew they had a runaway, transatlantic, trans-media hit on their hands.’91 Following this, Fielding worked with other writers, including Richard Curtis, to write the film adaptation of the first novel in 2001, and again to produce a film adaptation of the sequel in 2004. As Walsh’s account suggests, these ‘prolonged adaptations’ were regarded by the industry, in this case the literature industry, to have an increased potential for appealing to audiences. The potential of synergy produced by Fielding’s ‘prolonged adaptation’ has been further expanded on by Mireia Aragay and Gemma Lopez in their essay ‘Inf(l)ecting Pride and Prejudice: Dialogism, Intetextuality, and Adaptation’. In their study, Aragay and Lopez note that there is a system of ‘intertextual dialogic interactions’92 between Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999), its film adaptation in 2004, and the texts that they perceive to be its sources, namely Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) and its subsequent adaptations including the BBC television adaptation (1995). It is their suggestion that in whatever order these adaptations are viewed or read, the past experience of one adaptation serves to publicise, and contributes towards the audience’s experience of, the next: ‘the significance of rewriting/adaptation stretches well beyond the specific intertextual exchanges it sets up to encompass a radial undermining of a linear, teleological understanding of cultural history in favour of dialogic, synergetic notions of recycling and permutation’.93 This considered, making ‘prolonged adaptations’ offer an increased potential for synergy, whereby instead of just one text and its adaptation publicising each another, the resulting series of adaptations form a network with many different possibilities for cross-promotion. The potential appeal of ‘prolonged adaptations’ to audiences is also considered in the work of Sarah Cardwell, in which she describes the way multiple adaptations of the same work can ultimately manufacture a more meaningful text in combination together. Cardwell describes the way the source texts and the most recent adaptation merge together in the minds of the audience, making for a phenomenon that she refers to as the ‘meta-text’.94 For example, writing about the long history of adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, she notes: ‘subsequent “adaptations” can be realised as points in a continuum, as part of the extended development of a singular, infinite, meta-text: a valuable story or myth that is constantly growing and developing, being retold, reinterpreted and reassessed’.95 It is according to this principle that the familiarity of Shakespeare’s plays have increased with audiences over the years following each subsequent

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adaptation in theatre, film, television and other media. For example, the public perception of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is potentially given a broader range of meanings by audience memories of the Franco Zeffirelli film Romeo and Juliet (1968), Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Juliet (1996), and all the other adaptations in various media over the years – together making for a more powerful ‘brand’. Considering the potential for cross-promotion, the potential appeal of what I term to be ‘prolonged adaptations’ is multiplied. As such, the ‘prolonged adaptation’ does not only offer a potential synergy with a single text from the past, but a synergy with several such favoured texts all at the same time. By result, the most recent adaptation always has potentially greater audience appeal than those before it. For example, the story and script for the recent Atari project Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009) was written and voiced by the original film’s writers and actors Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd. This game offered audiences the possibility of prolonging not only the pleasure of the film Ghostbusters (1984), but also all the interim adaptations, including, for example, the Atari 65XE videogame Ghostbusters (1984) and the cartoon television series The Real Ghostbusters (ABC, 1986–91), through its similar animated reprise of the characters. By again reprising the Ghostbusters characters, storylines and settings, this particular ‘prolonged adaptation’ benefits from many tiers of audience memories that are added with each new text, together making the most recent text potentially all the more pleasurable for audiences. When these factors are considered together, it is evident that ‘prolonged adaptation’ is destined to play an increasingly prominent role in the future of production in the cultural industries. First, it effectively creates favourable conditions for artists to produce yet more adaptations. In other words, it is evident that because of the many incentives for artists relating to synergy and accumulated meaning, the more a text is adapted, the more it is likely to be selected for adaptation again by artists in the future. This tendency is exemplified in recent times by the increased dominance of ‘prolonged adaptations’ in Hollywood film, whereby twenty-yearold franchises are now dominating the marketplace. These ‘prolonged adaptations’ notably include the recent film remake A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), which follows eight sequels to the 1984 source film, and Terminator Salvation (2009), which was the fourth in a series of films, along with a series of comics and computer games, recycling twenty-fiveyear-old content, dating back to The Terminator (1984).96 Any new adaptation of these texts in the future would benefit from the publicity associated with all of those previous adaptations, and would potentially be highly ‘meaningful’ for audiences. By result, for artists struggling to survive in

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a competitive marketplace, there is an increased incentive to adapt these texts again rather than produce a perceived ‘original’ text. Last, understanding ‘prolonged adaptation’ is especially important for rethinking the historical development of production towards the modern ‘convergence culture’. There is already evidence of ‘prolonged adaptations’ that span multiple different cultural industries. For example, in Will Brooker’s essay ‘Batman: One Life, Many Faces’, he demonstrates the way the Batman comic-book character, as well as its storylines and associated characters, were transformed for new media, sometimes drastically, in order to appeal to new audiences beyond its comic-book fan base. As such, the Batman character sustained its commercial popularity by having been repurposed for whatever media platform was appropriate in each era.97 These instances of adaptation included bringing the comic book character to television in the live-action series Batman (ABC, 1966–8) starring Adam West, and then to the cinema in Tim Burton’s film Batman.98 As Brooker notes, it is precisely through the combined audience memories of Batman in all the various media together that his character is now ‘richer’ in meaning today: Batman has proved himself infinitely adaptable, retaining only minimal identifying traits of appearance and personality through every incarnation as he transforms according to the needs and moods of each new period. And perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. Purists might temper their protests with the reflection that their hero would, had he not been subjected to each of these mutations, be now far less complex, far less significant, far less rich in meaning; if indeed, he had lasted this long.99

Together, these studies suggest that thinking about the cultural industries in terms of ‘prolonged adaptations’ is a useful approach for understanding the historical development of production trends towards modern ‘convergence’. In the case of the ‘prolonged adaptations’ of Batman, Ghostbusters, Shakespeare’s plays and Jane Austen’s novels, they were each remediated many times. For example, Batman started as a comicbook character, was then adapted for 1960s television, and was then adapted for a Hollywood film in 1989, with various other adaptations in between. In the case of these ‘prolonged adaptations’, memories of Batman in all manner of media potentially feature in audience interpretations. Each subsequent Batman adaptation – and all such ‘prolonged adaptations’ – are potentially an intermedial experience for many audience groups. Although the resulting multimedia network of texts has accumulated over the years, rather than being the product of one synchronic franchise, this sharing of content, artists and audiences across the multiple

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cultural industries is in the end principally the same, and in these respects, predates that of the modern ‘convergence culture’.

Conclusion The framework of the cultural industries, as prepared by Hesmondhalgh, and the studies of industry by De Vany, Grainge and Jenkins, together provide a useful context with which to rethink the production of adaptations. By combining the relatively new discipline of adaptation studies with that of the cultural industries, it is possible to better understand the reasons for the current surge of adaptations. By taking this approach, and imposing an industrial production-context on studying adaptations, adaptation practices are revealed to be a labour-saving strategy for artists, employed increasingly since the late 1980s by artists and companies in the cultural industries. Furthermore, the recent rise of adaptations is also explained, in part, by the modern era of integration between the cultural industries, especially from around 1998, best captured in Jenkins’s notion of ‘convergence culture’. In this new era, companies and artists are often invested in a range of different industries, and so adaptations between the different media are necessarily increasingly common. However, further research is still required to completely understand the history of production that led to this modern era of prevalent adaptations and multimedia ‘convergence’. As adaptation studies by Hark, Leitch, Cardwell, Brooker and others have demonstrated, the practices of remediation, hybridisation and ‘prolonged adaptation’ are particularly important to understanding how the drive for efficiency with ideas has influenced the development of the cultural industries over the years. Most significantly, there is evidence that the use of these practices contributed towards establishing trends for sharing artists, content and audiences between the cultural industries. Following the example of these case studies – and adopting the artist-focused approach established in the studies of Disney – it is possible to examine these adaptation practices from a historical-production context. Through such an approach, it is possible to chart the way the use of adaptation has contributed towards shifts in production trends, increasing both the frequency of adaptations generally, and increasing the frequency of intermedial adaptations. To demonstrate adaptation as a survival strategy, and to better understand the historical impact of adaptation practices on production in the cultural industries, Brooks’s career provides the ideal subject for a case study. Brooks is just one of many significant adapters, but his dedicated use of remediation, hybridisation and ‘prolonged adaptation’, makes

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him a useful figure for studying the development of production trends. Furthermore, Brooks is also suitable given that his long career, spanning the television, film and theatre industries, predates the late 1980s era of ‘multimedia integration’100 described by Hesmondhalgh, and predates the current ‘convergence culture’101 described by Jenkins. These factors considered, by examining Brooks’s career, it is possible to examine how adaptations have contributed towards changes in production trends, contributing towards the modern era of multimedia convergence, and indeed, how they continue to contribute to the ongoing development of the cultural industries today.

Notes 1. James Naremore, ‘Introduction’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 12. 2. David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries (London: Sage, 2002), p. 12. 3. The increased production of adaptations between different media is described by James Naremore in ‘Introduction’, in Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, p. 12. 4. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), p. 19. 5. The terms preselling and presold are established terms in film studies, meaning recycling already familiar material. For example, see Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), p. 50. 6. See Ina Rae Hark, ‘The Wrath of the Original Cast: Translating Embodied Television Characters to Other Media’, in Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 172–84, and Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 86. 7. The practice of adaptation has already been documented to have a long history in all of the arts, starting with the earliest instances of cultural production for a mass audience. This has been noted by Thomas Leitch, who cites the short film The Kiss (1896) as an early adaptation of the stage musical The Widow Jones (1895). This example provides evidence that adaptation has a long history in film in particular, and indeed, ‘cinematic adaptation is as old as the cinema itself ’. See Leitch, Film Adaptation, p. 22. Similarly, the history of adaptation has also been studied in historic literature by Robert Stam, who demonstrates the way it is possible to identify the adaptation of material in the production of even the oldest, perceived ‘original’ texts. As such, Stam notes, ‘All texts are tissues of anonymous formulae, variations on those formulae, conscious and unconscious quotations, and conflations and inversions of other texts.’ In his analysis, Stam uses the example of Daniel Defoe’s

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8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

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1719 novel The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe to demonstrate that even this perceived ‘original’ work is in fact an adaptation of those works which came before it. In this case, Stam identifies the Bible and the travel writings by Alexander Selkirk as precursors to the novel. See, Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, in Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, p. 64. For another similar study of a long historical pattern of adaptations see Martin Barker and Roger Sabin’s study of the Mohicans in film, television and comic books, in their book, The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995). Naremore, ‘Introduction’, in Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, p. 12. Ibid., p. 15. It is important to note that in terms of methodology, the parameters of adaptation study are now very broad, stretching far beyond the simple study of name-for-name adaptations, and extending to the study of how stories, themes, production values and concepts are transferred and adapted between different texts. Notably, this broad outlook in adaptation studies originates from the principals of ‘dialogism’ as discussed in Mikhail Bakhtin, by which he identified the appropriation of material from various different sources in the creation of the novel as a literary form: ‘the novel makes wide and substantial use of letters, diaries, confessions, the forms and methods of rhetoric associated with recently established courts and so forth’. See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Epic and the Novel’, in Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds), The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 33. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 85–95. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 87. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings and Mark Jancovich (eds), The Film Studies Reader (London: Arnold, 2000), pp. 7–11. Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, p. 12. Although Hesmondhalgh’s categories of the cultural industries are useful in the thinking about cultural production, I would argue that understanding cultural production also benefits from a more focused approach, not necessarily employing these categories. For example, in terms of the broadcasting industry, I would suggest that television functions as an important sub-industry within that category, separate from radio, that needs to be examined through its unique relationship to other media including radio itself. Furthermore, the television industry can be examined in a more focused manner, for example, looking at the ‘industry’ of television comedy, specifically sitcom production. It is my approach to employ the same level

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

me l b r o o ks in the cu l t u r a l i n du s t r i e s of specificity to studying cultural production in all other industries, looking at what could be termed ‘traditions of production’ or ‘sub-industries’ rather than the vast ‘industries’ described by Hesmondhalgh. Hesmondhalgh, Cultural Industries, p. 2. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 18. Arthur De Vany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 7. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 19. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 149. Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. Third Edition (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, [1968] 1997), p. 16. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 40. Terri Martin Wright, ‘Romancing the Tale: Walt Disney’s Adaptations of the Grimms’ “Snow White” ’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 25.3 (1997), p. 99. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 106. Aviad E. Raz, ‘Domesticating Disney: Onstage Strategies of Adaptation in Tokyo Disneyland’, Journal of Popular Culture, 33.4 (Spring, 2000), p. 77. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 79. Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 112. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), p. 116. Paul Attallah, ‘The Unworthy Discourse: Situation Comedy in Television’, in Joanne Morreale (ed.), Critiquing the Sitcom: A Reader (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), p. 93.

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56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

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Ibid., p. 93. Celia Lury, Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 95. Ibid., p. 95. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation:  Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 185. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 67. Ina Rae Hark, ‘The Wrath of the Original Cast: Translating Embodied Television Characters to Other Media’, in Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 177. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 173. See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Emerson and Holquist, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 361. Although Leitch does not use the term ‘hybrid’, his study of such adaptations is nonetheless a useful case to demonstrate the broad use of hybridisation in television production. See Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, p. 86. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 87. Roger Corman, How I Made A Hundred Movies in Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime (New York: Random House, 1990), p. viii. Ibid., p. 37. Andre Gaudreault, ‘The Diversity of Cinematographic Connections in the Intermedial Context of the Turn of the 20th Century’, in Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (eds), Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000), p. 10. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 13. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 20. Ibid., p. 20. Ben Fritz, ‘Sony’s Game for Synergy’, Variety (8 September 2005), http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117928794?refCatId=20&query=syn ergy (accessed 3 January 2011). Ibid. Ibid. Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 10. The way filmmakers can capitalise on content circulating in other media has

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78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

me l b r o o ks in the cu l t u r a l i n du s t r i e s also been notably examined by Thomas Austin in his study of the way corporate publicity and press discussion configured audience expectations and even increased sales for the films Basic Instinct (1992), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Natural Born Killers (1994). As Austin notes, the audience interpretation of these films and their increased box-office success was a in part a product of the way audiences interpreted other related materials, whether they were promotional materials or press coverage of the film: ‘A constellation of satellite texts orbits the film, including not only licensed merchandising, but also media coverage arranged via symbiotic relationships between distributors and television outlets.’ See Thomas Austin, Hollywood, Hype and Audiences: Selling and Watching Popular Film in the 1990s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 30. Grainge, Brand Hollywood, p. 10. See Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, The 2000 Year Old Man Goes to School (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005). John Ellis’s notion that adaptation is a means of prolonging the pleasure of the first viewing has more recently been discussed by Julie Sanders, who also discusses the idea of works being extended through adaptations. However, Sanders takes a different approach to that of Ellis, whereby she suggests that each new adaptation is itself a ‘new’ and separate creation rather than just a ‘prolonging’ of its source. See Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 160. John Ellis, ‘The Literary Adaptation: An Introduction’, Screen, 23.1 (1982), p. 3. Ibid., p. 4. Eileen R. Meehan, Why TV is Not Our Fault: Television Programming, Viewers, and Who’s Really in Control (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), p. 93. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 93. Janet Wasko, ‘The Lord of the Rings: Selling the Franchise’, in Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs (eds), Watching the Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s World Audiences (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), p. 22. Ibid., p. 31. See Mel Brooks and Tom Meehan, The Producers: How We Did It (New York: Roundtable Press, 2001). Fielding’s adaptations of Bridget Jones is described in John Walsh, ‘Keeping up with Ms Jones’, Independent (3 August 2005), http://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/keeping-up-withms-jones-501280.html (accessed 14 October 2011). Walsh, ‘Keeping up with Ms Jones’. Mireia Aragay and Gemma Lopez, ‘Inf(l)ecting Pride and Prejudice: Dialogism, Intetextuality, and Adaptation’, in Mireia Aragay (ed.), Books

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93. 94. 95. 96.

97.

98.

99. 100. 101.

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in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship (Amsterdam: Rodopi BV, 2005), p. 203. Ibid., p. 217. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 14. Ibid., p. 25. Whereas the first film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) grossed $25,504,513 in the USA during its original cinematic release, the new adaptation, A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) was more successful, even accounting for inflation, making $57,283,852 in the USA as of 21 May 2010. Looking at the various sequels over the years, although not all were more successful than their previous incarnations, there is a trend whereby, after accounting for inflation, the most recent have more often than not achieved higher box office sales in the USA, with only the previous film, the hybrid Freddy vs. Jason (2003), making a comparable $82,622,655. See ‘Box Office History for Nightmare on Elm Street Movies’, The Numbers, http://www.thenumbers.com/movies/series/NighmareOnElmstreet.php (accessed 21 May 2010). For another similar study of a comic book character that has been repeatedly prolonged through remediation, see Richard Berger, ‘ “Are There Any More at Home Like You?”: Rewiring Superman’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 1.2 (2008), pp. 87–101. Will Brooker, ‘Batman: One Life, Many Faces’, in Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 197. Ibid., p. 197. Hesmondhalgh, Cultural Industries, p. 20. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 16.

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C H A PTER 2

From Sitcoms to ‘Parody-coms’: Writing for American TV, 1949–89

Mel Brooks’s career as a writer for American television comedy from 1949 through to 1989 has already been documented in the existing biographies and critical studies to include a mixture of perceived ‘hits’ and ‘misses’. As Bill Adler and Jeffrey Feinman note in Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman (1976), it was during the 1950s, working amid a team of writers on long-running television variety shows for Sid Caesar that Brooks ‘reached a peak of productivity’.1 Then, years later, with his own sitcom project When Things Were Rotten (ABC, 1975), Brooks created his first short-lived television show – blamed on his perceived ‘lack of judgement’.2 Yet despite this coverage, Brooks’s underlying adaptation strategy in writing these television shows – which brought about this mixture of successes and perceived ‘failures’ throughout his long career – has not yet been identified. Furthermore, the significance of Brooks’s adaptation production strategy in terms of the early development of American television comedy and its historical development since, specifically that of the American sitcom, is still yet to be recognised. By rethinking Brooks’s career as a television writer with a focus on his adaptation strategy, and by examining his projects within the academic approach of the cultural industries, the profound industrial significance of Brooks’s projects is made clear. As I explain, Brooks’s shows as an American television writer all exhibit one reoccurring adaptation strategy, in short, that of hybridising the television tradition of ‘domestic skits’ with various different kinds of Hollywood and European film content. Brooks’s adaptation strategy has varied greatly across these projects – from appropriating famous scenes from films, through to film characters and concepts, jokes, and even film direction techniques and production values. These adaptations allowed Brooks and other writers to revive presold content from other media in the sitcom format, and in these new hybrid combinations, also to produce prolonged adaptations of that material over numerous episodes – in some cases, over numerous seasons. Together,

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these adaptations have had a profound effect on the development and ongoing transformation of American television comedy, specifically the sitcom tradition, over the years. Brooks’s career as a television writer can be usefully divided into three distinct stages. These include the emergence of the American television sitcom tradition from 1949 to 1957, the revival of the sitcom from 1965 to 1970, and the modern transformation of the sitcom tradition from 1975 to 1989. Necessarily, Brooks is just one of many writers in this history of development, working with him and separately, producing similar adaptations throughout these periods. In the first stage of this history, Brooks started his adaptation strategy with the variety shows The Admiral Broadway Revue (NBC, 1949), Your Show of Shows (NBC, 1950–4) and Caesar’s Hour (NBC, 1954–7). In these projects, Brooks and other writers produced skits, mainly for Sid Caesar and his various female co-stars, in which they hybridised relatable moments of domestic life with famous scenes from Hollywood and European films. By this strategy, they produced prolonged adaptations of those domestic writing formulas within small segments on the shows week by week. As with other variety shows in this era, these skits were early predecessors of what would become the American sitcom tradition – thus providing useful evidence that the sitcom industry has been, in part, integrated with the film industry from its beginning. In the second stage of his television writing career, along with Buck Henry, Brooks was creator and writer of the sitcom Get Smart (NBC, CBS 1965–70). This show was one of several other gimmick-orientated sitcoms in the 1960s, including Bewitched (ABC, 1964–72) and The Addams Family (ABC, 1964–6), that revived the stale 1950s sitcom tradition by hybridising it with new themes, character-types, storylines, and other content appropriated from Hollywood film. In the case of Get Smart, Brooks employed content from the then-popular ‘secret agent’ or ‘detective’ films of the era, including Dr No (1962) and The Pink Panther (1963), and then hybridised that content with the half-hour, domestic, husband-and-wife formula that was common in American sitcoms of the 1950s. This strategy allowed Brooks and the other writers to revive old material, as well as enabling them to create novel experiences that allowed them to prolong a limited number of jokes over several seasons. Along with several other writers, this strategy made Brooks a significant figure in the 1960s revival and the continued production of the American sitcom tradition. Brooks’s most innovative contributions to the American sitcom tradition were his two final shows, When Things Were Rotten and The Nutt House (NBC, 1989). Here Brooks took the sitcom tradition in a untypical

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direction by adapting those familiar writing formulas together with the surreal jokes, characters and production values from his own commercially successful ‘parody’ films, Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974) and High Anxiety (1977). The resulting two ‘parody-coms’, When Things Were Rotten and The Nutt House, show significant departures from the perceived ‘mainstream’ of the American sitcom tradition.3 More significantly, these shows are also part of a wider trend in American sitcom production, along with Police Squad! (ABC, 1982), whereby content in all manner of forms, including production values and joke formulas, has been appropriated from Hollywood film. In this context, Brooks is part of a significant group of artists who have hybridised film content with more ‘traditional’ sitcom material. Together, these projects have transformed the American sitcom tradition – making way for the most recent new generation of parody-influenced sitcoms including The Office (NBC, 2005–).4

The Intermedial Origins of the American Sitcom, 1949–57 When Brooks started writing comedy for American television, many artists at that time were also adapting content from other media. As academic studies have recently demonstrated, in its early years, American television programming, including the sitcom, was largely a product of material appropriated and adapted from other media. This practice of recycling presold content has been documented by Susan Murray in Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom (2005), where she describes the way the American television industry as a whole in the 1950s was largely composed of already well received stars and texts transferred from radio and the theatre. As Murray notes, in many instances, ‘entire programs, genres, and scheduling techniques were simply lifted from radio and reworked to fit the aesthetic qualities of television’.5 This kind of adaptation was particularly important in the development of the American sitcom, which has been recognised, to varying degrees, in other studies, demonstrating the way even the most iconic American sitcoms are in fact appropriations from the other arts. As Lori Landlay notes, I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–7), was not only one of America’s first and defining sitcoms, but was also itself a hybrid of content taken from ‘conventions of comedy established in romantic comedy, vaudeville, film, radio, and the earliest television shows in general’ as well as ‘reworked material from [Lucille] Ball’s hit radio show, My Favorite Husband (1948–1951)’.6 In some cases, American sitcoms came about through adaptations of skits from television variety. For example, the tradition of adaptation between the two formats in the 1950s has been studied by Virginia Wright

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Wexman, who has demonstrated the way Jackie Gleason first developed his robust persona and his verbose performance style in his variety programme The Jackie Gleason Show (CBS, 1952–9), and then seamlessly transported that content, and its audience, to the sitcom format. As Wright Wexman notes, The Honeymooners [CBS, 1955–6] was initially developed as one of a number of irregularly aired skits that made up an hour-long variety show that Gleason hosted every Saturday night beginning in 1951 . . . Later, the popularity of The Honeymooners became so great that it was given a regular half-hour slot during the show.7

This example highlights a key reason for the cross-over between variety and sitcoms in the 1950s, in that variety shows often contained within them signature skits about domestic life, typically with common characteristics of production, performances and writing. When studied in isolation, these in-show skits constitute an abbreviated, precursor form of what was the then emerging sitcom tradition. More significantly, the rise of sitcom-style production in the 1950s has itself been, in part, attributed to the migration of talent, investment and thinking from Hollywood film studios. As Christopher Anderson has noted in his book Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (1994), the relatively lowered box-office success of films in the era, itself due to the competition from television, created an incentive for film studios to employ their system of ‘standardized, studio-based production’8 in supplying series television shows to networks. As Anderson notes, ‘Warner Bros., for instance, maintained term contracts with actors, directors, producers, and technicians, continued regular studio operations, and guaranteed a steady flow of product that was financed, produced and owned by Warner Bros.’9 This investment, in particular of Warner Bros and Walt Disney Studios, ‘signalled a growing trend toward the integration of the media industries’.10 Furthermore, Anderson also suggests that these shows were intermedial in the way home audiences experienced them: traditional histories have implied that the two media are distinctly separate, shaped by different historical forces while in pursuit of conflicting goals. In practice, however, the motion picture and broadcasting industries rarely disguise their many alliances, and the general public seem to have recognised this interpenetration of the media as soon as movies and radio began to share the same stage as the country’s most prominent forms of popular entertainment.11

The way adaptations of other types of comedy contributed towards the American sitcom in its earliest days has also been noted by David Marc in

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his book Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (1989), in which he describes the way that some shows in the early 1950s defied, or at least drastically disrupted, the experience of ‘domesticity’ before it became the genre’s standard.12 As Marc also notes, ‘In the early days of network television, before the stratification of commercial TV forms had crystallized, several shows toyed with mutant forms that crossed various elements of stand-up comedy with situational comedy.’13 In particular, Marc describes The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (CBS, 1950–8), noting that it often comprised ‘the insertion of satiric stand-up monologues into self-consciously banal dramatic plots’.14 In Marc’s terms, when George Burns steps away from his front room setting and addresses his audience directly in the form of a monologue, the resulting show can be said to be a hybrid, comprised of two distinctive forms of comedy together, making for what Marc determines to be a disjointed experience by result: Sitcomic drama lapses into a state of suspended animation as George is instantly transformed into narrator, from third-person representation to presentational personality. Placidly puffing his cigar, he offers the audience a stand-up routine that usually begins as a bit of impromptu explication de texte on the narrative development of the episode, then segues to an associative digression, and ends with a joke whose relationship to the studied suburbo-realism of the plot is utterly subversive.15

Brooks’s adaptations were of a very different kind, but were just as significant towards the development of American television comedy during the 1950s, and arguably, also to the emergence of the American sitcom tradition. Brooks’s writing exhibited a dependence on prolonged adaptation – repeating ‘domestic skits’ in a very similar way to that which is now perceived to define the American sitcom tradition.16 After a brief run writing for the short-lived programme The Admiral Broadway Revue,17 Brooks first established himself as a writer for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour. For Brooks, this writing strategy paid off financially. As reported in Vanity Fair, Brooks’s salary working for Sid Caesar was $5,000 a week.18 As such, it was while working on Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour that Brooks first experienced the financial potential of adaptation writing strategies. The sketches, the characterisations and formulas in Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour exhibit many hallmarks that typified sitcom gender-comedy in the 1950s, and just the same kind of writing formulas, with ideas recycled from one episode to the next. For example, Caesar’s Hour regularly opened with a series of sketches titled ‘The Commuters’. Here Caesar would play the character Bob, a married, American, white-

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collar worker. In ‘The Commuters in The Fur Coat’ skit, first aired on Caesar’s Hour on 23 April 1956, Caesar comes home to his wife, played by Nanette Fabray. Typically, Caesar is appalled to find out that she has foolishly bought a new fur coat which is seemingly out of his price range. In this skit, the two argue, and Caesar vents his frustration, allowing him to exhibit his usual hyper-masculine arm waving, deep-voice shouting and displeased mugging. In its set, the dynamic between the ‘husband and wife’ characters in the writing, and their performance styles on screen, this skit was very similar to the format of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. Along with these programmes, Caesar’s ‘The Commuters’ series of skits prefigures the long history of American sitcoms that would follow. As Caesar’s co-star Fabray has poignantly described the series more recently, ‘The Commuters’ was, along with other similar skits, ‘the beginning of all the half hour sitcoms’.19 Brooks and the other writers employed various strategies of prolonged adaptation to replay the same domestic, husband-and-wife narratives week after week. These techniques included transplanting Caesar and his female co-stars into foreign cultures, altering their costumes, the sets, and their performances, but underneath delivering the same comedy formulas. As Caesar himself remembers it: ‘What we did is now considered classic comedy. Like classical music, it stuck to rules.’20 For example, in the sketch ‘The Cobbler’s Daughter’, originally aired on Your Show of Shows on 3 April 1954, Caesar and Fabray argue with one another, both dressed as folksy Italian peasants, in the setting of an apparently authentic Italian home.21 Both speak in what appears to be Italian. However, this Italiansounding language was in fact gibberish or ‘double-talk’, which was a skill Caesar had been was famed for since The Admiral Broadway Revue.22 While their audiences were left unable to understand their speech word for word, the familiar gestures and the same ‘tug of war’ between husband and wife allowed the audience to make sense of the scene. Notably, the exact same adaptation strategy was employed in the skit ‘Argument to Beethoven’s Fifth’, first aired on Caesar’s Hour on 27 December 1954. In that performance, the two actors also argued, but instead of hearing their words, the audience only hear the music of the Beethoven symphony. The shifting tempo of the music soundtrack correlates with the various stages of their argument – thus again delivering the same juxtaposition of gender stereotypes, in this case most accurately described as that of the ‘domineering husband’ and the ‘tempestuous wife’. These shows were also the first to exhibit Brooks’s appropriation of Hollywood content. Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour both regularly featured adaptations of then-popular films whereby characters, costumes

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and scripts from films were hybridised with the husband-and-wife formulas, in order to recycle the show’s familiar characterisations. Most notably, this strategy was employed in the skits ‘From Here to Obscurity’, first aired on 5 March 1954, which was an abbreviated spoof of the movie From Here to Eternity (1953), and the skit ‘A Streetcar Named???’, adapted from the film A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), first aired on 5 April 1952. These sketches transformed Caesar and his then co-star Imogen Coca into the characters, setting, and costumes of the two Hollywood films, reprising recognisable scenes with famous elements of the scripts. For example, in ‘A Streetcar Named???’, Caesar wears the distinctive white vest worn by Marlon Brando in the role of Stanley Kowalski, in which his wife reprimands him for his grimy appearance. Throughout, Caesar reprises the slovenly dialect and mannerisms of Brando in the film with great accuracy. However, at the same time, this skit was also a very typical reprisal of the show’s usual formulas. First, it comprised, principally, a domestic husband-and-wife narrative featuring an argument, and second, the narrative closes with a return to a marital status quo: when the wife’s visiting sister is forced out of the front door by Caesar, the scene fades to black with the couple held tightly in each other’s arms, despite his bad behaviour. The film adaptations in Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour were hybrids, on one level allowing audiences to re-experience the show’s formulas from the other skits in the series, and on another level, recognising that the cinematic content added an extra layer to the experience. Notably, this has been documented by Gerald Nachman in his book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (2004), in which he describes the film parodies in both shows. As Nachman notes, The foreign parodies were chancier, since the TV audience wasn’t necessarily the same crowd that flocked to The Bicycle Thief and Grand Illusion. Their versions, titled ‘La Bicycletta’ and ‘Le Grand Amour’ (set in a French Bakery), had to work on two levels – as specific parody for the cognoscenti and as a broad farce for everyone else.23

While these sketches offered an intertextual pleasure for those who could recognise the references to ‘popular’ and ‘foreign’ films, to the general public they were easily comprehensible because way they reprised the familiar marital dynamic used in the other sketches, in which Caesar boisterously dominates the scenes, as always, upstaging his supporting actors.24 Following recent academic studies of American television comedy in the 1950s, Brooks’s projects provide valuable new evidence towards the process of rethinking American television production. Whereas the

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studies by Murray, Marc, Wright Wexman and Landlay have demonstrated the importance of theatre, radio shows and stand-up in the early days of American television production, and Anderson demonstrated the influence of Hollywood investment and studio production, Brooks’s projects, in particular Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour exhibit the so far neglected influence of Hollywood film content itself. These shows make evident that from the earliest days of American television comedy, film content was incorporated in the prolonged adaptation of writing formulas, and so contributed to the continued production and popularity of these programmes. With their strategy of incorporating film content, Brooks and the other writers on these programmes made a significant contribution towards the early development of skit-writing in American television variety, and also to the emergence of the American sitcom – given that their series of regular skits predate the long history of sitcom production that would follow.

Get Smart: Reviving the American Sitcom, 1965–70 Brooks’s next television project, Get Smart, is a very significant show in the history of American sitcom production. Most importantly, the show was a long-running success from 1965 to 1970, during which teams of writers produced 138 episodes, for which Brooks is credited as creator, along with Buck Henry. As well as a success with audiences at home, Get Smart was also a critical hit. The show itself won the award for ‘Outstanding Comedy Series’ and its lead Don Adams was awarded ‘Outstanding Performance by a Leading Actor in a Comedy Series’ at the 1969 Emmys. In the years since, the popularity of Get Smart has been long-lasting, inspiring the television-movie-remakes The Nude Bomb (1980) and Get Smart Again (1989), as well as a brief reprise with a series comprising seven new episodes with the original cast on Fox in 1995, and most recently, another film, this time with a new cast, Get Smart (2008). Get Smart was part of a new generation of American sitcoms in the 1960s that revived elements of the writing formulas established in the long-running sitcoms of the 1950s. Again, this was achieved through Brooks’s strategy of hybridising those domestic formulas with new gimmicks and new ideas, often from Hollywood film. From its conception, Get Smart was such a hybrid. The character Maxwell Smart and his secret agent storyline were appropriated from films – specifically conceived as a merger of Peter Sellers’s bumbling secret agent in The Pink Panther (1963), with its source, the ultimate ‘spy’ James Bond, as popularised in the cinema of the era by Sean Connery in Dr No (1960), From Russia With

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Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964). As Brooks’s co-writer Buck Henry recalls, the concept was suggested by network executives, who made calls to him and Brooks, saying, ‘Look, the two biggest things in the entertainment world today are James Bond and Inspector Clouseau. Why don’t you try and put them together?’25 In addition, like the James Bond films, Get Smart was pocketed with action sequences. However, more like the spy/action series of the era, particularly The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964–8) and Mission Impossible (CBS, 1966–73), these moments in Get Smart were consistently low budget, typically featuring tense scenes around unexploded bombs, that are defused just in time, rather than costly explosions as was possible in Hollywood. Get Smart was not the only show reviving the sitcom tradition in the 1960s. In fact, reviving, and so recycling the same ‘domestic’ husbandand-wife formulas by introducing new, perceived ‘innovative’ ideas was the norm at the time.26 As Paul Gardner noted in his 1965 commentary for the New York Times, ‘It’s not even enough anymore to have a new situation comedy that reports the hazards of suburban life. Somewhere, there’s gotta be a gimmick.’27 Notably, this transformative era in American sitcom production has already been studied by Lynn Spigel, in her essay ‘From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sit-Com’, in which she studied various sitcoms including I Dream of Jeannie (NBC, 1965–70), My Favorite Martian (CBS, 1963–6), The Jetsons (ABC, 1962– 4), and Lost in Space (CBS, 1965–8). It is Spigel’s assessment that the changing social and cultural context of production meant that sitcom producers remodelled the traditional sitcom formulas in view of then-topical public concerns and attitudes, such as the disillusionment of Americans on issues of ‘utopian dreams of technological supremacy, consumer prosperity, and domestic bliss’.28 As such, Spigel describes this grouping of ‘innovative’ sitcoms as a reaction to that cultural climate, summarising them together as a new generic form founded on the merger between the troubled paradise of 1950s domesticity and the new-found ideals of the American future. We might call this form the fantastic family sit-com, a hybrid genre that mixed the conventions of the suburban sit-com past with the space-age imagery of the New Frontier.29

However, there is a greater industrial significance to the creation of these new shows, beyond the introduction of fantasy themes. As with Brooks’s sitcom Get Smart, many of these shows were products of the writers drawing on themes appropriated from the output of the Hollywood film industry. For example, The Addams Family and The Munsters (CBS, 1964–66) shared an obvious heritage with Universal’s monster horror

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films of the 1930s, and Lost in Space appropriated many aspects of its scenarios and set design from the film Forbidden Planet (1956) – including the film’s iconic character, Robby the Robot. Similarly, the premise of the sitcom Bewitched was adapted from Hollywood, in this case, the film starring Veronica Lake, I Married A Witch (1942), which was also set in New England. As a result, Bewitched is a hybrid similar to Get Smart – part film-inspired fantasy, and part domesticom. Despite its supernatural theme, the show reprises the traditional husband and wife roles popularised in sitcoms of the 1950s such as I Love Lucy. This was evident in the show’s coverage at the time – as the New York Times noted in a 1964 feature article by Joanne Stang, ‘A.B.C. describes Samantha as someone yearning to be “a normal woman scrubbing floors”.’30 In the case of Bewitched, as with Get Smart, it was the addition of new Hollywoodinspired back stories and ideas that made the revival of these old gender characterisations possible. Beneath the gimmick of the ‘secret agent’ storyline appropriated from Hollywood film, Brooks and the other writers on Get Smart were also recycling elements of the same ‘domestic’ gender comedy popularised in the 1950s. Even though they were not initially together, secret agent Maxwell Smart and his female sidekick Agent Ninety-nine always behaved like a couple – much more familiar and flirtatious than professional spies – that is, until they actually began a relationship, and in season four they were married. By season five, the ‘family’ metaphor became a reality when Agent Ninety-nine became pregnant. In a similar formula to Bewitched, Agent Ninety-nine often proves to be a superior agent to her partner Maxwell Smart, but he is outwardly hailed as the show’s hero despite his frequent ineptitude. In both these sitcoms, and others, including I Dream of Jeannie, the episodes deliver mostly ‘conservative’ gender characterisations and narratives. Aside from their special powers and new situations – as appropriated from Hollywood film – the doting women in these shows were no more independent than the often subordinated women of the 1950s, typified by Caesar’s female co-stars. By incorporating film content, the writers of Get Smart were able to prolong even the most well-known sitcom conventions over several seasons. This strategy is clearly apparent in the show’s distinctive intro and outro. In Get Smart, the opening sequence portrayed Maxwell Smart walking through a hallway of sliding vertical and horizontal doors, appropriated from the tradition of secret instillations seen in James Bond films, including the base of the title character in Dr No. This was accompanied by a distinctive upbeat sitcom theme tune, as popularised in shows such as the animated intro of Bewitched, and earlier, in the sing-along intro of

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the sitcom The Addams Family. As the story editor Buck Henry notes, this combination meant the sequence immediately became ‘one of the most memorable things about the show’.31 The novelty of the film-inspired ‘secret agent’ theme also allowed the writers of Get Smart to prolong a relatively limited range of jokes. The scripts were largely composed of ‘runner gags’32 – a term meaning jokes repeated with minimal variation throughout the run of a sitcom series. In one example, Smart concealed a telephone in his shoe. This device was a variation on the theme of James Bond’s film-gadgets, except in taking off his shoe and bringing it to his ear, the new combination of shoe and phone made for a very odd spectacle. This visual prop-gag was seen in the first minute of the pilot episode and was used consistently across the whole five-year run. Notably, in an interview with Patrick Kevin Day in the Los Angeles Times, Brooks explained that this joke itself was also a subtle adaptation of another existing crime/action character that had been popularised in film and television in numerous incarnations since the 1930s: I stole it from Dick Tracy. I think Dick Tracy had a watch that was a TV watch or a radio watch. And he communicated through this watch. I thought that’s too simple and too nice. Let’s put his communicator device in his shoe. And it worked.33

Through skewering Dick Tracy’s more sensible communicator – by placing a phone in the most untechnological and impractical place on Smart’s person – Brooks made that existing gimmick into something so bizarre that it maintained its impact despite its prolonged use over the many seasons. Consequently, the gag was a favourite for audiences of the programme no matter how often it was used. As Don Rickles, an actor on the show, remarks, ‘That was the big thing, the shoe. They always loved that one.’34 Brooks and the other writers found new ways to present the same ‘runner gags’ in numerous episodes through only subtle adaptation. For example, in the pilot, Don Adams playing Smart, discovers a rubber banana peel at the scene of a crime, exclaims, ‘A rubber banana peel . . . The old rubber garbage trick!’ The popular appeal of this joke through its repetition is best captured in the decision of NBC, who even put a selection of these gags together for a promo sent exclusively to regional television stations, offering Get Smart in syndication.35 The chosen clips in the segment included a montage slicing together ‘The old microphone in the squeegee trick’, ‘The old false neck trick’ and ‘The old three-way gun trick’, followed by a voiceover instructing the viewer: ‘If you want big audiences – Get Smart!’ Producing this kind of repetition, with only

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minimal variation, was so central to the writing process of Get Smart that Buck Henry ultimately left the show in season two because the material failed to develop: ‘I left because I couldn’t do it anymore. I just ran out of those kinds of gags.’36 The writers were also able to repeat jokes and material, with only minimal variation, because home audiences had a great affection for the on-screen characters Maxwell Smart and Agent Ninety-nine, as played week after week by Don Adams and Barbara Feldon. Poignantly, the way audience affection for sitcom characters has the potential to make audiences susceptible to such prolonged adaptations was described by Brooks in a 1966 interview with Joanne Stang in the New York Times: When you are doing a TV series, of course, it’s incredibly hard to avoid repetition. If I tried to write ‘Get Smart’ every week, I’d run dry very soon – I could put a couple of things together, but the juice, the chemistry wouldn’t be there. Each show gets harder and harder for the writer, but oddly – easier for the network. If the series is successful at all, the audiences usually take the star into their hearts, and he can really do no wrong for two or three seasons.37

However, despite the continued audience affection for the characters, the network eventually ended the show, owing to its high production costs. To explain, Get Smart deviated significantly from the ‘mainstream’ of sitcom production as defined in the 1950s, in the way the show was presented, through its untypical style of direction, which was more akin to Hollywood film or television action drama than other American sitcom. Brooks was well aware of ‘the three camera style’38 that was predominantly used in the genre, and the rigid expectations audiences had for the way a sitcom should look. As Murray notes, ‘shooting in front of an audience in stage-play style’,39 largely recording scenes with uninterrupted continuity, has remained the convention in American sitcoms since the 1950s, back when it was made famous by landmark shows including I Love Lucy, I Married Joan (NBC, 1952–5), The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, and Make Room for Daddy (ABC, 1953–7, CBS, 1957–64).40 Certainly, this was still the case in the 1960s, when Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie in particular were popularising familiar three-wall household interiors, notably adhering to the consistent use of medium shots or head-to-toe framing, and warm lighting on what was typically an obvious studio set. In contrast to all this, however, Brooks’s Get Smart often broke with these long-established ‘rules’, bringing new more ‘cinematic’ techniques of direction into the programme. As Brooks describes it, ‘we were making mini-movies’.41 Get Smart was partly filmed in studio sets, the best recognised being the familiar Control headquarters in which the Chief and

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Smart would attempt to converse inside the farcically efficient ‘cone of silence’. However, many scenes were filmed on location, bringing the show into a new territory, away from the sitcom genre’s ‘domestic’ family front rooms and kitchens, and into a variety of different outside environments ranging from crowded theatres, to disused warehouses, urban high streets and even boats. According to Brooks, it was in fact because of the apparently high costs related to this production style that Get Smart ultimately ended.42 As he notes in his commentary on the show’s pilot episode, the network was simply spending more money on Get Smart than was being spent on what Brooks refers to as the ‘three-camera studio shows’43 – shows that were typically a tenth of the budget of Get Smart but which still raised equal investment from sponsors. In the years following Get Smart, The Addams Family and Bewitched, the tradition of adaptations from Hollywood continued in the 1970s, most notably, with the long-running show M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–83), adapted from the film of the same name (1970). This show was also a hybrid, in which the film’s Korean War setting and characters were incorporated into a highly typical half-hour sitcom structure. The creator of the sitcom, Larry Gelbart was also a writer for Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour, and Gelbart’s writing exhibited much of that show’s style. The resulting show was a hybrid, written in a glib style, with a high volume of wisecracking one-liners, akin to the skits for Caesar, delivered within the settings and by the characters of the adapted film. This hybrid mix is especially clear in the show’s performances. As Michael Carlson in the Guardian noted, ‘M*A*S*H owes much of its success to Alan Alda’s ability, playing Captain ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce, to channel Caesar’s chaotic energy in his performance, while Gelbart’s Frank Burns and Hotlips Houlihan draw on the film’s models, but give the impression of having been written for Caesar’s sidekicks’.44 When the hybrid M*A*S*H is considered along with Brooks’s Get Smart, The Addams Family and Bewitched, these texts together provide convincing evidence that American sitcom production has been reactive to and, in part, dependent on, the output of the Hollywood and European film industries, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Modern Transformation of the American Sitcom, 1975–89 Brooks’s most radical contributions into the American sitcom tradition were with his subsequent shows When Things Were Rotten and The Nutt House. These shows were cancelled early on, but these and other similar

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projects contributed towards a significant transformation of American sitcom production trends. While these sitcoms were also hybrids of material from Hollywood film and from the sitcom tradition, this time, Brooks practised a different adaptation strategy. Although his shows When Things Were Rotten and The Nutt House were not promoted as ‘adaptations’ of his films in any formal sense, it is evident that much of their material was appropriated from his successful Hollywood films, in particular Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and High Anxiety. However, instead of being adapted to suit the writing and production conventions established by the popular sitcoms in the 1970s and 1980s respectively, Brooks’s shows largely maintained their material from another comedy tradition – namely his anachronistic, surreal, intertextual, and often socially controversial brand of film ‘parody’. As Beau notes in Variety, Blazing Saddles constituted ‘an avalanche of one-liners, vaudeville routines, campy shticks, sight gags, satiric imitations and comic anachronisms’.45 This considered, Brooks’s parody films-turned-sitcoms, or what I term ‘parody-coms’, were not only intermedial, but were in many respects his most significant contributions to the historical development of the American sitcom. In order to understand the significance of Brooks’s adaptations of Hollywood film content in his sitcoms When Things Were Rotten and The Nutt House – in terms of their writing, associated production values, and ultimately, the different kind of experience delivered through the interpretation of their jokes – it is necessary to understand the way sitcom production in the 1960s, 1970s, and the 1980s, has commonly been characterised by academics to date. In her book Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era (2000), Janet Staiger makes an analysis of some of the most popular and long-running American sitcoms – those which she describes as ‘blockbusters’. By looking at the highest rated shows, including The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS, 1962–71), All in the Family (CBS, 1971–9), Laverne and Shirley (ABC, 1976–83) and The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–92), Staiger identifies various aspects which make sitcoms most appealing to the public. In particular, Staiger also asserts that audience familiarity through the repetition of material, from episode to episode, is fundamental to the sitcom experience: ‘Each of these programs offered a formula that became expected and routine, and to have deviated significantly from the formula would have broken the contract with the audience.’46 Even with the inclusion of sometimes prickly or perceived ‘controversial’ humour, Staiger suggests that these blockbuster sitcoms also owe their popularity to the way they consistently satisfy audience expectations for comedy that reprises social norms and mainstream sentiments

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through formulaic writing. As such, she suggests these programmes ‘solicit from the knowledgeable and cooperative viewer a maintenance of the values held coming into the programme. The series do not try to convert viewers to new sets of values so much as solicit agreement where sympathies already exist.’47 For example, while Staiger identifies the way All in the Family included jokes about ethnicity and race, she suggests the show’s ‘controversial’ comedy was ultimately defused by the way it was in fact both predictable and reflective of attitudes held by the American audiences at the time.48 This considered, Staiger’s analysis suggests that audience tastes, as much as network pressure, has fuelled the perpetual recycling of material, consequently giving rise to the perceived stagnation in sitcom culture. The perceived ‘passive’ and ‘submersing’ sitcom experience has been notably attributed, in part, to the genre’s focus on the portrayal of ‘families’. For Marc, the ‘passive’ sitcom experience is in large part a result of the portrayal of families, both literal and metaphorical, especially in the sitcoms The Donna Reed Show (ABC, 1958–66) and Father Knows Best (CBS, 1954–60) to Family Ties (NBC, 1982–9) and Kate and Allie (CBS, 1984–9).49 For Marc, these shows delivered an especially reassuring experience, best characterised as that of ‘domesticity’. In Marc’s words, ‘home in the sitcom is where the producer makes it. Relaxed domesticity is a state of mind, as casually affected at the front in the Second World War as in a single-unit detached dwelling on a suburban lane’.50 For Marc, this domesticity means that ‘the sitcom rarely reaches the psychological or political extremes that have been commonplace in other popular American comic genres’.51 Brooks broke with all of these conventions with his latter two shows When Things Were Rotten and The Nutt House – by introducing content appropriated from his own Hollywood parody films. To understand how these sitcoms broke with these perceived conventions – in terms of writing formulas, production values, and the perceived ‘domestic’ sitcom experience – Brooks’s strategy is best understood by considering the work of Dan Harries in his book Film Parody. In that study, Harries defines the conventions of parody films, using for his examples films such as Brooks’s own Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs (1987) and the movie Airplane! (1980). While parody movies all involve the reproduction of some ‘source’ text or generic canon, which can vary greatly, Harries demonstrates that the way that source is transformed plays with audience expectations in a uniform way, using joke formulas of ‘reiteration, inversion, misdirection, literalization, extraneous inclusion and exaggeration’.52 As a typical feature of such jokes, through combinations of performance and direction, film parodies

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often demand that their audience become conscious of the film’s production itself. As such, audience experiences of film parodies are in many ways inconsistent with the passive, repetitive and reassuring sitcom experience as it has been so far characterised by scholars. For example, writing about Brooks’s own work, Harries notes: in Blazing Saddles, a short scene features an old woman being held back and punched by a group of bandits. Not only is this an inversion of conventional character activity relations, it also becomes self-reflexively a misdirection when the woman turns towards the camera and exclaims: ‘Have you ever seen such cruelty?’ Another scene in Blazing Saddles features Hedley Lamarr talking to himself in his office as he ponders how to locate a sheriff who would ‘offend’ the citizens of Rockridge. Typically, the omniscient camera takes on an invisible status and such talking to oneself is viewed as normal. Lamarr continues, stating ‘How would I find such a man? Why am I asking you?’ as he acknowledges the presence of the imposing camera and by extension, the audience.53

For Harries, all elements of writing and production in ‘parody’ films are designed to alert the audience to the film’s intertextuality. For example, Harries also cites the placement of a contemporary pay toll in the middle of an expansive old Western desert in Blazing Saddles as a typical joke to the genre’s comedy formulas.54 By considering all such varied techniques together, Harries defines film parody according to the way these films demand a cognitive engagement from their audiences, captured most clearly in his conclusion that the interpretation of parody ultimately ‘creates a level of ironic incongruity’.55 Whereas sitcoms have been characterised by scholars as delivering repetitive writing, predictable, domestic experiences, all presented within consistent production values, film parody is entirely different. In contrast, film parody delivers periodical breaks from ‘classical’ performance codes and other ‘productionconscious’ moments, all of which are designed to disrupt any submersing experience of the text. It is this ‘incongruity’ that jars with the passive, repetitive and reassuring sitcom experience described by scholars, thus making film ‘parody’ a highly problematic form of comedy to adapt to what is commonly understood by scholars to be the ‘mainstream’ of American sitcom production.

When Things Were Rotten (ABC, 1975) The ‘innovative’ result of Brooks’s brand of film ‘parody’ hybridised with the sitcom format is clearly evident in his sitcom When Things Were Rotten – concisely described in its pre-broadcast publicity by Les Brown in the

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New York Times as ‘a situation comedy spoofing the Robin Hood story’.56 This project exhibits many hallmarks of sitcom convention, including its weekly broadcast, the repetition of characters, and an accompanying laugh track. However, the show more generally shared its joke formulas with Brooks’s parody films.57 As Maurice Yacowar notes, When Things Were Rotten was only green-lit by ABC because of Brooks’s record of success in the cinema.58 Significantly, Norman Steinberg – a writer from Blazing Saddles – was also a writer on the show. In a similar way to Blazing Saddles, the show’s writing was low on characterisation and story, instead opting for a high volume of one-liners, puns and visual gags. Some episodes even included lines lifted from Blazing Saddles without alteration. However commercially successful this material was in the cinema, it would seem that Brooks’s show failed to meet the expectations of audiences in the 1970s for an American sitcom. The show was cancelled after just one season. In addition, Paramount released the show on VHS in 1986, but the series has not been re-released since. In contrast to the climate of domesticoms in the late 1970s, When Things Were Rotten was produced without a historically and geographically specific setting. For example, whereas Staiger’s ‘blockbuster’ sitcom Laverne and Shirley was firmly placed in an authentic Milwaukee of the 1970s and 1980s as the series continued, When Things Were Rotten followed in the ‘parodic’ tradition of Brooks’s film Blazing Saddles, in which aspects of the historical old West and the modern 1970s were frequently intermixed for comic effect. When Things Were Rotten was an unpredictable fusion of disparate environments: a ‘historical’ Robin Hood story, infused with characters and references from modern America, with no clear-cut formula between the two. This was recognised at the time by John O’Connor in the New York Times in his review of the first episode, in which he made note of some striking ‘anachronistic’ joke formulas adapted from Brooks’s films: as the audience should immediately guess, it is created by Mel Brooks, whose more recent credits include the films ‘Blazing Saddles’ and ‘Young Frankenstein’ . . . For all its zaniness, ‘When Things Were Rotten’ is not above being carefully literal. When a speaker warns a crowd of peasants to hold their tongues, they do just that. Then, in the bow and arrow contest, there is Lord MacDonald (‘Over 1 Million Dispatched’). Or, in the middle of a sedated court entertainment, a conga player appears to give an impersonation of Miguelito Valdez singing ‘Babalu’. The comic bits are not uniformly successful.59

Brooks’s eclectic mixture of both settings at once consistently undermines expectations, and deprives audiences of any predictable set-ups to

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the coming punchlines, revealing both the artificial television-studio production context, and often serving to remind viewers that this particular version of ‘historic’ England is manufactured from a distinctly American perspective. While this kind of hybrid was unprecedented in the current sitcoms, such jokes were very familiar to audiences of Brooks’s film parody Blazing Saddles. For example, when the star Cleavon Little, playing sheriff Bart, first rides into his old Western town in Blazing Saddles, we are shown a close-up of his 1970s Gucci saddlebags. When a line of outlaws are being hanged, their executioner is incongruently dressed in medieval costume, with an eye patch, a hump, and an English accent. Many episodes introduced jokes about performance that evoked audience awareness of television-production, specifically direct-to-camera comments and ‘incongruent’ performance moments. For example, in the episode ‘The French Dis-Connection’, Robin Hood’s merry man Alan, played by Bernie Kopell is seen hanging by his hands from the dungeon ceiling, ready to be whipped. When the guard rips his shirt open at the back, there is an unprecedented moment whereby Kopell looks directly to the camera and in his distinctive American voice says: ‘Well, that’s the end of that shirt.’ This line was taken straight from Blazing Saddles, in which a local townsman is dragged through the dirt tied to a stampeding horse, and also addresses the camera in a similarly dry tone, despite the seriousness of his situation. In contrast to the performances in other shows, for example when George Burns addressed his audience in The Burns and Allen Show – which was delivered in a timely manner during intermissions – Kopell’s comments make no sense as part of the storyline, and his delivery breaks with the expected codes of performance without warning or pattern. The performances in the show were often made further evocative by the way they invited intertextual reading. In her book Comic Politics: Gender in Hollywood Comedy After the New Right (2000), Nicole Matthews notes that ‘parodic comedies use intertexuality – that is, they draw on audiences’ knowledge of star image and conventions of genre and form. They also employ self-referentiality, heightening the audience’s awareness that they are watching a film.’60 It is just this kind of casting and performance combination that was revived in When Things Were Rotten. For example, in the episode ‘The Wedding Bell Blues’, as the main running joke in the show, Dudley Moore plays a visiting Arab sheikh, but with his own middle-class English accent.61 The way this strange spectacle contrasts two very different identities is clearly drawn from Brooks’s own cameo as a Native American chief in Blazing Saddles, in which he spoke in Yiddish, albeit wearing feathers and war paint.62 In this way, Brooks’s

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cameo brought together the persona of an old Western Native American with his own contemporary Brooklyn-Jewish persona forged through numerous amiable appearances on television including on The Dick Cavett Show (ABC, 1968–72) and The Hollywood Squares (NBC, 1965–82). In a comparable fashion, Moore’s twelfth-century sheikh costume clashes with his otherwise genteel Englishman image crafted through his appearances in Not Only . . . But Also (BBC, 1965–70). Notably, Moore’s performance in When Things Were Rotten shares much with his role of Stanley Moon in Bedazzled (1967), in which he underwent several similar cultural transformations but maintained his own persona, including in one sequence becoming a nun in a convent, complete with a habit. Following Brooks’s When Things Were Rotten, the traditions of Hollywood film parody and the American sitcom were also linked in the 1980s by the work of other writers. Most significantly, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker produced their landmark movie Airplane! – best described today by Danny Graydon in Empire as ‘an undisputed genre classic’.63 This parody film employed the same formulas of ‘misdirection’ as described in Harries’s model of film parody, and with the same result as Brooks’s films. Airplane! consistently broke with audience expectations, bringing all manner of anachronistic content together ranging from disaster movies to more upbeat films such as Saturday Night Fever (1977). Airplane! was a commercial hit, making over $83m in the US domestic market in cinemas, and was popular with critics precisely for the way it played with expectations.64 It was following the success of their film that Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker then attempted to prolong their success by transferring those more abstract parody joke-formulas to the sitcom format with their show Police Squad!65 Similar to Brooks’s ‘parody-com’ When Things Were Rotten, Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker’s Police Squad! flopped in the ratings on its first broadcast run and was cancelled by ABC before the entire first season had been screened – leading Variety retrospectively to describe the show as the ‘ill-fated too-hip-for-TV series’.66 While those joke formulas were a commercial success in the cinema, they were seemingly not as successful when hybridised with the sitcom format in the form of Police Squad! Along with the untimely end of When Things Were Rotten, the cancellation of Police Squad! provides further evidence to suggest that ‘parody’, as Brooks and Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker popularised it in Hollywood, was simply not consistent with the expectations of home audiences for sitcoms in the 1970s and early 1980s. These ‘parody-coms’ were in many ways at odds with the perceived ‘mainstream’ of American sitcom production trends in the era.

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The Nutt House (NBC, 1989) Brooks’s next and last sitcom proved even more of a break with ‘mainstream’ American sitcom convention than the Police Squad television project. The Nutt House, produced by his own company Brooksfilms in 1989, was a hotel-based sitcom for NBC. Unlike his previous projects, which were produced by teams of writers, The Nutt House was written just by Brooks and Alan Spencer. Brooks was creator and executive producer, together giving him the most control yet in a television project. The Nutt House had great scheduling: it was broadcast immediately before Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989–93), a show which proved to be very popular. Despite these advantages, the series was cancelled after only seven of eleven already-filmed episodes were screened in the USA, and was never sold commercially on home formats, despite its marketing potential as a Mel Brooks production.67 In terms of duration, The Nutt House was Brooks’s least successful television project.68 As with Brooks’s When Things Were Rotten, The Nutt House was wholly dissimilar to other sitcoms in the era of its production. When the show was first screened in 1989, the US schedules were already dominated by homely domesticoms and community orientated workplace-based shows produced in the ‘three-camera’ style, notably including Cheers (NBC, 1982–93), The Golden Girls (NBC, 1985–92), Empty Nest (NBC, 1988–95) and The Cosby Show. Furthermore, NBC announced The Nutt House among a new raft of other family-based sitcoms including Major Dad (CBS, 1989–93), Sister Kate (NBC, 1989–90), Free Spirit (ABC, 1989–90), and the long-running show, Family Matters (ABC, 1989–98). Bill Carter, the New York Times television critic, notably captured this 1989 schedule as pandering to the expectations of commercial audiences for ‘family’ entertainment, and at the same time, marking the season as a new low point for more ‘innovative’ programming: Television programmers all have a certain predilection for sociology. They try to take the pulse of the nation, looking for a key that will translate into habit-forming television viewing. This year, it’s the family. Nuclear and non-nuclear, blended and extended, families of one sort or another are the focus of most of the major networks’ new shows. Nobody argues that it’s a breakthrough concept. But the network programming departments seem to feel the time for breakthrough concepts is over anyway.69

With The Nutt House Brooks made very little effort to adhere to the conventions of the other more character-driven ‘family’ shows then being broadcast, apart from a few basic conventions. For example, the show was

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written around a farcical hotel theme, serving not only as a workplace but also as a home for its characters, in the tradition of sitcoms such as Fawlty Towers (BBC, 1975–9), and later, The Golden Palace (CBS, 1992–3). Also significant, in the tradition of the 1980s shows including Family Matters and The Golden Girls, and Laverne and Shirley, The Nutt House introduced itself as a sitcom: each episode opened with the same heart-warming introductory titles, introducing each character with a brief montage of jovial clips, and closing on the actor in a flattering pose just as their stage name appears in the credits. The show also had a laugh track. However, these qualities aside, The Nutt House was otherwise from a very different comedy tradition. In contrast to the repetition evident in the long-running American sitcoms, The Nutt House exhibited only minimal consistency between episodes. This was foremost a result of the show’s shifting focus of its ‘parody’, whereby the subject was scattered over various Hollywood films, with storylines appropriated from a different film genre every week. Episodes ranged from dramatic action to some simple farce, while others are nothing more than surrealist comedy. For example, episode two, ‘A Frick Called Wanda’ – adapted from A Fish Called Wanda (1988) – was about a scam in which a woman and her partner try to swindle hotel manager Tarkington, played by Harvey Korman. This show featured some dramatic action. At one point, Tarkington wrestles a dangerous criminal with a loaded pistol, all filmed in close-up and backed by dramatic orchestral music. In the next episode, however, ‘21 Men and a Baby’ – adapted from Three Men and a Baby (1987) – a newborn is abandoned at the hotel, making for some low-level farce. To add to the confusion, episodes also featured incongruent micro-parodies of movies within them, for example, the episode ‘Suites, Lies and Videotape’ features a group of suited Italian-American debt collectors, who enter to the sound of the instrumental theme of The Godfather (1972), each holding a violin case by their side. Brooks capitalised on the performances of his cast in The Nutt House in just the same way as he did in his parody films. Notably, the way comedy personas are often transferred from non-film to film has been theorised by Steve Seidman in Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film (1979). By studying the performances of various popular comedians including Abbot and Costello, Chaplin, Bob Hope and the Ritz Brothers, Seidman suggests: ‘the preexistent popularity of these comedians was highly advantageous in terms of their film careers insofar as audiences could be expected to carry over their support from the other show business media into film’.70 Furthermore, in his theory of ‘enunciation’,71

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Seidman suggests that in the films of such comedians, the codes of production and performance often alert the film audience to the status of the comedian as an intermedial figure – thus breaking any ‘classical’ or ‘submersing’ engagement with the text. Seidman notes that: in comedian comedy, both the comedian’s awareness of the spectator’s presence and the assertion of his own presence are factors which work toward described enunciation, as evidenced by the frequency of revealing the narrative as a contrivance, and exposing the materiality of sound and image. These are strategies which point to the artificiality of individual films, but in many cases also underscore the artificiality of filmic construction in general.72

In many ways, The Nutt House adopted this approach to ‘comedian comedy’ as Seidman describes it in Hollywood film. Initially, viewers of The Nutt House would recognise Ronnie Graham as the inept doorman in the pilot episode – previously best known for playing the minister at the end of Brooks’s film Spaceballs. More significantly, though, the lead actors Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman were Mel Brooks regulars at the time. Korman was himself already an intermedial personality, having started out as a long-running variety performer on the Carol Burnett Show. Since then, he had crafted a distinct persona in Brooks’s fiilms, known for playing a suit-wearing, slightly perverse and wacky authority figure in Blazing Saddles and High Anxiety. As well as his character’s role as henchmen to the hotel owner, Korman’s frantic performance-style, and his snooty way of speaking in The Nutt House is entirely the same as that in his previous roles for Brooks. Furthermore, his performance in The Nutt House was, like his role in Blazing Saddles, also itself a continuation of his typical ‘campy’ performances played out with Carol Burnett. Whereas Korman’s Hollywood film/television variety persona and performance style required little adaptation for the sitcom format, the production values of The Nutt House that accompanied his performance jarred badly with the tradition. For example, the use of props and the direction of the episode ‘Suites, Lies and Videotape’ provides the most explicit reminders of Korman’s extra-textual Blazing Saddles persona. One scene opens with Korman in the lobby, talking on the phone to his electricity company about unpaid bills. Then, to emphasise the commercial failure of the hotel, a Western-style tumbleweed rolls into shot and Tarkington kicks it out of the way. As the camera begins to track out, the sound of blowing wind gets louder and louder. The camera tracks back, creating an unusually wide shot, and then moves low to the ground, bringing a sheep skull on the lobby floor into close-up – thus revealing the whole scene to be nothing more than a skit on stage. This use of clashing

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props echoes the closing sequence of Blazing Saddles, in which a similar convergence of Western and non-Western themes makes for an equally bizarre ‘production conscious’ moment. Many widely varying directorial techniques were evidently written into Brooks’s script – meaning that The Nutt House often defied sitcom audiences’ perceived expectations for consistency. As Brett Mills notes in his book Television Sitcom (2005), the most popular shows are filmed in a consistent style throughout their run, serving to engross the audience, in many ways like a soap opera: ‘For comedy to be successful, and for an audience to feel comfortable in finding the misfortunes of a character they may be fond of funny, shooting and performance must combine to construct a diegesis which is understandable.’73 However, The Nutt House followed no such rules. Instead, the show was filmed in a free-roaming style, and more importantly, its direction maintained little consistency from episode to episode. This unpredictability, more than anything else, makes the show disorientating to watch. Most significantly, there is no trademark scene in the script depicting any one part of the hotel running through the series – which is in total contrast to the familiar scenes in long-running sitcoms of 1989, like the bar in Cheers or the Huxstables’ front room in The Cosby Show.74 Instead, like Brooks’s films Blazing Saddles and High Anxiety, the lobby, hallways and offices are filmed from ever-changing angles, and the camera often tracks or zooms during a take, and cuts to close-up, sometimes to background details for visual gags. For example, in the episode ‘The Accidental Groom’, there is a scene in which Tarkington’s office is captured from an awkward view on the ceiling – making it seem impossible for a studio audience to be present. As he clambers over his desk – the only way to get to the other side in the room – Tarkington tells his guest: ‘It was supposed to be a broom closet but it turned out to be too small.’ While these often strange camera shots made bad gags better, or emphasised key dramatic moments in the story, they offer little consistency between the shows. Most untypical of all, owing to its high volume of jokes, only a fraction of the script in The Nutt House was devoted to narrative development. Again, this was much the same as that witnessed in Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. However, in the case of The Nutt House, the resulting lack of even rudimentary characterisation adversely influenced the interpretation of its ‘controversial’ comedy – making for the show’s most troubling break with the perceived sitcom format. This can be understood by considering the work of Mills, in which he suggests that when delivered as part of an ongoing story, controversial comedy, even racist humour, is framed

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within a ‘safe’ context, or as Mills puts it: ‘the narrative within the specific episode, or that stretched across the series as a whole, may suggest a very different reading’.75 For example, writing about the racist comments made by Alf Garnet in the British show Till Death Us Do Part (BBC, 1965–75), Mills suggests that the storyline inevitably makes Alf look like a fool, therefore also making his racist comments look foolish. In this way, the audience are instructed how to think about the jokes, thus limiting the controversy over those lines. In contrast to story and character-orientated shows like All in the Family – which was the US version of Till Death Us Do Part – Brooks’s comedy in The Nutt House touches on social and political issues too, but does so without the characterisation necessary to render the material inoffensive. The adverse effect of the show’s very limited narrative is exemplified by the racial comedy in the episode ‘The Accidental Groom’. This episode strays into the ethnic comedy popularised by All in the Family, but without the narrative closure offered by episodes of that show. To explain, in this episode, a visiting government inspector says to Tarkington: ‘It occurs to me that hotels on the skids like yours resort to hiring illegals in order to save a buck.’ Tarkington replies: ‘I resent that. The Nutt House only employs red-blooded American workers!’ Suddenly, a Chinese man stumbles into the room carrying a ladder. Tarkington shouts something to him in Chinese and gestures, drawing a line across his throat, and the man backs out of the room without further explanation. Although not a literal imitation of Blazing Saddles, this scene has overtones of the film’s opening sequence, in which a Chinese man – wearing a generic ‘oriental’ hat – toils amid a gang of African-American railroad workers. When he passes out, his cowboy supervisor shouts: ‘Dock that chink a day’s pay for napping on the job!’ While these lines about race both stereotype Chinese people as low-paid labourers, The Nutt House offers even less context than Blazing Saddles. In other words, Blazing Saddles did counter the racism of the ‘chink’ comment with its related storyline, in which a young black sheriff outsmarts his racist community. However, Brooks’s storyline in The Nutt House delivered no such racially orientated narrative closure. The stereotyping passes without comment or context, and no responsible character learns the error of their ways. In terms of its writing by Brooks and Spencer, as well as its associated performances and production values, The Nutt House was a significantly different from those of the ‘mainstream’ American sitcom tradition. Not much has been written about The Nutt House, but the bewildering result of its eclectic material – at least within the perceived framework of American sitcom tradition – is captured by arts critic Mark Lewisohn,

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in an article written for the BBC. According to Lewisohn, the show was a real oddity – seemingly for breaking with the predictable and limited formulas identified by academics in the majority of the most long-running American shows, and for appropriating a broader range of sources: Clearly, subtlety was not part of the comedic tapestry in this combination of wacky plots, madcap characters, OTT slapstick and surreal sight gags. The result was as if Fawlty Towers, Police Squad!, Arthur Hailey’s Hotel and Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles had been put into a blender, yielding a colourful concoction, hard to swallow but with a few nuggets of gold amid the sprawling mess.76

In stark contrast to the academic studies of perceived sitcom stagnation, specifically as popularised by Staiger’s American ‘blockbusters’ in the 1960s through to the 1980s, Brooks’s career suggests that outside influences have in fact contributed to major changes in sitcom production. The influence of Hollywood is most significant in Brooks’s ‘parodycoms’ When Things Were Rotten and The Nutt House, which were in many respects highly untypical of ‘mainstream’ sitcom production. By comparison to those more popular shows, – which have largely defined sitcom studies so far – these projects, along with Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker’s Police Squad!, were in many ways more technically experimental, drawing on Hollywood traditions of ‘parody’ writing, direction and performance rather than the 1950s-inspired formulas of ‘domesticity’ and narrativecomedy that went before them. In addition, the void of narrative left by the high volume of jokes meant that the humour in these shows was not subject to the same criticisms of social ‘conservatism’ that have been often perceived in regard to other programmes. These shows failed, seemingly because they defied audience expectations for the ‘mainstream’ sitcom tradition in their era of production. But nevertheless, these hybrids, along with M*A*S*H, highlight the previously neglected influence of Hollywood in the post-1960 era. The historical significance of Brooks’s television projects becomes all the more apparent in more recent years, in which, following Brooks’s projects, Hollywood comedy has been appropriated for the sitcom market very successfully. Most significantly, NBC’s award-winning, long-running show The Office is famed for the way it combines ‘politically incorrect’ humour with the most experimental, self-conscious direction style yet seen in a long-running US sitcom. However, like Brooks’s projects, these seemingly unique production values and its writing style were also appropriated from the cinema. As the original creator of The Office (BBC, 2001–3), Ricky Gervais has openly disclosed, the ‘parody’ film This is Spinal Tap (1982), with its similar presentation of ‘social awkward-

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ness’ and its documentary aesthetic, was his ‘biggest single influence’.77 Although the NBC version of The Office seems revolutionary in terms of American sitcoms, Brooks’s hybrids When Things Were Rotten, The Nutt House, Get Smart, and indeed Caesar’s Hour, were in this respect its predecessors. While these shows appropriated film content with different results, the cinematic influences evident in The Office unites these shows within the same cinema-inspired tradition. As such, Brooks’s adaptations are forerunners of such film-influenced programmes that have, over the years, reshaped American sitcom production.

Notes 1. Bill Adler and Jeffrey Feinman, Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976), p. 42. 2. Ibid., p. 172. 3. For a critique of the American sitcom tradition as a formulaic, rigid and repetitive genre of television production, see Paul Attallah, ‘The Unworthy Discourse: Situation Comedy in Television’, in Joanne Morreale (ed.), Critiquing the Sitcom: A Reader (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), pp. 91–115. 4. Regarding my method for examining Brooks’s career, it is important to acknowledge that the authorship of individual writers is very difficult to determine in television variety shows that employ writers in teams since scripts are produced in collaboration. In this context, the contribution of an individual writer to a particular joke or a particular skit cannot be determined in most cases. For this reason, I have focused on the common aspects or trends of writing on these shows, my intention being to accurately represent the projects themselves to which Brooks has contributed, with his specific influence accounted for when applicable. It is also important to note that this study also includes some examination of performances and production values. As is evident in Brooks’s own account of the sitcom Get Smart, many aspects of production are intended in the writing. In fact, my study suggests that the majority of the scripted jokes in Brooks’s television shows employ a visual element, and so only gain their meaning in conjunction with the use of specific performances and production techniques. Also, there are various means of studying perceived success and ‘failure’ in terms of television shows, including ratings, as employed by Janet Staiger in her book Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era (New York: New York University Press, 2000), and critical popularity, as I have done for other kinds of texts in other parts of this book. However, in this chapter, I have employed the duration of the respective shows on their original broadcast run in order to determine their degrees of perceived success. Given the disparity between the shows in this respect, this indicator

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5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

me l b r o o ks in the cu l t u r a l i n du s t r i e s alone makes Brooks’s ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ as a television writer clearly evident, notably ranging from a proven five-year run to a striking cancellation after only a few episodes. Susan Murray, Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), p. 1. Lori Landay, ‘I Love Lucy: Television and Gender in Postwar Domestic Ideology’, in Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linden (eds), The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 87. Virginia Wright Wexman, ‘Returning from the Moon: Jackie Gleason and the Carnivalesque’, in Morreale (ed.), Critiquing the Sitcom, p. 58. Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 14. For an explanation of sitcom ‘domesticity’, see David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 19. Marc, Comic Visions, p. 19. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 21. Despite its complex intermedial invention in the 1950s, the American sitcom was quickly characterised by critics and television writers as a stagnating, one-track, culturally limited tradition of entertainment. This attitude has been documented by William Boddy, who describes the way industry executives engineered the decline of live programmes in favour of pre-recorded shows that were more economical, such as I Love Lucy and Dragnet (NBC, 1951–9). As a consequence of this drive for profitable formulas, Boddy describes the way television writing quickly earned a lowered cultural status in the perception of critics and television writers: ‘Many critics found the new program format of the continuing character filmed series, where main characters, themes, and plot ideas for the entire series are established in the pilot episode – to be intrinsically resistant to thoughtful criticism.’ See William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 191. The Admiral Broadway Revue (NBC, 1949) was a popular show with home audiences, and was in fact only cancelled because it was very successful in generating sales for the programme’s sponsor, Admiral Continental Radio and Television Co. The sponsor was faced with a choice, either to reinvest in the show or withdraw their funding in order to instead build a new factory to meet the increased demand for their products. They chose the latter. For an account of this, see Sid Caesar and Eddy Friedfeld, Caesar’s Hours: My Life in Comedy with Love and Laughter (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), p. 67.

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18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

75

The subsequent Sid Caesar television shows ‘resurrected’ the same formulas, including film adaptations, as first delivered in The Admiral Broadway Revue. See Maurice Yacowar, The Comic Art of Mel Brooks (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 37. Sam Kashner, ‘Producing The Producers’, Vanity Fair, 521 (1 Jan 2004), p. 110. See Nanette Fabray speaking on The Sid Caesar Collection: The Magic of Live TV. DVD (Beverley Hills, CA: Sidvid, 2000). Caesar and Friedfeld, Caesar’s Hours, p. 147. Brooks was a writer on this episode, although his exact contribution to this sketch is not documented. See ‘Your Show of Shows: Episode Dated 3 April 1954’, Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0752929/ (accessed 21 August 2010). Caesar’s skill in ‘doubletalk’ is described as ‘nonsensical utterances that sound like French, German, Japanese, Italian and other languages to those unfamiliar with those foreign tongues’ in Bill Keveney, ‘Sid Caesar is the showman of showmen who keeps on laughing’, USA Today (9 January 2008), http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2008-01-08-sid-caesar_N. htm (accessed 13 September 2009). Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Back Stage Books, 2004), p. 102. With these numerous intermedial adaptations, the writing of Brooks and others on Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour went against the grain of production trends in the era. This is seemingly the case according to the star of the shows, Sid Caesar, who blames the cancellation of his final project Caesar’s Hour on what he perceives was their over-reliance on cinematic adaptations. In his retrospective about the decline of the programme, Caesar makes some judgements about changes in audience tastes in the late 1950s, in short, suggesting that audiences at that time expected to watch more formulaic, one-dimensional shows, such as sitcoms, without the intellectual demands made by adaptations of films or texts from other media: ‘They didn’t understand the foreign movies we were parodying. We were writing high-class comedy and were not willing to dumb it down.’ See Caesar and Friedfeld, Caesar’s Hours, p. 15. Buck Henry, ‘Mr. Big: Pilot Episode with Audio Commentary by Buck Henry’, Get Smart: The Complete Series, DVD, disc 1 (New York: Home Box Office Video, 2006). Notably, marital comedy, or comedy about gender roles, has been a fundamental staple of American sitcoms since they began. These formulas combined with the repetitive storylines and the perceived lack of character development from episode to episode, has been perceived by some scholars to maintain only ‘traditional’ gender roles. As Patricia Mellencamp notes, the highly popular show I Love Lucy consistently played out formulaic storylines, in which housewife Lucy regularly aspires to greater things, such as a career in show business, but ultimately resigns herself to the role

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27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

me l b r o o ks in the cu l t u r a l i n du s t r i e s of simply house-maker: ‘Week after week, the show keeps Lucy happily in her confined, domestic, sitcom place after a twenty-three-minute-tourde-force struggle to escape.’ See Patricia Mellencamp, ‘Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracy and Lucy’, Critiquing the Sitcom, ed. Morreale, p. 51. Given this assessment, I Love Lucy helped defined the sitcom early on as a socially conservative form – in literal terms, one that popularised a 1950s model of married life. Paul Gardner, ‘TV Shows in Fall to Have Gimmicks’, New York Times (29 June 1965), p. 71. Lynn Spigel, ‘From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sit-Com’, in Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel and Janet Bergstrom (eds), Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 209. Ibid., p. 205. Joanne Stang, ‘The Bewitching Miss Montgomery’, New York Times (22 November 1964), p. 13. Buck Henry, ‘Mr. Big: Commentary by Buck Henry’, Get Smart: The Complete, disc 1. Barbara Feldon, ‘99 Loses Control: Episode with Audio Commentary by Barbara Feldon and Buck Henry’, Get Smart: The Complete, disc 11. Mel Brooks, quoted in Patrick Kevin Day, ‘Q&A with Mel Brooks’, Los Angeles Times, 19 May, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ news/movies/la-et-brooks20–2008may20,0,5321315,full.story (accessed 22 September 2009). Don Rickles, ‘The Little Black Book, Part 2: Episode with Audio Commentary by Ron Rickles’, Get Smart: The Complete, disc 12. The ‘Get Smart Syndication Promo’ is available on Get Smart: The Complete, disc 24. Buck Henry, ‘99 Loses Control: Episode with Audio Commentary by Barbara Feldon and Buck Henry’, Get Smart: The Complete, disc 11. Mel Brooks, quoted in Joanne Stang, ‘And Then He Got Smart’, New York Times (30 January 1966), p. 17. Mel Brooks, ‘Mr Big: Pilot Episode with Audio Commentary by Mel Brooks’, Get Smart: The Complete, disc 1. Murray, Hitch Your Antenna, p. 91. Ibid., p. 91. Mel Brooks, ‘Mr Big: Pilot’, Get Smart: The Complete, disc 1. In 1968, when NBC did not pick up the show again, Get Smart, moved to CBS. In 1970, at the end of its fifth season, the show was cancelled. Mel Brooks, ‘Mr Big: Pilot Episode with Audio Commentary by Mel Brooks’, Get Smart: The Complete, disc 1. Michael Carlson, ‘Obituary: Larry Gelbart’, Guardian (13 September 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/sep/13/larry-gelbart-obituary (accessed 19 September 2009).

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45. Beau, ‘Blazing Saddles’, Variety (13 February 1974), p. 18. 46. Janet Staiger, Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 169. 47. Ibid., p. 162. 48. Ibid., p. 81. 49. Marc, Comic Visions, p. 26. 50. Ibid., p. 26. 51. Ibid., p. 26. 52. Dan Harries, Film Parody (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 37. 53. Ibid., p. 67. 54. Ibid., p. 9. 55. Ibid., p. 6. 56. Les Brown, ‘ABC TV Lists Robin Hood Spoof, Live Variety Show’, New York Times (3 May 1974), p. 68. 57. As I discuss later in this book, the concept of When Things Were Rotten was later revived by Brooks in his film Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). 58. Yacowar, The Comic Art, p. 60. 59. John O’Connor, ‘TV: Brooks and Robin Hood Legend’, New York Times (10 September 1974), p. 88. 60. Nicole Matthews, Comic Politics: Gender in Hollywood Comedy After the New Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 1. 61. The episode ‘The Wedding Bell Blues’ was guest directed by Brooks’s colleague, British actor Marty Feldman, who worked with Brooks on his movie Young Frankenstein (1974). 62. Brooks’s role as the Native American chief in Blazing Saddles could also be considered a parody of non-Native American actors playing Native American characters in previous years, including the Jewish actor Joey Bishop’s performance as the sidekick Kronk in the film Texas Across the River (1966). 63. Danny Graydon, ‘Airplane!’, Empire [no date of publication], http://www. empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?SID=10202 (accessed 22 September 2009). 64. ‘Airplane!’ The Numbers. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1980/ 0RPL1.php (accessed 2 January 2011). 65. It was only a few years later that the sitcom Police Squad! became popular on home formats, leading the Chicago Sun Times to suggest the show had acheived ‘cult status on video’, and prompting it’s producers to remake the sitcom as a series of movies, starting with The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988). As Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times notes, in an imitation of Police Squad!, the Naked Gun movie was produced ‘in the same style of nonstop visual and spoken puns, interlaced with satire, slapstick and scatological misunderstandings’. See Roger Ebert, ‘The Naked Gun’, Chicago Sun-Times (2 December 1988), http://rogerebert.suntimes. com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19881202/REVIEWS/812020301/1023 (accessed 11 August 2009).

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66. Variety Staff, ‘Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!’. Variety (1 January 1988), http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117793402.html? categoryid=31&cs=1 (accessed 11 August 2009). 67. The British Film Institute currently holds copies of the first eight episodes of The Nutt House. My copies of the full series were provided by ‘cult’ television collector Marc Couroux. 68. The cancellation of The Nutt House part way through its first season ‘left Brooks angry and humiliated and wondering, once again, where to find his next show business options’. See James Robert Parish, The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks: It’s Good to be the King (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), p. 255. 69. Bill Carter, ‘Prime Time Puts on a Happy Face’, New York Times (10 September 1989), p. 48. 70. Steve Seidman, Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1979), p. 3. 71. Ibid., p. 27. 72. Ibid., 30. 73. Brett Mills, Television Sitcom (London: British Film Institute, 2005), p. 85. 74. The variation between episodes of The Nutt House contrasts with other perceived ‘mainstream’ American sitcoms produced since the 1960s. In short, American sitcoms have been characterised by academics as a stagnating tradition of production, without variation and without innovation within each series. The common perception has been insightfully examined by Paul Attallah in his study of various shows as varied as The Beverley Hillbillies, Taxi (ABC, 1978–82, NBC, 1982–3), M*A*S*H and Happy Days (ABC, 1974–84), in which he notes: ‘It is a narrative necessity of situational comedy that the “situation” remain unchanged. If the program is to be repeated week after week, the characters and their mode of interaction must not be allowed to evolve.’ See Attallah. ‘The Unworthy Discourse’, in Morreale (ed.), Critiquing the Sitcom, p. 107. 75. Mills, Television Sitcom, p. 107. 76. Mark Lewisohn, ‘Guide to Comedy: The Nutt House’, BBC, http://www. bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/n/nutthousethe_7774900.shtml (accessed 11 October 2006). 77. Ricky Gervais discussed how the film This is Spinal Tap influenced his work in the documentary Ricky Gervais Meets . . . Christopher Guest (Channel 4, 2006).

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C HA PT E R 3

Prolonged Stardom: Audio Records, TV and Film, 1961–2004

Throughout the four decades of his career, Mel Brooks’s strategy of adaptation has been central to his longevity as a high-profile performer. Since establishing a selection of trademark personas, jokes and routines in the 1960s and 1970s, Brooks made the best use of those inventions by prolonging them through adaptation into a trail of subsequent appearances, maintaining his ‘star’ status through the 1980s, 1990s and to date. Brooks’s ability to continually renew this material is foremost due to his strategy of remediation – essentially meaning he has replayed his performance material in different media, moving between audio records, voiceovers, Hollywood film acting, television talk shows and sitcom appearances over many years. Brooks has also demonstrated great versatility, often significantly adapting his performance style and his material for different eras and audiences. Throughout his career, Brooks has capitalised on the synergy between his various performances. Furthermore, this long campaign of adaptations has ultimately earned Brooks critical prestige, in that his most recent audio record, The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 (1997), earned Brooks a Grammy in 1998, and his performance in the sitcom Mad About You (NBC, 1992–9) won an Emmy in 1997, 1998 and 1999. To understand Brooks’s success through adaptation, it is useful to consider the various studies of Hollywood film comedians. These studies have commonly suggested that the most popular actors adopt a distinct approach to performance, one that makes them the central attractions of their movies. Scholars have argued that instead of performing a variety of believable, ‘realistic’ and compelling characters, comedians often play a consistent role – adopting a recognisable appearance, persona and behaviours that satisfy audiences through repetition. For example, in his book Film Comedy, Geoff King has already studied the way performance as a ‘spectacle’ has its own set of expectations which dominate all other aspects of the text, including the storyline. King notes:

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me l b r o o ks in the cu l t u r a l i n du s t r i e s Much of what we are offered is the immediacy of the performance of the star comedian, regardless of the plot contrivance. The films exist primarily as showcases for these performers. How far are we expected really to be very interested in the narrative plights of Cobb, Hillard and Reede rather than the thinly-veiled comic personae of Martin, Williams and Carrey? Are these just an excuse for the main attractions, the crazy performances of comic stars doing their inimitable stuff? Steve Martin ‘does’ a Steve Martin; Williams a Williams, Carrey a Carrey; as have previous generations of film comedians. The name of the comic performer, and the promise of the routine, is usually the main box-office draw.1

Following this assessment, it has also been suggested that comedians’ earlier appearances necessarily play an important role in audience interpretations – including their previous roles in non-film media. For example, writing about the performance of Jim Carrey in Liar Liar (1997), Philip Drake suggests that Carrey uses a range of facial and physical contortions which his audience would recognise, not only from his past films such as Ace Ventura (1994) but also from his appearances on the US television series In Living Color (Fox, 1990–4). As Drake suggests, The often flimsy narrative premise of comedian comedy – often criticized for its dumbness – may ultimately be less important to our reading of and pleasure in these films than our investment in, and recognition of, the idiolect of the performer and the knowing references they make to their own star image.2

The idiolect of the comedian is manufactured in the public’s memory of the respective actor, as configured by their appearance, costume, gestures, way of speaking, their behaviours, and their persona, as they are publicised though their various films, television shows and every other appearance. In fact, this strategy of recycling material from previous performances, and capitalising on audience memories, is essential for actors to ensure their survival in the Hollywood film industry, and other media industries. As Drake has more recently noted, every performance necessarily ‘retains traces of earlier roles’ as an ‘economic condition of stardom’.3 Brooks’s career, and his coverage by critics, provides a very suitable case to re-examine the career model of the film comedian, as described in the studies by King and Drake, and the notion of ‘star’ personas. It is evident that Brooks, like so many other comedians, capitalised on each subsequent role by recycling material from previous appearances. In fact, his career can be usefully divided into three distinct campaigns, in which he cultivated an evolving persona. While Brooks’s idiolect is certainly dependent on audience familiarity, his image is characterised by regular and significant change. Through a broad and prolonged history of inter-

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medial adaptations, Brooks’s career has been marked by transitions into various personas, ranging from his zany Yiddish goof in his 2000 Year Old Man audio performances, to his anarchic, Groucho Marx-style persona in his film Blazing Saddles (1974), to his endearing old gent ‘Uncle Phil’ in the sitcom Mad About You. These shifts demonstrate his ability to drastically adapt the material to meet the expectations of new eras as the cultural industries continue to change. In this respect, Brooks’s prolonged survival as a performer through many adaptations presents evidence to suggest a broader industrial trend in which ‘celebrity’ has become more important to an artist’s career survival than consistent ‘star’ performance abilities, such as those typically employed by film comedians. This industrial trend has been usefully described by Barry King in his essay ‘Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form’ (2010), in which he suggests that the labour of the actor, meaning the actor’s ability to deliver a specific kind of performance – previously associated with ‘stardom’ – has in recent times become less significant: ‘the gradient relationship between star and celebrity, between demonstrated flair in performance and market-indexed popularity, is currently shifting. Rather than being created by stardom in some focused realm of performance, celebrity is becoming the basic condition of fame.’4 Brooks has capitalised on his celebrity in this way, admittedly while maintaining a reputation for some shifting ‘star’ performance skills. Most significantly, however, Brooks’s long career of adaptations also demonstrates the way longevity itself can contribute towards the critical canonisation of performers. In the short term, Brooks’s adaptations have assisted his career survival, creating links that raise critical audience awareness of his other performances, past and current. For example, Brooks adapted content from his 1960s audio records into his 1970s talk show appearances, he adapted his talk show material into his 1970s film performances, and later, he adapted content from his 1990s film roles into his 1990s sitcom performances. However, in the long term, his strategy of prolonged adaptation had the accumulative effect that, through bringing his performances to a wealth of different media, his material has reached a level of notoriety that eventually earned him the status of a ‘classic’ American comedian. This is despite the perceived ‘low points’ in his performance career. As I explain, Brooks’s elevated critical status is most clearly evident in his modern-day accolades, press coverage, and in the context of his appearances themselves on new a new generation of shows including Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 2000–), where Brooks is treated as an iconic figure. In addition, by overcoming the critical condemnation of his past, and reviving his career in different

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media, Brooks’s prolonged stardom has also contributing towards his modern-day ‘multimedia survivor’ reputation. To understand Brooks’s survival strategy – that is, how he sustained his prolonged stardom and celebrity – it is useful to consider the work of Timothy Corrigan, for example his essay ‘Auteurs and the New Hollywood’, where he describes ‘the contemporary status of the auteur as celebrity’.5 By studying artists including Quentin Tarantino, Corrigan demonstrates the way filmmakers can sustain their celebrity by making media appearances outside of their films, without creating a specific ‘star’ image, in particular, by guest starring on high-rating television variety shows such as Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975–).6 Corrigan suggests that those filmmakers who have continued to have successful careers over long periods of time, such as the New Hollywood directors Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, have demonstrated their ability to adapt to different media and eras, noting, ‘Duration is a distinguishing characteristic of another sort of auteur today – the auteur who creates a figure of time as enduring, evolving within the commerce of expression.’7 Furthermore, in order to understand the benefits of Brooks’s multiple synchronic careers in different media, it is also useful to consider the work of Geoff King in his study, ‘Stardom in the Willennium’, in which he explores the potential of multimedia stars to exploit the publicity generated by texts released in association with each other, and the cross-over audience those releases can appeal to. King specifically examines the way Will Smith has capitalised on the ongoing synergy between his successes in the music industry and in Hollywood films, specifically with his singles and films of the same title, including the synchronic releases for Men in Black (1997) and Wild Wild West (1999). As King notes, Smith’s strategy demonstrates that maintaining multiple careers in different media can be highly profitable: ‘A dual-career performer such as Will Smith offers great potential in the cross-media corporate environment of contemporary Hollywood. Synergy remains a quality admiringly discussed in the trade press, and pursued where possible by the major studios.’8 Brooks’s multimedia career is in some ways similar to, and in fact predates, the dual career of Will Smith. In Brooks’s case, from the 1970s to the 2000s, he pursued synchronic careers in audio records, film and television. In the same way as Will Smith’s careers cross over, so do Brooks’s performances: his television appearances adapt his audio records, his film performances adapt his television appearances, and his sitcom roles adapt his films. Brooks even produced some performances in conjunction with one another – including for his film To Be or Not to Be (1983), set in Second World War Poland. These included his single The Hitler Rap

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(1983), in which Brooks performed as a rapping Adolf Hitler in the music video, and his television show An Audience with Mel Brooks (ITV, 1983), in which he performed material from the film. Furthermore, in examining Brooks’s various performances, it is evident that his roles are designed to be appreciated by critics familiar with his other roles past and present. For example, Brooks’s role in The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–) was only wholly understandable when audiences incorporated their memories of his 2000 Year Old Man act as it was played in his series of audio records. I suggest that this tendency is more evident in the latter stage of Brooks’s career, whereby he released a remake of his 2000 Year Old Man record in the midst of his run as an actor in the sitcom Mad About You, thus capitalising on a potentially profitable synergy between the two projects.

Adapting the 2000 Year Old Man, 1961–83 Brooks first established his reputation as a performer, and critical expectations for his subsequent roles, with his audio comedy-record 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (1961). Brooks originally performed the ‘cult’9 headline skit of this record, ‘The 2000 Year Old Man’, with his colleague Carl Reiner at social occasions – that was until, as the Washington Times reports, actor George Burns told Brooks: ‘You better put it on an album, or I’m going to steal it.’10 During this period, Brooks reprised the material in a series of follow-up albums, including 2000 and One Years (1961), Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks at the Cannes Film Festival (1962) and 2000 and Thirteen (1973). Throughout this series of records, Brooks and Reiner replayed the same headline routine, in which Brooks played an ancient Jewish gentleman apparently as old as his title suggests, being interviewed by a straight-laced, all-American newscaster, performed by Reiner – a man once described by the Village Voice as ‘Brooks’s longtime crony’.11 Through repetition across these records, this routine established Brooks’s idiolect for various qualities, specifically, a JewishAmerican cultural identity, a naive, zany and witty character, and his performance style, best described as that of loud speech, a rambling delivery, and his raspy way of speaking, captured more recently by the New York Times as his ‘trademark gravelly voice’.12 The routine has been popular with critics, and has been a cornerstone in the public perception, and expectations of Brooks, typically described by Time as ‘a campus favourite’.13 The voice of Brooks across all of these records constituted some distinctive cultural characteristics that marked him out as a unique comedian among his contemporaries in the 1960s. As Henry Jenkins notes,

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reputations are often established by comedians by exhibiting distinguishing qualities of performance, whether gesture, facial expression or an ‘idiosyncratic way of speaking’.14 In order to examine Brooks’s voice alone, and to understand how this audio act first established his persona and performance style, it is useful to consider the study of the voice made by Gianluca Sergi. In his study ‘Actors and the Sound Gang’, Sergi describes the way an actor can portray the socio-cultural identity of their character by controlling their voice. For example, Sergi describes Morgan Freeman’s vocal performance as Hawke in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), suggesting he accurately conveys a specific ‘social and cultural background’ which Sergi concisely describes as ‘a poor, ignorant black man from Georgia’.15 In the case of his 2000 Year Old Man, Brooks’s accent conveys a stereotypically ‘traditional’ Jewish identity. His Yiddish accent – determining his East European or German-Jewish regional background – creates a clear-cut cultural contrast between Brooks’s identity and that of his interviewer, Reiner. This ‘outsider’ connotation – which made Brooks’s persona distinctive from his peers – was a particular feature of the era. While the American entertainment industry featured many popular Jewish performers at the time who were gradually introducing perceived Jewish-American personas into the ‘mainstream’, for example, Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, and George Burns, none of these matched the explicit ‘otherness’ of Brooks’s non-assimilated, foreign-born Jewish character. The importance of Brooks’s Yiddish accent in creating his persona as an ‘other’ to his American interviewer, and his audience, has been studied by David Desser and Lester Friedman in American Jewish Filmmakers (1993), where they describe Brooks on the record, noting: Such a dialect, beyond its obvious comic intentions, marks Brooks as a Jew, a descendent of someone not born in this country. As such, it puts definable limits on the possibilities of his assimilation, because a person speaking this type of broken English remains permanently alienated from the high culture of any given epoch in American life.16

Brooks’s persona as the 2000 Year Old Man also contrasts with that of his interviewer Reiner through his ‘Jewish’ pattern of speech. This has been discussed by Tony Silverman Zinman, in ‘Jewish Aporia: The Rhythm of Talking in Mamet’, in which he studies the speech of various actors playing a variety of Jewish-American characters in the theatre. Silverman Zinman suggests that outside of speaking Yiddish, secondgeneration American Jews adopt a pattern of speech which identifies their cultural heritage:

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Jewish aporia demonstrates the loss, not only the subject and its meaning, but the loss of a language with which to articulate that loss, and even the loss of an accent to deliver it in. All that is left for Mamet is a rhythm of speech to give Nothing shape and sound.17

Brooks’s speech, with his often rhetorical sentences, rhythmic delivery, is also recognisably Jewish in this tradition. Although also a Jewish New Yorker himself, Reiner disguises his identity behind more formal sentence structure, which defines him as an all-American, middle-class radio announcer. When Reiner interjects, his questions serve only as brief prompts, allowing Brooks to springboard into his rants, and towards the next punchline, or swiftly ending a comic bit which has failed to get a big laugh. Reiner’s comments range from subtle interjections like ‘oh’ or ‘I see’, to questions which stop Brooks mid-flow, drawing audience attention to his more unexpected remarks.18 However, even this seemingly original invention was, in part, an appropriation itself. In particular, Brooks’s long, rambling, often hightempo delivery in his 2000 Year records reprises a pattern of timing and rhythm that is very similar to that common in 1930s vaudeville comedy, in particular that of Groucho Marx. Brooks’s style in his records, suitably described by Time in 1968 as ‘a free-form vaudeville routine’19 – is in many ways an adaptation of that often employed by Marx in both style and content. This parallel is readily apparent according to Gerald Mast, who highlights the same distinctive qualities in Marx’s delivery. Mast identifies Marx’s speech as characterised by unusual speed, rhythm, and a general lack of ‘naturalistic’ pauses, by which his ‘careless talk leads the listener in intellectual circles, swallowing us in a verbal maze’.20 These same tactics of rapid, rhythmic, flowing sentences are evident in Brooks’s performance as his 2000 Year persona. To understand how their performance styles are both ‘unnaturalistic’, it is useful to consider the work of Henry Jenkins in his book What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (1992). In his study of 1920s and 1930s ‘comedian-centered comedies’,21 including those featuring the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, Eddie Cantor and others, Jenkins identifies what he determines to be ‘anarchistic comedies’.22 He suggests that these films draw on material, specifically performance material, from the vaudeville tradition of stage performance, which filmmakers then attempted to integrate with the production values of ‘classical’ Hollywood cinema. Jenkins suggests these films are best described as containing ‘two competing aesthetic systems, one governed by a demand for character consistency, causal logic, and narrative coherence, the other by an emphasis on performance, affective immediacy and atomistic spectacle’.23

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Brooks’s performance style, starting with his vocal performance as the 2000 Year Old Man, followed in the same ‘anarchistic’ vaudeville tradition as Groucho Marx – thus jarring with the ‘naturalistic’ behaviours as would be appropriate to ‘causal logic’. This connection is even more apparent when comparing the content of Brooks’s and Marx’s speech, For example, in the film Go West (1940), Groucho Marx is picked up by a stagecoach, only to ramble to the other passengers, reminiscing about world history in the same way as Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man, and delivering punchlines in a comparable rhythm. At one point, Marx lifts up a necklace and offers to sell it to his fellow passenger, saying: ‘How would you like to buy a diamond necklace that formerly belonged to the czarina of Russia’. On being asked, ‘How did you get it?’ Marx replies, ‘I used to room with Rasputin’. It is just these kinds of exchanges, which normalise otherwise grand historic events, that Brooks delivered as his 2000 Year Old Man. For example, in Brooks’s follow-up record 2000 and One Years (1961), Carl Reiner asks, ‘Did you know King Arthur? Did he exist? Did you know him?’ Without a ‘naturalistic’ pause to consider his response, Brooks replies, ‘A very important man. Not only a King! . . . He owned four apartment buildings!’ In this instance, Brooks’s quick-fire delivery, and his flowing, rhythmic, two-part response, including both the set-up and punchline, clearly echoes that of Marx. In the years throughout the release of these records, Brooks also revived and adapted his 2000 Year Old Man persona for his voiceover work, most notably in his performance for Ernest Pintoff ’s prestigious cartoon short The Critic (1963), for which Brooks was credited as creator and narrator. Throughout this performance, Brooks delivers a monologue, voicing the unseen viewer of an on-screen experimental film. Brooks’s accent and speech patterns portray a character of a cultural orientation typically unaccustomed to such avant-garde filmmaking, credited in the piece as ‘old man from Russia’. Brooks’s performance in The Critic has been highly regarded in its press coverage. For example, in 1968, Renata Adler in the New York Times introduced Brooks as ‘the famous 2,000-Year-Old Man and writer-narrator of the Academy Award-winning cartoon The Critic’.24 Gordon Gow in Films and Filming ‘admired’ Brooks for his ‘witty japes in that putdown cartoon’,25 and Tom Milne in the Monthly Film Bulletin credited Brooks with The Critic, noting, ‘Mel Brooks was the scriptwriter responsible for much of the loony brilliance in Pintoff ’s cartoon’.26 Brooks’s performance style in The Critic was a straightforward appropriation of his familiar 2000 Year Old Man, only differentiated by the marginally deeper pitch of Brooks’s voice, and his fragmented, more intermittent pattern of speech – without a supporting voice to fill the gaps.

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Brooks also maintained his profile with regular appearances on television talk shows. The way Brooks uses his interview appearances to ‘perform’ been described by Wes D. Gehring, who notes, a Mel Brooks interview is generally an invitation for a comedy performance. This is not to say the reader does not learn from the comments, but Brooks is generally ‘on’ during an interview. Just as he wanted to constantly wow his family as a child, he wants to entertain the interviewer, to please.27

In examining these performances, however, it is apparent that Brooks has often adapted his established material for the talk show format, finding ways of using his persona, and his 2000 Year routine in his interviews. This ranged from enacting his whole 2000 Years skit while sitting onstage with Carl Reiner, as he did in 1961 on The Ed Sullivan Show (CBS, 1948–71), through to making reference to his old material in his interviews on programmes including The New Steve Allen Show (ABC, 1961–5) and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (NBC, 1962–92), in which he appeared in five episodes. Throughout all these appearances, Brooks commonly reprised his ‘manic’ style of delivery and his Jewish ‘outsider’ identity. For example, when telling an anecdote to Johnny Carson in 1992 about how he was humbled by his first meeting for lunch with Hollywood icon Cary Grant, Brooks described the way they afterwards went to separate offices, Grant to his company Grant Art, and Brooks to his own, which he referred to as ‘schwartz’. Brooks’s ability to recycle material is most clearly evident in his 1970 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show (ABC, 1968–72), in which, in the same style as his 2000 Year Old Man routine and The Critic, Brooks reprised his fast and fluid delivery, linking anecdotes into a continuous monologue. Cavett proved to be an ideal supporting performer, in his delivery and in his cultural identity, allowing Brooks to reprise and renew his 2000 Year material, with only minimal adaptation.28 As Bill Adler and Jeffrey Feinman note in their book Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman (1976): ‘Brooks and Cavett were an ideal pair. Mel declared Cavett the most “incredibly gentile” person he had ever seen, and thought the juxtaposition of himself with the blond all-American WASP was very effective’.29 Throughout Brooks’s rambling, Cavett makes incidental remarks which bear little relation to journalistic interviewing – as did Reiner in the 1960s. In addition, Brooks’s madcap accents, dialect, and demeanour all contrast with Cavett, who speaks with all the formality of a 1950s American anchorman. In fact, this performance-dynamic was so similar to that of Reiner, that Brooks and Cavett even pursued a similar career

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together in a series of two-man comic radio advertisements for Ballantine Beer, notably described in Time as a ‘profitable hitch for Brooks’.30 In his 1970 interview with Cavett, Brooks even reprised the segmented skit format of his records, whereby his interview was divided into various mock-interviews in which a cigarette-smoking Brooks runs through a variety of small character pieces. These included imitations of his own Jewish mother, Adolf Hitler, a French wine taster referred to as Pierre Le Tongue, James Cagney’s sister and Frank Sinatra. In order to make these brief performances suitable for television, Brooks alters his posture, his expression, and mannerisms for each, looking out towards the camera, rather than to his interviewer. The adaptation of his audio records is made explicit later in the episode when Cavett prompts Brooks – to the delight of his cheering studio audience – to adopt the persona of his 2000 Year Old Man. This time, Brooks gives the traditionally audio-only character a visual element when Cavett hands Brooks a cape, hat and a cane with sceptre. To indicate a shift from his ‘real’ self to that of his character, Brooks turns his back to his audience while putting on the cape, groaning to himself and then excitedly declaring: ‘I’m Jewish!’ Along with adopting a thick Yiddish accent and speech pattern, Brooks’s gives his character a physical element, leaning forward on his chair, his hands on the top of the cane between his knees, and his shoulders hunched as if adopting the posture of a senior. It is useful to note that during his campaign of television appearances, a sharp contrast developed between Brooks’s performances and those of his television peers – in particular, his fellow Jewish TV writer and comedy film director, Woody Allen, who also regularly appeared on US talk shows. Allen was a high-profile performer on US TV at the time, making regular appearances on the iconic programme The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (CBS, 1962–92) in eleven episodes from 1963 to 1972. Woody Allen’s performances were less flamboyant, he was more subtle in his punchlines, and he was known for delivering observational commentaries about modern life, rather than impersonations or physical performance pieces. In respect of working in different media, Allen’s strategy was even more diverse than that of Brooks in that he also sustained this ‘intellectual’ star image with regular writing of comic pieces for the New Yorker.31 Nevertheless, unlike Allen’s ‘urban’ persona, Brooks’s 2000 Year routine marked him out for his nostalgic imitation of Jewish, verbal-dexterity and language-based comedy, popularised in the bygone vaudeville era – thus contributing towards the development of his reputation for idiosyncrasy as defined by Jenkins to be important for comedians.32 Brooks would later adapt this material for the television variety format

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when he starred in the British special programme An Audience with Mel Brooks. The show, produced by London Weekend Television and his own Brooksfilms in an effort to publicise his film To Be or Not to Be, featured Mel Brooks on stage, mostly alone, courting an audience of then-famous British celebrities. Towards the end of the show, Brooks once again took on his 2000 Year persona. This time, his studio audience together shared the role of interviewer. In the tradition of Brooks’s previous co-stars, their apparently spontaneous questions are asked politely in fixed rhythm and moderate tones, all of which contrast with Brooks’s croaky voice, loud and irregular speech, and his periodically heavy Yiddish accent and dialect. The cultural difference between Brooks and his middle-class British guests makes for a new national variation on his usual 2000 Year dynamic – in this case substituting reserved Brits for the reserved American tones of Reiner or Cavett. Through this initial campaign of performances, Brooks maintained his profile for over twenty years from 1961 to 1983. In accumulation, this history of performance adaptations together gradually made Brooks well known for their common qualities, namely his distinctive gravelly voice, his quick-fire, rambling delivery and his ‘zany’, upbeat personality. For one example, in 1987, Hal Hinson noted in the Washington Post: Off the cuff, Mel Brooks is one of the world’s funniest talkers – a spritz artist par excellence. In interviews, the words tumble out in a mad, inspired rush, one character, one voice, taking the stage almost before the previous one has left it. Alone or paired with his favorite partner, Carl Reiner, he’s a legendary improviser, dinnerparty entertainer, talk-show guest. I’m guessing his lunches are masterpieces.33

Hollywood Film Actor, 1974–87 In the middle years of his career, Brooks continued his strategy of adaptation by supplementing his career with a series of performances in Hollywood films during the 1970s and 1980s. In his films, specifically Blazing Saddles, History of the World: Part I (1981), and Spaceballs (1987), Brooks adopted a different strategy, more suitable for the cinema, making himself known for prolonging material explicitly appropriated from the visual performance style and persona of other film comics, in particular, Groucho Marx. These performances introduced a more defined visual element into his idiolect, combining his loud, gravelly voice, and his rapid-fire, rhythmic delivery from his records, with a physical performance style that matched his speech by flaunting artificiality, insincerity and self-reference. Even though this material was not always popular with critics, by regularly reviving such set pieces, and recalling the routines of

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America’s ‘classic’ Hollywood comedians, Brooks continually exploited audience memory of past films, and – for a while – made himself into a high-profile Hollywood actor. In order to understand the way critics’ memories of Brooks’s previous appearances figured in their interpretation of his subsequent roles, it is useful to consider the study made by Martin Barker, in which he suggests that audiences react to cinema primarily according to their past experiences with ancillary materials. As Barker notes, ‘all the circulating prior information, talk, images and debates generate and shape expectations which will influence how we watch a movie’.34 As such, Barker demonstrates the way that audience experiences of all films are engineered by the history of associated texts that are consumed before them, preconfiguring audience expectations through trailers, interviews and other promotional materials. Furthermore, using Barker’s logic, this premise can be extended to include other films among the range of potentially significant prefigurative texts. This is certainly evident in the case of performances, whereby not only do trailers and interviews feature in audience expectations, but past performances themselves are particularly significant in predetermining critical reactions and adding to the experience. Brooks made his reputation as a film actor by capitalising on prefigurative experiences, most commonly by reprising his own previous roles, and so capitalising on audience memory of his career to date. This process started in 1974, when Brooks appeared in Blazing Saddles in the cameo role of Governor Lepetomane. This appearance first established his vaudeville-esque idiolect as performer, defined by a combination of rapid, rhythmic delivery, and his sometimes purely rhetorical remarks. Brooks’s attempt to exploit the notoriety and audience affection for Groucho Marx was notably recognised by David Elliot in Film Heritage, who noted: Those who remember the Marx Brothers in Go West will know where Brooks drew his main inspiration for this film. The flip remarks to the audience, the non sequiturs, the double and triple entendres, the facile resort to slapstick, the scattershots at every kind of target – it’s the Marx Bros. uninhibited, as dirty as the real Groucho, though perhaps without his special dirty charm.35

Brooks’s personality in Blazing Saddles as Lepetomane was a major variation on his 2000 Year persona, in that rather than playing a naive and likeable old gent, Brooks redefined himself as an outrageously corrupt, sexist, authority figure. Furthermore, it was also in his cameo as the notorious Governor Lepetomane that Brooks defined his performance style – marking himself as a highly ‘theatrical’ actor, channelling the performances of Hollywood’s early sound film comedians. Brooks’s performance

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style here is essentially similar to the ‘performative’36 method described by James Naremore in his study of Charles Chaplin – that is, an acting style that breaks the ‘classical’ behaviours of Hollywood film performance. Although other studies, including Geoff King’s have identified such ‘performative/presentational’37 techniques in the repertoire of popular Hollywood comedians more generally, this tradition of acting is certainly most associated with the artificiality and self-conscious behaviours of the vaudeville comics – in particular, the most prolific of those, the Marx Brothers. As Steve Seidman notes, Groucho Marx was ‘the prime exponent of direct address during the 1930s’.38 However, not all of Brooks’s performances in film – including his earlier film The Twelve Chairs (1970) and his following roles in Silent Movie (1976) and High Anxiety (1977) – were so dependent on Groucho Marx, instead drawing on a number of different sources. As Barker’s theory of preconfigurative materials suggests, all of these sources, to varying degrees, contributed towards the experience of Brooks’s films. For example, Brooks did not rely so heavily on Marx’s performances in his subsequent film, the Alfred Hitchcock parody-movie High Anxiety, in which Brooks played the leading character, the esteemed Dr Richard H. Thorndyke. This role was originally written for Gene Wilder, and was played by Brooks as a genteel and urbane personality similar to that performed by Wilder in Young Frankenstein (1974).39 Furthermore, this largely ‘straight-man’ character of Dr Thorndyke was an adaptation of the educated professional male protagonist, as popularised by James Stewart in Vertigo (1958) and Cary Grant in North by Northwest (1959). However, to examine some specific scenes, this performance was also an opportunity for Brooks to capitalise on his history of talk-show appearances and audio records, adapting material from those previous roles and so satisfying that range of critical expectations. In one scene in High Anxiety, Brooks reprised his skill at imitating club singers such as Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra, which he previously made popular on television. In this scene, Brooks, as the retiring Dr Thorndyke, is initially sitting at a table in a busy restaurant, when he is encouraged by the evening’s host to perform a song. At first Brooks is bashful – as would be expected of the ‘nervous’ professor – but then he suddenly abandons his modesty, takes up the microphone, and performs an elaborate musical number. As with his impersonation of Frank Sinatra on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970, Brooks essentially delivered a pre-sold spectacle, reprising subtle techniques of well-known singers. In the case of High Anxiety, this was broadly recognised by critics as a similar skilful appropriation. For example, Brian Case in Time Out noted: ‘It’s almost

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Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin and The Wham of Sam, with the heat turned up under the Vegas cuff-shooting mannerisms, and the microphone-cable snaking and cracking like a bullwhip.’40 In addition, Brooks also satisfied expectations in High Anxiety with another adaptation, this time of his renowned 2000 Year routine. This adaptation satisfied audience expectations on two levels – as a continuation of Brooks’s Yiddish persona, and, at the same time, adapting Hitchcock’s films. As Gordon Gow in Films and Filming notes, Brooks and Kahn, in the scene, ‘attempt to evade a hazard at an airport by creating an extravagant diversion – as did Cary Grant at the auction in North by Northwest and Paul Newman at the ballet in Torn Curtain (1966)’.41 However, their performances make it evident that Brooks was also reprising his famous 2000 Year persona. Both Brooks and Kahn ham up the scene, notably disguised as an old Jewish couple. The way Brooks controls his voice makes him sound much like his familiar character, just as he performed it on Dick Cavett, and in his audio records. At one point a security guard asks to see inside his shopping bags. Brooks replies, ‘What? You think we’re smuggling dope in the celery? The celery’s not for dope, it’s for dip!’ Here, the extended, subtle play on language, combined with the rhetorical way Brooks speaks, his layered cloth costume and even his hunched posture, make it a uniquely pre-sold spectacle, both a revival of highly regarded Hitchcock films and Brooks’s own Yiddish character. In subsequent years, Brooks shifted back to reprising his chauvinistic, vulgar and crooked authority figure persona, as popularised with his character Governor Lepetomane in Blazing Saddles. In his cameos in the films History of the World: Part I and Spaceballs Brooks reprised the sexist, obnoxious and ruthless, powerful persona – giving his character a new historical and futuristic twist respectively. For example, when Brooks appeared as King Louis XVI in History of the World: Part I, he was just as despicable and sexist as he was in Blazing Saddles. After seducing women of the court using his royal authority, he even made a catchphrase of turning to the camera and saying smugly: ‘It’s good to be the king.’ Similarly, as President Skroob in Spaceballs, Brooks pushes his co-stars out of the way, to steal the last escape pod from an exploding space station; and again in Spaceballs, Brooks as Skroob is accompanied by a bimbo, this time in the form of the blonde twins, Darlene and Marlene. In keeping with his misogynistic persona, when Brooks calls them by the wrong names, and they correct him, he dismisses them simply muttering: ‘oh whatever’.42 In general, Brooks performed both these film characters as ruthless, crude men with sexist attitudes, and his performance style is littered with the same kind of production-conscious remarks. In all of these,

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Brook also exhibited one distinctive costume accessory: in both he wore a thin, villain’s moustache.

A Transitional Performance: Life Stinks (1991) The culmination of Brooks’s adaptation strategy, following these ‘villainous’ roles, would be his performance in his 1991 film Life Stinks – produced through his own company Brooksfilms, and first premiered as a surprise entry at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. It was in the coverage of Life Stinks that critics most frequently discussed the expectations of Brooks as an actor. In this performance Brooks adapted his history of callous villains from Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs and History of the World: Part I, with the same trademark elements of vaudeville comedy, this time, specifically the Three Stooges. However, his role in Life Stinks was also his final film as a ‘vaudeville clown’. As a feature of the storyline, Brooks changed his persona in the second half of the movie, adopting a ‘naturalistic’ playing style, appearance and a more modest delivery that was closer to his likeable ‘talk show self ’. While this shift in his idiolect appalled and confused film critics, it also made Life Stinks a transitional text, paving the way for his latter-day revival on television. The pre-release promotion of Life Stinks, including the 1991 theatrical trailer, set up expectations for Goddard Bolt to be yet another of Brooks’s cartoon scoundrels – almost always described in the press as ‘a callous billionaire’. In the opening scenes in Life Stinks Brooks’s performance did satisfy this expectation, by re-enacting his first scene as Lepetomane in Blazing Saddles, in this case, updating the scenario to a more topical 1990s LA boardroom setting. The film’s reviewers appreciated this role as an adaptation of Brooks’s previous ‘vulgar’ and crooked personas, including Geoff Brown in The Times, who noted: ‘At first Brooks parades his usual persona, playing a callous developer, happily levelling nursing homes.’43 Whereas Brooks as Lepetomane ordered the confiscation of Native American lands, Brooks, playing Bolt, orders a group of his lawyers to arrange to cut down acres of Brazilian rainforest for financial gain, again ejecting its local inhabitants. In this new incarnation, Brooks wears a sharp grey suit, the distinctive thin moustache – as seen in History of the World and Spaceballs – and this time, he also sports a thick Charles Bronson-style wig. Furthermore, Brooks’s gestures are sharp (he points to add emphasis to his statements) and his facial expressions are unnaturally abrupt. This, along with the sharp tone of his voice, makes Bolt seem like another ‘theatrical’ Brooks villain. Life Stinks did satisfy some expectations for the kind of ‘theatrical’

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vaudeville-style routines that Brooks was known for in Blazing Saddles. This was especially evident in one sequence where Brooks and his cowriter Rudy De Luca meet each other wandering the LA streets, each with the appearance of a deranged and dishevelled ‘bum’. They argue, and then engage in a rhythmic exchange of slaps and shoves – accurately described by Brown in The Times as ‘old vaudeville shtick’.44 This sequence could only be appreciated completely by critics familiar with the previous performances it recreates. In their costumes, and their actions, Brooks and De Luca deliver an obvious imitation of the Three Stooges – signified most clearly in their wild hair, high waistlines and braces, and in the rhythm of their slapping, especially when De Luca rebounds off the fence in such an ‘unreal’ way. Just as Peter Brunette notes in his study of the Three Stooges, their performances were always ‘anticipated, set up and provided for’,45 and as such, their act ‘offers a kind of play-within-play’.46 Many critics recognised the scene for its reprise of the Stooges – earning Brooks credibility by association. Typically, Shaun Usher in the Daily Mail noted that the performance recreates ‘a classic Three Stooges fight, with Brooks and co-writer Rudy De Luca managing to impersonate the entire headslapping, eye-poking trio’,47 and Cart in Variety praised this sequence for ‘descending to the Three Stooges level of sophistication’.48 However, Life Stinks was also significant because it was a transitional performance for Brooks. In the latter part of the movie, the storyline evokes a change in his persona and performance style, revealing Brooks as a more endearing and ‘naturalistic’ personality. His unscrupulous character Goddard Bolt finds his redemption in poverty, or as Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard described it: ‘Brooks has discovered that the lump on his left side is a heart, not a wallet’.49 Notably, the changeover from the cartoonesque, ‘ruthless tycoon’ Goddard Bolt, to a likeable and more relatable, ‘naturalistic’ persona was conveyed by a swift change in his costume. After Brooks’s character decides to accept a bet to abandon his billions and live for thirty days like a ‘bum’, his lawyers ceremoniously remove his watch, shave off his thin moustache, and as a punchline to the sequence, pull off his toupee – to which Brooks exclaims in his raspy voice: ‘Hey! That was stitched in!’ This change in costume was interpreted by many critics, including the writers of the film, as a turning point in the performance.50 Notably, in his 2005 commentary on the sequence, Brooks himself comments, ‘That was brave of me right – suddenly getting down to the real, funny me?’51 Poignantly, his co-writer Rudy De Luca replies, ‘Yes, and you’re immediately more lovable without the toup.’52 From this point on, Brooks adopts a modest, compassionate and liberal

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personality – accurately captured by Sheila Johnstone in the Independent as ‘a born-again softie’.53 For example, when Brooks first wakes up under a cardboard box, after his first night on the LA streets, he is met by one of the ‘wacky’ homeless characters: a white-bearded old man wearing a US Navy hat – called ‘Sailor’ because he was ‘nearly in the navy’. Brooks witnesses Sailor blowing his nose onto the floor. Instead of engaging in rhetorical banter or outmatching sailor’s vulgarity, Brooks displays his refined social attitude, simply exclaiming: ‘That almost hit me! That’s disgusting!’ Following this, he kindly donates his hand-embroidered handkerchief to Sailor. As the story progresses, Brooks even falls in love with an attractive bag lady he meets on the streets. More than any other element, this reinvention of Brooks as an ‘old romantic’ meant abandoning the chauvinism he crafted in Blazing Saddles, History of the World and Spaceballs, and becoming what Peter Cox in the Sun described as ‘a more mellow Mel’.54 Brooks’s change in performance style was equally severe. His behaviours are mostly ‘naturalistic’, almost always using realistic and believable mannerisms, and his words are delivered in modest and appropriate patterns of speech – together making his character far more convincing. Instead of speaking in a loud and theatrical manner, Brooks often speaks very softly, lowering the volume of his voice and expressing apparent sincerity in his concern for the supporting homeless characters. In view of Brooks’s history of performances, the sudden transformation in his persona, costume and performance style conflicted with critical expectations, and was a big disappointment for some critics. This, for example, was reflected by Georgia Brown in the Village Voice: At this point the narrative undergoes a fatal revision. Once the bet is made, Bolt is stripped of his toupee, his greasy pencil moustache, and, more incredibly, of his ruthless arrogance. Before getting to the streets, he’s already a sliver of his former horrid self.55

These critics expected Brooks to deliver a ‘villainous’ persona and a vaudeville-type performance. As such, reviews of Life Stinks frequently described the high expectations generated in the first few minutes of the film, followed by a big disappointment with the change in Brooks’s character. For example, writing about Brooks’s move to more subtle, situationoriented comedy, Tom Hutchinson in the Mail on Sunday condemned Life Stinks, noting: ‘Mel Brooks should stop lane-hopping and stick to his fast-track of gaudy bawd and pell-mell parody’.56 Similarly, writing about Brooks’s departure from his ‘villainous’ persona, Janet Maslin in the New York Times notes: ‘Mr Brooks is no longer his customary wisecracking

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self. He becomes subdued, compassionate and – worst of all, given that this is Mel Brooks – polite.’57 With these changes, Life Stinks reinvented Brooks’s perceived onscreen idiolect, making him into a more rounded, more ‘naturalistic’, and more endearing personality – in sharp contrast to the crude, sexist gag-man that he was previously notorious for, in Blazing Saddles, History of the World: Part I and in Spaceballs. This transformation ultimately conflicted with the expectations of many critics for Brooks as an actor, as prefigured by his previous films. As a consequence, Brooks’s performance in Life Stinks was a critical flop, leading Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard to describe the film as ‘the grossest miscalculation of Mel Brooks’s career’.58 In fact, Life Stinks marked the end of his career as a leading actor in Hollywood film, and his return to playing only cameos or supporting roles in his films. However, in terms of Brooks’s career more generally, this change in his idiolect marked an important transition for Brooks that would ultimately become profitable. His transformed image in Life Stinks set a precedent for his revival on television in the years that would follow, in which he would revive his career by popularising himself as just this kind of more ‘naturalistic’, eccentric and endearing personality.59 Again, Brooks’s shift in his ‘star’ image contrasts with that of Woody Allen, who pursued a similar strategy, also casting himself in his written and directed films during the 1970s. In contrast, Allen manufactured a relatively consistent ‘star’ reputation for specific qualities, namely his ‘nerdy’ spectacled appearance, his distinctive Jewish-American pattern of speech, and his nervous, intellectual, ‘high’ art-interested persona – all of which have been showcased in his films, especially Annie Hall (1977) – which, as The Times noted, was the film that ‘consolidated Allen’s public image as the weedy, Jewish, New York, therapist-pecked comedian’.60 More significantly, Allen’s ‘star’ persona has continued to be relatively consistent to date – that is, apart from the controversy in his personal life that emerged in 1992.61 Even now that Allen himself is too old to play a romantic lead, film critics still recognise his persona being acted out by those younger actors that Allen casts to replace him – as when the New York Times reviewed Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), and recognised Owen Wilson performing ‘the familiar Allen persona’, which in this case meant ‘a perpetually dissatisfied Hollywood screenwriter trying to reinvigorate his youthful dreams of literary glory’.62 In contrast with Allen, Brooks’s performance adaptations have together contributed towards the unique reputation as a ‘survivor’. This is most evident in the backlash that followed his ‘endearing’ performance in Life

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Stinks, which defied critical expectations of his ‘villainous’ star image, as established in his previous films Blazing Saddles and Spaceballs. Furthermore, his performances together contributed towards his unique reputation as a ‘survivor’ in a way that Allen’s has not. Although the critical condemnation of Life Stinks ended his career as a leading Hollywood actor, Brooks would later reinvent his performance style and persona yet again for his cameos in the television sitcoms Mad About You and Curb Your Enthusiasm. By making the bold move of starting a new career as a television sitcom actor, Brooks won several Emmys – and in doing so, dramatically overcame the critical condemnation in a way that was never replicated by Allen.

Comedy Legend and Sitcom Actor, 1995–2004 In his latest career campaign, this time on television, Brooks finally earned critical credibility as a performer – thus contributing towards his reputation as a ‘multimedia survivor’ – through a series of appearances on television that capitalised on his history of roles, in particular by prolonged adaptations of his 2000 Year routine. Again, Brooks’s continued notoriety in this new era meant adapting his material. Most significantly, the talk show circuit proved to be very different to that which Brooks was used to in the 1970s and 1980s. In an affirmation of what Andrew Horton describes as the ‘breakdown of traditional comedy in the twentieth century’63 – in which he describes the popular decline of the traditional funny-man and straight-man performance dynamic – the ultra-formal talk show hosts like Dick Cavett had largely been replaced by shock-orientated, satirical, comedians-turned-interviewers in the 1990s. This left Brooks without the supporting performance necessary to replay his 2000 Year material, and led to Brooks being upstaged on shows like Primetime Glick (Comedy Central, 2001–3) in 2003 and The Frank Skinner Show (BBC, 1995–9, ITV, 2000–) in 2005. In both of these, rather than supporting Brooks, the presenters themselves vied for attention, delivering more ‘jokes’, and speaking in a louder, more flamboyant style than Brooks himself. However, in this modern era, Brooks found new platforms in which he was still able to capitalise on his material, especially his trusted 2000 Year routine. It was on a new generation of programmes including The Simpsons, Mad About You and Curb Your Enthusiasm that Brooks, now in his late sixties and seventies, respectively, capitalised on his long history of appearances. By appearing in these uniquely high-rating, critically very popular comedy shows that Brooks raised his profile with a new generation of critics, and by association, added credibility to his past works.

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Furthermore, by examining his treatment within these programmes – in terms of how the writers frame Brooks within the storyline, and exactly how the shows make reference to his history of performances – it is evident that Brooks’s very appearance is primarily justified by audience memory of his previous roles. These cameos demonstrate the ‘high’ critical status with which he is now regarded by critics and writers in American television, in the aftermath of his long career. Looking back over his career up to this stage, it would seem that Brooks’s elevated critical status – and his ‘survivor’ reputation – are, in part, a product of his prolonged adaptations of his 2000 Year routine over the decades. The way this was achieved can be understood by considering Sarah Cardwell’s study of adaptation, in her model of ‘the meta text’.64 Cardwell examines the way contemporary adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels as primetime television shows have served to re-popularise the original works and encourages audiences to revisit them. Furthermore, Cardwell suggests that all of these adaptations together make for a cultural experience that is greater than the sum of its parts – a phenomenon she describes as the ‘meta-text’.65 However, there is one fundamental difference between this occurrence and that of Brooks’s 2000 Year routine. Whereas Cardwell examined the way television producers have over many years adapted the work of others, and so, inadvertently contributed to this rolling, ongoing pattern of adapted texts, Brooks has repeatedly repurposed his own project. In doing so, through the audio records, talk shows and his voiceovers and recent sitcom role, over the four-decade period, Brooks succeeded in making his 2000 Year routine into a broadly known intermedial ‘meta-text’, primarily of his own creation. In 1995, Brooks made his first significant ‘new generation’ appearance in a cameo on The Simpsons. Generally, any appearance on The Simpsons is widely regarded an achievement of itself, whereby only high-status celebrities or those with current relevancy are invited to appear, and those who feature are given a useful publicity boost. This is confirmed by both the reaction of artists and press coverage of such appearances. For example, when then British Prime Minister Tony Blair guest starred on the show in 2004, his appearance was described by Robin Brant of the BBC as ‘a PR masterstroke’.66 When actor Seth Rogan was confirmed to be appearing on, and writing, an episode for broadcast in 2010, Variety quoted Rogan describing The Simpsons as ‘the Holy Grail’ of comedy, adding, ‘I can die a happy man now’.67 Similarly, in an interview with Gary Susman in Entertainment Weekly, Ricky Gervais talked about his episode as a great achievement: ‘The Simpsons is the greatest TV show of all time . . . When I first got into comedy my greatest ambition was to get one joke on The

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Simpsons. I may as well retire now.’68 As such, the show was a very suitable platform for Brooks to revive his career. Every aspect of Brooks’s treatment in the script evokes audience memory of his history of works, and at the same time, consistently frames Brooks as a ‘classic’ comedian. Most notably, he is introduced in the episode ‘Homer vs. Patty and Selma’, by Homer as: ‘comedy legend Mel Brooks!’ Following this, Brooks enacts a partial adaptation of his 2000 Year Old Man routine. However, instead of a straightforward replay of the original act, the routine is corrupted for comic effect – leaving its interpretation dependent on his audience remembering the original skits. For example, when Homer forces Brooks to join him in a rendition of what he calls ‘the 2000 pound man’, Brooks resists, saying: ‘Homer, it’s not that easy. It takes the genius of Carl Reiner and the rhythm and timing that only he and I . . .’ The joke continues when Homer interrupts Brooks, launching into a Homer-esque, unconvincing impersonation of the formal tone and flat metre employed by Carl Reiner in the role: ‘Sir. Today every country has a national anthem. Did they have national anthems two thousand years ago?’ In his answer, Brooks then runs through his old material – this time taken from his cartoon The Animated Classic: The 2000 Year Old Man (1975). Notably, the writers’ high regard for Brooks’s 2000 Year routine is also conveyed by Homer’s unconvincing impersonation of Reiner, whereby voice-actor Dan Castellaneta, regularly employs this very same tone whenever Homer is attempting – always unsuccessfully – to sound intelligent, or engage with ‘high’ culture. Brooks best capitalised on his history of performances in Hollywood, in television and in his audio records, by again remediating that content into a series of cameos on the romantic sitcom Mad About You, in which Brooks played the occasional character Uncle Phil in episodes ‘The Grant’, ‘The Penis’, ‘Uncle Phil and the Coupons’, and ‘Uncle Phil Goes Back to High School’. It was for these performances that Brooks won Emmys for ‘Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series’ in 1997, 1998, and 1999.69 To understand the way Brooks’s previous roles affected his critical popularity in Mad About, it is useful to consider the work of Brett Mills, who suggests that critically popular performances in sitcoms are pleasurable on two levels – by offering a believable and understandable character within the narrative of the show, and by offering a break with ‘classical’ performance, whereby audiences can identify the unique talents of the actor. As Mills notes: Award-winning performances are often not the most ‘realistic’ or appropriate; instead they are the ones which most pleasurably balance the naturalistic

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requirements of the text with the expectations and pleasures associated with the star performing them and the ‘skill’ which this process involves.70

Brooks’s appearances in Mad About You were a hybrid of content prolonged from his previous performances in various media, and so delivered just this kind of layered experience. First, Brooks appears in the show wearing a grey suit, and his hair remains crazily windswept to one side, in the same style as his appearance as a homeless eccentric in Life Stinks. In addition, Brooks’s persona as the much loved uncle to the show’s married couple, played by Paul Rieser and Helen Hunt, is in keeping with his Life Stinks character. More significantly, however, the script itself and Brooks’s vocal delivery is particularly reminiscent of his performances as the 2000 Year Old Man. For example, in the episode ‘The Penis’, when the characters Paul and Jamie, played by Paul Rieser and Helen Hunt, are visiting Brooks as Uncle Phil in hospital, they discover him trapped inside a folded-up hospital bed. Phil’s first lines in the scene echo his early appearances, some way between the exaggerated Jewish speech pattern of his 2000 Year Old Man and his more typical Brooklyn working-class dialect: ‘I pressed the wrong button . . . I’m pressing buttons all my life – intercoms, doorbells – this is the first time I ever got folded in half.’ When Brooks delivers his lines as Uncle Phil, he does so in a flowing monologue, pocketed by abrupt changes in tone. For example, after hugging Paul and Jamie, Brooks remarks unexpectedly, ‘Of course you know I’m dying?’ Paul and Jamie question Phil, who launches into a long 2000 Year Old Man-style monologue about God: ‘The doctors. What do they know? It’s bleak. Last night, late at night . . . I saw God. Yes. He was hovering above me – maybe a little to the left.’71 Brooks is assisted in reprising his ‘classic’ material by the supporting performances of Rieser and Hunt, who throw in minor remarks and interjections throughout his rant, in the same tradition first established by Reiner. Although Brooks did not write his script for Mad About You himself, his impromptu-sounding lines and this dialogue rapport were intended by the writers as nostalgic imitations of his early vocal work. This is discussed by the show’s creator and occasional writer and producer, Rieser and his co-star Hunt, in their 2005 retrospective on Brooks’s Emmy winning performance for ‘The Penis’. For example, Rieser recalls: ‘He was called Uncle Phil because in the 2000 Year Old Man it said, “Have you got a God?” He said, “No, we had a fella called Phil.” ’72 Poignantly, actress Helen Hunt also reveals the inspiration of the production team, adding: ‘The writers were raised on vintage Mel Brooks . . . We memorised those albums.’73

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The accumulated critical popularity of Brooks’s 2000 Year routine is best confirmed by his brand new audio record, with his original partner Carl Reiner, titled The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000. Notably, this new record was released during Brooks’s run as an Uncle Phil on Mad About You – therefore maximising the potential synergy between his record and that popular show. Furthermore, it was for this new album that Brooks won the Grammy for ‘Best Spoken Comedy Album’ in 1998, which along with his Emmys for his sitcom, created a potentially profitably synergy between his performances, whereby the critical success of each one could potentially be transferred to the other through association. Finally, it was following the release of this record that Brooks re-released all his previous 2000 Year records. As a result of these adaptations all combined, it was in 2009, as a reaction to that re-release that Brooks’s 2000 Year performance – rather than any record in particular – was described by Mandy Stadtmiller in the New York Post as ‘one of the most classic comedy routines of all time’.74 It would seem that Brooks’s 2000 Year routine has become a highly profitable meta-text, manufactured through the ongoing synergy of its various incarnations in different media, and elevated further by various awards, popular talk shows, and iconic programmes like The Simpsons for which Brooks adapted his material over the years. In order to produce yet another 2000 Year record in 1997, and so capitalise on the history of these performances, Brooks made some drastic changes to his material and performance style for the modern critical audience. For example, the new record includes Brooks making jokes about ‘topical’ issues, including call centres, with reference to the common problem of having to deal with automated services. Throughout, Brooks also makes scattered references to various Hollywood films. For example, when Reiner pressures Brooks to reveal the truth about the history of biblical Moses, Brooks eventually breaks under the pressure and exclaims, ‘You can’t handle the truth!’, spoofing the famous Jack Nicholson line from A Few Good Men (1992). In another substantial change, it was in this new record that Brooks’s vocabulary includes swear words for the first time – such as when describing the way that on meeting Sylvester Stallone, he was once told to ‘fuck off ’ by the star. Brooks even attributes his change in content to innovations in ‘current’ popular culture, remarking in the record: ‘Recently, in the last thirty or forty years, from the movies, mainly by Martin Scorsese, I am liberated – I’m now comfortable with those words because of his movies.’ Most significantly, however, Brooks updated his performance for 1997 by changing his voice. In this new record, Brooks largely dropped the

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original Yiddish dimension of his 2000 Year character, instead speaking with a dialect and accent that was far closer to his own ‘real life’ Brooklyn accent and adopting his own more contemporary ‘Jewish’ pattern of speech – as heard in his numerous talk show appearances and in films ranging from High Anxiety to Life Stinks, and most recently, Mad About You. The new 1997 record even includes a part of the routine whereby Brooks describes the way that fierce press criticism of his performance in a play, some years ago, actually drove him to take elocution lessons to overcome what he jokingly describes himself in the record as ‘that stupid Jewish accent’. Considering the culture of the new era, this adaptation was entirely understandable. In the shadow of explicitly Jewish television characters, including those on Larry David’s Seinfeld (NBC, 1990–8) and those on his show Curb Your Enthusiasm, simply exaggerating a Jewish pattern of speech, or indeed jokes about Jewishness, fails to embody Brooks’s same oddball or ‘outsider’ status that it once signified in the 1970s and even the 1980s. This modern-day shift in attitudes which has essentially ‘normalised’ Jewishness, has been notably documented by Henry Bial in his study Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005), in which he describes the way that audience familiarity with Jews including Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen had changed public attitudes. As Bial notes, by the late 1980s ‘Jews had achieved an unprecedented level of social acceptance in the United States’, meaning that ‘the mainstream American audience’ had come to accept ‘explicitly Jewish characters and themes’.75 The apparent outdated status of Brooks’s Jewish persona, and the reason for downplaying it in the new record, was further confirmed in 2006 when Brooks and Dick Cavett attempted to reprise their old routines in a brand new edition of The Dick Cavett Show (2006) for Turner Classic Movies. In the programme, Brooks and Cavett, sitting opposite one another, replay their old line of jokes. However, in the wake of the cultural shift described by Bial, this old performance dynamic, and so Brooks’s persona itself, lacked the impact it once had. Consequently, this new Cavett Show interview was regarded as an unsuccessful attempt by critics to revive out-of-date material. Poignantly, this sentiment was captured by Virginia Heffernan in her New York Times review of show, in which she notes: ‘Mr. Cavett, 69, and Mr. Brooks, 80, sit side by side, reminiscing about the old days and replaying the urbane banter of the bygone JudeoEpiscopate elite . . . This is a broadcast for buffs only.’76 In the years following his new record, Brooks still continued to work and to make high-profile appearances on television. In 2004, Brooks

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made his most explicitly opportunistic appearance – capitalising on his history of performances, and his now flourishing Broadway career – with his role on the ‘new generation’ show, Larry David’s documentary-style sitcom on HBO, Curb Your Enthusiasm. All in 2004, Brooks played himself in episodes: ‘Mel’s Offer’, ‘The Blind Date’, ‘The Surrogate’ and ‘Opening Night’. This show was another coup for Brooks, as Curb Your Enthusiasm is a highly regarded show with critics, notably described by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian as ‘the greatest television series ever made’.77 The show was an ideal platform for Brooks to capitalise on audience memory, and to create a synergy with his then running, prestigious The Producers project on Broadway. As such, the documentary style of the show portrays Hollywood actors, producers and agents, apparently as themselves, behind the scenes. This premise, accurately described by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian as ‘television as high-concept art’,78 allows actors to portray their perceived ‘off-screen’ selves, while at the same time, evoking audience memory of the actors’ on-screen personas. For example, when Jason Alexander appeared in the episode ‘Thor’ (1999), he played himself with all the anxiety and short temper of his character George Costanza in the show Seinfeld. In this context, the show was the ideal vehicle for Brooks, whereby the very premise of the show encourages critical audiences to consider his history of performances. For this role, Brooks’s performance style in Curb Your Enthusiasm resulted in his idiolect undergoing significant change – thus maintaining his celebrity status at the expense of his reputation for particular ‘star’ performance skills. This time, in contrast to the loud, extroverted personality of Larry David, Brooks, now in his late seventies, in fact seems like a calmer, quieter, milder version of himself. Indeed, Brooks is upstaged by David’s outrageous delivery, big gestures and his distinctive ‘Jewish’ pattern of speech – as well as that of all his supporting characters, such as David’s in-show agent Jeff Greene, played by Jeff Garlin. In contrast, Brooks’s voice is this time far more gravelly now than in any previous performance, and in the context of the show, Brooks plays yet another straight man to David’s uncouth self. This transformation was notably reflected in the opinion of one Brooks fan commenting on the Internet Movie Database: Nowadays when I see him make guest appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm he seems like that old uncle who tries to make all the kids laugh at family get-togethers. The uncle was probably a funny kid back in high school – but now the years have caught up with him [and] his humor is just tired, dated, and boring.79

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Even so, Brooks’s series of performances in Curb Your Enthusiasm contributed towards his ‘star’ or ‘celebrity’ status, as well as drawing attention, more explicitly than ever, to his history of works in various media, past and present. When Larry David first encounters Brooks in the episode ‘Mel’s Offer’ he finds Brooks performing on stage in a karaoke bar, in which Brooks imitates the club-singing style on a microphone with long lead, with all the familiar mannerisms and inflections in his voice. In this scene, Brooks performs a rendition of ‘Just in Time’ (1956), best known for being performed by Tony Bennett, just as he did in a popular segment of his film High Anxiety, and on television including as far back as on The Dick Cavett Show and An Audience with Mel Brooks. More importantly, however, as the episode progresses, this appearance creates a synergy with Brooks’s current projects. For instance, when Brooks invites the show’s star Larry David to play the part of Zero Mostel in his then-running Broadway show The Producers (2001–7), he in effect delivers a withinshow advertisement for his production. This storyline even develops in subsequent episodes, including ‘Opening Night’ in which David enacts Brooks’s The Producers on stage – thus sustaining a potentially profitable synergy throughout the series between Brooks’s concurrent high-status projects on television and in Broadway.80 In this respect, Brooks’s 2004 performances in Curb Your Enthusiasm were typical of his strategy as practised throughout his long career – in which Brooks capitalised on his history of appearances and on potential synergy with his other current projects. It is only in recent years, however, that Brooks has benefited from the longevity of his stardom itself. The long-term result of his strategy has now become apparent, whereby it was only in the aftermath of his history of prolonged adaptations that Brooks was recognised as an Emmywinning sitcom actor, and his 2000 Year routine has been elevated from a ‘cult’ performance piece to a critically recognised ‘classic’ of American comedy. Another vivid result of this can be seen in Brooks’s series of appearances on a new generation of television programmes including The Simpsons, Mad About You and Curb Your Enthusiasm. It was in these most recent roles that Brooks capitalised on his celebrity, and relied most heavily on audience memory and affection for his past appearances in order to give his roles meaning – without relying on a consistent ‘star’ image for himself. This considered, it would seem that Brooks’s longevity itself, which allowed him the time to popularise his material so heavily – and in doing so, to earn that capital with his audience – has proved to be a significant contributing factor in his modern-day revival and his current critical prestige.

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Notes 1. Geoff King, Film Comedy (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), p. 32. 2. Philip Drake, ‘Performance in Post-Classical Comedy’, in Frank Krutnik (ed.), Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 196. 3. Philip Drake, ‘Jim Carrey: The Cultural Politics of Dumbing Down’, in Andy Willis (ed.), Film Stars: Hollywood and Beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 77. 4. Barry King, ‘Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form’, The Velvet Light Trap, 65 (Spring 2001), p. 9. 5. Timothy Corrigan, ‘Auteurs and the New Hollywood’, in Jon Lewis (ed.), The New American Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 43. 6. Ibid., p. 38. 7. Ibid., p. 59. 8. Geoff King, ‘Stardom in the Willennium’, in Thomas Austin and Martin Barker (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Stardom (London: Arnold, 2003), p. 73. 9. I define Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man routine as a ‘cult’ in the years 1961–83, because, again, like The Producers, it has been described as a ‘cult’ in press coverage. However, in this case, the perceived ‘subcultural ideology’ is a product of the character’s Yiddish identity, which at the time of the act’s first recording in 1961, separated Brooks from the cultural ‘mainstream’ of American comedians. While many American comedians were Jewish, such as Carl Reiner and Sid Caesar, none exhibited their Jewishness to the same degree as Brooks did in this routine. As referenced in my introduction, for a definition of ‘cult’ fandom in this context, see Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andy Willis, ‘Introduction’, in Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andy Willis (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 1. 10. Sonny Bunch, ‘2009 Kennedy Center Honoree: Mel Brooks’, Washington Times (4 December 2009), http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/ dec/04/2009-kennedy-center-honoree-mel-brooks/ (accessed 5 December 2009). 11. Andrew Sarris, ‘Picking the Funny Bone’, Village Voice (14 March 1974), p. 71. 12. Geraldine Fabrikant, ‘Talking Money with: Mel Brooks; A Funny Man Earns It The 2,000-Year-Old Way’, New York Times (26 October 1997), http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/26/business/talking-money-with-melbrooks-a-funny-man-earns-it-the-2000-year-old-way.html (accessed 23 October 2009). 13. ‘Cinema: The Producers’, Time (26 January 1968), http://www.time.

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14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

me l b r o o ks in the cu l t u r a l i n du s t r i e s com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,837773-1,00.html (accessed 13 August 2010). Henry Jenkins, ‘Acting Funny’, in Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (eds), Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 152. Gianluca Sergi, ‘Actors and the Sound Gang’, in Peter Kramer and Alan Lovell (eds), Screen Acting (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 127. David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 122. Toby Silverman Zinman, ‘Jewish Aporia: The Rhythm of Talking in Mamet’, Theatre Journal 44.2 (May 1999), p. 215. The kind of ‘newsreader’ persona and the formal way of speaking that Carl Reiner crafted in his performances in the 2000 Year Old Man record series was first popularised in his television acting for Sid Caesar in the 1950s, in which he regularly played Caesar’s office colleague, or family friend in skits on Your Show of Shows (NBC, 1950–4). ‘Cinema: The Producers’, Time. Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., 1973), p. 282. Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Colombia University Press, 1992), p. 22. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 24. Renata Adler, ‘The Producers’, New York Times (19 March 1968), http:// movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html (accessed 5 January 2004). Gordon Gow, ‘The Producers’, Films and Filming, 16.4 (February 1970), p. 53. Tom Milne, Monthly Film Bulletin, 36.430 (1969), p. 233. Wes D. Gehring, Parody As Film Genre: Never Give a Saga an Even Break (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), p. 21. Brooks performed numerous adaptations of his 2000 Year routine over the years. In 1975, he adapted his routine into a cartoon version, ambitiously titled The Animated Classic: The 2000 Year Old Man (1975) – the simplistic animation of which was in a style similar to that of The Flintstones (ABC, 1960–6). Although it was never broadcast, Brooks also enacted his routine with British actor Peter Sellers, a copy of which was kept by Sellers. This is documented in Peter Lydon, ‘The Goons and a bomb on Broadway’, Sight and Sound, 5.2 (February 1995), p. 39. More recently, there have been reports that Brooks is in talks to feature in a new television special, performing the routine with Carl Reiner for HBO. See Richard Johnson, ‘Mel Brooks Wants to Make 2000 Year Old Man’, New York Post (29 June 2009), http:// www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/item_0lftqYdzGVkbTSlyz9eo5L (accessed 30 October 2009). Bill Adler and Jeffrey Feinman, Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976), p. 68.

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30. See ‘Cinema: The Producers’, Time. 31. Allen’s works for The New Yorker are republished along with other pieces in Woody Allen, Complete Prose (New York: Wings Books, 1991). 32. Jenkins, ‘Acting Funny’, in Brunovska Karnick and Jenkins (eds), Classical Hollywood, p. 152. 33. Hal Hinson. ‘Lost in “Spaceballs”; Laughs Missing From Mel Brooks’ Genre Spoof ’, Washington Post (24 June 1987), http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/spaceballspghinson_a0c94a. htm (accessed 14 October 2006). 34. Martin Barker, ‘News, Reviews, Clues, Interviews and Other Ancillary Materials – A Critique and Research Proposal’, Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies (February 2004), http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article. php?issue=feb2004&id=246§ion=article&q=News%2C+Reviews%2C +Clues%2C+Interviews+and+Other+Ancillary+Materials+%96+A+Criti que+and+Research+Proposal (accessed 9 October 2007). 35. David Elliot, ‘Blazing Saddles’, Film Heritage, 9.4 (Summer 1974), p. 36. 36. For a description of the kind of ‘out of the frame’ acting that Brooks was famous for, see James Naremore, ‘The Performance Frame’, in Jeremy G. Butler (ed.), Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 109. 37. King, Film Comedy, p. 33. 38. Steve Seidman, ‘Performance, Enunciation and Self-Reference in Hollywood Comedian Comedy’, in Krutnik (ed.), Hollywood Comedians, p. 25. 39. After Gene Wilder was acclaimed by critics, including by Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, for his neurotic and nervous performance routines for Mel Brooks in The Producers (1968) and Young Frankenstein (1974), Wilder abandoned Brooks to write and direct his own movies, the first being Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother (1975), often using members of Brooks’s crew. It was only Wilder’s leaving that Mel Brooks says forced him into film acting: ‘I never would have been the actor you see here if Gene Wilder hadn’t deserted me . . . I miss him very much. I hope one day Gene and I can get back to doing movies again.’ See Mel Brooks,‘Audio Commentary with Mel Brooks’, Spaceballs, spoof ed, disc 2, DVD, directed by Mel Brooks (1987; Santa Monica, CA: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Home Entertainment, 2005). 40. Brian Case, ‘Cinefile: Brian Case on High Anxiety’, Time Out (2 February 1994), p. 143. 41. Gordon Gow, ‘Reviews: High Anxiety’, Films and Filming, 24.9 (June 1978), p. 34. 42. Mel Brooks reprised his role of President Skroob in his voiceover work for his cartoon adaptation of his film, Spaceballs: the Animated Series (G4, 2008). 43. Geoff Brown, ‘Life Stinks’, The Times (19 September 1991), p. 15. 44. Ibid., p. 15. 45. Peter Brunette, ‘The Three Stooges: De(con)structive Comedy’, in Andrew

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46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

me l b r o o ks in the cu l t u r a l i n du s t r i e s S. Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 175. Ibid., p. 175. Shaun Usher, ‘Mel and Greif ’, Daily Mail (20 September 1991), p. 34. Cart, ‘Life Stinks’, Variety (27 May 1991), p. 80. Alexander Walker, ‘Rough and Fumble’, Evening Standard (19 September 1991), p. 37. For publications that were especially critical of Brooks’s change in persona in Life Stinks, see Sean French, ‘Life Stinks’, Observer (22 September 1991), p. 56 and Geoff Brown, ‘Life Stinks’, Sight and Sound, 1.6 (October 1991), p. 52. Mel Brooks, ‘Commentary’, Life Stinks, disc 1, DVD, directed by Mel Brooks (Santa Monica, CA: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Home Entertainment, 2005). Rudy De Luca, ‘Commentary’, Life Stinks, disc 1. Sheila Johnstone, ‘Tapping into the Depths’, Independent (20 September 1991), p. 16. Peter Cox, ‘Bum Gags Make Life a Winner’, Sun (20 September 1991), p. 17. Georgia Brown, ‘Life Stinks’, Village Voice (13 August 1991), p. 60. Tom Hutchinson, ‘Poor Taste in a Skid Row Farce’, Mail on Sunday (22 September 1991), p. 40. Janet Maslin, ‘Life Stinks’, New York Times (26 July 1991), http://movies2. nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=2&res=9D0CE0DB1430F935A15754C0A 967958260&oref=slogin&oref=login (accessed 6 September 2007). Alexander Walker, ‘Rough and Fumble’, Evening Standard (19 September 1991), p. 37. Brooks also played an endearing, unkempt, friend of the family-type character as mental patient Jake Gordon in Ezio Greggio’s Italian-American production Svitati (1999), titled Screw Loose in the US and UK. The first scene of this straight-to-DVD movie portrayed a scruffy-haired Mel Brooks impersonating a doctor, wearing a traditional white coat, hitting a fellow patient over the head as a kind of ‘cure’ – his logic being, to take his patient’s mind off their other ailments. This was a joke adapted from Brooks’s 2000 Year routine, in which Brooks describes such an approach as a pre-medicine technique used in early human history. ‘Annie Hall’, The Times (15 October 1994), p. 69. In 1992, Allen’s personal relationships became the focus of his press – as is more typical of celebrity coverage. For example, see Dennis Hevesi, ‘Woody Allen Tells His Side to a Magazine’, New York Times (23 August 1992), http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/23/nyregion/woody-allen-tells-hisside-to-a-magazine.html (accessed 5 October 2011). A. O. Scott, ‘The Old Ennui and the Lost Generation’, New York Times (19 May 2011), http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/movies/midnight-inparis-by-woody-allen-with-owen-wilson-review.html (accessed 1 October 2011).

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63. Andrew S. Horton, ‘Beginnings: The Unbearable Lightness of Comic Film Theory’, in Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/Theory, p. 10. 64. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 13. 65. Ibid., p. 13. 66. Robin Brant, ‘Blair’s Simpsons role is great PR’, BBC (24 November 2003), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3234778.stm (accessed 30 October 2009). 67. Seth Rogan, quoted in Associated Press, ‘Seth Rogen pens “Simpsons” episode: Actor co-writes, lends voice to Fox toon’, Variety (27 September 2009), http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118009237.html?categoryid= 14&cs=1 (accessed 30 September 2009). 68. Ricky Gervais in Gary Susman, ‘Brit Wit’, Entertainment Weekly (23 December 2004), http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1011712,00.html (accessed 30 September 2009). 69. ‘Awards’, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences,http://www.emmys. tv/awards/awardsearch.php?action=search_db&selectYearFrom=1949&sel ectYearTo=2004&textPerson=carl+reiner (accessed 2 November 2006). 70. Brett Mills, Television Sitcom (London: British Film Institute, 2005), p. 72. 71. Ibid., p. 72. 72. Paul Rieser, ‘Introduction to The Penis’, The Mad About You Collection, disc 3, DVD (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Television, 2005). 73. Ibid. 74. Mandy Stadtmiller, ‘None Finer than Bits from Reiner’, New York Post (24 November 2009), http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/none_ finer_than_bits_from_reiner_WLBiPqW277pQATp9nUXSlJ (accessed 24 November 2009). 75. Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 107. 76. Virginia Heffernan, ‘Interviewer of Old Is Back and Sounding, Well, Old’, New York Times (7 September 2006), http://tv.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/ arts/07cave.html (accessed 30 September 2009). 77. Jonathan Jones, ‘The art of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm’, Guardian (19 October 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/oct/19/larry-david-curb-your-enthusiasm (accessed 30 October 2009). 78. Ibid. 79. MyDarkStar, ‘Mel Brooks’ humor begins its downfall’, Internet Movie Database, comment posted on 14 April 2004, http://imdb.com/title/ tt0094012/usercomments?filter=hate (accessed 14 August 2006). Italics added. 80. For an expanded examination of the synergy between The Producers on Broadway and Brooks’s cameos in Curb Your Enthusiasm, see Chapter 5.

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C H A PTER 4

Recycled Hollywood for the TV Generation: The Rise of Parody and the Fall of Mel Brooks the Director, 1974–95 Whereas existing academic studies have examined Mel Brooks’s career as a film writer and director, no study has yet accurately identified his production strategy or his actual contribution to film production trends. Dan Harries and Wes D. Gehring have credited Brooks for his adaptations of film content, specifically for his contribution to the perceived rise of the parody film genre in the mid-1970s.1 Similarly, in his study of the New Hollywood era, John Cawelti described Brooks’s strategy as a practice of recycling content from older Hollywood cinema, like other filmmakers of that era, including Roman Polanski in Chinatown (1974) and George Lucas in Star Wars (1977).2 However, these studies have not identified Brooks’s whole contribution. In short, Brooks has not just recycled Hollywood film, but has hybridised film content together with a wide range of content from television. It is through hybridising film with television that Brooks made his reputation as a director with Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974), and in doing so, contributed towards a cycle of television-film hybrids that continues today. As I explain, the rise of televisionfilm hybrids has been central to the production of what has come to be understood by critics as the parody film genre. Furthermore, it was, in part, Brooks’s own apparent choice not to capitalise on television content to the same extent in his subsequent films Spaceballs (1987), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) that brought about the end of his career as a film director. To explain the significance of Brooks’s contribution to Hollywood film production – in particular, his contribution to the rising production of parody films, it is useful to consider the comprehensive study of parody made by Dan Harries in his book Film Parody (2000). Harries suggests that because of the substantial increase in the number of Hollywood parody films produced since the mid-1970s, audiences are now aware of their ‘standardized and predictable manner’,3 thus enabling them to recognise parody as a film genre in its own right. By citing examples from

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films such as Airplane! (1980), Spaceballs and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) – as well as some significantly earlier films such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Bob Hope’s The Paleface (1948), and Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (1969) – Harries demonstrates the uniform strategies whereby parody filmmakers appropriate and renew content from previous films.4 Harries argues that the film parody genre can be recognised by a standardised set of production strategies whereby filmmakers reproduce content from a source film with some notable differences for comic effect – for example, by altering costumes, sets, or by adopting production techniques that deviate in some way from that source. This is no clearer than in Harries’s concise definition of the parody genre, whereby he suggests that parodies are recognised by ‘the process of recontextualizing a target or source text through the transformation of its textual (and contextual) elements, thus creating a new text’.5 For example, Harries notes: ‘In Airplane!, what begins as a typical pan of the plane’s control panel turns into a long-running shot of countless controls that would spatially exceed the confines of the cockpit.’6 Since filmmakers have produced so many parodies with this strategy, Harries suggests that audiences interpret parody films in a standardised fashion, in short, by enjoying the ‘oscillation between similarity to and difference from the target’.7 It is also important to note that Harries’s systematic and very useful analysis of production strategies in the film parody genre is almost entirely cinema focused. In other words, Harries’s study suggests that since the rise of the parody genre in the mid-1970s, the vast majority of Hollywood’s parody films appropriate content only from other films – with a broad neglect of non-film media. Notably, this is in contrast to Harries’s historical overview of parody production trends outside the Hollywood film industry, whereby intermedial adaptations have been common, for example, in animations including ‘Warner Bros. parody of nature documentaries with Wacky Wildlife (1940); and the now classic sci-fi parody, Duck Dodgers in the 24th½ Century (1953)’.8 Brooks’s production strategy prompts a rethinking of Harries’s conclusions regarding the production of parody films, specifically in terms of how filmmakers adapt content from existing films, and also in terms of his film-focused understanding of the sources employed. In order to understand exactly how Brooks’s projects make it necessary to rethink parody filmmaking, it is useful to consider the study of adaptation by Christine Geraghty in Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (2008). In this study, Geraghty suggests that film adaptations are very rarely reproductions of just one text, and that, in fact, audiences

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are very likely to identify multiple adaptations from numerous disparate sources within the text, just by focusing on individual elements, including themes in the storyline, the performance of star actors, or the production values of the work.9 As such, the process of interpretation may often be more than simply based around the perceived ‘oscillation’ between the source film and its film parody as Harries describes it, but the oscillation of numerous texts combined together.10 This concept is captured best in Geraghty’s notion of ‘layering’, where she suggests that when audiences are aware that a film is an adaptation, they are likely to be looking for meaning within it, and consciously considering the numerous other texts within the film: thinking about adaptations in terms of layering at least allows for the possibility of seeing through one film (in both senses) to another and acknowledges that the effect of simultaneity might draw on understandings built up through time and knowledge. The layering process involves an accretion of deposits over time, a recognition of ghostly presences, and a shadowing or doubting of what is on the surface by what is glimpsed behind.11

Brooks’s films are layered in just this way. Instead of the formulaic reproduction of content from one film source at a time, as described by Harries, Brooks’s films Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It were manufactured as hybrids of content. In looking at the production and critical reception of Brooks’s films in a broad range of sources, including newspapers, magazines, film periodicals, and in the discussions of online communities, it is evident that critics have commonly recognised these hybrids, sometimes recognising more than two sources at once. In addition, Brooks’s films are not limited to appropriations of film content alone. Instead, his parodies also appropriate content from television, and other non-film media including Broadway theatre. Since Brooks’s film parodies are manufactured from layers of different media together, his films thus provide a new perspective for understanding the history of Hollywood film production since the New Hollywood era, and in particular, the historical development of the film parody genre since the mid-1970s. Furthermore, Brooks’s films are only part of a long history of similar television-film hybrids produced in the Hollywood film industry, especially within the film parody genre. Brooks’s changing production strategy, in the industrial context of this tradition, has resulted in his perceived rise and fall as a director, and has contributed to his ‘survivor’ reputation today. To explain, Brooks’s film Blazing Saddles made $119,500,00012 on its theatrical release in the USA, and Young Frankenstein, released

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later that same year, made $86,273,333 in US theatres.13 Following these blockbuster films, a long history of other artists produced similar hybrids, most notably, the films The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Airplane!, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) and Repossessed (1990). Notably, the Hollywood film industry has become increasingly dependent on the output of television since the 1990s, as is evident in the rising tide of name-for-name television-show adaptations, including The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), The Dukes of Hazzard (2005), Bewitched (2005), and more recently, the adaptation of Brooks’s own 1960s television sitcom, Get Smart (2008). It was following Hollywood’s increased production of television-film hybrids that Brooks suffered his perceived downfall with his subsequent films, Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. This can be understood by considering his differing production strategy for these films – in short, his neglect of content from television and other non-film media. In terms of box-office sales, his film Spaceballs made only $36.7m in the USA in 1987.14 Robin Hood: Men in Tights did less well, making $24.3m in the USA in 1993,15 and Dracula: Dead and Loving It made only $10.6m in the USA in 1995.16 By looking at the reception of these films with critics, it is evident that Brooks’s latter films were judged against a set of critical expectations generated by broader trends in Hollywood film production. Following the rise of parody as a tradition of film-television hybrids, critics expected parody films to deliver eclectic or ‘innovative’ combinations of texts from a variety of ‘popular’ sources. While suitable content is not exclusively found in television, Brooks’s early films, and those of others, provide evidence that television is a reliable source of suitable content. In retrospect, Brooks’s mixture of critical praise and condemnation for his parody films, accumulated throughout his career, has contributed towards his ‘survivor’ reputation today. First, his films Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein are both regarded by many film critics today as his greatest directorial works. In 1999, Adam Smith described these films in Empire as ‘comedic gold dust’17 and Brooks ‘at the very apex of his powers’.18 Similarly, in 2000, Mike Flaherty described Blazing Saddles in Entertainment Weekly as ‘kitchen sink mayhem’19 and credited Brooks with having ‘expanded the frontiers of the lowbrow comedy’.20 Most significantly, the American Film Institute today canonises these films as the sixth and thirteenth greatest film comedies of all time in their online archive ‘100 Years . . . 100 Laughs’.21 Notably, the films on this list are acclaimed by AFI director and CEO Jean Picker Firstenberg for having ‘enriched America’s film heritage’.22 With the critical accolades and the

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commercial success together, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein made Brooks into a highly respected American filmmaker. However, Brooks’s reputation today as a parody filmmaker is also tainted with perceived ‘failure’. Along with a clear trajectory of commercial popularity – which peaked in the 1974 and then gradually declined in the period 1987–95 – Brooks also suffered a critical backlash against his latter films. For just a few examples of the harsh condemnation by film critics, Variety described Spaceballs as a ‘misguided parody’,23 Rita Kempley in the Washington Post described Robin Hood: Men in Tights as ‘pointless and untimely’,24 and Dracula: Dead and Loving It was described by Ben Backley in Sight and Sound as ‘woefully short of the mark’.25 However, these kinds of criticisms, as well as Brooks’s increasingly limited commercial success from 1987 to 1995, provided Brooks with a perceived ‘obstacle’ to be overcome, which ultimately contributed towards his unique status today as a ‘multimedia survivor’. Brooks’s reputation as a parody filmmaker is very different from that of Woody Allen, who was also a significant contributor to the parody film genre during the 1970s. In contrast, Allen adapted less ‘popular’ and less ‘current’ texts, including 1940s Hollywood film noir, European cinema, and Russian literature – none of which had the commercial appeal of Brooks’s adaptations of then-current US television shows. For example, Allen’s film Play it Again, Sam (1972) adapted content from Casablanca (1942), his film Love and Death (1975) hybridised content from Russian authors Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, and later, his film Annie Hall (1977) hybridised a storyline and directorial techniques appropriated from the films of Ingmar Bergman with other content including a brief animated scene appropriating Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). With these more obscure sources, Allen’s parody films were significantly less commercially successful than Brooks’s early films. Allen’s biggest box-office hit, Annie Hall, grossed a mere $38.25m in 1977, and his previous films Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972), Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death consistently grossed only $18–$20m.26 Nevertheless, Allen’s parody films demonstrate a further layer to the tradition, demonstrating the historical importance of literature and European cinema to the production of Hollywood film parody in the 1970s. In order to study Brooks’s contribution within the parody film genre it is useful to consider the approach employed by some leading scholars in this field. Fredric Jameson defined parody by its contrast to what he determines to be another similar form of reproduction, namely pastiche, noting that parody reproduces ‘idiosyncrasies and eccentricities to

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produce an imitation which mocks the original’.27 In this way, Jameson defined parody against pastiche, which is, in his words, ‘a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter’.28 A very similar analysis is provided by Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (1985), in which she similarly notes that parody ‘is related to burlesque, travesty, pastiche, plagiarism, quotation, and allusion, but remains distinct from them’.29 As such, Hutcheon also argues that parody is defined by its ironic or satirical function: ‘Ironic “trans-contextualization” is what distinguishes parody from pastiche or imitation’.30 In terms of these studies, it is my finding that Brooks’s films are in fact best described as pastiche rather than parody. To explain, Brooks’s films have been written about by critics in many different ways, sometimes perceived as homage, sometimes as burlesque, sometimes as parody, sometimes as satire, and sometimes as spoof – overall, without any consistent expectation of what Jameson describes as the ‘satirical impulse’. Brooks’s films deliver a pastiche of content that allow audiences to prolong their pleasure of previous texts, along with numerous jokes – but this is all without any particular satiric or ulterior motive. In contrast, my research suggests that audiences, in fact, have a different set of expectations for parody, in film at least. In short, my examination of critical reactions suggests that the most important factors are whether or not the sources are ‘popular’ or not, and whether these hybrid combinations are perceived to be ‘innovative’. While these expectations cannot be said to be defining factors in the commercial success of Brooks’s parody or ‘pastiche’ films, I suggest that the public perception and judgement with this criteria is at least a significant factor in their box-office sales.

Rethinking New Hollywood: Intermedial Blockbusters in 1974 The existing studies of the New Hollywood era have largely been cinemacentric in their approach, and have described Brooks’s parody films Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein simply as recycling Hollywood film content, just like other films at that time.31 This interpretation is clearly evident in John Cawelti’s landmark study of the era, in which he described the way films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Little Big Man (1970), Chinatown, and Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, were adaptations of older films – together contributing to a phase of production that Cawelti refers to as ‘generic transformation’.32 He illustrates this transformation

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by suggesting that filmmakers were recycling popular movies of the past in four different ways – which he describes as ‘humorous burlesque, evocation of nostalgia, de-mythologization of generic myth, and the affirmation of the myth as myth’.33 In each case, Cawelti suggests that filmmakers transformed the conventions of storyline and characterisation because audiences in the 1970s were familiar with the history of Hollywood films, and they were tired of their conventions. Notably, this era of production was made possible through the rise of a new generation, which Cawelti credits with ‘a kind of sophistication about the history of genres different from earlier publics because of the tremendous number of past films now regularly shown on television and by college film societies’.34 This trend of recycling in Hollywood film production is discussed in detail by Thomas Schatz, who advanced Cawelti’s approach by studying the most commercially successful films of the era. Writing about movies such as Jaws (1975) and Star Wars, Schatz suggests the industry entered a ‘blockbuster syndrome’,35 in which studios produced films by reusing a selection of popular conventions in storyline and characterisations. In this way, Hollywood filmmakers were capitalising on tried and tested film material, instead of inventing anything more ‘original’.36 While Schatz suggests that these films were in some way entertaining on their own merit, he thus suggests they were most engaging to those audience groups familiar with the history of films that they reprised. For example, Schatz notes Star Wars: ‘an inspired amalgam of Western, film noir, hardboiled detective, and sci fi’, which he suggests ‘actually “opens” the film to different readings (and readers), allowing for multiple interpretive strategies and thus broadening the potential audience appeal’.37 This strategy goes beyond just capitalising on familiar content by making calculated revisions of older films in the same tradition, as Little Big Man was a revision of previous Western films. Instead, Schatz identifies an eclectic range of cinema contained within the most successful blockbuster films. By making films that recycled and hybridised an eclectic range of Hollywood films together, uniting perceived exclusive genres, Schatz suggests these filmmakers managed to appeal to an unprecedented variety of different audience groups at the same time, beyond that of perceived ‘classical’ Hollywood. For example, Schatz describes the various film genres within Jaws: Jaws was essentially an action film and a thriller, of course, though it effectively melded various genres and story types. It tapped into the monster movie tradition with a revenge-of-nature subtext (like King Kong, The Birds, et al), and in the film’s latter stages the shark begins to take on supernatural, even Satanic, qualities à la Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.38

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Brooks’s films Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein are to some extent part of this recycling Hollywood production trend, catering for the same post-1970 generation who were increasingly familiar with older films through television.39 By examining the performances, editing, writing, cinematography and techniques of direction in these films, it is apparent that Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein were in many respects composites of landmark genre-films, popular Westerns and films of the Horror genre – in a standard Hollywood practice of appealing to regular filmgoers, described by Geoff King as ‘pre-selling’.40 However, in contradiction to Cawelti’s cinema-centric analysis, the way Brooks’s transformed that film content in Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein expands this model of recycling. Brooks’s films are also layered with material from ‘popular’ television programmes, typified by popular long-running shows including The Carol Burnett Show (CBS, 1967–78), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC, 1969–74) and The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine (ABC, 1971–2).41 By appropriating this television content, Brooks’s films reached out to an even broader potential range of audience groups. In financial terms, this production strategy was very successful for the studios, but not as profitable for Brooks himself, as might have been expected. The production costs for both Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein was very low – neither were ‘event films’ or relied on special effects, and neither cast the most expensive Hollywood stars. As a result, Blazing Saddles cost only $2.6m42 and Young Frankenstein cost only $2.8m43 to produce. However, as already mentioned, Blazing Saddles took box-office sales of $119,500,00044 in the USA on its theatrical release, and Young Frankenstein sold $86,273,333 in the USA.45 Most of this profit was taken by the studios, Warner Bros, and Twentieth Century Fox respectively, and for each, Brooks only received a relatively meagre fee. This is described in his account in the New York Times, in which it quotes Brooks saying that he was underpaid by calculating studio executives: He said studios are creative in calculating their costs in ways that hold net profits down. ‘With net profits, you’ll never see a thing’, he said. ‘They have this thing called rolling break-even, and the accountants are told to keep rolling it so it never breaks even, because that’s when they pay profit participants’. In truth his share of net profit over 23 years probably came to $5 million for each film, but Mr. Brooks maintains that he should at least have received a bigger upfront payment. ‘When I saw how much money “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” made – let’s say they made $150 million between them’, he said, his voice trailing off. ‘It was my child. Don’t you think they would give me $5 million? Nope. I didn’t make $1 million’. ‘The artists risk their reputation’, he said. ‘The studios risk their money. When they have a big surprise, like “Young Frankenstein”, you would think there would be a thank you.’46

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Blazing Saddles (1974) Blazing Saddles was Brooks’s first and most commercially successful hybrid of television shows, film, and Broadway content. It was following the commercial success of Blazing Saddles that Brooks first realised that his film production strategy could be very profitable, and, as he admits today, it was following this revelation that reaching a mass audience became his primary motivation in the years since: When I made Blazing Saddles I realised that maybe I had taken the wrong route . . . I did Twelve Chairs (1970) which I thought was an important funny little movie and I liked it. I didn’t mind directing that either. But when I got to Blazing Saddles I realised that I was . . . I don’t know . . . I was deserting my private muse and I was getting into big stuff. That may have been my mistake. Maybe I should have gone on making stuff like The Producers (1968) and The Twelve Chairs and stayed away from this business of having to fill so many seats in so many theatres. Anyway, I got stuck. Blazing Saddles was a hit and that was the making and the breaking of me.47

As scholars have already recognised, Brooks’s Blazing Saddles was partially a product of previous Hollywood films, adopting the most popular clichés and iconography of what was then the Hollywood Western. By recreating its sets, costumes, storyline and character-types, the massive popularity of the Western genre ensured that audiences were already familiar with the material, as identified by John Cawelti in his book The Six Gun Mystique (1975) and Jim Kitses in Horizons West (1969).48 Rio Bravo (1959) is perhaps the most easily identifiable film to be recycled in the storyline of Blazing Saddles, with its reformed drinker gunslinger as town deputy. The storyline of Blazing Saddles – which is concerned with the opposition between a local town of pioneers and a land-grabbing businessman – was also familiar, most notably from the film Shane (1953), in which the saviour to the story is yet another drunken gunslinger who arrives as a stranger in the town. Brooks’s hybrid of Hollywood film Westerns is most apparent in Blazing Saddles, with Gene Wilder in the role of the Waco Kid. In his characterisation as an alcoholic ex-gunslinger, and his ‘relaxed’ persona, Wilder was widely recognised as a recreation of Hollywood’s washed-up cowboy heroes. Typically, Richard Combs in Sight and Sound noted, ‘Gene Wilder provides a tremendously bleary-eyed imitation of Dean Martin trembling through Rio Bravo’,49 and Jan Dawson in the Monthly Film Bulletin notes, ‘Gene Wilder manages to weld elements disparately borrowed from Sergeant York, The Magnificent Seven, Rio Bravo and even Cat Ballou into a single, irresistibly appealing character’.50 By recycling

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performances from a range of the most popular, light-hearted Western cinema, ranging from the Howard Hawks film Rio Bravo through to zany Western-comedy Cat Ballou (1965), Wilder’s character was given immediate depth to a broad audience who were familiar with these famous Hollywood figures. However, Blazing Saddles more generally appropriated content from television Westerns. This genre was very familiar to television audiences by the mid-1970s – as documented by William Boddy in his essay ‘Sixty Million Viewers Can’t Be Wrong: The Rise and Fall of the Television Western’51 – meaning the appropriation of that content in Blazing Saddles was very likely to be recognised by a mass audience. Brooks capitalised on these shows from the first scene of Blazing Saddles, which delivers a wide shot of an old Western landscape, accompanied by a soundtrack performed by Frankie Laine – who was most famous for singing the theme tune to the popular television series Rawhide (CBS, 1959–66).52 According to Brooks, Laine was unaware that the song was a joke, and performed it in the recording studio with all the sincerity of his previous song – even though the lyrics were intentionally awful.53 The appropriation of Rawhide was further indicated by the sounds of whiplashes scattered throughout the Blazing Saddles theme – as heard in the introduction of Rawhide, which portrays a cattle drive. In addition, the way the Warner Bros emblem dissolves into flames at the start of Blazing Saddles also recalled memories of the introduction to Bonanza (NBC, 1959–73), in which a Wild West map similarly dissolves into flames. The critical reception of these appropriations suggests that critics’ affection for the television sources was transferred seamlessly to Brooks’s film. Notably, the title tune for Blazing Saddles was nominated for an Academy award, and many critics mentioned the opening very favourably – often admiring the revival of the television Western tradition, and the notoriety of its star singer. For example, Gordon Gow in Films and Filming noted: ‘I started chortling from the outset when the Warner Brothers trade mark was demolished in flames. Then a smidgen of nostalgia crept in as Frankie Laine himself gave voice to the title song.’54 Also, Roy Pennington in the Hollywood Reporter credited Brooks for ‘immediately setting the incredibly irreverent tone with a hilarious parody in the title song.’55 Beneath the surface of the Western costumes and settings, the gagbased writing in Blazing Saddles and its fragmented set-piece structure followed in the tradition of the 1970s television skit-orientated variety shows, such as The Dean Martin Show (NBC, 1965–74) and The Carol Burnett Show. Following the style of these programmes, Blazing Saddles comprises various short segments that display only minimal continuity.

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Furthermore, Brooks’s direction of Blazing Saddles employed many techniques associated with television. Most obviously, the framing of Blazing Saddles, which is simplistic throughout, generally using a static camera, with occasional cuts to close-up, and with very little of the wide panoramic landscapes seen in Hollywood Westerns. There is an unrealistic brightness to the lighting of every shot, which together with the woodenness of the set-design, makes every scene look like a television studio set. Critics generally recognised the film’s affinity with television production values, and in the case of Beau in Variety, also its potential appeal to a perceived broad commercial audience by result: If comedies are measured solely by the number of yocks they generate from audiences, then Mel Brooks’ ‘Blazing Saddles’ must be counted a success. The Warner Bros. release, produced by Michael Hertzberg, spoofs oldtime westerns with an avalanche of one-liners, vaudeville routines, campy shticks, sight gags, satiric imitations and comic anachronisms. Few viewers will have time between laughs to complain that pic is essentially a raunchy, protracted version of a television comedy skit. Box office should be merry, especially in urban and collegiate situations.56

Many actors in Blazing Saddles were known best for their television work. Notably, the way such actors can function in adaptations has been explained by Thomas Leitch as ‘microtexts’.57 Leitch describes how producers often cast a variety of famous actors to play Scrooge in television and film adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Each of these actors in some way reinvents the source character being played, giving that character a new dimension through the audience memory of the actor’s previous roles. As Leitch notes: ‘Even though adaptation theorists consider each of these productions an adaptation of Dickens’s story, the major precursor text for a very large number of viewers is the star rather than the author or the author’s story.’58 By adopting this casting strategy, television and film producers can hybridise A Christmas Carol with the contemporary text associated with the star actor, thus making a new text that potentially appeals to a crossover of audience groups. Brooks employed this strategy in Blazing Saddles by casting several television actors, most notably Harvey Korman, who performed the role of Hedley Lamarr in a flamboyant, audience-conscious way, appropriating his work in the long-running comedy variety programme, The Carol Burnett Show, for which he won four Emmys and a Golden Globe.59 During his career with Carol Burnett, Korman delivered much of the same kind of material as he did in Blazing Saddles – as noted in 2000 by Susan King in the Los Angeles Times, the show featured ‘skits, spoofs of old movies, musical production numbers, guest stars and a wonderful cast

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of regulars’.60 Korman’s performance style in The Carol Burnett Show was typified by exaggeration, audience-conscious looks, and his undisguised ‘camp’ persona and behaviours, in particular his habit of corpsing on stage. As Cheng in USA Today notes, Korman was ‘famous for trying, and usually failing, to keep a straight face’.61 It was just this kind of behaviour that defined his role in Blazing Saddles, with looks to the camera and ostentatious overacting (moments of anger that are seemingly disproportionate to the situation), culminating in an excessively dramatic speech (in a far louder and deeper voice than that of his character in the film so far, and in an uncharacteristically serious tone). In that speech Korman again draws attention to his performance style by announcing: ‘You will only be risking your lives, whilst I will be risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.’ Korman was popular, and his critical coverage suggests that his television fame was a significant factor in critics’ experience of his performance in Blazing Saddles. To examine the way Korman is mentioned in the press, praise for his performance was almost always given in tandem with a reminder about his career in television. Typically, Korman was described by Vincent Canby in the New York Times as ‘a gifted comic actor who is so fine as Carol Burnett’s television co-star’.62 However, his performance in Blazing Saddles was not just a pleasurable revival of his previous work, but rather an adaptation in and of itself, whereby his move from the television studio to this more ‘grand’ cinematic medium was itself a novelty. This sentiment was captured best by Beau in Variety, who noted, pic is handily stolen by Harvey Korman . . . Korman, here cast as the mellifluously villainous Hedley Lamarr (get it?), has long been a regular on CBS’ ‘The Carol Burnett Show’, where week in and week out he has offered some of the choicest caricatures available in any medium. He is just as wittily funny on the big screen.63

Another selection of television microtexts can be identified within the performance of the actor Slim Pickens, as the dumpy side-kick Taggart. Pickens was a regular television Western player in the 1970s, having appeared in shows including Alias Smith and Jones (ABC, 1971–3), Gunsmoke (CBS, 1964–72), Bonanza and Rawhide. In addition, Pickens also breaks with the conventions of ‘classical’ performance, which could be expected of his Western setting, by making references to 1970s popular culture, and on occasion displaying an awareness of the film’s production. In one notable scene, Korman, playing Hedley Lamarr, steps towards the camera, his finger pointed in the air as he dictates his scheme to take over the town of Rockridge. Pickens steps forward too, but realising he’s encroaching on Korman’s space in this dramatic shot, awkwardly shuffles

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backwards like a television actor in a live variety skit, overstepping his mark. More obviously, it is Pickens who takes his hat off and exclaims: ‘What in the Wide World of Sports is going on here?’ – referring to the television show of the same title (ABC, 1961–98). As was often recognised by critics, Blazing Saddles was littered with jokes and sequences appropriated from a broad range of television shows and cartoons. In one example, as Richard Combs in Sight and Sound notes, Blazing Saddles shows Cleavon Little ‘running his own gamut of imitations from Roy Rogers to Bugs Bunny’.64 Bugs Bunny was a very popular television character in the 1970s, and his first feature film Bugs Bunny Superstar (1975) was shortly to hit American theatres. This character is adapted in one scene in which Little defeats the monstrous character Mongo, played by ex-American footballer and television celebrity Alex Karras, in a sequence that very closely resembles a Bugs Bunny cartoon. First, Little enters the scene in the disguise of a Bellboy-type uniform, and exclaims, in a high-pitched voice (unlike his usual 1970s AfricanAmerican dialect): ‘Candy-gram for Mongo!’ The performance takes on a more cartoonesque quality when, after Little has delivered the package, he puts his fingers in his ears and marches out the door. His actions are all exaggerated, and when he walks, he takes unusually high steps in a frantic rhythm. As this happens, we hear the musical ditty made famous by the ending of Warner Bros cartoons. Brooks’s adaptations in Blazing Saddles were not just of film and television, but also Broadway content as well – as seen in the various distinctive musical set pieces in which content from all three is hybridised together. In one such segment, lead character Bart and his fellow black railroad workers are ordered to perform a ‘good ol’ slave song’. Their white bosses encourage them to sing ‘Camptown Races’. Instead, Bart and his co-workers lean together in formation, clutching their hats in their hands, and break into a sophisticated harmony of Cole Porter’s ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’, taken from the musical Anything Goes (1924). This musical number was typical of the kind of ‘easy-listening’ song and dance act that was so popular on American television in the 1970s, which guests such as Gene Kelly and the Mills Brothers regularly performed on long-running programmes like The Dean Martin Show. Similarly, The Carol Burnett Show itself comprised song and dance routines as well as sketches. It was, however, only in syndication that the musicals were cut from the programme because of the expense of paying the musicians’ union.65 As such, this scene in Blazing Saddles delivered a hybrid of the television Western, in terms of its characters, costumes and scenario, together with Broadway material, in terms of the song itself and the performance-style of the actors.

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This fragmented, surreal ending to Blazing Saddles – whereby Brooks’s brawling cowboys burst into the modern setting of an MGM musical set – was very much like the kind of TV material that was popular in the 1970s, especially the era’s ‘hip’ comedy shows. Most famously, the link between a series of very different settings and the production-aware attitude of the characters is very similar to those typical in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which started broadcasting in 1969. For example, this particular sequence of ‘production conscious’ comedy in Blazing Saddles was very similar to the Python episode ‘Michael Ellis’, first broadcast in November 1974. In the sketch ‘Different Endings’, which closes this episode, Eric Idle finds himself standing in front of Terry Jones, behind a desk, and behind him a sign that reads ‘End of the Show Department’. Idle and Jones discuss and enact the various typical endings they could close the show with – including the ‘walking into the sunset’ ending, described by Jones and portrayed on screen as ‘two lone figures silhouetted against the dying rays of the setting sun’. In Blazing Saddles, a very similar dialogue occurs between Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little, in which they also discuss the end of the film, and eventually ride off into the sunset (like Jones and Idle), except they are met by a limousine chauffeur who drives them out of the Western setting. In this scene, the audience are delivered a deeply layered experience, part presold Hollywood ending and part 1970s television self-referential skit – together making for a new variation on both traditions. It is also important to note that Brooks also capitalised on the era’s increased critical and public affection for older television by appropriating American variety shows of the 1950s that were being re-run. The benefit of this can be understood by considering the phenomenon of 1950s re-runs in the 1970s, as studied by Derek Kompare in Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (2005), in which he suggests that there was a dramatic rise in the number of re-runs, especially of sitcoms including I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–7), The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955–6), The Andy Griffith Show (CBS, 1960–8) and The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS, 1962–71).66 In his study of the industry and the attitude of television critics in the 1970s, Kompare suggests that the 1970s ‘marked the beginning of television’s historicity, that is, its articulation into discourses of history and memory’.67 In particular, Kompare describes the way television variety in the 1950s was first thought to have belonged to a ‘Golden Age’,68 brought about by ‘biographies, insider accounts, and retrospectives of the 1950s programs’ which ‘approach their subjects through nostalgia, wistfully describing legendary figures and lost times’.69 The similarity of Blazing Saddles to these well-regarded shows was

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somewhat limited – evident most in its sketch show-style editing, the appropriations of popular culture, and the musical numbers. Even so, critics sometimes perceived Blazing Saddles as an adaptation of Kompare’s perceived ‘Golden Age’ of American television. This connection was commonly made by critics, primarily because of Brooks’s own well-known career writing in the 1950s for Sid Caesar in Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour (NBC, 1954–7). For example, Daniel Golden in Jump Cut notes: In pacing and crosscutting, it most closely resembles a 90-minute version of a TV comedy skit. This is no accidental resemblance, since Brooks was instrumental in perfecting the TV take-off skit while writing for one of the earliest and funniest of comedy hours, the Show of Shows.70

Notably, Susan Rice in Take One also made this connection, noting: ‘Brooks, Reiner and Allen wrote for Sid Caesar during the Golden Years of TV . . . This may explain their “sketchy” approach to movie comedy.’71 As such comments demonstrate, critics sometimes nostalgically viewed Blazing Saddles as a pleasurable remediation of ‘classic’ television content.

Young Frankenstein (1974) Brooks’s film Young Frankenstein, written with Gene Wilder, was also a hybrid of television and film, like that of Blazing Saddles. However, as the reviews indicate, this time, more so than ever before, Brooks appropriated content from what was then regarded as ‘classic’ media. In terms of film content, Brooks’s capitalised on Hollywood’s historic and ‘respectable’ horror films of the 1930s, with specific adaptations of Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein (1939). The canonised status of these films has been identified by Rick Worland, who notes that James Whale’s Frankenstein is regarded by critics today as ‘not only the most famous horror film of all time but one of the landmarks of Hollywood cinema’.72 As such, Brooks capitalised on audience memories and affection for these ‘historic’ texts. The technical production of Young Frankenstein was incredibly close to the James Whale’s film Frankenstein (1931). Brooks even reused some of the Whale film’s props and sets, as well as employing Kenneth Strickfaden, who worked on the film’s set design.73 Consequently, Young Frankenstein was regarded as an accurate reproduction of cinema from that bygone era, and effectively capitalised on critics’ memories and affection for those films. As John Russell Taylor in Sight and Sound notes, the black and white cinematography ‘has often an uncanny look of James

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Whale at his best. To appreciate Young Frankenstein fully, you have to be pretty well acquainted with his legitimate grandfather.’74 Similarly, Joel Thingvall in Cinefantastique explicitly praises Young Frankenstein for ‘a unique style that has not been recaptured in contemporary films’.75 Many of the most critically popular sequences in Young Frankenstein layered famous moments from 1930s Hollywood together with other nonfilm content, including content from Broadway theatre. In one scene, the young Dr Frankenstein presents his monster onstage to a convention of Bucharest scientists. Initially, the way Frankenstein unveils his monster in front of an audience captures the feel of a 1930s monster film – accurately described by Gordon Gow in Films and Filming, who noted the scene evokes ‘an incidental memory of King Kong’.76 Then, instead of making the monster perform simple motor-skill tasks for the scientists, they perform a song and dance act together – which turns out to be a rendition of Irving Berlin’s 1924 number ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’, made famous in the 1930 film of the same title. This layered performance, which integrated two sources of 1930s historic media, was very popular with critics – typically, praised by Tom Milne in the Monthly Film Bulletin who noted, ‘the Monster and his creator – top-hatted, white tied and tailed – do their best to do a Fred Astaire on “Puttin’ on the Ritz”, with the Monster bellowing a marvellous phonetic equivalent to the lyrics’.77 Brooks’s casting strategy for Young Frankenstein also produced hybrids. To explain, Dr Frankenstein, his fiancée, and his assistant Igor, were all appropriations of the 1930s film sources. However, by casting Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, and Marty Feldman – who were recognisable stars, and performed in their own usual fashion – those film characters were given a new dimension. Notably, Brooks’s strategy of casting recognisable comedy personalities was very similar to the films of William Abbott and Lou Costello, the Hollywood double act who starred in films such as Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953) and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). The similarity between these strategies was recognised by John H. Dorr in the Hollywood Reporter, who described Young Frankenstein as ‘an old-fashioned programmer-type comedy in which all your favourite funny-people get together and ham up a well-known story’.78 Brooks’s twist on this casting strategy was his utilisation of ‘hip’ 1970s television culture – namely, his casting of British comedian Marty Feldman as the assistant Igor. Wilder, who wrote the screenplay with Brooks, in fact crafted the anachronistic character specifically for Feldman, then at the height of his fame, after being inspired by Feldman’s Saturday night sketch show The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine.79

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Feldman’s strange looks and his bulging eyes were his trademark as a zany television personality since It’s Marty (BBC, 1968–9).80 This curious appearance and his European accent made Feldman already suitable for the role of Igor – allowing him to play the role and perform elements of his usual routine undisguised. As such, Feldman’s witty comments and sharp tone were often severely out of step with that of Whale’s ‘humble and dumb’ Igor, making his performance into a new variation on the character. In examining the technical production of Young Frankenstein, and the way Brooks worked with his crew to make the film, it is apparent that the film was heavily influenced by the production values of television and, like Blazing Saddles, also commanded critics’ memories of popular television programmes. The experience of working with Brooks is described by his cinematographer for Young Frankenstein, Gerland Hirschfeld in American Cinematographer, in which he describes how they argued over their different agendas for the film: ‘I was about to learn a new type of photography which had nothing to do with mood, or with composition, or with lighting, or sets; it had to do with photographing a “joke”.’81 Rather than allowing Hirschfeld to create ‘atmospheric’ lighting and dark scenes – as was done in the Universal horrors – Brooks forced him to keep the scenes well lit, more like a television skit, so he could foreground performance moments such as Feldman’s wry smirks or Wilder’s off-camera eye rolling. This ‘televisual’ style of cinematography frustrated Hirschfeld, who notably complained: ‘The important point I had to remember was not to lose the so-called “joke”.’82 The production values of Young Frankenstein, which Brooks negotiated with Hirschfield, also contributed to the way specific scenes in the film reprised Brooks’s own work on American television variety during the 1950s ‘Golden Age’. Brooks’s most effective recreation of this ‘historic’83 medium, as studied by Derek Kompare, is evident towards the end of Young Frankenstein, in which several scenes incorporate combinations of writing, performance and direction familiar to audiences from the 1950s skits in Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour. The penultimate scene in Young Frankenstein displays the greatest affinity with Your Show of Shows. In this scene, the monster is seen sitting in bed, reading the Wall Street Journal, apparently married to Madeline Kahn (with hair like the Bride of Frankenstein). In this moment, the 1950s gender stereotyping and domesticity lived out by Kahn and Boyle echoes the trademark sketches in which Sid Caesar and his female leads would play husband and wife. By hybridising these old shows and films together, signified by the black-and-white cinematography, Young Frankenstein was not just an intermedial film, but an intermedial film constructed from what was then

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becoming known as ‘historic’ media. This is confirmed in the reviews of the film, which sometimes mentioned Brooks’s appropriation of historic sources, seemingly transferring their affection for those now prestigious texts directly onto the film. For example, Joel Thingvall in Cinefantastique acclaimed Young Frankenstein, citing its layered hybrid revival of material that was now highly regarded with great nostalgia: Young Frankenstein wends its way through the thicket of modern all-or-nothing moviemaking. It is amazing that there is as much honest craftsmanship in the movie as there is. The music hall performance of Young Frankenstein and the monster is nothing less than enchanting. Peter Boyle’s Frankenstein makes his first entrance in a bathrobe much as Sid Caesar used to do on ‘The Show of Shows’ with which Brooks used to be involved as writer. And when Wilder and Boyle go into their version of ‘Puttin’ On the Ritz’, all of Brooks’s smouldering affection for showbiz performers seems to burst into flame.84

Together, Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein suggest that current thinking on the New Hollywood ‘transformation’85 period needs to be reconsidered. In contrast to the cinema-centric studies by Thomas Schatz, John Cawelti and David A. Cook, the content and critical reactions to Brooks’s intermedial blockbusters Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein suggest that Hollywood film – especially the film parody genre – has since at least the 1970s been a reactive to the television and Broadway industries. Furthermore, as I explain, Brooks’s projects are part of a wider trend in which Hollywood films have been hybridised with non-film media, especially television shows. This production trend has profoundly affected the expectations of critics and the public for the film parody genre in the years since.

A New Film-Focused Strategy: The Fall of Mel Brooks, 1987–95 Brooks changed his adaptation strategy with his subsequent parody films, Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. These films were hybrids of content, mainly from film, but were without any significant appropriation of television or other non-film media. As a result, his selection of source texts was far less eclectic than his earlier films, this time focusing on hybrids of content from specific film genres, including science fiction, Robin Hood films and vampire horror films, respectively. In addition, Brooks also included several prolonged adaptations of jokes from his own previous films, with only limited change. As I explain, Brooks’s new production strategy was not consistent with critical

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expectations for the parody film genre as they had emerged over the years. Following his own previous films, and those by other filmmakers who had capitalised on television content, critics had come to expect perceived ‘innovative’ hybrids of ‘popular’ texts. Since Brooks’s new films disappointed critical expectations in this new industrial context, these films marked a severe decline in his popularity with film critics, and in his commercial popularity as a film director. Without television content, Brooks’s less varied selection of texts in his latter films meant that there was far less potential for new and surprising combinations of content that had come to be expected of films in the parody genre. Notably, there is some precedent for the importance of ‘innovation’ in film parody in the work of Wes D. Gehring, in which he suggests that although parody necessitates the appropriation of presold content, parody films necessarily also require filmmakers to produce a perceived ‘creative’ adaptation of that content. Gehring demonstrates this by demonstrating how Carl Reiner capitalised on casting a ‘popular’ television personality: The ‘creative criticism’ significance of parody is important to keep in mind, because the genre often has been considered as something less than important; it has been defined as a parasitic growth on true works of art or as a literary elitist form of Trivial Pursuit, in which one needs to know an unnecessarily detailed collection of facts before even understanding the parody. The act of spoofing is more than a comic replication of close-up scenes from a given genre . . . [It] takes just as much creative talent to both perceive a given structure and then effectively parody it as it does to create a structure in the first place. Parody is simultaneously something old and something new: kid a traditional structure, have fun with the content. That is, the parodist replicates the familiar pattern of a given genre or auteur while subjecting it to a fresh comic twist, such as the mysterious ‘elevator killer’ of the Carl Reiner/ Steve Martin film The Man with Two Brains (1983) turning out to be talk show host Merv Griffin.86

The potential of adaptation strategies, including the production of Hollywood film parodies, to produce perceived ‘innovative’ texts, and so to deliver ‘new’ experiences to audiences, has already been recognised in adaptation studies. This issue has been addressed by Julie Sanders in her book Adaptation and Appropriation (2006), in which she concludes that despite the ‘sameness’ involved in the reproduction of familiar texts, in either their whole form or in part, adaptations are ‘not merely belated practices and processes; they are creative and influential in their own right’.87 Sanders suggests that adaptations are ‘all about multiple interactions and a matrix of possibilities. They are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible.’88 In

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the case of the parody film genre, this is not just an academic notion, but is in fact a commercial imperative. As I explain, the film parody genre has been a consistent site of ‘innovation’, whereby filmmakers have hybridised content from disparate genres, and different media, in new combinations, in order to meet the expectations of audiences. Manufacturing ‘innovative’ new films through the hybridisation of film and television content became a convention in Hollywood in the years following the release of the films Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein in 1974. For one significant example, John Landis’s film The Kentucky Fried Movie contributed to audience expectations with its far more eclectic mixture of popular television shows from the era and well-known films. This is exemplified at the start of the film, where a long opening section intersperses adaptations of corporate promotions, news broadcasts, talk shows and infomercials, in each case with accurate reproductions of the performance styles, framing and direction associated with the respective television genres. The Kentucky Fried Movie then shifts into an adaptation of ‘martial arts cinema’, specifically the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon (1973). Again, this film parody is hybridised with television content at various points, as when the actor imitating Bruce Lee is, during his academy training, made to sit as a contestant on a Far Eastern variation of the show The Dating Game (ABC, 1965–86). By capitalising on existing content, The Kentucky Fried Movie broke new ground with even less narrative consistency and seemingly ‘original’, sometimes surreal, multilayered hybrids of ‘popular’ culture, with a focus on content from television. In the 1980s, audience expectations for ‘innovative’ hybrids were reinforced by the films Airplane! and its follow-up Airplane II: The Sequel (1981) – the latter set in space. In terms of cinema history, the ‘urban disaster’ cycle of films had only recently emerged, having become familiar to audiences through a sudden spate of action movies including Airport 1975 (1974), Earthquake (1974) and The Towering Inferno (1974). Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker were the first writerdirectors to parody this particular cycle with Airplane!, thus setting a new example for filmmakers to seek out new sources, and raising expectations of audiences for ‘new’ subject matter. Furthermore, within the making of Airplane!, various perceived unrelated texts were mixed together to further defy expectations throughout, thus making for what was often regarded by film critics as an ‘innovative’ cinema experience. As Janet Maslin in the New York Times notes, Airplane!, which opens today at the Baronet and other theaters, pokes fun at much more than disaster movies alone. Ted Striker tells, in flashback, of his days in the

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roughest, toughest bar in the Far East, where some of the world’s meanest customers are seen lounging until ‘Stayin’ Alive’ comes on the jukebox; at that, everybody leaps into a Saturday Night Fever parody . . . No one in the large and talented cast of Airplane! does anything he or she might be expected to do, however. And that attitude extends to all aspects of the film.89

Following these parody films, Brooks’s subsequent films were commonly perceived by film critics as inadequate – in other words, they were condemned for not meeting audience expectations. In this new industrial context, Brooks’s subsequent films Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It were seen as stale, repetitive projects that reprised old, often unpopular texts. This sentiment has been broadly indicated in retrospective press coverage, including by Adam Smith in Empire, who notes: Mel Brooks admitted in a recent interview that the arrival of Zucker/ Abrahams/ Zucker with Airplane (1980) pretty much blew him off the map as far as spoofs were concerned. His output dropped off a comedic cliff after the new guys arrived, with the genius behind The Producers (1968) and Blazing Saddles (1974) farting out stinkers like Spaceballs (1987) . . . and Dracula: Dead And Loving It (1995).90

Spaceballs (1987) In financial terms, Spaceballs was a success, but not a blockbuster in cinemas, compared with Brooks’s earlier parody films. The film was a relatively expensive project for Brooks as a director, costing approximately $25m.91 In this case, this production cost was inflated by Brooks’s effort to recreate the production values of Star Wars, even employing the services of Lucasfilm’s company Industrial Light and Magic in the film’s postproduction.92 Spaceballs opened very strongly in its first week. As noted in the Hollywood Reporter, the film ‘laughed its way to a five-day total of $9.1 million’.93 Notably, Spaceballs benefited in the box office from a quiet time in the industry, during which there was limited competition – or at least less than was expected by the trade press. In fact, so many films stalled in production or were rescheduled before release that the Hollywood Reporter coined the era as ‘the summer of 1987 that never was’.94 However, even with the increased investment in the production, and the relatively limited competition, Spaceballs made just $36.7 million in US theatres – significantly less than Brooks’s blockbuster parodies of the 1970s.95 The relatively limited box-office returns for Spaceballs can be understood in the industrial context of the 1980s film parody genre. In writing and directing Spaceballs, Brooks mainly appropriated content from

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George Lucas’s film Star Wars and its sequels, with only a minimal addition of other content, mostly appropriated from the sci-fi genre. Star Wars was itself a prolonged adaptation by 1987, meaning that numerous other Star Wars adaptations were already in circulation. This made for a potentially profitable synergy between those texts, which Spaceballs did benefit from. However, despite this potential for synergy, some film critics, and people commenting in online communities, perceived Spaceballs to be an inadequate parody film. In short, Brooks’s hybrid of Star Wars and other science fiction films was perceived to lack the ‘innovation’ that was then expected of the film parody genre. This was especially apparent when compared to Brooks’s own previous films, and those of others that had established critical expectations by mixing disparate genres, often by capitalising on television content, such as The Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane! Most of the content in Spaceballs was appropriated from Star Wars, but rather than hybridising the material with a wide array of anachronistic texts – as was the convention in previous parodies – Brooks simply reprised the Star Wars characters with their personas, costumes and storylines largely intact. Even the rolling opening text that sets up Star Wars opens Brooks’s Spaceballs with a similar story, except that the punchline last sentence in Brooks’s version reads: ‘If you can read this, you don’t need glasses.’ Rather than bringing in new characters that could have dramatically altered the formula, a selection of the main roles from Star Wars – including Yoda, Chewbacca, Han Solo, Princess Laya, C3PO, Darth Vader and Jabba the Hut – were all appropriated in Spaceballs. While all of these characters were all altered in some way, none of them are significantly very different: Chewbacca becomes Barf, the half-dog half-man sidekick played by John Candy, known in the era for Splash (1984), and his similar sidekick role in Brewster’s Millions (1985). Brooks replaced Harrison Ford’s Han Solo with Bill Pullman’s Lone Starr, but his character is effectively indistinguishable from the rugged looks, and the rebellious and informal attitude of Han Solo as played by Ford in the original. Similarly, Princess Leia becomes Princess Vespa for Spaceballs – both of which are assertive, feminist-type princess who is not afraid to shoot down an Imperial storm trooper. Vespa’s assistant in Spaceballs is a version of the golden robot C3P0, Dot Matrix, a golden female version voiced by Joan Rivers. While this change seems drastic compared to the others characters, it is hardly radical: this kind of transformation was done several times in Star Wars itself when the robot C3P0 encountered other strange-but-similar variations of his own ‘unit’ – often with comic effect, as seen when he stumbles into another similar droid at Lando

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Calrissian’s Cloud City station in The Empire Strikes Back (1980). The reaction of critics was one of disappointment. As Duane Byrge noted in the Hollywood Reporter, ‘ “Spaceballs” is one mission its players may want to forget’.96 Similarly, Hal Hinson noted in the Washington Post, ‘There’s no inspiration left – no drive. After that first joke, which at least gets you tittering, I don’t think there’s another first-rate comic idea in the whole film.’97 Spaceballs was released a full decade after the original Star Wars film – which is a longer than usual timeframe for parody films. As Harries notes, parody-makers usually leave only two to six years between the original and their parody, giving the general public just enough time to become familiar with the source film, so that it is still fresh in their minds.98 In the case of Spaceballs, however, a saturation of official Star Wars adaptations had also occurred in the eleven years before Brooks’s film was released. These adaptations in various media included spin-off cartoons like the series Star Wars: Droids (ABC, 1985–6), the mass production of action figures, and other merchandise, videogames including Star Wars (1987) released on the era’s very popular Nintendo Entertainment System, and the film’s own sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (1983). All this considered, the prolonged adaptation of Star Wars, was, like Spaceballs, a very tired concept – that is, when adapted without significant ‘innovative’ ideas. In terms of big budget Hollywood film, there had been no significant parody of Star Wars but, nonetheless, other independent parody films were already well known to film critics. For example, in her review of Spaceballs in the New York Times, Janet Maslin made note of the most famous parody film already in circulation: ‘In the wake of the original film’s 1977 release came “Hardware Wars”, a very funny short film that substituted household appliances – irons, toasters, whatever – for the familiar spacecraft and filmed them in the same imposing way.’99 By comparison to this picture, Spaceballs was without any significant ‘new’ adaptation of the concept. As such, Maslin also noted: ‘Mr. Brooks vision of “Star Wars” and its underlying silliness cannot help but wear thin’.100 This common sentiment was reflected in other reviews of Spaceballs – most concisely by Roger Ebert in the Chicago-Sun Times, in which he also condemned the film by comparison to its peers: ‘The strangest thing about “Spaceballs” is that it should have been made several years ago, before our appetite for “Star Wars” satires had been completely exhausted.’101 When Brooks did renew the Star Wars content in Spaceballs by hybridising it with content from non-sci-fi films, his adaptations were drawn not from especially ‘popular’ or topical texts, but instead relied on Brooks’s

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own penchant for reprising 1930s studio-era Hollywood – thus failing to capture the potentially broad audience available through reselling material from current television shows. For example, there is a non-sci-fi adaptation layered within a more obvious adaptation of the film Alien, but this film content is hybridised with obscure, thirty-year-old material rather than current popular culture. In one scene, the actor John Hurt makes a cameo appearance to re-enact his famous stomach-bursting scene from the original movie. However, when the alien monster breaks out from his body in Spaceballs, the lighting dims, and a theatrical spotlight falls onto the creature. A music-hall-style tune then accompanies the creature as it merrily dances its way out of the shot, looking to the camera and singing ‘Hello! Ma Baby!’ (1899). In a far cry from sci-fi movies, this spectacle was itself also a parody of the Warner Bros cartoon, One Froggy Evening (1955), in which a frog with similar proportions – and with a very similar, deep and loud singing voice – makes its way off the screen, also waving a straw hat and cane in time with the upbeat tune. While such moments added a new dimension to the Star Wars tradition, they were, however, only instances of incongruent hybrids, amid a film that more broadly kept to content from the sci-fi film genre. Notably, the most significant appeal of Spaceballs is suggested in its coverage by communities online. When Brooks’s films are discussed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) (as of 21 April 2009), Brooks’s other films have limited discussion, but the discussion on Spaceballs totals 192 opinions – showing even more interest than Brooks’s canonised film The Producers (1968).102 In this environment, opinions are shared and then commented on by others, often giving way to a dialogue, out of which attitudes towards the film are discussed and consensuses are developed in a way that is not possible in print media – that is, outside the somewhat protracted, vetted, and limited venue of readers’ letters pages. In addition, these particular opinions are particularly informative of expectations associated with the ‘parody’ tradition, since they are all retrospectives, written in recent times, not only after the release of film parodies like The Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane!, and also after the history of similar movies in the 1990s, including Repossessed, Hot Shots! (1991), Fatal Instinct (1993) and Loaded Weapon 1 (1993). As such, it is with all of these films in mind that the opinions are enriched by reference, making the comments clear cut, motivated by an apparently concrete perception of the film parody genre as it stands today. There had already been many prolonged adaptations of Star Wars over the years, making it an increasingly familiar text to audiences generally. As Barbara Klinger notes in Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies,

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and the Home (2006), a long tradition of adaptations have followed in the wake of Star Wars, creating a body of associated texts that still continues to grow, in particular with amateur filmmakers on the internet. As Klinger notes, the Star Wars saga is a ‘quintessential blockbuster phenomenon that has elicited one of the most substantial and sustained fan communities on the Web. Lucasfilm Ltd. claims that the home page of its official site, www.starwars.com, alone is linked to more than eleven thousand other sites.’103 This body of works listed by Klinger notably includes Ayaz Asif and Ted Bracewell’s parody Park Wars (2001).104 This text capitalised on current and popular television culture by hybridising audio content from Star Wars with fan-made animations based on the cartoon South Park (Comedy Central, 1997–). So much was the popular appeal of this text that, as Henry Jenkins has documented, Trey Parker and Matt Stone ultimately invited the film’s creator Asif to air Park Wars on the Comedy Central channel.105 Looking at the opinions posted on the IMDB, there is some evidence that by adapting Star Wars, Brooks capitalised on a devoted and readymade audience of fans. The people who posted their comments are, more often than not, big fans of sci-fi and in particular Star Wars. Typically, one person describes himself as ‘a long time Star Wars fan & collector’,106 and notes, ‘I love this film!! Saw it 3 times in the theater.’107 Similarly, another person notes, ‘You really have to like some sci-fi to enjoy Mel Brooks Sci-fi spoof Spaceballs . . . Most of the movie is a spoof off of what is considered the greatest sci-fi trilogy of all time.’108 This avid appreciation of Spaceballs provides some evidence that by appropriating such a popular commercial and now ‘cult’109 film, Brooks was guaranteed that his movie would appeal to at least this audience group.110 However, even though these people were seemingly drawn to Spaceballs because of their affection for, and interest in, Star Wars and sci-fi, they too sometimes agreed with the criticisms of the film in the print press – that Spaceballs was a tired old concept, and that it repeated Brooks’s material from his own past films rather than adding anything ‘original’ – as could have been achieved by incorporating content from another disparate category of texts. Instead of introducing popular and current texts, Brooks often chose to prolong much older material in Spaceballs, with a particular focus on the type of puns and film-production in-jokes that he delivered in his own films Blazing Saddles and History of the World: Part I (1981). For example, there is a scene in Spaceballs when the Spaceballs flick through an archive of VHS movies in order to find ‘Spaceballs the Movie’ – so that they can fast forward the tape to discover where the Rebel heroes are hidden. This self-reference is a hallmark of Brooks’s films, with particular overtones of

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the closing scenes in Blazing Saddles in which Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little, in the roles of the Waco Kid and Sheriff Bart respectively, sit down in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to view the end of Blazing Saddles on the in-film cinema screen. Such similarities were often recognised by those commenting on the IMDB. As one person notes, ‘the whole thing is typical Mel Brooks stuff, with a gag every minute and parts where they admit that they’re in a movie’.111 By adapting old content and formulas from his own previous films, Brooks’s Spaceballs was perceived by many people writing on the IMDB to be entirely out of step with what viewers expected. As such, his strategy of adapting old material, albeit in a new setting, was not innovative enough for the expectations of the parody genre. In fact, several people noted that the comedy in Brooks’s Spaceballs was so incompatible with their expectations of the genre that it should not be considered a parody film at all. For example, one person notes: ‘Brooks really just uses this as a sounding-off board for his own farcical comedy. I find these movies more Mel-Brooks comedies than spoofs.’112 For these people, the way he recycled his older comedy material was overly familiar, and this repetition, rather than offering ‘innovative’ new hybridisations, was a particular disappointment to many. Another person notes that: ‘Brooks doesn’t actually pick apart the films or genres he parodies, he just takes the given setting and fills it with a bunch of dumb sight gags and predictable jokes’,113 and that, ‘Brooks has nothing new or biting to offer the audience’.114 In addition, Brooks also included some prolonged adaptations of genderstereotyping joke formulas in Spaceballs, appropriated from his previous films – except in this new industrial context, these jokes were severely outdated. Most significantly, Brooks’s own character, President Skroob in Spaceballs was assisted by two ‘bimbo’ twins – just as his character Governor Lepetomane in Blazing Saddles was accompanied by his doting, bikini-clad, dopey secretary, and his character King Louis XVI in History of the World: Part I took sexual advantage of the entirely subservient women of the court. These jokes were now entirely out of step with current trends in Hollywood film comedy. As Nicole Matthews notes in Comic Politics: Gender in Hollywood Comedy After the New Right, the 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of the ‘new man’ whereby notions of masculinity were ‘repeatedly returned to and problematised’.115 To take two of Matthews’s examples, Parenthood (1989) saw Steve Martin playing a responsible, modern, ‘family man’, and in Ghostbusters II (1989), Bill Murray similarly adopted a pseudo-father role. In this era of ‘new man’ comedies, Brooks’s misogynistic characters were entirely inconsistent with the current trend of gender representations in Hollywood film comedy.

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These factors considered together, Spaceballs was not an innovative hybrid like Brooks’s previous films Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Instead, Spaceballs was a very conventional reprise of science fiction content, with a focus on Star Wars, in a way that had been already been produced in the years before its release. If the attitude of film critics and the online reaction is any indicator of public reactions, it is likely that Spaceballs failed commercially, in part, because it failed to deliver perceived ‘innovative’ hybrids of ‘popular’ texts from disparate genres – most notably, through the absence of current television sources. Following Spaceballs, American Film reported that Brooks suffered a significant business setback when he made a bid to sell shares in his production company Brooksfilms, in order to free him from the creative control of fewer bigger investors. Brooks’s bid failed owing to his apparent overestimation of the stock price at approximately 65 times the earnings of Brooksfilms in 1987, which reportedly totalled $323,000.116 In part, the reason for the apparently low profit figure was that Brooks had paid himself a $4 million salary during 1987 in order to avoid the taxation involved in declaring the income as company profits – thus making it seem to his potential investors as if the company was less profitable than it in fact was.117 However, even with this explanation, only 40 per cent of the stocks sales were ever agreed, so the deal was withdrawn. In part, the lack of interest in Brooksfilms was due to the industrial context of the proposal. As American Film reported, production companies endorsed by celebrities had failed in recent years: ‘TV tycoon Aaron Spelling and Italian filmmaker Dino De Laurentiis sponsored high-profile ventures that were respectively, so-so and disastrous’.118 The failure of these companies ‘helped kill investor enthusiasm for celebrity production companies. For a time, it seemed as if Wall Street’s interest in independent production companies was extinct.’119 Owing to this lack of enthusiasm from brokers, Brooksfilms ‘halted sales indefinitely’.120 As a result, Brooks was forced to continue raising funds for his films with the major studios.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) In financial terms, Brooks’s next film, Robin Hood: Men in Tights was another relatively marginal success in cinemas, with nowhere near the profit margin of his earlier blockbusters Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the production of Men in Tights cost around $20m – half of which was provided by Twentieth

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Century Fox.121 Initially, the film enjoyed a strong opening week, charting in the sixth position for box-office sales, totalling $18,390,464122 – while major blockbusters such as Jurassic Park (1993) and The Fugitive (1993) were still in theatres. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Brooks gave some credit for this strong opening to Fox executives, in particular Andrea Jaffe, who marketed the film with ‘an incredible teaser trailer’123 campaign on television, and a ‘media junket’ with an ‘ungettable’124 press attendance, totalling eighty-nine reporters. Unfortunately for Brooks, the box-office sales for Men in Tights decreased significantly after the opening week, closing at a total of only $24.3m by the end of its run in US cinemas – suggesting its profits were relatively limited, considering the production costs.125 These limited profits can be understood, in part, by considering Brooks’s production strategy – which was in some ways at odds with the trends of Hollywood film production at the time. In short, Brooks broadly adopted the same production strategy as Spaceballs, except this time the sources appropriated were even less well known, and the film delivered even fewer perceived ‘innovative’ hybrids of content – with the obvious neglect of television content in particular. This was in contrast to the wider production trends in Hollywood in the early 1990s, in which television adaptations were increasingly common. This was summarised by the Hollywood Reporter, which noted in 1993 that studios were frequently opting to ‘mine yesterday’s sitcoms for today’s development deals’.126 This was captured in particular by Fox executive Tom Sherak, who described Hollywood’s incentive to appropriate and adapt television content for film at the time, rather than inventing ‘new’ ideas: there’s a limit to new ideas. They take time. So why not go back and see what worked and why – ‘Dennis the Menace’, ‘The Fugitive’? If the ideas worked for people back then and they’re not so antiquated that they can’t be brought up-to-date, why won’t they work now? . . . I think all those old series found a second home on Nick at Nite. So I don’t think there’s anybody in any age group who doesn’t have some nodding acquaintance with ‘The Flintstones’.127

Irrespective of this industry trend to adapt television – including current shows and older shows being re-run – Brooks’s Men in Tights was manufactured almost entirely from film content. It was mainly promoted on the back of Kevin Costner’s film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), and its massively successful soundtrack single by Bryan Adams, ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ (1991).128 The way the project was designed to capitalise on this phenomenon has notably been described by Brooks himself, who is reported as saying:

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I’ve always wanted to do a Robin Hood movie and the recent Kevin Costner version made it all possible; I’m very grateful. His big hit picture reawakened the legend all over the world, so the time was right for a grand spoof.129

This time, Brooks released his parody just two years after the original film was released – thus better maximising audience interest in the ‘Robin Hood’ brand. Also, the film’s advertising, as developed by Jaffe at Fox, made the connection between the texts very apparent. For example, the US television trailer employed an adaption of the famous shot from Prince of Thieves where a camera follows on the back of a flying arrow (this time, impossibly curving around trees). More explicitly, the trailer even closes with actor Cary Elwes in the role of Robin Hood, delivering the line, ‘Unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent’ – which was of course a reference to Costner’s American accent in Prince of Thieves. Even when Brooks did capitalise on television content, it was from older, unpopular texts, without the broad appeal of his previous work. Brooks’s concept for the film itself was in fact an old idea that he had fostered since his days in television – originally conceived and produced as the television sitcom When Things Were Rotten (ABC, 1975). As Bill Adler and Jeffrey Feinman note, the format of that show offered essentially the same ‘simultaneous juxtaposition of different periods of time by using contemporary dialogue and events in a period setting’.130 In the casting of Men in Tights, Brooks capitalised on comic Richard Lewis in the role of King John, performed as his own contemporary screen self, complete with his distinctive mullet haircut and manic hand-waving mannerisms, as popularised in the 1980s on his regular television appearances on programmes including The New Hollywood Squares (NBC, 1986–7) and Late Night with David Letterman (NBC, 1982–93). However, again, this performance was not entirely current since Lewis’s act, as reprised in Men in Tights, was then becoming a dated 1980s stereotype, best described by the New Yorker as ‘a backdated version of his neurotic urban Jew’.131 In terms of Hollywood films, the most obvious source text for Men in Tights is even older. Whereas Kevin Costner played a very modern American-hero version of Robin Hood, Cary Elwes in Men of Tights appropriates a Robin from studio era Hollywood. Similar to his ‘heroic’ and ‘noble’ leading role in The Princess Bride (1987), Elwes performs with his own crisp English accent, adopting the hands-on-hips postures, traditional green costume, cornered green hat, and the pointed moustache and beard that defined the ‘swashbuckling’ performance by Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) – itself later revived by Flynn in his

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similar adventure-picture The Adventures of Don Juan (1948). However, unfortunately for Brooks, this revival of old Hollywood material, rather than new, more modern content was not what critics expected. As Vincent Canby in the New York Times notes: ‘The most damaging thing to be said about “Men in Tights” is that in spite of the references to “Prince of Thieves” and other comparatively recent films, it seems embedded in a movie world that’s far more ancient.’132 Following the strategy employed in Spaceballs, Brooks again included adaptations of material from his own 1970s parody films – leading Time Out to describe Men in Tights as ‘a standard, camp, unapologetic Mel Brooks parody’.133 This prolonging of Brooks’s own jokes formulas, here hybridised with the Robin Hood story, was often recognised by critics, including Variety which notes: ‘Here he has managed to mangle the legend so that it essentially resembles his biggest hit, Blazing Saddles . . . The supporting cast features many members of Brooks’ stock company.’134 Most obviously, the actor Robert Ridgely even reprises his character of ‘Boris the Hangman’ from Blazing Saddles, again adopting the same costume, posture, gestures and the same slovenly way of speaking – except this time he is simply called ‘Hangman’. In other scenes, Brooks’s colleague Dom DeLuise, who also featured in Blazing Saddles, and Brooks himself, also make appearances. In terms of the jokes themselves, Brooks adapted a lot of formulas from his previous films. Often, the adaptations were minimal, with actors replaying the same jokes with only the superficial changes in setting and costumes. As one running gag in Men in Tights, Richard Lewis, playing King John, has a mole on his face that moves around between cuts, just as Feldman’s hump inexplicably moved from shoulder to shoulder during his performance of Igor in Young Frankenstein. Brooks even recreated some whole scenes complete with the same framing and rhythm to the performances. In another notable case, there is one scene in which a squad of King John’s guards are shown beating a peasant. When a passer-by sneezes, the guards all pause the beating and turn to the camera in unison to say ‘bless you’ – and then resume. This same gag was used in Blazing Saddles when two cowboys paused while beating an old woman. In that case, the woman herself looks to the camera and exclaims, ‘Have you ever seen such cruelty’ – but in just the same fashion as Men in Tights, the punchline is delivered by the way the beating then resumes. More striking, however, was Brooks’s cameo in Men in Tights – a prolonged adaptation of his own performance in Blazing Saddles in which he hybridised the persona of a Native American chief with a Yiddish identity. This cameo was notably an adaptation of a role in Spaceballs when

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he appeared as ‘Yoghurt’, a Yiddish version of the Star Wars character Yoda – again hybridising a Jewish persona with a non-Jewish one. Brooks prolonged this formula yet again in Men in Tights, this time adapting the gentile Robin Hood character Friar Tuck into the Jewish character Rabbi Tuckman. However, in the 1990s, this old joke formula was not significantly updated for the new industrial and cultural context. As Henry Bial notes, high-profile Jewish performers such as Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand had already made Jewish culture overly familiar to ‘the mainstream American audience’.135 As I have already explained in reference to Brooks’s prolonged adaptations of his 2000 Year Old Man routine, Brooks’s adaptation of this Jewish/non-Jewish formula was without the same cultural significance, and appeal to audiences, that it once had in the 1970s. This volume of repetitious material, prolonged from Brooks’s own films, was often recognised by critics, in particular by Desson Howe in the Washington Post, who made a list, breaking down and categorising the various prolonged adaptations from Brooks’s previous films in Men in Tights, and referring to these jokes together as the ‘familiar Mel Brooks trademarks’.136 The formulas listed by the Washington Post include more general kinds of material including ‘sight gags’, ‘asides to the audience’, ‘nutty character names’ and ‘Yiddish jokes’, as well as more specific adaptations referred to as ‘repeat jokes’137 – in this case, referring to the longer routines and scenes lifted directly from Brooks’s previous films. The way Brooks prolonged content from his own films was notably observed by Vincent Canby in the New York Times, who condemned Brooks for his perceived lack of invention: The director also has an unfortunate way of reminding us of his own earlier, better, much more riotous comedies. He even has a reprise of a beloved gag from ‘Young Frankenstein’. It’s perfectly acceptable in a comedy of this sort to be offensive, but it’s something else to scrape the bottom of your own barrel in front of everybody.138

In addition, Men in Tights was seen by critics as a very predictable text in the Robin Hood tradition, following numerous other similar parodies. This perceived sameness is acknowledged by Steven Knight in his study of Men in Tights, in which he discusses ‘the trashing Brooks’s film received’.139 In his analysis, Knight identifies Brooks’s film as just another adaptation in a long tradition of Robin Hood parodies including the film The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood (1984) and the television series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (BBC, 1988). While Knight demonstrates that comic adaptations are in fact commonplace in portrayals of Robin Hood, he thus demonstrates that Brooks’s version of that legend is in fact

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just one more film ‘in the mainstream of the Robin Hood tradition’.140 Looking at the reviews themselves, it seems that this very ‘sameness’ largely disappointed audiences, who were craving innovation. As Michael Sragow in the New Yorker notes, ‘Even when Brooks isn’t recycling gags from previous hits, the humor is rarely as fresh as the Mad parody of the legend in the fifties.’141 While Men in Tights was sometimes condemned by film critics for a this perceived lack of ‘innovation’, this reaction can be attributed to a lack of content from then-current television.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) Brooks’s next film, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, was yet another similar adaptation of older film – again, with a broad neglect of current television content. Brooks conceived the project on the back of a popular and current film, this time Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992). However, apart from some superficial consistencies, Brooks was again adapting much older material. Instead of focusing on the Coppola version, Brooks adapted the plot from Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), and in terms of production, as Joe Leydon in Variety notes, Dead and Loving It was produced ‘in the style of the old Hammer horror pictures of the 50s and 60s’.142 This approach was particularly evident in the way the sets were designed, especially in the decorative finishes of the ‘high society’ interiors, and their rich, sometimes garish, colours – all of which closely recreated the feel of those films, most notably Dracula (1958), starring Peter Cushing. In financial terms, Dead and Loving It was one of Brooks’s least successful projects commercially. While the film was another relatively expensive project for Brooks – reportedly costing approximately $28m to produce according to Cinefantastique143 – its box-office sales totalled only $10.6m in US cinemas in 1995.144 Yet again, the critical coverage suggests this limited commercial performance was in large part due to Brooks’s production strategy. While Brooks’s careful adaptation of thirty-year-old movies received a lot of coverage in horror and cult-interest periodicals such as Fangoria, Starburst and Cinefantastique, more generally, film critics neither appreciated nor, sometimes, recognised Brooks’s revival of the old vampire subject. This constitution meant Brooks’s Dead and Loving It not only seemed ‘unoriginal’, but often seemed incomprehensible to modern critics – leading to some ruthless criticism in the press. For one typical example, Time Out noted: ‘It hardly needs saying that sending up the Dracula myth is not blindingly original: but this emaciated item, having nothing to say reaches unsuspected depths of pointlessness.’145 The critical reception of Brooks’s film was worsened by the industrial

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context of its production, in which numerous similar film parodies of the vampire tradition had already been produced. As Bill Warren in Fangoria notes, ‘Obviously there have been many other comedies about vampires, including several with Dracula as a leading character, most famously Love at First Bite [1979], with George Hamilton.’146 While many critics made such comparisons, this history was most concisely described by Ben Backley in Sight and Sound, who noted: By coming unstuck in taking on Dracula he’s in good company. Polanski tried it with Dance of the Vampires [1967] . . . Clive Donner with Vampira [1974], and most recently Wes Craven with the Eddie Murphy vehicle Vampire in Brooklyn [1995], all with less than barnstorming success.147

For these critics, Dead and Loving It was only the latest in a long history of Hollywood vampire film parodies – and unfortunately for Brooks, his film offered only minimal reinvention of that concept. Brooks’s most efficient decision, and his perceived most ‘innovative’ hybrid, was in the casting of actor Leslie Nielsen. Not only was Nielsen associated with the parody film genre, but more importantly he was known for playing the same ‘kind-but-dumb’ protagonist. From his role as Detective Frank Drebin in the Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker television series Police Squad (ABC, 1982), to his performance as a priest in Repossessed, Nielsen always had the same clean-cut appearance, and always his own distinctive white hair. His persona was entirely different from that of Dracula as often characterised in Hollywood, especially the recent Coppola version. Rather than a suave, European villain, Neilson was branded as a bumbling, all-American guy, renowned for incredible clumsiness and perhaps more importantly, for his good-hearted nature. With these qualities, Neilson’s casting itself reinvented Dracula, making for an immediately recognisable hybrid. As Joe Leydon noted in Variety, Neilson played Dracula as ‘a dead-serious but frequently flustered fellow who’s prone to slipping on bat droppings in his baroque castle. (Imagine Nielsen’s “Naked Gun” cop in fangs, tux and black cape, and you’ll get the idea)’.148 Notably, the poster campaign for Dead and Loving It capitalised on Nielsen’s casting by mimicking that of Coppola’s Dracula, imposing a goofy Nielsen face onto the advertisement’s gothic logo – thus capturing Brooks’s revision of the traditional count in one simple image. In every other respect, however, Brooks’s prolonged adaptation of jokes in Dracula: Dead and Loving was perceived as a cynical attempt to revive old material, and was universally condemned by critics as his weakest parody film yet – described by Kevin Jackson in the Independent on Sunday as ‘the feeblest thing he’s done’.149 Yet again the jokes themselves were

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variations on those popularised in Brooks’s other parody films, this time re-purposed simply by adding the unpopular vampire theme. Typically, the film opens with Leslie Nielsen tripping over and rolling down a flight of stairs – at that time wearing a Gary Oldman-style wig taken from Dracula (1992). Later, he rises from his coffin like the old Dracula (1931) – only to then hit his head on a low-hanging candelabra, creating what was described in Starburst as ‘a clunky piece of trademark Brooks vaudeville schtick’.150 Elsewhere, a bat with Nielsen’s face flaps head first into a closed window pane – similar to the way Rick Moranis hit his head on a ship door in Spaceballs, and Harvey Korman, before him, caught the back of his head on a window in Blazing Saddles. When critics recognised the way Brooks had prolonged these same old routines, puns, slapstick and farce from his previous films, they were again disappointed. The reviewers revelled in their criticisms, often playing on the film’s tag line. As Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard noted, ‘Mel Brooks’s spoof of the Dracula legend shows traces of tired blood . . . The jokes here really don’t get better than the title.’151 Even in horror periodical Fangoria, which followed the film’s production with numerous cast interviews, the film was condemned as yet another ‘Mel Brooks turkey’.152 Perhaps most concisely, Georgia Brown in the Village Voice noted: ‘There’s certainly a lot of dead time here, but nobody’s going to love it.’153 More than ever before, the historical context of parody production in 1995 influenced critical opinions on Brooks’s film. In comparison to the recent drive of parody films Hotshots!, Loaded Weapon 1 and Fatal Instinct (1993), as well as Nielsen’s own films The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994) – which hybridised various different film genres together – Dead and Loving It focused strictly on content adapted from vampire films. For many critics, Brooks’s narrow range of vampire-horror adaptations bore no comparison with the creative fusion of texts that had since been established as the norm in parody film production. For example, Ben Backley in Sight and Sound compared Brooks’s Dead and Loving It to what he called the ‘multi-referenced patchworks’154 in films such as Airplane! and The Naked Gun. In contrast to these broad-ranging parodies, Backley also judged Brooks’s film to be ‘old-fashioned humour’.155 In a very similar comparison, Bob McCane in Empire noted that whereas Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker have ‘soared to new heights in recent years’,156 Brooks ‘continues to tackle specific movies in a manner that renders him out of touch and out of date’.157 Even in terms of parody production on television, critics also considered Brooks’s prolonged adaptation of old jokes in Dead and Loving It to be ‘outdated’. In particular, Brooks’s joke formulas revolved around

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simple puns and the kind of language-based humour that Brooks’s had made famous with the various European characters, including Cloris Leachman as Frau Blucher in Young Frankenstein, and the French revolutionary character Madame Defarge in History of the World: Part I, who poignantly declared, ‘We are so poor, we don’t even have a language! All we have is this stupid accent.’ With this kind of ‘inoffensive’ material, critics of Dead and Loving It were often not impressed. As David Kronke, in the Los Angeles Times, notes: ‘All Brooks and his conspirators seem to be able to muster up is a handful of pratfalls and jokes about the actors’ bad accents.’158 In this respect, Brooks’s comedy recaptured a bygone era of entertainment, more akin to his own writing for Sid Caesar in the 1950s, that simply could not match the thrills of the ‘gross out’ and more unrestrained comedy being practised by America’s current comics. For example, Dead and Loving It paled in comparison with the shocking comedy popularised in current performances by comics such as the attention-getting Chris Farley or Chris Rock on Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975–) in the 1990s. Given this comparison, Brooks seemed entirely ‘out of step’ with critical tastes, in having failed to update his material. This was commented on by Joe Leydon in Variety, who noted: Compared with the recent glut of dumb, dumber and dumbest comedies, Brooks’ pic seems positively understated. Indeed, there isn’t much here that would have seemed out of place (or too tasteless) in comedy sketches for TV variety shows of the 1950s. And what little risqué humor there is seems mighty tame compared with what often gets by on contemporary shows such as ‘Saturday Night Live’. As a result, unfortunately, ‘Dead and Loving It’ is so mild, it comes perilously close to blandness.159

When Brooks’s blockbusters in 1974 are considered together, along with his perceived critical and commercial decline from 1987 to 1995, it is clearly evident that his career as a film director has contributed to his mixed reputation today. In critical and commercial terms, Brooks is known for both his perceived mastery of the parody genre early on, and also for his more recent perceived diminishing skill at working in that same genre. It was following his latter films, ending with Dracula: Dead and Loving It, that Brooks came to be regarded as a comic of the past, trapped in an old world of Hollywood associated with a bygone generation. This strange climb-down from commercial success and mastery of the genre in 1974 has led critics to describe Brooks as a somewhat tragic figure. Typically, in Fangoria it was noted that Brooks and his crew are now thought of as ‘past-their-prime jesters shedding their dignity – and jeopardising their “grand old men of comedy” status’.160 Poignantly, this

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perception was also captured in a 1996 retrospective article for Empire by Jeff Dawson, in which he quotes Brooks describing his brand of parody as ‘years ahead of its time’.161 Typically, Dawson also adds: ‘a good idea then, but in the age of mass-produced Naked Guns and Loaded Weapons and Fatal Instincts, not the novelty it once was’.162 Following the end of Brooks’s career as a film director in 1995, the trend for hybrids of film and television content in the parody genre has continued. Looking at the output of other filmmakers, artists since have continued the tradition of multilayered, television-film hybrids, in particular the series of films Scary Movie (2000), Scary Movie 2 (2001) Scary Movie 3 (2003) and Scary Movie 4 (2006). For example, Scary Movie 3 hybridised Eminem’s rap battle in his film 8 Mile (2002) with content from television programme American Idol (Fox, 2002–) – featuring television personality Simon Cowell in a cameo as himself. More recently, David Zucker has produced Big Fat Important Movie (2008), which was itself a hybrid of Charles Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). Throughout the film, many scenes were also hybridised with television content, including a cameo by Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor (Fox, 1996–), and a diner scene which appropriated the framing and musical score of the sitcom Seinfeld (NBC, 1990–8). With such eclectic hybrids still in production, it seems that ‘innovative’ hybrids of film, television, and other media, will continue to be a typical characteristic of Hollywood parody film production.

Notes 1. See Dan Harries, Film Parody (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p.  21, and Wes D. Gehring, Parody As Film Genre: Never Give a Saga an Even Break (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group Inc, 1999), pp. 129–72. 2. John Cawelti, ‘Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent Films’, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 570. 3. Harries, Film Parody, p. 3. 4. Ibid., p. 3. 5. Ibid., p. 6. 6. Ibid., p. 85. 7. Ibid., p. 6. 8. Ibid., p. 17. 9. Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), p. 5.

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10. It is important to note that the way adaptations can provoke audiences to proactively look for dialogic relationships to other external texts was captured early on in Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of parody. In his study of the novel Don Quixote, Bakhtin suggests that parodies have at least two levels of interpretation – something that he refers to as ‘double-voiced’. By parodying other works, Bakhtin asserts that the novel necessitates the reader to be consciously aware of the source text – or the way such novels normally pan out – and suggests that they must detect the author’s own alterations to that formula. Audience awareness of this engages the reader in a cognitive process of interpretation: ‘an unresolved conversation begins to sound in the image itself; the image becomes an open, living, mutual interaction between worlds, points of view, accents’. See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds), The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 409. 11. Geraghty, Now a Major, p. 5. 12. ‘Blazing Saddles’, The Numbers, http://www.the-numbers.com/ movies/1974/0BSAD.php (accessed 2 January 2011). 13. ‘Young Frankenstein’, The Numbers, http://www.the-numbers.com/ movies/1974/0YNGF.php (accessed 2 January 2011). 14. ‘Spaceballs’, Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0094012/ (accessed 23 October 2011). 15. ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’, The Numbers, http://www.the-numbers. com/movies/1993/0RHMT.php (accessed 2 January 2011). 16. ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It’, The Numbers, http://www.the-numbers. com/movies/1995/0DCDL.php (accessed 2 January 2011). 17. Adam Smith, ‘Blazing Saddles in DVD to buy’, Empire, 118 (April 1999), p. 122. 18. Ibid., p. 122. 19. Mike Flaherty, ‘Soaring ‘Saddles’, Entertainment Weekly, 525.11 (February 2000), p. 84. 20. Ibid., p. 84. 21. ‘AFI’s 100 Years...100 Laughs’, American Film Institute (2000), http:// www.afi.com/100Years/laughs.aspx (accessed 3 September 2006). 22. This phrase is attributed to AFI Director and CEO Jean Picker Firstenberg on the website ‘AFI’s 100 Years . . .’, American Film Institute, 23. Variety staff, ‘Spaceballs’, Variety (31 December 1986), http://www. variety.com/review/VE1117795083.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 (accessed 20 September 2010). 24. Rita Kempley, ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’, Washington Post (28 July 1993), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/ videos/robinhoodmenintightspg13kempley_a0a39f.htm (accessed 20 September 2010). 25. Ben Backley, ‘Dracula Dead and Loving It’, Sight and Sound, 6.10 (1 October 1996), p. 39.

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26. ‘Woody Allen’, The-Numbers, http://www.thenumbers.com/people/ directorships/WALLE.html (1 September 2004). 27. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 4. 28. Ibid., p. 5. 29. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), p. 43. 30. Ibid., p. 12. 31. The term ‘New Hollywood’ has been used with various different meanings in academic studies, as discussed in Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002). For the purpose of this study, I refer to New Hollywood as a historical era spanning the late 1960s to the late 1970s. 32. Cawelti, ‘Chinatown’, in Mast et al. (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, p. 577. 33. Ibid., p. 577. 34. Ibid., p. 511. My reference to the ‘TV Generation’ in the title to this chapter is a concept based on Cawelti’s notion of a new generation of audiences influenced by the broadcast of films on television since the mid-1970s – except that my model of this ‘new generation’ takes into account the consumption of television shows themselves, not just films on television. 35. Thomas Schatz, ‘The New Hollywood’, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 9. 36. The way filmmakers in the 1970s were recycling bygone Hollywood film content has also been studied by David A. Cook, who similarly identifies the film Jaws as a significant example of this recycling trends because it ‘occupies landmark status in terms of genre because it combined motifs from several of them to create a new kind of disaster film’. See David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970–1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 255. 37. Schatz, ‘The New Hollywood’, Collins et al. (eds), Film Theory Goes, p. 23. 38. Ibid., p. 18. 39. Television has increasingly become an important form of exhibition for Hollywood films since the mid-1970s. As Douglas Gomery notes, the introduction of the channel Home Box Office offered subscribers ‘recent Hollywood motion pictures – uncut, uninterrupted by commercials, and not sanitized to please network censors’. The increased home consumption of films was further accelerated when Sony introduced its Betamax video cassette recorder in 1975, and further still when the costs of recorders dropped over the years, down $300 in the mid-1980s. See Douglas Gomery, ‘Hollywood as Industry’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 250. 40. King, New Hollywood, p. 50.

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41. The rise, decline and premature death of Marty Feldman is described in the BBC documentary Legends: Marty Feldman – Six Degrees of Separation (2008), first broadcast on 31 March 2008. 42. ‘Blazing Saddles’, Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0071230/ (accessed 23 October 2011). 43. ‘Young Frankenstein’, Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/ title/tt0072431/ (accessed 23 October 2011). 44. ‘Blazing Saddles’, The Numbers. http://www.the-numbers.com/ movies/1974/0BSAD.php (accessed 2 January 2011). 45. ‘Young Frankenstein’, The Numbers, http://www.the-numbers.com/ movies/1974/0YNGF.php (accessed 2 January 2011). 46. Geraldine Fabrikant, ‘Talking Money With: Mel Brooks; A Funny Man Earns It The 2,000-Year-Old Way’, New York Times, 26 October 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/26/business/talking-money-with-melbrooks-a-funny-man-earns-it-the-2000-year-old-way.html?pagewanted=2 (accessed 6 October 2011). 47. Mel Brooks, ‘Audio Commentary with Mel Brooks’, Spaceballs, spoofed, disc 2, DVD, directed by Mel Brooks (1987; Santa Monica, CA: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Home Entertainment, 2005). 48. See John G. Cawelti, Six Gun Mystique (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1975) and Jim Kitses, Horizons West (London: British Film Institute, 1969). 49. Richard Combs, ‘Blazing Saddles and S*P*Y*S’, Sight and Sound, 43.3 (Summer 1974), p. 180. 50. Jan Dawson, ‘Blazing Saddles’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 41.485 (June 1974), p. 120. 51. William Boddy, ‘Sixty Million Viewers Can’t Be Wrong: The Rise and Fall of the Television Western’, in Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson (ed.), Back in the Saddle Again New Essays on the Western (London: British Film Institute, 1998), p. 131. 52. Tim Hall, ‘Rawhide singer Frankie Laine dies’, Telegraph (8 February 2007), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/ 02/07/nlaine107.xml (accessed 4 April 2008). 53. Mel Brooks, ‘The Making of Blazing Saddles’, disc 1, DVD, Blazing Saddles, 30th anniversary edition, directed by Mel Brooks (1974; London: Warner Home Video UK, 2005). 54. Gordon Gow, ‘Blazing Saddles’, Film and Filming, 20.11 (August 1974), p. 43. 55. Roy Pennington, ‘Blazing Saddles’, Hollywood Reporter (6 February 1974), p. 3. 56. Beau, ‘Blazing Saddles’, Variety (13 February 1974), p. 18. 57. Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 82. 58. Ibid., p. 82.

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59. Jim Cheng, ‘Carol Burnett Show’ veteran Harvey Korman dies at 81’, USA Today (29 May 2008), http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2008-0529-korman-obit_N.htm (accessed 13 September 2009). 60. Susan King, ‘ “Carol Burnett” Videos Put Shows Back Together’, Los Angeles Times (10 October 2000), p. 2, http://articles.latimes.com/2000/ oct/10/entertainment/ca-34154 (accessed 1 August 2008). 61. Cheng, ‘Carol Burnett Show’, USA Today. 62. Vincent Canby, ‘Blazing Saddles’, New York Times (9 February 1974), p. 175. 63. Beau, ‘Blazing Saddles’, Variety (13 February 1974), p. 18. 64. Combs, ‘Blazing Saddles’, Sight and Sound, p. 181. 65. See King, ‘Carol Burnett’, Los Angeles Times, p. 2. 66. Kompare describes the way CBS dominated the market for syndicated television with popular shows such as I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and The Beverly Hillbillies in Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 87. 67. Ibid., p. 102. 68. Ibid., p. 107. 69. Ibid., p. 108. 70. Daniel Golden, ‘Blazing Saddles heading ’em off at the cliché’, Jump Cut (3 September 1974), p. 3. 71. Susan Rice, ‘Blazing Saddles’, Take One (19 March 1974), p. 40. 72. Rick Worland, The Horror Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 157. 73. Ibid., p. 21. 74. John Russell Taylor, ‘Flesh for Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein’, Sight and Sound, 44.2 (1 April 1975), p. 125. 75. Joel Thingvall, ‘Young Frankenstein’, Cinefantastique, 4.1 (1 April 1975), p. 29. 76. Gordon Gow, ‘Young Frankenstein’, Films and Filming, 21.7 (1 April 1975), p. 35. 77. Tom Milne, ‘Young Frankenstein’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 24.495 (1 April 1975), p. 90. 78. John H. Dorr, ‘Young Frankenstein’, Hollywood Reporter, 234.17 (13 December 1974), p. 3. 79. This casting decision based on Feldman’s television career, and the way Feldman’s act inspired parts of the script for Young Frankenstein are both discussed by Gene Wilder in ‘Making of Young Frankenstein’, disc 1, DVD, Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks (1974; Beverley Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1998). 80. Some of Feldman’s sketches from Marty and The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine can be viewed today on the BBC archive collection The Best of Marty Feldman, DVD (London: BBC Video, 2005). 81. Hirschfeld, ‘The Story Behind’, American Cinematographer, p. 802. 82. Ibid., p. 802.

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83. Kompare, Rerun Nation, p. 87. 84. Thingvall, ‘Young Frankenstein’, Cinefantastique, p. 29. 85. Cook, ‘Genres 1: Revision, Transformation, and Revival’, in Cook, Lost Illusions, pp. 159–257. 86. Gehring, Parody As Film Genre, p. 23. 87. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 160. 88. Ibid., p. 160. 89. Janet Maslin, ‘Airplane!’, New York Times (2 July 1980), http://movies. nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1738E762BC4A53DFB16683 8B699EDE (accessed 21 April 2009). 90. Adam Smith, ‘Young Frankenstein’, Empire, 138 (1 December 2000), p. 141. Italics added. 91. Brooks, ‘Audio Commentary’, Spaceballs, DVD. 92. Duane Byrge, ‘Spaceballs’, Hollywood Reporter (22 June 1987), p. 8. 93. ‘U.S. Box Office’, Hollywood Reporter (30 June 1987), p. 56. 94. Martin A. Grove, ‘The Summer That Never Was: Studios Reshuffle Film Lineups’, Hollywood Reporter (30 June 1987), p. 1. 95. ‘Spaceballs’, Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0094012/ (accessed 23 October 2011). 96. Byrge, ‘Spaceballs’, Hollywood Reporter, p. 8. 97. Hal Hinson, ‘Spaceballs’, Washington Post (24 June 1987), http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/spaceballspghinson_a0c94a.htm (accessed 21 April 2009). 98. Harries, Film Parody, p. 122. 99. Janet Maslin, ‘Spaceballs (1987)’, New York Times (24 June 1987), http:// movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=1&res=9B0DEED9163EF937A15 755C0A961948260 (accessed 21 April 2009). 100. Ibid. 101. Roger Ebert, ‘Spaceballs’, Chicago Sun-Times (24 June 1987), http:// rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19870624/ REVIEWS/706240301/1023 (accessed 21 April 2009). 102. The IMDB records 103 comments for Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), 148 comments for Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), 206 comments for The Producers (1968), and most of all, 218 comments for Spaceballs as of 21 April 2009. See ‘IMBD User Reviews for Spaceballs’, Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094012/usercomments (accessed 21 April 2009). 103. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 224. 104. Ibid., p. 211. 105. Henry Jenkins, ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture’, in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds), Rethinking Media Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

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106.

107. 108.

109.

110.

111.

112.

113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

151

2003), http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/starwars.html (accessed 19 January 2010). Ckcswhffan, ‘My all time favorite Mel Brooks movie’, Internet Movie Database, comment posted on 3 March, 2006, http://imdb.com/title/ tt0094012/usercomments (accessed 14 August 2006). Ibid. Fmacdonald, ‘In the Same League as Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles’, Internet Movie Database, comment posted on 13 September 2005, http://imdb.com/title/tt0094012/usercomments (accessed 14 August 2006). I also define Star Wars as a ‘cult’ film because of the perceived non-mainstream identity of its fans as expressed in many comments posted on the Internet Movie Database. For example, some fans of the film that I quote in my study describe their repeated viewing of Star Wars and their status as ‘collectors’ of Star Wars merchandise. These activities are implied to be in contrast to the ‘mainstream’ activities of the general public who are not such dedicated fans of the film. For a definition of ‘cult’ fandom in this context, see Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andy Willis, ‘Introduction’, in Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andy Willis (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 2. Spaceballs was also adapted by author Jovial Bob Stine into a novelisation titled Spaceballs: The Book (Secaucus, NJ: Scholastic, 1987), and more recently, by Brooks and others into the TV show Spaceballs: the Animated Series (G4, 2008). Lee Eisenberg, ‘Time for a nice, fun space-out!’, Internet Movie Database, comment posted on 8 May 2006, http://imdb.com/title/tt0094012/ usercomments (accessed 14 August 2006). Ben Cheshire, ‘Star Wars farce is so good-natured it’s hard not to like’, Internet Movie Database, comment posted on 27 June 2004, http://imdb. com/title/tt0094012/usercomments?start=170 (accessed 13 September 2006). Hotoil, ‘Not Very Good’, Internet Movie Database, comment posted on 8 March 2001, http://imdb.com/title/tt0094012/usercomments?start=170 (accessed 14 August 2006). Ibid. Nicole Matthews, Comic Politics: Gender in Hollywood Comedy After the New Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 100. Cameron Stauth, ‘Mel and Me’, American Film, 15.7 (1 April 1990), p. 10. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 10.

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121. Martin A. Grove, ‘Brooks Spreads Credit for “Tights” Success’, Hollywood Reporter (4 August 1993), p. 6. 122. ‘The Box Office’, Hollywood Reporter (10 August 1993), p. 61. 123. Grove, ‘Brooks Spreads Credit’, Hollywood Reporter, p. 6. 124. Ibid., p. 6. 125. ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’, The Numbers, http://www.the-numbers. com/movies/1993/0RHMT.php (accessed 2 January 2011). 126. Steve Chagollan, ‘Grow Up! Filmmakers Discuss Aging Audiences’ Desire for More Sophisticated Comedies’, Hollywood Reporter (27 July 1993), p. 36. 127. Ibid., p. 36. 128. The single is noted to have remained at number one in the UK single chart for 16 weeks in Helen Pidd, ‘UK’s first Chart Topper and Godfather actor Al Martino dies’, Guardian (14 October 2009), http://www.guardian. co.uk/music/2009/oct/14/al-martino-godfather-charts-dies (accessed 20 June 2010). 129. Nottingham Evening Post (13 December 1993), Robin Hood file, Nottingham City Library, p. 169. 130. Bill Adler and Jeffrey Feinman, Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976), p. 166. 131. Michael Sragow, ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’, New Yorker (16 August 1993), http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/robin_hood_men_ in_tights_brooks (accessed 21 April 2009). 132. Vincent Canby, ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights: Mel Brooks Aims His Comedic Barbs at Robin Hood et al’, New York Times (28 July 1993), http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=2&res=9F0CE4DD1431F 93BA15754C0A965958260 (accessed 21 April 2009). 133. ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’, Time Out, http://www.timeout.com/film/ reviews/76844/robin_hood_men_in_tights.html (accessed 21 April 2009). This entry has no posting date. 134. Variety Staff, ‘Robin Hood – Men in Tights’, Variety (1 January 1993), http:// www.variety.com/review/VE1117794518.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 (accessed 21 April 2009). 135. Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 107. 136. Desson Howe, ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’, Washington Post (30 July 1993), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/ robinhoodmenintightspg13howe_a0afe4.htm (accessed 21 April 2009). 137. Ibid. 138. Canby, ‘Mel Brooks Aims’, New York Times. 139. Stephen Knight, ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights: Fitting the Tradition Snugly’, in Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture Across the literature / Media Divide (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 125.

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140. Ibid., p. 125. 141. Michael Sragow, ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’, New Yorker, 16 August 1993), http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/robin_hood_men_ in_tights_brooks (accessed 21 April 2009). 142. Joe Leydon, ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It’, Variety (18 December 1995), p. 67. 143. Chuck Wagner, ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It’, Cinefantastique (January 1996), p. 8. 144. ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It’, The Numbers. http://www.the-numbers. com/movies/1995/0DCDL.php (accessed 2 January 2011). 145. ‘Dracula Dead and Loving It’, Time Out (4 December 1996), p. 79. 146. Bill Warren, ‘Dracula: Clown Prince of Darkness’, Fangoria, 149 (1 January 1996), p. 26. 147. Backley, ‘Dracula’, Sight and Sound, p. 40. 148. Leydon, ‘Dracula’, Variety, p. 67. 149. Kevin Jackson, ‘Dracula Dead and Loving It’, Independent on Sunday (1 December 1996), p. 12. 150. ‘Dracula Dead and Loving It’, Starburst, 212.1 (April 1996), p. 42. 151. Alexander Walker, ‘Another Fang Mess . . .’, Evening Standard (28 November 1996), p. 26. 152. ‘The Video-eye of Dr. Cyclops’, Fangoria, 155 (1 August 1996), p. 35. 153. Georgia Brown, ‘Dracula Dead and Loving It’, Village Voice (2 January 1996), p. 52. 154. Ben Backley, ‘Dracula Dead and Loving It’, Sight and Sound, 6.10 (October 1996), p. 39. 155. Ibid., p. 39. 156. Bob McCane, ‘New Films: Dracula: Dead and Loving It’, Empire (November 1996), p. 45. 157. Ibid., p. 45. 158. David Kronke, ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Brooks’ ‘Dracula’ Parody: Dead or Undead?’, Los Angeles Times (22 December 1995), http://www.cal endarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-movie960406-12,0,700016.story (accessed 2 April 2007). 159. Joe Leydon, ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It’, Variety (18 December 1995), p. 67. 160. ‘The Video-eye’, Fangoria, p. 35. 161. Jeff Dawson, ‘Blaze of Glory’, Empire (November 1996), p. 114. 162. Ibid., p. 114.

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C H A PTER 5

The Integration of the Film and Theatre Industries: The Producers, 1968–2007

In order to sustain his long career in show business, Mel Brooks has capitalised on adapting material between theatre and film. This strategy is clearly apparent in the invention and prolonged life of his film The Producers (1968). This process started with The Producers itself, which Brooks originally manufactured largely by appropriating content from Broadway shows. This film, best understood as a jarring hybrid between Broadway and Hollywood, made Brooks’s name as a director, and in later years, gradually became a ‘cult’1 work with film critics, in part, for its ‘theatrical’ qualities. Brooks then capitalised on that critical popularity by remediating his 1968 film into a Broadway musical, The Producers (2001–7). That version was a massive commercial and critical success internationally. Following that project, Brooks then prolonged the work through adaptation into yet another Hollywood film, The Producers (2005). By examining Brooks’s prolonged adaptations of this work in historical context – looking at the way they bring ‘cinematic’ content and audiences into theatres, and ‘theatrical’ content and audiences into cinemas – it is evident that Brooks has contributed towards, and capitalised on, the increasing modern integration of the film and theatre industries. To understand the significance of Brooks’s contribution to the integration of the film and theatre industries, it is necessary to understand that, traditionally, it has been suggested in academic studies that the theatre and film are, for the most part, exclusive in their production values and in their audiences. This has recently been discussed by Robert Stam, who suggests that critics and academics commonly preconceive that film and the theatre are each suitable for certain codes of production and unsuitable for others, noting for example, ‘A cinematic essence is posited as favoring certain aesthetic possibilities and foreclosing others, as if a specific aesthetic were inscribed in the celluloid itself.’2 As a result, Stam suggests that this kind of thinking adversely affects the way audiences interpret and judge film and other media, and concludes that such notions ‘impose

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an oppressive straightjacket on an open-ended and “non-finalized” set of practices’.3 The origins of these critical attitudes – and in particular, why film critics have traditionally been so adverse to perceived ‘theatrical’ codes of production – can be largely understood by considering how the two media first came to be understood as two separate institutions with perceived oppositional values and audiences. This history has been described by many scholars, notably including Thomas Leitch, who notes that film studies ‘from its beginnings had staked its insurgent disciplinary claims by rejecting the aesthetic appreciation of literature and developing a competing methodology of cultural critique rooted in the revolutionary intellectual ferment in France during the 1960s and 1970s’.4 As Leitch notes, the cinema emerged as a commercial medium far later than the theatre, and – as scholars have widely recognised – from the point of its invention, the theatre has been empowered with a ‘higher’ cultural status. As a reaction to this, film scholars have often praised ‘great’ cinema according to the degree of its difference from perceived theatrical production values – thus rejecting the principles which had until that point privileged the theatre over film. This ‘reactionary’ agenda of film critics, described by Leitch, has traditionally been evident in the writing of film scholars. For example, Susan Sontag has discussed this perception, in which filmmakers are expected to employ production techniques that could not be imitated in the theatre: The history of cinema is often treated as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models. First of all from theatrical ‘frontality’ (the unmoving camera reproducing the situation of the spectator of a play fixed in his seat), then from theatrical acting (gestures needlessly stylised, exaggerated – needlessly, because now the actor could be seen ‘close up’), then from theatrical furnishings (unnecessary ‘distancing’ of the audience’s emotions, disregarding the opportunity to immerse the audience in reality). Movies are regarded as advancing from theatrical stasis to cinematic fluidity, from theatrical artificiality to cinematic naturalness and immediacy.5

The perceived different cultural associations that separate film from theatre is most clear in the opposing way the two respective audiences are assumed to engage with their entertainments.6 This difference is explained by Sontag, who notes: ‘Cinema, at once high art and popular art, is cast as the art of the authentic. Theatre, by contrast, means dressing up, pre-tense, lies. It smacks of aristocratic taste and the class society.’7 As such, the cinema is expected to make for a more absorbing and straightforward entertainment for a ‘less-sophisticated’ mass audience – one which disguises its production and keeps its commercial audience engrossed

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without making them think about its making. Notably, this perception, which differentiates theatre as a more ‘sophisticated’ experience, has been long established in scholarly studies, most famously by André Bazin who proposed that ‘theater calls for an active individual consciousness while the film requires only a passive adhesion’.8 Despite such scholarly work on the perceived separation of film from the theatre, the historical development of the relationship between these two industries, beyond the 1960s, has yet to be thoroughly examined. In this context, following on from the studies by Stam, Leich, Sontag, Bazin, and others, by examining Brooks’s adaptations of The Producers, a history of increased integration between film and theatre is revealed. While it becomes evident that the cinema and theatre were indeed perceived by critics as exclusive media in the 1960s, even then these two industries were interconnected. Furthermore, as I will suggest, owing to the increased production of adaptations between theatre and film, making for the increased integration of the two industries since around 2000 onwards, critical attitudes towards the two media as inherently separate have since declined significantly. It is my suggestion that Brooks’s strategy of adapting his own content between film and theatre has contributed towards this shift in production trends and towards a shift in critical culture, making for a new era in which perceived ‘cinematic’ and ‘theatrical’ content is more broadly accepted in either media.

The Producers (1968) The Producers was Brooks’s first attempt as a film director to hybridise film and theatre content. With its storyline focusing on Broadway, its casting of Broadway actors Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, their outlandish ‘theatrical’ performances, its stagy sets and simplistic framing, The Producers essentially rendered theatre content for the cinema screen. In terms of its subject matter, production and performances, The Producers followed in the history of films which have repurposed theatre for a film audience, as seen in films with stories about the theatre like Top Hat (1935), or in the Broadway musicals-turned-films that were produced in the years before. As Peter Kramer notes, in his book The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (2005), before the New Hollywood era, there was in fact a trend of commercially very popular Broadway shows adapted for Hollywood film in the period from 1949 to 1966, which he terms the ‘Roadshow Era’.9 Notable texts during this period include West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Sound of Music (1965).10 However, The Producers was not an adaptation in the sense of the

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‘Roadshow Era’ Broadway films. Whereas those musicals were ‘cinematic’ treatments of their sources – adopting all the cinematography, editing and more ‘naturalistic’ performance styles associated with ‘classical’ Hollywood film – Brooks used very few explicitly ‘cinematic’ techniques in directing The Producers. As such, Brooks largely chose not to take his production, in Sontag’s terms, ‘from theatrical artificiality to cinematic naturalness’.11 The Producers was a modest production – as reported by Vanity Fair, it was made for approximately $941,000,12 half of which was provided by producer Joseph E. Levine, with a mere $35,000 paid to Brooks as his set fee.13 The Producers was produced with only limited filming on location, and using a relatively small cast. Brooks’s simplistic direction is most apparent in the early scenes of the film, in which just Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel perform together. Their scenes are filmed in long takes from only one side of what appears to be a three-walled set. Apart from the occasional close-up, their performances are captured without any panning, stylistic editing, long shots, overhead shots, or any kind of the dramatic ‘cinematic’ technique described by Bazin and others. This adoption of ‘theatrical’ production values meant that The Producers was considered an oddity in the climate of its production. Looking at the coverage in the press, including the writers of the New York Times and critics such as Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael and others, it is now evident that 1968 was a unique time when film critics were struggling to establish the ‘respectability’ of the American cinema – by arguing that it was a ‘modern’ and ‘popular’ medium, and more than just a remediation of the American theatre and old film culture. As Kramer notes, the studios were attempting to reach a new generation of audiences with films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Graduate (1967), ‘youth being on the side of innovation and older audiences on the side of tradition’.14 These expectations dominated film criticism in the late 1960s, preconfiguring every aspect of films with interpretations, so that critics praised any affiliation with ‘modern’ culture, as recognised in the movies The Graduate and Sympathy for the Devil (1968), and damned movies for any perceived revival of the past, or of ‘establishment’ culture, embodied most strongly by ‘theatrical’ or Broadway traditions. In this climate, by adapting content from Broadway through the performances of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, and its storyline about Broadway itself, The Producers channelled critics’ memories of theatre culture – meaning that Brooks’s film was often perceived as a misjudged and inopportune project. Brooks’s approach to directing led some film critics to compare his film to the theatre. Most concisely, Mandel Herbstman in Film Daily noted that The Producers has ‘the quality and appearance of a photographed

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stageplay’.15 However, rather than praising Brooks, The Producers was heavily condemned by many critics for its lack of inventiveness, and for not adopting the kind of production values they expected. The way The Producers contrasted with the ‘innovative’ filmmaking of other directors in the late 1960s is most clearly evident in the comments made by prestigious film critic Andrew Sarris, who wrote: ‘Unfortunately, the capacity of the motion-picture medium for realism, social contiguity, and generalized experience confounds the expectations of The Producers.’16 In his own words, Sarris’s review suggests that movies should be ‘realistic’; and in examining his criticism against the film, it would seem the wooden sets and head-to-toe framing of The Producers hardly created an experience that could be perceived as ‘real’, and was not ‘cinematic’ in Sarris’s view. However, the motivation behind the criticism becomes apparent in his following remarks, whereby he compares the production values of The Producers to past eras of filmmaking. Sarris notes that, ‘the direction of Mel Brooks is thoroughly vile and inept. Everyone in the film down to the last extra mugs with an extravagance not seen since the most florid silent days.’17 As this comment suggests, the criticism of American cinema as ‘theatrical’ was given special relevance according to its intrinsic association with perceived old-fashioned entertainment. The term ‘realism’ is important in understanding how Brooks’s film deviated from the perceived conventions of other New Hollywood films. I use the term as it is used by Bazin, in which he determines ‘realism’ to be a fundamental quality of the cinema. As Bazin notes, ‘Illusion in the cinema is not based as it is in the theatre on convention tacitly accepted by the general public; rather, contrariwise, it is based on the inalienable realism of that which is shown. All trick work must be perfect in all material respects on the screen.’18 In this context, ‘realistic’ performance styles, and other production values, are intended to contribute towards the same engrossing experience by not calling attention to the production of the film. The controversy surrounding Brooks’s appropriation of ‘theatre’ in The Producers can be clearly understood by considering the divisive climate in which it was released. The film opened amid a drive for other more ‘realist’ and innovative movies, most notably, the landmark film The Graduate. This is a particularly important comparison since The Graduate was described by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times as a ‘sophisticated film’,19 and won Mike Nichols best director, according to the 1967 New York Film Critics, and also the 1967 Directors’ Guild of America. More significantly, The Graduate was identified by Crowther in the New York Times as one of the year’s ten superior films – also includ-

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ing Cool Hand Luke (1967) and In the Heat of the Night (1967) – together creating a rising tide of movies striving for ‘critical respectability’.20 As that article details, these movies largely adopted qualities of performance and direction copied from the French New Wave cinema. The dramatic emergence of this new kind of filmmaking is also documented by Thomas Schatz, who credits this trend to ‘a new “generation” of Hollywood filmmakers, such as Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, and Bob Rafelson, who were turning out films that had as much in common with the European art cinema as with classical Hollywood’.21 In contrast with these new American films, which were seen by critics as aiming for ‘modernism’ rather than ‘tradition’, The Producers was a very old-fashioned kind of Jewish, studio-era comedy. Most significantly, The Producers featured vaudeville-style verbal performances, and simplistic direction, like the Marx Brothers in films such as Duck Soup (1933). This is significant as it has been long argued by film scholars that the cinema, by its nature, suits more subtle and ‘realistic’ performances. For example, this perception that ‘naturalistic’ acting is better suited to the screen is typified by Virginia Wright Wexman, who notes: ‘The absence of a live audience gives an obvious advantage to actors who are specifically trained to ignore spectators. Further, Stanislavski’s preoccupation with expressing inner conflict rather than cultivating external effects is well suited to the cinema’s feelings.’22 More importantly, it seems this medium-specific idea about ‘naturalistic’ acting was perceived by film critics to be a feature of the new Hollywood movement. Dustin Hoffman, in the acclaimed movie The Graduate, for example, was given particular praise from Crowther in the New York Times for his ‘stolid, deadpanned performance’,23 which earned him a nomination for a 1967 Academy Award. In terms of Bazin’s vision of the cinema, this ‘naturalistic’ performance fulfilled the goals of the medium – making for a relatable and immersive experience. The hectic and wildly emotional performances by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in The Producers were in every way inconsistent with this perceived ideal of film acting – in contrast, their performance style evoked what Jeremy G. Butler has described as the Brechtian ‘alienation effect’.24 Mostel’s performance in particular defied the expectations of film critics, reviving what was essentially a challenging avant-garde experience – with all the associations of old and ‘high’ culture rather than anything ‘popular’. Mostly, the critics made their judgements without reservation – sometimes referring to Mostel as ‘overacting’ or calling him a ‘ham’, but his performance was always written about for its unreal, exaggerated qualities. Typically, Renata Adler in the New York Times described Mostel as ‘overacting grotesquely’.25 Most poignantly, Andrew Sarris condemned

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Mostel, not just because his mugging was perceived as ‘theatrical’, but because this acting style, in film, was a particular point of serious discussion with critics in 1968: At a time when film aestheticians are solemnly debating the merits of looking directly at the camera to talk to the audience, Mel Brooks indulges in asides too stagy even for the stage. With no grading in the direction, the performances are all grating. Zero Mostel roles his eyes on the screen as if he were running a bowling alley in his skull.26

It is important to note that outrageous, loud, or ‘Brechtian-style’ performances were not always unpopular with film critics at the time. Most notably, the work of Brecht-inspired director Jean-Luc Godard was well regarded. Godard’s film Sympathy for the Devil, for example, was treated by Roger Greenspun in the New York Times as a provocative and valuable work of filmmaking, despite its arguably ‘theatrical’ qualities. The film may have been an eclectic mix of camera-aware performances – breaking the fourth wall – but all of this was perceived to have some deeper significance. Typical of the philosophical slant of his whole review, Greenspun suggests the film expressed ‘a concern with ways of putting things together’, adding that ‘the film seems determined to be the prospective text of some ultimate, infinitely complex collectivism’.27 However, the contrasting opinion about these two films is generated not from any fundamental reaction to the performances themselves, but from the cultural interpretation of these performances in this era, as determined by the history of performances they adapt. The Producers and Sympathy for the Devil exhibit too many differences to examine them conclusively as part of this study. However, in terms of adaptation, it is very clear that the toward-camera looks and erratic behaviours by the Rolling Stones in Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil had significantly different cultural associations in this era from the performances in Brooks’s film. Godard’s variation on what could be called Brechtian performance adapted very ‘popular’ modern media, infusing the film with direct to camera performance taken from documentary interviews, recording studio ad libs by hip personalities the Rolling Stones – all spliced together for the cinema. Brooks’s performances, in contrast, were perceived to be adapted from old-fashioned, less ‘hip’ entertainment – namely vaudeville and some Broadway stage shows. The performances by both Mostel and Wilder in The Producers were preconfigured by critics’ memories of their Broadway acting careers. Both were experienced theatre actors, and relatively new to film acting at that time. Wilder was discovered by Brooks when he was featuring on Broadway in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1963),

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in which he played alongside Brooks’s wife Anne Bancroft. More significantly, Mostel – described by J. R. T. in The Times as an ‘old fashioned ham’28 – was familiar to theatregoers for his original Broadway performances on Keep ’em Laughing (1942) and Top-Notchers (1942), but he was most well known for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962–4) and Fiddler on the Roof. However, as popular as Mostel was in the theatre, his fame did not extend to popularity as a Hollywood actor with film critics. As was noted in Time, Mostel was ‘a Broadway favorite but long a film disappointment’.29 This considered, Mostel’s performance and the production values of The Producers were ultimately not compatible with the forward-thinking vision of film critics for the ‘new’ American cinema of the late 1960s.

The Modern Revival of The Producers (1968) In the years since the late 1960s, critical attitudes have undergone a significant transformation, whereby the adaptation of Broadway material and the appropriation of ‘theatrical’ production techniques have become significantly more acceptable on screen. This shift was in part a result of the massively increased diversity within Hollywood film production over the years, which has notably included some significant ‘theatrical’ films. In particular, Broadway choreographer Bob Fosse won an Academy Award for his direction of the film Cabaret (1972), which was described by Variety as an ‘expertly accomplished’30 adaptation of the stage show Cabaret (1966–1). Furthermore, the Academy Award-nominated movie All That Jazz (1979), written by Fosse, portrayed his own story behind the scenes during the 1975 Broadway run of his show Chicago. That film was a critical success, making a star of its director in both media, and leading Frank Rich in Time to note: ‘this gifted director-choreographer has shown the same strengths and weaknesses throughout his stage and film career’.31 The rising acceptability of ‘theatrical’ material in film, however, was also a result of a shift in Broadway culture, whereby the theatre became a more modern, ‘hipper’ form of entertainment – and so more compatible with the ‘innovative’ new medium of film. For example, the popular Broadway show The Wiz (1975–9) reinterpreted The Wizard of Oz (1939) within 1970s ‘youth’ culture, and was in fact so popular that it inspired a film adaptation, The Wiz (1978). More significantly, the theatre show Grease (1972–80) was also translated into the subsequent film Grease (1978), in the midst of its Broadway run. That film became a ‘cult’32 phenomenon over the years, leading Jen Chaney in the Washington Post

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to describe the film adaptation as ‘the enduring sing-a-long hit that has earned more than $394 million worldwide since its release in 1978’.33 After the release of these more innovative ‘youth culture’ projects, and their film adaptations, the notion that perceived ‘theatrical’ qualities were the hallmark of some older, aristocratic culture for a regressive, stagnating audience, have been largely made redundant, or at least, broadly declined. The shift in critical attitudes was very fortunate for Brooks, in that his film The Producers came to be described without the previous stigma. In more recent coverage, critics often mention the condemnation the film received in 1968, in particular from the New York Times, New Yorker, Village Voice, and the Hollywood Reporter.34 In modern reviews, critics acclaim The Producers, frequently mentioning its ‘theatricality’ – fondly describing the film for the stagy simplicity of Brooks’s direction and its outlandish performances. For example, in 1995 Lydon noted in Sight and Sound: ‘The Producers is highly theatrical, mostly interiors with few locations, and long dialogue scenes, and dominated by the Mostel and Wilder double act.’35 Similarly, in 1998 Andrew Collins in Empire described The Producers, noting, ‘the film has a rock-solid performing base, not to mention some marvellous flyaway hair. Their two-handers are like acts in a beautifully-scripted stage play.’36 Necessarily, this change in opinion – from the condemnation of these same qualities in 1968 – makes evident a shift in the way critics interpret such production values. For example, whereas film critics in the 1960s were inclined to disregard the Marx Brothers’ films because of their close affinity with the theatre, such ‘outdated’ American films have since been broadly canonised by critics. Significantly, the Marx Brothers’ film Duck Soup, which is echoed in The Producers through the quick retorts and side-comments made by Mostel, is itself now regarded by the AFI as the fifth best movie comedy of all time.37 This shift in interpretation is most clear in the now universal acclaim of the old-fashioned ‘ham’, Zero Mostel. When critics often appreciate Mostel, they still identify his act as a reprise of a theatrical or vaudevillian performance. But rather than damning his performance for these qualities, Mostel is praised explicitly for not adapting – or rather not compromising – his style for the cinema. For example, in 2001, J. Hoberman in the New York Times noted that Mostel makes ‘no concessions for the intimacy of big screen close-up’,38 also adding, ‘Bialystock is a sort of frenzied Groucho Marx (complete with asides to the audience) infiltrated to Falstaffian dimensions’.39 Notably, today’s critics have no recent memory of Mostel on Broadway in his ‘classic’ shows. Instead, the contemporary reviews praise the rhetorical delivery and the big mannerisms of his per-

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formance for its needless excess – the association today being a far more positive one, empowered by the modern acclaim of Groucho Marx, and a new association with Shakespearean performance. This current interpretation is best captured by Roger Ebert, in his 2001 review for the Chicago Sun-Times, in which he praises Mostel’s performance style, also noting: ‘Like Falstaff, Zero Mostel’s Max Bialystock is a man whose hungers are so vast they excuse his appetites.’40 The more recent reviews also write about Brooks’s direction, but instead of criticising Brooks for making a shoddy, low-budget production, they celebrate his film for its production values. As Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books notes in 2001, ‘the deliciously anarchic, gleefully grotesque energies you get in The Producers, which find expression in the many repellent closeups of Zero Mostel and the choppy, hectic pacing and camera work, were to become hallmarks of Brooks’s directorial style, such as it was’.41 In such nostalgic accounts, Brooks’s roughshod approach to filmmaking still marks The Producers as a different kind of film from others in the 1960s, but its ‘theatrical’ production values are interpreted without the negative associations of ‘old’ entertainment. For example, J. Hoberman in the New York Times noted in 2001: ‘The Producers’ is nothing if not self-conscious filmmaking and, although far less flashy in its technique than several of its contemporaries like ‘The Graduate’ and ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (which also quoted Busby Berkeley), the movie was, in its way, one more example of the Hollywood new wave.42

In a total reversal of the 1960s methodology, Brooks’s ‘theatrical’ filmmaking is now interpreted as being just as ‘innovative’ as the other films of the era, rather than something ‘regressive’. This high critical regard of The Producers today provides some convincing evidence that the critical community has largely let go of the negative associations linking theatricality with ‘establishment’ culture – thus, to some extent, discrediting the old scholarly notions that differentiated these two industries in terms of their production values and audiences.

The Broadway Adaptation: The Producers (2001) Brooks’s following project contributed towards a significant transformation of the theatre industry. In 2001, he capitalised on the ‘cult’ popularity of his 1968 film, by remediating it as the Broadway musical The Producers. Aside from the introduction of some highly conventional musical numbers, this show essentially replicated his film on stage. As well as reprising the storyline largely intact, Brooks cast Broadway actors

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Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, who imitated the performances of Mostel and Wilder, and reprised key scenes from his film, including the ‘Springtime for Hitler’ number. The resulting show brought a new audience of filmgoers into theatres, making an experience that was, for many, preconfigured and enhanced by audience memories of Brooks’s original film. Furthermore, Brooks’s appropriation of film material in his Broadway show The Producers set a new precedent for the kind of theatre critics were willing to consume. By adapting that well-known film content, Brooks’s show demonstrated that modern theatre critics were eager to re-experience material from Hollywood film on stage – thus delivering a standardised, predictable and ‘popular’ experience, in a manner traditionally associated with that of the ‘cinematic’ by scholars. The way the Broadway theatre industry has begun to reach out beyond its traditional market has been studied by Celia Lury, in her book Consumer Culture (1996). Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who associated theatre and film with distinct upper-class and working-class audiences respectively,43 Lury describes the gradual integration of those divides. It is Lury’s suggestion that ‘lower’ class audiences are increasingly consuming goods with perceived ‘higher’ cultural value – making for a new, broader audience group she refers to as the ‘new middle class’.44 Lury also notes that when producers aspire to sell cultural commodities – such as Broadway shows – to this ever-broader market, they cater their works towards the competence or ‘aesthetic knowledge’45 of the desired audience. Thus, because the content of new works alters according to popular demand, and the social constitution of the audience itself is broadening, this two-way process serves to blur the divide between traditionally perceived ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of entertainment.46 The rising trend of pre-sold, over-familiar material, designed for theatre’s new ‘mass audience’, has been perceived by some scholars to have transformed Broadway theatre into a highly predictable and unchallenging entertainment. This turnaround has been studied by Susan Bennett in Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (1997), where she recounts the history of empirical research which has already been conducted into theatre audiences. According to Bennett, theatre audiences are not inclined towards innovation. Bennett suggests that because a higher level of education is typical of theatre’s ‘middle class’ audiences, and because educational institutions mostly share the same social and artistic agendas, theatregoers expect only ‘traditional’ theatre rather than avant-garde shows.47 Bennett also suggests that theatre is subject to a form of creative censorship because of its increasing dependence on the box office. In other words, she suggests that theatre companies often ‘cannot

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risk anything but the most popular works’,48 and that by result, many companies ‘tend towards more conservative choices’.49 Publicity and marketability, rather than creative merit, are becoming the most important factors in which shows get commissioned. As Bennett notes, this contributed towards the increased production of film-to-theatre adaptations and revivals of previous theatre shows: Another patch of little resistance is the choice of play already evaluated as a ‘hit’ through previous box-office success, and it is thus transferred, reproduced in a different location, or revived . . . In 1989, Joel Gray toured through the USA in a production of Cabaret; in this instance, the producers can rely not only on past success on Broadway and other stages, but on the enormous popularity of the movie and of Gray’s performance to attract ‘new’ audiences into regional theatres.50

With these criticisms in mind, many theatre workers now also consider the theatre to have become a ‘mass culture’ business, in which prefigurative materials predetermine audience reactions as well as commercial success. In Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich’s book Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century (2002), the essays of many theatre makers describe their concerns about the industry. For example, US theatre director Roberta Levitow notes: ‘What comprises the majority of the work presented in the American theatre? Revivals, classics and some new work that generally steers clear of the controversial, politically or socially.’51 Levitow suggests that since theatre began to appeal to mass audiences, shows have become less experimental and less thought-provoking. Notably, this criticism is reflected in the expectations of critics for theatre shows. Drama critic Michael Billington suggests that criticism of the theatre has become a celebrity-driven thumbs-up or thumbs-down practice – rather than the more complicated assessment of ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’, which he suggests was typical back in the 1960s: ‘Thirty years ago I would never have guessed that even the most serious papers would be assessing the value of works of art by visual symbols or star-ratings.’52 Billington blames the dumbing-down of theatre criticism on the ‘consumerist culture’ and ‘the rise and rise of public relations’.53 According to Billington, the popularity of a theatre show is determined in advance by the popularity of the text, author, cast and crew – a popularity dictated by whether or not the show has big enough publicity. In addition, since modern theatre companies now strive to reach the broadest possible audience, marketing strategies have assumed a prominence previously unseen in the industry. In her study of Disney’s Broadway show The Lion King – itself adapted from the animated film The Lion King – Maurya Wickstrom suggests that because the market

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for today’s Broadway consists largely of tourists passing through New York, Broadway advertisements are designed to reach an international audience, including those who typically do not go to the theatre, rather than the artistically-motivated group of locals it might once have relied on. As Wickstrom observes: ‘In a globalized market, characterized by transnational competition and potentially world-wide reach, the industry can no longer rely on the old techniques of displaying goods as objects for purchase.’54 Looking at examples of advertisements in New York’s Times Square and inside the programme for the show, Wickstrom concludes that the theatre industry has taken a turn for the worse, desperately appealing to a mass audience, using recognisable logos and gimmicks: ‘The subordination of art to commerce is not only more powerful; it is more naturalized than ever.’55 The effect of commercialisation on the production and consumption of American theatre, as discussed by Celia Lury, is nowhere more apparent than in the phenomenon of Brooks’s Broadway show The Producers. First, the show was an adaptation rather than an ‘original’ work, based on Brooks’s 1968 film The Producers – described by Reggie Nadelson in the Guardian as a film with a ‘fanatical cult following’.56 Also, Brooks himself, who wrote the book with Thomas Meehan, was famous for his numerous works and appearances in film and television.57 As John Lahr in the New Yorker notes, ‘Brooks is a licensed zany. The paying customers know that he has the comic goods, and they giggle excitedly as the curtain goes up even before there is anything remotely funny onstage.’58 For theatre critics, given Brooks’s fame, the popularity of the show was already assured. As Nadelson succinctly put it in the Guardian, ‘from the second it opened in New York in 2001, the stage musical was a critical, popular, financial and iconic hit’.59 Thanks to the press coverage, public interest in the show was also frenzied from the start. When it opened on Broadway, The Producers broke all records for ticket sales – making $3m the day after opening,60 leading Clive Barnes in the New York Post to describe The Producers as ‘a cast-iron, copper-bottomed, superduper, mammoth oldtime Broadway hit’.61 The Producers was immediately a massive commercial success for Brooks. According to Gordon Cox in Variety, public demand for The Producers in New York ‘created the phenomenon of the premium-priced ticket’.62 Notably, the Broadway show opened at a ticket price of $99, in a week that Rent (1996–2008) was priced at $80, The Phantom of the Opera (1988–) was charging $85, and The Lion King was charging $90.63 Even so, tickets for The Producers kept climbing, eventually peaking at $480.64 After starting in Chicago, and following the successful New York run, The

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Producers was exported with success to London in 2004. Then in 2006, the show was exported to Australia,65 South Korea, and Israel. As of February 2007, Cox noted in Variety that the show ‘raked in more than $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales’.66 The ticket pricing strategy for The Producers – which was designed to offer a range of very high price and low price tickets – was a product of Brooks’s exchanges with the other thirteen producers of the show (notably, two of which, the SFX Theatrical Group and the FrankelBaruch-Viertel-Routh Group, were companies rather than individuals). In short, this pricing strategy was motivated by the concern of the other producers that the show would be a flop and close early – thus losing them their investments without an adequate return in ticket sales. Selling high-price tickets meant they had a greater chance of recouping their investments if that was the case. Brooks’s own contribution to this pricing strategy was described in his interview with Chip Crewes in the Washington Post, in which he suggested that it was only at his own insistence that the lower-cost tickets were also made available: The show acquired a stain of notoriety when the producing team – there are a lot of producers – decided to begin charging an astounding $480 for the best seats. Asked about that, Brooks raises his voice. ‘Shaaaame’, he says. ‘Shame on them . . . The producers said, “Look, if we opened and we closed in two weeks, and it cost us 10 or 12 million dollars, there’s not one mention in the paper – ‘Oh – oh poor, poor producers. Oh, we’re so sorry that this happened’.” So they said, “You gotta strike while the iron is hot.” . . . I said, “I don’t know – I just think, you know – promise me this: For the ‘La Boheme’ crowd, for the people in the third balcony, $30 tickets. For way in the back.” So they did. . . . We did have $30, $35 tickets. And they needed an oxygen mask and binoculars. But – you could see “The Producers” for 35 bucks.’67

It was already a convention that Broadway shows such as Cats (1982– 2000) and The Phantom of the Opera offered an advertised, standardised experience, in some way similar to that offered by the cinema. This massculture practice has been studied by Tori Haring-Smith, who suggests that while cinema plays to many cities worldwide at the same time, theatre has begun to do so too. For example, she suggests the musical Rent plays in London, New York and Chicago simultaneously, and ‘all productions are designed to deliver the same show. New actors must pick up the same intentions, actions and timing as previous actors’.68 She suggests that in ‘traditional’ theatre, each performance should be individual – a product of its regional community. In contrast, Haring-Smith draws the conclusion that in ‘modern’ theatre this has changed. Instead, ‘when cast members must duplicate some other actors’ performances, not develop their own,

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they become automations, no more alive than the projections of light on a cinema screen’.69 This critique evokes a criticism of the theatre audience, in which Haring-Smith suggests that audiences come to theatre shows with rigid expectations: ‘Our modern society craves predictability, permanence, and universality . . . Perhaps theatre is dying because it cannot be predictable enough . . . You can’t out-cinema cinema. And theatre must not try.’70 The Producers was an especially marketable show because of the way Brooks capitalised on his ‘cult’ film – thus manufacturing just the kind of ‘predictable’ experience described by Haring-Smith. As such, the public and critics knew they would be delivered a standardised experience, but more specifically, performances that revived the familiar roles exactly as performed by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the 1968 film, wherever and whenever they were audience to it. This expectation is best demonstrated by the reception of the actors to take on the roles of Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, whereby some actors were certainly perceived to be more successful than others. As Nigel Reynolds reported in the Daily Telegraph, British actor Henry Goodman was ‘sacked by Brooks after 30 performances for not being funny enough’.71 In contrast, the most popular performers proved to be its first players, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick – something reflected in both the critical press and the ticket sales. For example, when Alfred Hickling in the Guardian remarks that The Producers ran for three years on Broadway without an unprofitable week,72 he also adds, ‘when the original stars, Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, left the show attendances dropped. But a show that had been grossing $1.2m a week was still fairly comfortable at $900,000.’73 In looking at the reviews, however, it seems that the success of Lane and Broderick’s performances with critics was not due to their own distinctive interpretation of the roles, but simply to their physical likeness to the 1968 film’s stars. Nathan Lane was uniquely suitable to replace the late Zero Mostel, given his physical resemblance to him, especially in his stocky build and broad face. In addition, Lane had already replaced Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, in a 1996 revival of his 1962 show. As such, combined with his wild, loud, and overly dramatic acting, Lane was the ideal choice to channel audience memories of Mostel. However, since Mostel was such a highly distinctive and well-known actor, Lane’s performance was also under the greatest scrutiny. As Hickling notes in the Guardian, ‘The Producers relies heavily upon the interplay of its two leads, however, and finding an actor with sufficient stamina to carry the role of Max has been a continual problem.’74 Similarly, John Lahr in the

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New Yorker notes: ‘As good as he is, Lane can’t quite find the oily desperation that Zero Mostel brought to the film role or escape the shadow of Mostel’s comic genius.’75 In any case, critics’ memories of Mostel commonly preconfigured experiences and attitudes towards Nathan Lane’s performance. Brooks’s other significant intervention into Broadway theatre was his use of television actors. In order to maintain the ongoing popularity of The Producers, Brooks renewed interest in the show by changing the cast members several times, often employing well chosen television celebrities. This casting provided an ongoing source of publicity whereby newspapers often speculated on the actors, with interest in how exactly these various stars would match expectations set by the 1968 film’s performances. For example, USA Today quoted Marc Hirschfeld, executive vice-president of casting for NBC Entertainment, who suggested that many stars were being considered for the roles. These included personalities as varied as Martin Short, Jason Alexander, Kevin Kline, and Danny DeVito as Max Bialystock. For the role of Leo Bloom, he named David Schwimmer of Friends (NBC, 1994–2004), David Hyde Pierce of Frasier (NBC, 1993– 2004), French Stewart, star of 3rd Rock From the Sun (NBC, 1996–2001), and Dana Carvey of Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975–).76 The show’s actual actors were just as varied. In 2007, dumpy working-class comic Peter Kay of Phoenix Nights (C4, 2001–2) featured as Roger DeBris in the show’s Manchester run in the UK, and actor-producer David Hasselhoff, famed for Baywatch (NBC, 1989–2001), played Roger DeBris in Las Vegas.77 This variety of well-known television stars titillated critics because they expected the performances to be compatible with those of the original film’s actors – and these actors were to varying degrees incompatible with the two roles, owing to the baggage of their television careers. Among these many stars, the show’s most unusual choice must be ItalianAmerican star of the sitcoms Who’s the Boss? (ABC, 1984–92) and Taxi (ABC, 1978–82, NBC, 1982–3), Tony Danza, in the role of Bialystock. Given audience memory of Danza’s two lovable characters, his casting was seen as the most unlikely choice, and as such, generated most publicity for the show, much to the entertainment of Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, who noted: Max Bialystock is many things – a stinking liar, a crook, a shameless noodge, a stud muffin for the elderly and infirm. And of course a big fat Broadway producer. But a mensch he is not. This incontrovertible fact has apparently not been imparted to Tony Danza, who is struggling gamely through this gargantuan role at the moment, treating audiences to a soft and chewy sweetheart of a Bialy.78

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Danza’s incompatibility with the role of Bialystock even meant that the script had to be altered to accommodate him. As such, Isherwood also observed, ‘Now, when Leo Bloom, played with zest by Roger Bart, descends into one of his many bouts of hysteria and hisses venom at Max, he abuses his partner as a “former fatty”.’79 Notably, his article also goes into depth describing how Danza’s full head of hair and his likeable persona make him the most unsuitable actor yet. Perhaps the most controversial casting, however, was Richard Dreyfuss who was also picked to play Bialystock – despite the fact that he had no stage or singing experience. Dreyfuss withdrew from the show four days before opening night, notably after making a ‘gaffe’ on the Frank Skinner Show (ITV, 1995–). As Nigel Reynolds reported in the Daily Telegraph, Dreyfuss was talking about his lack of practice when he warned audiences: ‘The Producers opens November 9. Come from Christmas on. Do not come before that, OK? The general manager just had a heart attack when I said that.’80 Even this casting decision, however, provided a source of press interest in the show, in this case, capitalising on the Hollywood career of Dreyfuss as well as this notorious television appearance. Where Brooks did make significant changes in remediating the story of The Producers for the theatre medium, he did so only to meet the well established expectations of Broadway critics for ‘showy’ musical numbers. Musical theatre is famously formulaic, and even more so at the high-price end of the industry. For example, in his study of the American theatre, Mark Fortier writes about ‘the effect of high commodification on recent musical theatre’.81 Fortier suggests that theatrical musicals like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1994–2007) are ‘more economically and technically endowed and more profitable and yet more precarious and directly susceptible to market forces than ever before – a theatre that sells out in a number of senses’.82 In the case of such high-price-ticket musicals, regular audiences expect certain kinds of numbers at certain points in the narrative, which together determine the structure of the show. This modern trend in production has also been described by Jonathan Burston, who goes as far to suggest that such big-investment shows are so highly standardised that they belong to a unique genre all of their own – namely a category he calls ‘megamusicals’.83 Burston suggests: Unlike their predecessors, megamusicals are big global business: capital investments are larger, markets are bigger, more international and more numerous, and stakes are higher than ever before in the history of popular music-theatre production. In addition, with the arrival of megamusicals we have also witnessed the attainment of

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a level of standardisation in production regimes previously unknown in the field of the live theatre.84

For The Producers, to create a broadly appealing megamusical, Brooks made some striking changes to his original story, to bring it into line with the structural conventions of Broadway narratives. Near the end of the 1968 film, Bialystock and Bloom are arrested together for overselling investment in the Springtime for Hitler production. In the 2001 show, however, only Bialystock is caught. Bloom runs away to Rio with his secretary Ulla, leaving Bialystock in jail. At this point, trapped in his dramatically lit jail cell, Bialystock performs the solo ‘Betrayed’. While fans of the original film watching the show may find this plot twist an ‘innovative’ change, it is in fact a convention of musical theatre. For the show, this new twist was necessary to justify Bialystock performing a song referred to by theatregoers as the ‘eleven o’clock number’85 – an emotional number, traditionally used to lift the audience’s spirits at this late point in evening shows. Notably, The Producers also contained other musical numbers that were similarly inserted, in some cases with content appropriated from other Broadway shows. For example, when Franz Liebkind, dressed as Hitler, sits playfully on the edge of a darkened stage, meekly singing a solo under a spotlight, his performance mimics Dolly Levi’s entrance in the musical Hello, Dolly! (1964–70).86 The remediation of The Producers into a typical Broadway show is most evident in Brooks’s adaptation of the final scene from the 1968 film, in which Bialystock and Nazi-helmeted Franz Liebkind are seen in jail together, conducting a string of prisoners in a seedy jailhouse production called Prisoners of Love. Bloom is sitting at a desk, overselling the production to other convicts and a prison guard: ‘Tell the governor he owns one-hundred percent of the show.’ However, in the Broadway theatre production, this melancholy finish is not the end of the story. Instead, a messenger runs into the scene, and reads a telegram from the governor: ‘Gentleman, you are hereby granted a full pardon for having – through song and dance – brought joy and laughter into the heart of every murderer, rapist and sex maniac in Sing Sing!’ The next sequence is a big glitzy Broadway version of the same Prisoners of Love performance – lit with pink lighting, and with rows of chorus girls each twirling a prop ball and chain in unison. This time, Ulla even appears centre-stage with Roger DeBris. Here, all the leads are united again in a legitimate Broadway success, closing the show with an uplifting number that theatre audiences have come to expect – in some way similar to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘The Jellicle Ball’ finale at the end of Cats.

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In examining the performances, story, the musical numbers together, and the critical reactions to these elements, it is evident that Brooks’s Broadway show The Producers was an innovative hybrid of material from the film, television and Broadway industries. First, the show reprised the story and performances of Brooks’s 1968 film, therefore appealing to fans of his ‘cult’ movie. Second, Brooks repurposed his material by introducing musical numbers as was the convention in megamusicals, thus appealing to traditional fans of Broadway. Third, Brooks also renewed The Producers over its run by casting various popular television stars whose well-known career histories also contributed to the presold experience. With these strategies considered together, The Producers was an innovative hybrid of content from the Broadway, film and television industries – designed to deliver cinematic and television material on stage, in order to appeal to a cross-over audience that spans these different media. The impact of Brooks’s The Producers on the American theatre industry can be seen in the cycle of film adaptations that have followed, in which theatre-makers worldwide have adopted Brooks’s strategies of capitalising on film and television content.87 Notable among these is Brooks’s own adaptation of his 1974 film, Young Frankenstein.88 These shows have quickly come to dominate the theatre industry, bringing in both solid box-office sales and critical acclaim. As Ryan Gilbey in Sight and Sound notes, The Producers ‘transformed Broadway into a shrine for screen-tostage musical adaptations: Hairspray [2002–9], Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Spamalot (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) are among those currently playing’.89 In the wake of Brooks’s success, and that of numerous other stage shows, including The Little Shop of Horrors (2003–4), adapted from the 1986 film, The 39 Steps (2005–), adapted from the 1935 Hitchcock film, and Mary Poppins (2006–), adapted from the 1964 film, it seems theatres worldwide are now thriving like never before by recycling film content, offering a standardised, cinema-like experience, and reaching out to filmgoers. Also in the wake of The Producers, theatre producers have broadly adopted Brooks’s strategy of casting television stars. With his eclectic casting of ‘popular’ television actors including David Hasselhoff, known for Baywatch, Tony Danza of Taxi, and Peter Kay of Phoenix Nights, Brooks demonstrated that celebrity from any cultural industry, even the most ‘low’ culture television personalities, could make for profitable theatre. Again, following Brooks’s example, there is now also a rising trend for television celebrities to be cast on Broadway, notably including Kelsey Grammer, the star of Frasier, who as Playbill reported with much excitement, starred in La Cage aux Folles in 2010.90 Perhaps most signifi-

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cantly, this calculated use of television talent has been imitated by theatres worldwide – and not just by big budget Broadway producers. As Melena Z. Ryzik reports in the New York Times, the popularity of the recent filmadaptation Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story on Stage (2004–), produced by the family-based company Jacobsen Entertainment, was partly insured by the fact that the lead was played by ‘Kym Valentine, the Australian television star’.91 With such projects now appearing with increasing frequency, it would seem that following the example of Brooks’s The Producers, film and television content is destined to play an ever-increasing role in the theatre industry.92 Brooks also capitalised on synergy between The Producers on Broadway and the television industry in 2004 with his cameo appearances in Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 2000–). Brooks appeared working behind-the-scenes, casting his then currently-running Broadway show – playing what Entertainment Weekly described as his ‘wrinkly, adorable’93 self. The synergy between his projects is most apparent in the episode ‘Opening Night’, which featured a recreation of a key scene in The Producers itself whereby Brooks and Bancroft, here acting as the producers of The Producers, are seen toasting their success in a bar across the street from the theatre – just as did Lane and Broderick in the 2001 stage play, and Mostel and Wilder in the 1968 film before them. They are captured with just the same framing, and even deliver many of the same lines from the film’s notorious opening night scene. With all these indicators, this scene offered audiences a multilayered experience in which David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm is layered with Brooks’s ‘off-screen’ career, and with the fictional storyline of The Producers – thus creating synergy between these cinematic, theatrical and television projects.

Remade in Hollywood: The Producers (2005) Brooks exhibited his strategy of prolonged adaptation when, during the run of The Producers on Broadway, he adapted it into yet another Hollywood film in 2005. Although other recent films remediated Broadway material, including Chicago (2002), Brooks took the rare step, this time as producer, to oversee his own text making the prolonged transition from film to theatre and then back again to film. Following his previous strategy, Brooks made every effort to capitalise on his 2001 show, this time by employing many of the same cast members from his theatre project to make this new film, including the stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick – described by Ryan Gilbey in Sight and Sound together as ‘a hefty insurance policy’.94 Brooks also cast film and television actors Will

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Ferrell and Uma Thurman in supporting roles, but these additions were unique in what was otherwise a highly accurate reproduction, designed expressly to render and resell the Broadway show with all of the storylines, characters and performance-styles seen in the theatre. This was notably commented on by Todd McCarthy in Variety, who noted, ‘reproducing Mel Brooks’ still-running Broadway smash so literally you can practically see the proscenium arch, new pic is undeniably stagy, even clunky,’ adding, ‘it’s been a very long time since a stage musical was so minimally reconceived for motion pictures’.95 In an effort to accurately recapture his recent Broadway production, including its new numbers, actors, and the old New York setting created for the show, Brooks hired the show’s choreographer and director Susan Stroman to direct, even though she lacked any film experience. At Brooks’s request, she even adopted the head-to-toe framing style familiar in screen musicals like Singin’ in the Rain (1952).96 Brooks’s promotional statements suggest that the film was conceived simply in order to allow a wider audience to see the Broadway show – making the assumption that film audiences would share his adoration of the recent theatre version. For example, in an interview with Film Review, Brooks describes his idea for the film: Now, we were making the musical CD back in 2001, before we opened, and I scream out, ‘Stro, this has gotta be a movie! Their performances are so brilliant and thrilling that I want to document it all forever, even if we just shoot it on a handheld video camera.’ So we made the movie.97

Brooks was not alone in thinking the Broadway show would be just as successful again as a new film – even without significant remediation or other means of ‘renewing’ the material. With his critically acclaimed show still running on Broadway, and his 1968 film still enjoying ‘cult’ status with film critics, there was some speculation by critics that Brooks’s new film adaptation of The Producers could become a prestigious text simply by association with the other versions. As such, early reports presumed that the film was Oscar material. Notably, an article in Empire commented, ‘their chances of striking box-office and awards gold are high as a showgirl’s heel’,98 and Jeff Dawson in The Times asserted that ‘Thurman, a certifiable wow, is now being talked up for the Oscars’.99 Similarly, reviewers expected that the big public following of The Producers on Broadway would carry over to the new film, and make it a commercial hit. For example, Simon Brent suggested in Screen International that ‘Given the crowd-pleasing material and its large fan base, it should skew toward the more optimistic levels of returns in the US.’100 Indeed, since the new

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film adaptation of The Producers was to be released concurrently with the run of the Broadway show, there was much potential for synergy between the two. Despite this critical anticipation, however, the film-of-the-show had only limited success at the box office. When it was released, Brooks’s new cinematic version never received a nomination from the Academy, and its commercial reception was relatively poor. Brooks’s film took $19.4m in the USA, and $13.5m in foreign theatres. The film thus made only $32.9m in theatres worldwide101 – marginally less than its reported $45m cost.102 By capitalising on his Broadway show still in theatres, and reproducing that show so faithfully, the reaction from film critics was ultimately one of great disappointment, ironically, due to the apparent lack of ‘innovative’ content. In short, it was commonly perceived by critics that this time Brooks had now over-extended his project. For example, when Anthony Simon reviewed the 2005 film in the Independent, he noted: ‘What we have in 2005 then, is the movie of the musical of the movie, and it feels like the fizz has been recorked once too often.’103 Brooks’s prolonged adaptation of The Producers shocked film critics because of its similarity to the previous Broadway adaptation. Brooks’s latest adaptation of The Producers was often considered as a step too far, whereby Brooks was condemned for imitating old material on the basis of its commercial profitability rather than any other perceived ‘artistic’ merit or entertainment value. These criticisms were often highly detrimental to Brooks’s reputation – a sentiment captured by Simon McCartney in the Sunday Times, who noted: ‘I wonder what purpose has been served by this screen re-make, beyond the potential broadening of financial rewards.’104 The backlash against Brooks, however, was most overt in the review by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice, who made a point of the film’s prolonged life through its adaptations: There’s no business like show business, and the musical Producers’ considerable success showed the original movie to have been prophetic – of itself. Thus, The Producers has mutated into a story of self-actualization. Is there a Saturday-morning cartoon series in Max and Leo’s future? The Producers: The Musical: The Movie insists, even as it demonstrates, that the show must go on . . . and on.105

The harshest criticism of Brooks’s prolonged content in The Producers was directed at the way the 2005 film reprised the same old jokes, just as they were acted out in Brooks’s 1968 film, notably including the ‘walk this way’ routine, Wilder’s line ‘creative accounting’, and Bialystock shouting ‘Look at me! I’m wearing a cardboard belt!’ Since these gags were largely the same as in the first 1968 film, this was a particular point

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of resentment for several critics. This attitude is most apparent in A. O. Scott’s review for the New York Times in which he notes: ‘some of the big laugh lines have been provoking groans since the first, nonmusical Producers movie way back in 1968, and probably even longer, since even that film was a fond, nostalgic embrace of a dying show business tradition’.106 Furthermore, whereas Brooks was able to renew his comedy by remediating The Producers on stage in 2001 – thus offering audiences the novelty of seeing his skits in the theatre – this time, Brooks’s recycling of the exact same punchlines as a film lacked even that appeal. As a result, the new 2005 film was considered a failure by many critics because it simply rehashed the same jokes that had been seen in the cinema over thirty years ago, leading to an article in Empire concisely noting: ‘As a re-interpretation of a classic . . . it’s a disappointment.’107 Despite all of its criticism, however, Brooks’s latest The Producers was followed by a new cycle of similar theatre adaptations, in which Hollywood copies of Broadway shows were produced, exploiting their current on-stage counterparts with significantly greater investment from studios. Even until recently, films of shows were commonly lowinvestment projects, and were relegated to straight-to-DVD status. For example, even the long-running theatre show Rent was adapted to film in 2005 without the contribution of a major director or star. Similarly, The Phantom of the Opera (2004), which was adapted from the Broadway show of the same title (1986–), was a similar low-key project – despite the casting of Minnie Driver in a supporting role. However, in the wake of The Producers, subsequent film adaptations of Broadway shows have begun to feature big stars, and have enjoyed greater critical and commercial success. For example, the Broadway stage show Mamma Mia! (2001–) was adapted for the cinema in 2008, with the contribution of several A-list actors including Pierce Brosnan and Meryl Streep, and was broadly well received by critics.108 Most significantly, like The Producers, the recent drive of theatre adaptations have been increasingly remediated for the cinema screen with less significant transformation of the material, often retaining much of the ‘theatricality’ that was traditionally toned down, removed, or disguised behind ‘cinematic’ production values in earlier eras. For example, Tim Burton adapted Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979–80) into a film of the same title (2007), complete with its musical numbers intact. As David Benedict noted in his review of the film for the Guardian, despite the fact Burton regularly works with Danny Elfman as his composer, this time all the music in the film is a variation on the original Sondheim material. This approach alone

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made Burton’s film version part of a new generation of adaptation when it is considered that ‘almost every past stage musical has transferred to the screen with the help (or hindrance) of Hollywood composers’.109 As such, along with The Producers, Sweeney Todd marks a new era in theatre adaptations where theatre material is reprised with significantly less alteration for the cinema. Following The Producers, John Waters’s Hairspray was the next text to make the same prolonged transition in a similar timeframe, from the original film (1988) to the Broadway show – on which Brooks’s colleague Thomas Meehan was also a writer – then, to the eventual film-of-the-show Hairspray.110 Most significantly, with the shock of such a prolonged commercial enterprise already out of the way, given Brooks’s earlier release of The Producers, that final version of Hairspray was reviewed by film critics with far less resentment towards its similarly extended material. This time, while the Variety reviewer was dubious about Brooks’s 2005 film, Dennis Harvey in Variety notably praised the Hairspray film-of-theshow for what he described as ‘retro movie-musical craftsmanship’.111 In this new era, repeatedly prolonged material, adapted in quick succession between film and theatre, is now becoming a critically accepted convention of the film and theatre industries. This recent cycle of theatre-to-film adaptations, including The Producers, Mamma Mia, Hairspray and Burton’s Sweeney Todd, are now contributing towards a new integrated landscape in which perceived ‘theatrical’ and ‘film’ content, artists, and production values, are more frequently incorporated in the output of both industries, with increasing critical acceptance. At the same time, texts in both industries are increasingly serving to publicise one another, and contribute towards pre-selling the experiences of each other, all while appealing to the same cross-over audience. In this new integrated marketplace, the old perception of theatre, film, and indeed television, as separate industries is quickly becoming outdated.

Notes 1. As discussed in my introduction, I describe The Producers as a ‘cult’ film, first because it is sometimes described as such by critics, but also because of its notorious critical condemnation in 1968. It is following that condemnation that The Producers is still regarded as distinct from the perceived ‘mainstream’ of Hollywood film, even though it is universally popular with critics today. For a definition of ‘cult’ fandom in this context, see Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andy Willis, ‘Introduction’, in Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andy Willis

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2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

me l b r o o ks in the cu l t u r a l i n du s t r i e s (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 2. Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 58. Ibid., p. 59. Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 5. Susan Sontag, ‘Film and Theatre’, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, second edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 362. It is important to note that the separation of the theatre and film industries using the cultural distinctions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ is very problematic. For example, the perceived cultural difference between film and theatre is blurred by the perception of the Broadway musical as a ‘low’ culture enterprise. Sontag, ‘Film and Theatre’, p. 364. André Bazin, ‘Theater and Cinema’, in Mast et al. (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, p. 378. Peter Kramer, The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), p. 22. Kramer identifies the New Hollywood era as 1967–1976. See Kramer, The New Hollywood, p. 2. Sontag, ‘Film and Theatre’, p. 362. Sam Kashner, ‘Producing The Producers’, Vanity Fair, 521 (1 January 2004), p. 113. Geraldine Fabrikant’, Talking Money With: Mel Brooks; A Funny Man Earns It The 2,000-Year-Old Way’ New York Times (26 October 1997), http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/26/business/talking-money-with-melbrooks-a-funny-man-earns-it-the-2000-year-old-way.html?pagewanted=2 (accessed 6 October 2011). Kramer, The New Hollywood, p. 38. Mandel Herbstman, ‘The Producers’, Film Daily (15 December 1967), p. 7. Andrew Sarris, ‘The Producers’, in Stuart Byron and Elisabeth Weis (eds), The National Society of Film Critics on Movie Comedy (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1977), p. 117. Ibid., p. 117. André Bazin, ‘Theater and Cinema’, in Mast et al. (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, p. 389. Bosley Crowther, ‘The Graduate’, New York Times (22 December 1967), http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1739E564BC 4A51DFB467838C679EDE (accessed 23 February 2008). Bosley Crowther, ‘The Ten Best Films of 1967’, New York Times (24 December 1967), p. 55.

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21. Thomas Schatz, ‘The New Hollywood’, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 14. 22. Virginia Wright Wexman, ‘Method Acting in Hollywood’, in Pamela Robertson Wojcik (ed.), Movie Acting the Film Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 129. 23. Crowther, ‘The Graduate’, New York Times. 24. Jeremy G. Butler, Foreword. ‘Short Description of a New Technique of Acting Which Produces an Alienation Effect’, in Jeremy G. Butler (ed.), Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 66. 25. Renata Adler, ‘The Producers’, New York Times (19 March 1968), http:// movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html (accessed 5 January 2004). 26. Andrew Sarris, ‘The Producers’, in Byron and Weis (eds), The National Society of Film Critics, p. 118. 27. Roger Greenspun, ‘Screen: ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ (‘1+1’)’, New York Times (27 April 1970), http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=95 0DE1DF1438EE34BC4F51DFB266838B669EDE (accessed 14 September 2008). 28. J. R.T., ‘Larger than Life’, The Times (10 October 1969), p. 8. 29. ‘Cinema: The Producers’, Time (26 January 1968), http://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,837773-1,00.html (accessed 13 August 2010). 30. Variety Staff, ‘Cabaret’, Variety (1 January 1972), http://www.variety. com/review/VE1117789631.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 (accessed 15 March 2010). 31. Frank Rich, ‘Cinema: Fan Dance’, Time (31 December 1979), http://www. time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912606-1,00.html (accessed 15 March 2010). 32. I define Grease as a ‘cult’ because of its fan following and their participation as described in the press. In particular, the tendency of fans to dress up as characters from the film at recent re-release screenings and sing along with the on-screen characters defines them from the ‘mainstream’ public who are not so dedicated. See Kirstin McGrath, ‘Hopelessly devoted ‘Grease’ fans can sing along in theatres’, USA Today, 7 July 2010, http://www.usatoday. com/life/movies/news/2010-07-07-greasesing07_ST_N.htm (accessed 9 January 2011). 33. Jen Chaney, ‘Look at Me, a New ‘Grease’ on DVD’, Washington Post (19 September 2006), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2006/09/17/AR2006091700861.html (accessed 15 February 2010). 34. For examples, see Max Décharné, ‘Sound and Führer’, Neon (November 1998), p. 104; J. Hoberman, ‘When The Nazis Became Nudniks’, New York Times (15 April 2001), http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F

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35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

me l b r o o ks in the cu l t u r a l i n du s t r i e s 10A12F6345A0C768DDDAD0894D9404482&incamp=theater (accessed 5 January 2004); and Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘Double Take’, New York Review of Books, 28.10 (21 June 2001), www.nybooks.com/articles/14271 (accessed 5 January 2004). Lydon, ‘The Goons’, Sight and Sound, p. 39. Andrew Collins, ‘Must Buy: The Producers’, Empire, 114 (December 1998), p. 144. ‘100 Years’, American Film Institute. Hoberman, ‘When The Nazis Became Nudniks’, New York Times. Ibid. Roger Ebert, ‘The Producers’, Chicago Sun-Times (15 April 2001), http:// www.rialtopictures.com/prod4/prod4.htm (accessed 4 January 2008). Mendelsohn, ‘Double Take’, New York Review of Books. Hoberman, ‘When The Nazis’, New York Times. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), p. 116. Celia Lury, Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 117. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 95. Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 89. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., p. 112. Roberta Levitow, ‘Some Words About the Theatre Today’, in Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (eds), Theatre in Crisis?: Performance Manifestos for a New Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 26. Michael Billington, ‘The State of Reviewing Today’, Delgado and Svich, Theatre in Crisis?, p. 56. Ibid., p. 57. Maurya Wickstrom, ‘Commodities, Mimesis, and The Lion King: Retail Theatre for the 1990s’, Theatre Journal 51.3 (1999), p. 285. Ibid., p. 298. Reggie Nadelson, ‘The Never Ending Story’, Guardian (3 June 2005), p. 5. At the time, Brooks was known for his Emmy-winning appearances (1997, 1998, 1999) on the sitcom Mad About You (NBC, 1992–9). John Lahr, ‘Mel Brooks Is Back, Mit a Bing, Mit a bang, Mit a Boom’, New Yorker, 7 May 2001, http://www.producersonbroadway.com/ (accessed 12 April 2007). Nadelson, ‘The Never Ending’, p. 5. Gordon Cox, ‘B’way “Producers” to Close: Brooks Tuner Will Shutter April 22’, Variety (22 February 2007), http://www.variety.com/article/ VR1117959998.html?categoryid=1236&cs=1&query=mel+brooks (accessed 12 April 2007).

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61. Clive Barnes, ‘Springtime for B’way’, New York Post (20 April 2001), http://www.producersonbroadway.com/ (accessed 12 April 2007). 62. Cox, ‘B’way “Producers” to Close’, Variety. 63. ‘Week 47: April 16th–22nd 2001’, Variety, www.variety.com/index. asp?layout=legit_chart&page=legit47&dept=Legit (accessed 21 April 2007). 64. Cox, ‘B’way “Producers” to Close’. Variety. 65. Robert James Parish, The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks: It’s Good to Be the King (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Son, 2001), p. 279. 66. Cox, ‘B’way “Producers” to Close’. 67. Chip Crews, ‘The Producer: Nearly 78, Mel Brooks Still Has a Song in His Heart, A Skip in His Step and a Monster Hit on His Hands’, Washington Post (27 June 2004), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/ A5469–2004Jun25.html (accessed 30 September 2011). 68. Tori Haring-Smith, ‘On the Death of Theatre: A Call to Action’, in Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (eds), Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 101. 69. Ibid., p. 101. 70. Ibid., p. 101. 71. Nigel Reynolds, ‘Star quits musical after TV gaffe’, Daily Telegraph (19 October 2004), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ news/2004/10/19/nprod19.xml (accessed 7 February 2007). 72. Alfred Hickling, ‘Meet The Producers’ Producers’, Guardian (3 November 2004), http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1341874,00.html (accessed 9 April 2007). 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Lahr, ‘Mel Brooks Is Back’, New Yorker. 76. Elysa Gardner, ‘New Producers Game: Guessing New Stars’, USA Today (6 June 2001), http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/2001-06-06-produc ers.htm (accessed 9 April 2007). 77. Barbara Scherzer, ‘Reams joins Producers in Vegas: Actor to Replace Hasselhoff in May’, Variety (11 April 2007), http://www.variety.com/ article/VR1117962908.html?categoryid=15&cs=1 (accessed 12 April 2007). 78. Charles Isherwood, ‘Welterweight Bialystock Treads Softly on Big Shtick’, New York Times (19 January 2007), http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/ theater/reviews/19prod.html?ex=1184821200&en=1c0f02b2a6904628&ei =5087&mkt=theaterphoto (accessed 9 April 2007). 79. Ibid. 80. Nigel Reynolds, ‘Star quits musical after TV gaffe’, Daily Telegraph (19 October 2004), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ news/2004/10/19/nprod19.xml (accessed 7 February 2007).

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81. Mark Fortier, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 108. 82. Ibid., p. 108. 83. Jonathan Burston, ‘Theatre Space as Virtual Place: Audio Technology, the Reconfigured Singing Body, and the Megamusical’, Popular Music 17.2 (1998), p. 205. 84. Ibid., p. 205. 85. Susan Stroman, ‘Commentary on The Producers’, The Producers, DVD, directed by Susan Stroman (2005; London: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006). 86. This parody was noted in John Heilpern, ‘How a stinker becomes a winner becomes a loser (and ends up the biggest winner on Broadway)!’, Talk Magazine (June/July 2001), http://www.producersonbroadway.com/ (accessed 12 April 2007). 87. Although it is difficult to trace the origins of current projects to Mel Brooks specifically, it is only following Brooks’s casting of television stars in The Producers (2001) that theatre and television have become increasingly integrated. Most notably, this includes a new generation of programmes that have broadcast the casting of Broadway and West End shows, televised within the competition format seen previously in The X Factor (ITV, 2004–9). These television shows notably include the programme Grease: You’re the One that I want! (NBC, 2007), which cast the Broadway revival of Grease (2007–9), and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s programme I’d Do Anything (BBC, 2008), which cast the West End revival of Oliver! (2009–). Conversely, the latter show capitalised on Webber’s own reputation in the theatre by having him appear in each episode sitting on a large golden throne, with the effect of turning Webber into a television star himself. Not only do such, now highly conventional, theatreorientated programmes serve as advertising for their subsequent theatre productions, but the audience memory of the stars in these shows potentially serves to preconfigure and so enrich the experience of them on stage. Theatre adaptations of television reached a new level of prominence in 2005, with Stuart Lee’s Jerry Springer: The Opera, which became the first show to appropriate the format of a whole TV programme, albeit with major adaptations, and enjoyed a limited UK run in 2005 and 2006. However, even in its brief existence, this television-inspired theatre production started a dialogue among theatre’s critics, with the outcome being that ‘theatre’ and what is ‘theatrical’ are now being reconsidered, as part of an initiative for reaching a broader audience. Notably, this has been articulated by the director of the UK’s National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, in an interview with the Guardian, in which he noted that Jerry Springer: The Opera was drawing ‘a young, buzzy, highly vocal’ crowd into the theatre, following which, the Guardian’s Michael Billington added: ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera is only the start of a process of re-examining our overly rigid theatrical categories’. This considered, the theatre industry is arguably integrating

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88.

89. 90.

91.

92.

93.

94. 95. 96.

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with the television industry, just as much as it is that of film. See Michael Billington, ‘Welcome to the Cheap Seats’, Guardian (29 April 2003), http:// www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2003/apr/29/theatre.artsfeatures (accessed 5 February 2010). I was audience to the Broadway version of Young Frankenstein at the Hilton Theatre in New York City, featuring the original cast Roger Bart and Megan Mullally, known from her role on Will and Grace (NBC, 1998– 2006). At the time, the theatre shop in the Hilton Theatre was replaced by a themed Young Frankenstein store, in which only merchandise relating to Mel Brooks’s musical was available, and goods were sold in ‘Young Frankenstein’ carrier bags. Ryan Gilbey, ‘The Producers’, Sight and Sound, 16.2 (1 February 2006), p. 79. Andrew Gans and Kenneth Jones, ‘Emmy Winner Kelsey Grammer Will Star in La Cage Revival’, Playbill (30 November 2009), http://www. playbill.com/news/article/134913-Emmy-Winner-Kelsey-Grammer-WillStar-in-La-Cage-Revival (accessed 5 February 2010). Melena Z. Ryzik, ‘The Time of Their Lives, Live’, New York Times (30 January 2005), http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/theater/ newsandfeatures/30ryzi.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story on Stage&st=cse&scp=1 (accessed 5 February 2010). It is poignant to note that owing to Hollywood’s recently declining box-office figures, there has been an increased migration of talent from Hollywood to Broadway in order to support their careers. At the time of writing, the Guardian reports, Denzel Washington is set to appear in a 2010 revival of Fences (1987–8), Scarlett Johansson is currently making her Broadway debut in the latest revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955– 6), and Christopher Walken is currently reviving his long career of playing mobsters in Hollywood film by playing a killer in Martin McDonagh’s play, A Behanding in Spokane. Furthermore, the profitable casting of film actors in Broadway shows has contributed towards a new business strategy in the theatre industry. As the Guardian notes: ‘If the names are big enough it can even make a production “review-proof” as audiences will flock to see the stars whatever the reviews. Many New York theatres and producers are now basing their business model around short-run plays with big star names.’ See Paul Harris, ‘Hollywood Stars Flock to Broadway Stage’, Guardian (19 March 2010), http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/mar/19/holly wood-stars-broadway-theatre (accessed 19 March 2010). Ken Tucker. ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’. Entertainment Weekly (2 January 2004), http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,568735,00.html (accessed 15 November 2011). Gilbey, ‘The Producers’, Sight and Sound, p. 79. Todd McCarthy, ‘The Producers’, Variety (5 December 2005), p. 48. Ian Mohr, ‘It’s like Singin’ on the Rhine’, Variety (14 March 2005), p. 6.

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97. ‘News: From Screen to Stage to Screen: Mel Brooks on the Life of The Producers’, Film Review (February 2006), p. 34. 98. ‘54 Films For Your Consideration: 9 The Producers’, Empire, 197 (1 November 2005), p. 85. 99. Jeff Dawson, ‘Having Triumphed on Stage, The Producers is Marching Back to the Big Screen – No Wonder Jeff Dawson Finds Mel Brooks So full of Beans’, The Times (18 December 2005), http://entertainment.timeson line.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article766980.ece (accessed 9 April 2005). 100. Simon Brent, ‘The Producers’, Screen International (16 December 2005), p. 36. 101. ‘The Producers: The Movie Musical’, The Numbers, http://www.thenumbers.com/movies/2005/PRODC.php (accessed 2 January 2011). 102. ‘News: From Screen to Stage’, Film Review, p. 34. 103. Anthony Simon, ‘The Producers’, Independent (23 December 2005), p. 89. 104. Simon McCartney, ‘The Producers’, Sunday Telegraph (1 January 2006), p. 20. 105. J. Hoberman, ‘Your Show of Shows: The Movie of the Play of the Movie’, Village Voice (13 December 2005), http://www.villagevoice.com/ film/0550,hoberman,70940,20.html (accessed 9 April 2007). 106. A. O. Scott, ‘The Producers, Again (This Time With Uma)’, New York Times (16 December 2005), http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/ movies/16prod.html?ex=1175054400&en=e7f4519732e5dec5&ei=5070 (accessed 26 March 2007). 107. ‘In Cinemas: The Producers’, Empire, 200 (1 February 2006), p. 57. 108. Despite its many explicitly ‘theatrical’ qualities, the film adaptation of Mamma Mia! received a good reception in the press. For example, see A. O. Scott, ‘Mamma Mia!’, New York Times (18 July 2008), http://movies. nytimes.com/2008/07/18/movies/18mamm.html (5 February 2010). 109. David Benedict, ‘The Singalong-Slasher’, Guardian (23 December 2007), http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/dec/23/1 (accessed 15 March 2010). 110. Unlike Mel Brooks’s The Producers, each version of Hairspray was conceived, written and directed by a different team. John Waters himself only wrote and directed the original 1988 film, and then later featured in a cameo of the 2007 film. For an account of the Broadway version’s invention, see Robin Pogrebin, ‘Riding High With a Big, Bouffant Hit; After 25 Years of Paying Dues, an Independent Producer Scores With ‘Hairspray’, New York Times (16 October 2002), http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/16/theater/ riding-high-with-big-bouffant-hit-after-25-years-paying-dues-independ ent.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2 (accessed 17 March 2010). 111. Dennis Harvey, ‘Hairspray’, Variety (6 July 2007), http://www.variety. com/review/VE1117934040.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 (accessed 10 March 2010).

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Conclusion

In this book, I have introduced a new perspective on Mel Brooks, challenging the established perceptions in the critical studies, biographies and in the scattered academic articles about his work so far – which, as I have already suggested, have been limited, and in some respects, misleading. To recap, the academic studies by Gubar, Fermaglich, and that by Desser and Friedman, have examined Brooks’s contribution from a socio-cultural perspective, with a focus on his contribution to Jewish culture and his perceived ‘bad taste’ jokes.1 Accordingly, these studies provide no significant examination of Brooks’s incredible longevity or his production strategy. Whereas the studies by Harries and Gehring examined Brooks’s work from an industrial perspective, and in doing so, have identified Brooks for his contribution to ‘parody’, these studies have neglected the extent of Brooks’s adaptation strategies, especially his intermedial adaptations.2 Furthermore, none of these studies have thoroughly examined Brooks’s projects in historical production context, and so they have not yet recognised the profound significance of his contribution to the development of the cultural industries. By adopting a suitable methodology – combining adaptation studies together with studies of the cultural industries – my case studies have examined Brooks’s personal survival strategy. In particular, this book has identified Brooks’s use of adaptation practices including remediation, hybridisation, and his strategy of repeatedly adapting content, which I define as ‘prolonged adaptation’. Through these practices, Brooks has capitalised on the synergy between texts in a range of different media, and has ultimately maximised the commercial life of his inventions in competitive and changing industries. As such, this book casts Brooks in a new light, revealing him as a specialist in adaptation, as a long-term survivor in the cultural industries, and to some degree, a significant figure within the historical development of the multimedia strategies that are common with artists today.

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Throughout this book, I have argued the way Brooks has acquired the reputation of a ‘multimedia survivor’. This reputation has been earned in several different ways. Most obviously, Brooks’s reputation has been manufactured by his longevity, along with his continued prominence in the cultural industries – typically whereby Brooks’s modern press coverage increasingly mentions his age. This aspect of his ‘survivor’ reputation was most evident in his interview with the Wall Street Journal, in which he describes his enduring friendship with his colleague Carl Reiner, whom he has worked with regularly since the 1950s.3 In that interview, Brooks is asked about his routine, the 2000 Year Old Man. In his reply, Brooks described his enduring, six-decade friendship with Reiner, and how they even now still recreate their routine, both in their old age, and after both have outlived their respective spouses: I see [Carl] almost every night. We eat together, we talk. I’m in Santa Monica and he’s in Beverly Hills. We do this thing where I’ll take the band off a cigar and put it on my finger, and he’ll say ‘Where’d you get that ring? It’s beautiful’. There’s no audience. We’ve been doing that for over 50 years. We’re both widowers. He lost his wife a year ago and I lost my wife [actress Anne Bancroft] six years ago. We keep each other company.4

However, Brooks’s reputation as a ‘survivor’ is also distinct from those other artists who have ‘survived’ for several decades in the cultural industries. Whereas Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, George Burns, and others, have also enjoyed long careers, during which they have all have aged significantly, Brooks has not simply endured. Instead, his adaptation production strategy has resulted in a mixture of perceived ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ in critical and commercial terms. This has contributed towards creating an extra dimension to his reputation, whereby Brooks has become known for the continual struggle of surviving his perceived ‘failures’ – often by moving between different media. This career history has uniquely cast Brooks’s reputation as that of a ‘multimedia survivor’ in a way that differentiates him from those other enduring artists. The way Brooks manufactured this unique reputation is captured most clearly in the coverage of his 2001 Broadway show The Producers. In the context of Brooks’s long career, his adaptation of The Producers on Broadway was the sharpest change in his fortunes to date. At the time of its opening, Brooks was well known because of the critical condemnation of his performance in Life Stinks, his increasingly critically unpopular work as a director on his parody films from 1987 to 1995 and, of course, the critical condemnation of his ‘cult’ film The Producers (1968) at the time of its first release. As such, the unprecedented international success

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of The Producers reinvented Brooks, framing him more clearly than ever as a survivor who had overcome critical condemnation and limited commercial success. In addition, this project also added to Brooks’s status as a multimedia artist – in this case, for his perceived move to the theatre from the industries of film and television for which he was better known. This impression of Brooks was notably captured in the review of The Producers (2001) by Jeff Dawson in The Times, in which Brooks was praised for his apparent ability to survive: F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in American life – he should have stuck around for the astonishing resurgence of Mel Brooks. It was at the tender age of 74 that Brooks traded in a five-decade career as a film and TV thigh-slapper to mount his first Broadway musical.5

Ever since Brooks’s landmark comeback with The Producers on Broadway, the memory of his less successful work has remained a common point of discussion in his press coverage – thus framing discussion of Brooks around his ability to ‘survive’. This is evident in Scott Vogel’s coverage of Brooks’s 2009 Kennedy Center Honor in the Washington Post, which typically quotes Brooks praising himself as a ‘national treasure’,6 and in the same breath, also making a joke – in this case, suggesting that depending on the outcome of his future projects, he could easily return to obscurity. As Vogel characterises him, in the aftermath of his long career, Brooks is today a problematic figure – defined as a prestigious auteur known for overcoming adversity, thus making him into a uniquely resilient personality: ‘I am a national treasure, I should be celebrated. And I hope against hope that you won’t find my award on eBay, because you never know’, he said, adjusting the pocket square. ‘You run out of cash and wherewithal . . .’ With that, Brooks‘s voice trailed off. The no doubt very wealthy writer-director-actor was apparently seriously concerned that he might still lose it all. The ‘national treasure’ stuff was vintage Brooks chutzpah, of course, but the fear of the abyss was, in its own way, vintage Brooks, too. Like Max Bialystock, the washed-up impresario at the heart of ‘The Producers’, Brooks is intimately acquainted with the bottomless depths of showbiz hell.7

The way Brooks’s reputation as a ‘survivor’ has distinguished him from other enduring artists is particularly evident when considered in contrast to the reputation of his closest peer, his fellow Jewish-American comedian, Woody Allen. As I have already discussed at intervals throughout this book, Allen’s equally long career followed a similar path to that of Brooks – and yet they developed starkly different reputations. Both of them started out in the cultural industries in television, working as writers

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for Sid Caesar during the 1950s, and both of them pursued performance careers through appearances on television and in film during the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes appearing on the same talk shows, such as The Dick Cavett Show (ABC, 1968–72). More significantly, both also became film writers and directors, even producing comparable parody films during the rise of this genre in Hollywood during the 1970s. Nevertheless, Brooks’s different production strategy has resulted in a critical reputation that is very different from that of Allen. The contrast between Brooks and Allen is particularly evident in their reputations as film directors. Whereas Allen has been regarded as a prestigious ‘auteur’, Brooks has struggled to maintain that status. For example, Allen’s landmark film Annie Hall was met with immediate and almost universal critical acclaim. This acclaim was international, including four British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards, and four Oscars at the Academy Awards, famously surpassing monumental blockbuster Star Wars for the Best Picture of 1977 – the same year that Brooks produced High Anxiety. More significantly, this acclaim has been consistent to date. Annie Hall is rated today by the American Film Institute as the fourth best film comedy of all time, the film was described by Andy McNab, in his 2001 review for Sight and Sound as a ‘cast-iron classic’,8 and by Time as ‘a quintessential masterpiece’.9 This consistent critical acclaim for his film Annie Hall has ensured that Allen is regarded by critics an institutional figure in American film comedy. In contrast, Brooks’s aforementioned reputation for his film The Producers means that he is known to critics for overcoming critical condemnation – before finally achieving prestige. This considered, Brooks’s career as a film director made his reputation as a ‘survivor’ in a way that Allen’s has not. Furthermore, Brooks’s constant struggle to survive has actually inspired his adaptation strategy. In my introduction, I suggested that Brooks’s underlying motivation for prolonging content through adaptation has been his ‘lingering poverty mentality’,10 as it was first identified by his biographers Adler and Feinman in 1976. In other words, this means that Brooks’s fear of potential ‘failure’ has, over the years, inspired him to prolong every successful idea, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. In this respect, Brooks’s motivation to become an adapter is in fact very similar to that of another significant adapter in the history of the cultural industries, Walt Disney. In short, both Brooks and Disney endured for decades, working in multiple different media in these industries, and both have been motivated by a ‘poverty mentality’ originating in their impoverished upbringing. As Richard Schickel describes Disney, his production strategies were motivated by his own personal experience during his childhood

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in Kansas, described concisely as ‘frugality in day-to-day matters, willingness to plunge on his own ideas, [and] distrust of the outsider who might somehow take it all away from him’.11 As Schickel notes, this approach to business ‘was surely an acting out, on a large scale, of the truths he had learned in Kansas City’.12 It was because of this kind of ‘poverty mentality’ that Brooks was driven to relentlessly produce adaptations. In his recent interviews, Brooks has talked openly about how his fear of ‘failure’ has inspired him to make the most of his ideas – in the process, personally contributing towards his reputation as that of a ‘survivor’. This was the case when The Producers finally came to an end on Broadway, and Brooks then immediately followed it with yet another similar adaptation, this time of his film Young Frankenstein (1974) as the Broadway show Young Frankenstein (2007–9). In Brooks’s 2007 interview with Brian Williams on the NBC Nightly News, Williams voiced some concerns in the press at the time, quoting the Village Voice and other publications, suggesting that Brooks was somehow exploiting his audience.13 In his defence, Brooks launched into a brief tongue-in-cheek rant, revealing more explicitly than ever before how his fear of ‘failure’ motivates him to capitalise on his ‘hits’ in order to survive: Look, I’ve had a lot of failures! Give me a break! Shinbone Alley! Ever hear of it? It ran a week! No Where to Go But Up! You ever hear of that show? Ran a week! These things take two, sometimes three years to write – and sometimes they only run a week, so when you have a hit . . . you know . . . sometimes . . . you have to . . . maximise it.14

In fact, Brooks has increasingly expressed this ‘poverty mentality’ motivation in his more recent interviews. This was especially evident when he was interviewed by Miriam Marcus in the leading business publication, Forbes, in which he was asked simply: ‘What is the American Dream?’15 Brooks replied, providing the bleakest expression of his attitude to date, again demonstrating how his memory of poverty and his personal anxiety about returning to poverty still informs his outlook today: When I was a little kid 50 years ago, in 1946, I had just got out of the Army after two years fighting in the war. The American Dream was a house and a car. Today, the American Dream is winning American Idol. It’s changed slightly. In another 50 years from now, when the economy collapses and everything is in threads and torn, the American Dream then, in 20-whatever, will be a house and a car.16

While this remark by Brooks seems dramatic, my research suggests that this level of anxiety does in fact illustrate the way he thinks, and the way he makes his business decisions. This attitude is evident no more clearly

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than in the way Brooks has invested his income over the years. As Brooks admitted to Geraldine Fabrikant in the New York Times, he prefers not to take any chances with his money – for example, referring to investments in Wall Street stocks as ‘a shortcut to the poorhouse’.17 Instead, Brooks has invested his profits in what he considers to be ‘a conservative investment strategy’.18 As Fabrikant reported in the New York Times, a great deal of Brooks’s wealth is invested in real estate, amounting to ‘an abundance of abodes’.19 These investments, as listed in that 1997 article, include a home in Los Angeles, estimated to be worth $5m, a beach cottage in Malibu worth around $4m, a home on Fire Island, an apartment in Manhattan, an office building in Beverly Hills with an estimated value of $6 million, and two beachfront condominiums near Miami Beach, each estimated at $400,000.20 In this case, Brooks’s ‘survivalist’ investment strategy adds yet further evidence to the way his ‘lingering poverty mentality’ has informed his business affairs. Concurrently, his investment strategy contributes another aspect to his reputation as a ‘survivor’. Along with Brooks’s unique reputation, this book has so far identified his neglected contribution to the historical development of production trends in the cultural industries. Whereas David Hesmondhalgh presents the case that the 1980s marked a significant increased integration of the cultural industries – as is confirmed by other scholars including Henry Jenkins21 and Paul Grainge22 – the way this new era of production came about is as yet not conclusively understood. This book presents evidence that Brooks has been a significant preconvergence figure, producing adaptations between different media, and contributing towards the increased multimedia integration of the cultural industries, through the sharing of content, including artists and production techniques. Brooks’s regular work on developing intermedial adaptations effectively started from the beginning of the 1950s – following his contribution to The Admiral Broadway Revue (NBC, 1949). As I have explained in my previous case studies, Brooks’s adaptations have followed systematic patterns, rather than being simply one-offs, and are consistent with changing production trends in the cultural industries. By remediating and hybridising content in his television, film and theatre projects, over his six-decade career, Brooks has contributed towards the modern convergence of the cultural industries. As such, Brooks and other artists have produced what I have argued are historically significant ‘intermedial’23 texts, in the words of Andre Gaudreault, that is, texts that cross different traditions of production and exhibit qualities of both. In the case of Brooks’s career, these adaptations included, for example, television sitcoms that exhibit qualities of his Hollywood film

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parodies (The Nutt House, NBC, 1989), audio performances that were adapted for television talk shows (The 2000 Year Old Man), films which exhibit qualities of Broadway theatre (The Producers, 1968), and Broadway theatre shows which exhibit qualities of films and television programmes (The Producers, 2001–7). As I have explained in the case studies themselves, these projects, along with similar adaptations by many other artists, together constitute a long history of exchanges between the cultural industries that have contributed towards changing production trends – for example, making the appropriation of perceived ‘theatrical’ techniques in Hollywood films increasingly acceptable to film critics. In addition, Brooks has also contributed towards new trends in the way stardom operates within the cultural industries. In the terms of recent scholarship, Brooks contributed towards the industrial rise of what Graeme Turner has described in his book Understanding Celebrity as ‘celebrity-commodity’.24 To explain, whereas other film actors have appeared on television in order to publicise their films,25 Brooks’s multimedia strategy was more diverse, in that he adapted his performance material for audio records, as well as the film and television industries – often capitalising on the synergy between these performances. For example, Brooks’s cameos in the sitcoms Mad About You (NBC, 1992–9) and Curb Your Enthusiasm adapted material from his audio record The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 (1997), and his Broadway project The Producers (2001), respectively. The synergy between these projects is not reliant on any consistent ‘star’ image of Brooks, but simply on his celebrity as it spans the film, television and theatre industries. While Brooks did not employ his celebrity to the same extent as other major stars such as Michael Jordan, as studied by Turner,26 in this respect he has created a ‘Mel Brooks’ brand, thus adding to the rising importance of celebrity ‘as a branding mechanism for media products’.27 Furthermore, in recent years, the way that Brooks has capitalised on his long history of performances also reflects wider industrial trends. Most notably, this industrial practice is described by Fredric Jameson in his book Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), in which he suggests that for a new generation of actors since the 1990s, ‘stardom’ was for the first time being manufactured ‘in the utter absence of “personality” in the older sense’.28 Instead, Jameson suggests that modern ‘stars’ survive by channelling audience memories of their previous roles, eclectically layered together in a pastiche of the past, without a coherent ‘star’ image or persona. As Jameson notes, the absence of a coherent ‘star’ image instead ‘opens up the possibility of a play of historical allusions to much older roles’.29 Brooks contributed towards the rise of

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this new industrial trend through his many performance adaptations – for example, moving from his Yiddish goof of his 2000 Year Old Man routine to his ‘eccentric’ persona seen in Life Stinks, both of which were later adapted within his performances in Mad About You. As such, Brooks is one of an increasing number of performers who have capitalised on audience memories of their previous roles without maintaining a consistent on-screen persona or ‘star’ image in visual or behavioural terms. In terms of adaptation studies, Brooks’s career has provided a suitable opportunity to examine the industrial significance of the new term that I have defined, namely the practice of ‘prolonged adaptation’. As explained in my first chapter, the industrial practice of prolonged adaptation – as practised by Brooks as well as others – is an increasingly frequent practice in the cultural industries. Prolonged adaptations offer artists increased potential for commercial and critical success, greater than that of just one adaptation. The more adaptations that are produced, the greater the potential for audiences to appreciate the adaptation in a variety of different ways, enjoying what Christine Geraghty has described as multiple ‘layers’30 of familiar content. More significantly, prolonged adaptations can accumulate together in the minds of audiences, with the potential to together manufacture a more significant cultural experience – eloquently described by Sarah Cardwell as the ‘meta-text’.31 In this respect, each adaptation in a sequence of prolonged adaptations has greater potential than the last. Brooks’s career has provided some convincing evidence of the way prolonged adaptations can be successful in both critical and commercial terms, in part, as a result of these principles. First, his prolonged adaptations of a limited range of jokes in Get Smart attracted home audiences for five years – making the project a commercial success for the network until it was eventually cancelled in favour of cheaper projects. Similarly, after thirty years of prolonged adaptations, his 2000 Year Old Man routine eventually became regarded as a ‘classic’ of American comedy – earning Brooks critical prestige for his run of routines. Admittedly, this study has also identified the way prolonged adaptations can result in perceived critical condemnation and sometimes very limited commercial success. For example, Brooks’s revival of his ‘Jewish’ material in a new television special with Dick Cavett in 2006 was condemned by Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times as ‘bygone’32 comedy. Similarly, Brooks’s prolonged adaptation of old joke formulas in his parody films from 1987 to 1995 often failed to appeal to critics or achieve the same level of appeal to commercial audiences – for example, leading Joe Leydon in Variety to describe Dracula: Dead and Loving It as ‘perilously close to blandness’.33

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This considered, while prolonged adaptation is potentially a very profitable strategy, it is by no means a guarantee of success. If anything, since these adaptations sometimes span decades, this practice often requires strategies that take special account of the new historical and industrial context of production. In addition, Brooks’s career also demonstrates the way that prolonged adaptations have contributed towards the rise of the modern convergence culture – in particular, the integration of different industries. By rethinking texts in these terms, it is possible to identify the layers of different texts within them, as well as the sometimes intermedial layers of different production values, artists, ideas, and performance styles constituted within them. For example, this is no clearer than in Brooks’s prolonged adaptation of his 2000 Year Old Man routine as the record The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 (1997). This routine has started out as an audio record, but during the course of its prolonged adaptation, the material was adapted for television talk shows (The Dick Cavett Show), a cartoon animation (The Critic, 1963) and films (High Anxiety). This considered, the routine as performed on the 1997 audio record was developed in various different media – making it intermedial in its manufacture. Furthermore, to anyone familiar with its previous adaptations, that new record is potentially an intermedial experience, with the potential of synergy between those different cultural industries. Most significantly, in terms of adaptation studies, this book has identified the similarity between Brooks’s adaptation strategies and those of other adapters. By making these comparisons, my case studies have identified a group of other significant artists who have also practised similar adaptation strategies in order to survive in the cultural industries. These other historically significant adapters include Lucille Ball, who adapted her radio programme My Favorite Husband (1948–51) for the television show I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–7),34 and similarly, Jackie Gleason, who adapted a skit on his own Saturday night variety programme into the sitcom The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955–6).35 More recently, other influential adapters include Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker who adapted content from their film Airplane! (1980) into the sitcom Police Squad! (ABC, 1982), and Bob Fosse, who contributed numerous theatre and film adaptations, including the film Cabaret (1972), adapted from the Broadway stage show of the same title (1966–9). Following the artist-focused, industrial adaptation studies on Disney by Shickel, Terri Martin Wright36 and Aviad E. Raz,37 these cases together provide a broader industrial perspective on adaptation. In other words, these studies together provide convincing evidence that numerous artists,

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employing similar adaptation practices, can together contribute towards the historical development of production trends. While these other artists, such as Ball, Gleason and Fosse, have not been as dedicated to adaptation as Brooks, several of them have sustained their careers by practising similar strategies – including hybridisation, remediation, and prolonged adaptation. My research suggest that by employing these strategies, these adapters have together contributed towards the historical development of American sitcoms, Hollywood parody films, and Broadway musicals – as well as significant changes in critical attitudes towards these traditions. In some cases, these patterns of adaptations have brought the television, film and theatre industries together in a way that predates Jenkins’s modern era of convergence. Following the conclusions of this book, there is still broad scope for further study of adaptation in the cultural industries. This book has necessarily been narrow in its focus – looking only at traditions of adaptation in comedy, with particular attention to those in the American sitcom, the film parody genre, audio comedy records, television talk show performances, and the Broadway musical. While this book has offered some new insights into how adaptations have shaped the development of these traditions, the impact of adaptations in the cultural industries more broadly is still uncharted. Following this study, there is thus still a need for further historical studies of adaptations so that other, as yet, marginalised or misrepresented figures can also be identified, new industrial adaptation practices can be recognised, and the impact of adaptation can be better understood.

Notes 1. As referenced in the introduction to this book, for an examination of Brooks as a ‘controversial’ comic, see Susan Gubar, ‘Racial Camp in “The Producers” and “Bamboozled” ’, Film Quarterly 60.2 (2006), pp. 26–37. For an examination of Brooks as a Jewish comic, see David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 113–68, and Kirsten Fermaglich, ‘Mel Brooks’ The Producers: Tracing American Jewish Culture Through Comedy, 1967–2007’, American Studies 48.8 (2007), pp. 59–87. 2. Brook’s contribution to ‘parody’ is discussed in Wes D. Gehring, Parody As Film Genre: Never Give a Saga an Even Break (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 1999), pp. 129–72. Also see Dan Harries, Film Parody (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 21. Brooks is also referred to as a ‘parody’ filmmaker in David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970–1979 (Berkeley: University of

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

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California Press, 2000), p. 255, and John Cawelti, ‘Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent Films’, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, second edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 570. Amy Chozick, ‘The 2,000 Year Old Man, at 85’, Wall Street Journal (12 August 2011), http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190400730 4576498212212474334.html (accessed 5 October 2011). Mel Brooks quoted in Amy Chozick, ‘The 2,000 Year Old Man, at 85’, Wall Street Journal (12 August 2011), http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 4053111904007304576498212212474334.html (accessed 5 October 2011). Jeff Dawson, ‘Having Triumphed on Stage, The Producers is Marching Back to the Big Screen – No Wonder Jeff Dawson Finds Mel Brooks So full of Beans’, The Times (18 December 2005), http://entertainment.timesonline. co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article766980.ece (accessed 9 April 2005). Brooks did in fact have an earlier career in Broadway, which is documented in his biographies. Poignantly, James Robert Parish noted that the short run of Shinbone Alley on Broadway ‘exacerbated Brooks’s growing doubts about the viability of his showbusiness future. It was hard for him not to become panic-stricken.’ See James Robert Parish, It’s Good To Be The King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), p. 108. As this example makes evident, my book is only a selective study of Brooks’s career, focusing on texts which I perceive demonstrate Brooks’s adaptation strategies and are important texts in the historical development of the cultural industries. Scott Vogel, ‘2009 Kennedy Center Honors Mel Brooks: Mel Brooks: ‘I am a national treasure’, Washington Post (6 December 2009), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/04/AR2009120400074. html?sid=ST2009120402859 (accessed 22 December 2009). Ibid. Andy Mcnab, ‘Annie Hall’, Sight and Sound, 11.2 (February 2001), p. 58. ‘Annie Hall’, Time, 15 October 1994, p. 69. Bill Adler and Jeffrey Feinman, Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976), p. 185. Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. Third Edition (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, [1968] 1997), p. 83. Ibid., p. 83. Mel Brooks, ‘Full Mel Brooks interview’, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, broadcast 8 November 2007. http://www.bing.com/videos/ watch/video/full-mel-brooks-interview/6ccsp0l (accessed 20 June 2010). Ibid. Miriam Marcus, ‘Mel Brooks On The American Dream’, Forbes (22 March 2007), http://www.forbes.com/2007/03/20/mel-brooks-dream-oped-cx_ mlm_dream0307_0322brooks.html (accessed 5 October 2011).

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16. Mel Brooks quoted in Miriam Marcus, ‘Mel Brooks On The American Dream’, Forbes (22 March 2007), http://www.forbes.com/2007/03/20/ mel-brooks-dream-oped-cx_mlm_dream0307_0322brooks.html (accessed 5 October 2011). 17. Geraldine Fabrikant, ‘Talking Money With: Mel Brooks; A Funny Man Earns It The 2,000-Year-Old Way’, New York Times (26 October 1997), http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/26/business/talking-money-with-melbrooks-a-funny-man-earns-it-the-2000-year-old-way.html?pagewanted=2 (accessed 6 October 2011). 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 22. For an examination of how multimedia conglomerates in the late 1980s capitalise on multimedia synergy, see Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 23. The term ‘intermedial’ is employed as used by Andre Gaudreault in ‘The Diversity of Cinematographic Connections in the Intermedial Context of the Turn of the 20th Century’, in Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (ed.), Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000), p. 10. 24. Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage Publications, 2004), p. 34. 25. Ibid., p. 36. 26. Ibid., p. 39. 27. Ibid., p. 39. 28. Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 20. 29. Ibid., p. 20. 30. Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), p. 5. 31. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 13. 32. Virginia Heffernan, ‘Interviewer of Old Is Back and Sounding, Well, Old’, New York Times (7 September 2006), http://tv.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/ arts/07cave.html (accessed 30 September 2009). 33. Joe Leydon, ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It’, Variety (18 December 1995), p. 67. 34. For an account of this adaptation, see Lori Landay, ‘I Love Lucy: Television and Gender in Postwar Domestic Ideology’, in Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linden (eds), The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 87.

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35. The origin of the The Honey Mooners is noted by Virginia Wright Wexman in ‘Returning from the Moon: Jackie Gleason and the Carnivalesque’, in Joanne Morreale (ed.), Critiquing the Sitcom: A Reader (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), p. 58. 36. Terri Martin Wright, ‘Romancing the Tale: Walt Disney’s Adaptations of the Grimms’ “Snow White” ’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 25.3 (1997), pp. 98–108. 37. Aviad E. Raz, ‘Domesticating Disney: Onstage Strategies of Adaptation in Tokyo Disneyland’, Journal of Popular Culture, 33.4 (Spring 2000), pp. 77–99.

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Index

Abbott, William, 68, 125 Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Lamont), 125 Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Barton), 111 Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (Lamont), 125 Abrahams, Jim, 16 Airplane!, 66, 129–30, 143, 193 Airplane II: The Sequel, 129–30 Police Squad!, 66, 72, 142, 193 ‘The Accidental Groom’ episode, 70, 71 Ace Ventura (Shadyac), 80 Acting Jewish (Bial), 102 Adams, Bryan, 137 Adams, Don, 55, 58 adaptation artist-centred approach, 7–8, 41, 193 audio records, 34, 79, 81, 88, 91, 98–101, 191, 193 cultural industries, 20, 22–3 economics of, 21 history of, 42–3n7 hybridisation, 48–9 industrialisation, 20 intermediality, 185, 190 prevalence, 21 sitcoms, 51–2 strategies, 1–2, 4, 7–9, 28, 48–9, 79, 127–8, 185 see also prolonged adaptation Adaptation and Appropriation (Sanders), 128–9 Adaptation journal, 18n28 adaptation studies, 7–8, 13, 17n28, 21, 41 The Addams Family (ABC), 30, 49, 56–7, 58, 60 Adler, Bill, Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman, 4, 48, 87, 138, 188 Adler, Renata, 86, 159 The Admiral Broadway Revue, 49, 52, 53, 74–5n17, 190 Admiral Continental Radio

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and Television Co., 74–5n17 Adorno, Theodor W., 22 The Adventures of Don Juan (Sherman), 139 The Adventures of Robin Hood (Curtiz), 138–9 The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 43n7 advertisements, radio, 88 Airplane! (Abrahams & Zucker, D. and J.) audience expectations, 133 commercial success, 66, 143 Harries on, 62, 111 television-film hybrid, 113, 129–30, 131 Airplane II: The Sequel (Abrahams & Zucker, D. and J.), 129–30 Alda, Alan, 60 Alexander, Jason, 103, 169 Alias Smith and Jones (ABC), 121 Alien (Scott), 133 alienation effect, Brechtian, 159 All in the Family (CBS), 61, 62, 71 All That Jazz (Fosse), 161 Allen, Woody as adapter, 16 Annie Hall, 96, 114, 188 as auteur, 188 and Brooks, compared, 96, 187–8 career length, 186 Jewishness, 84, 102, 140 Midnight in Paris, 96 parody films, 114 press coverage, 108n61 star reputation, 96 Take the Money and Run, 111 on talk shows, 88 Altman, Robert, 82, 159 American cinema see film American Cinematographer, 126 American Film, 136 American Film Institute, 12, 113, 188 American Idol (Fox), 15, 145 American Jewish Filmmakers

(Desser & Friedman), 5–6, 84 anarchic comic performance, 3, 16n8, 81, 85, 86, 163 Anderson, Christopher, 55 Hollywood TV, 51 The Andy Griffith Show (CBS), 123 The Animated Classic (Brooks), 99, 106n28 animations, 21, 111, 134, 193 Annie Hall (Allen), 96, 114, 188 Anything Goes (Lewis), 122 appropriation Bakhtin, 43n10 Blazing Saddles, 61, 65, 119 The Critic, 86 Disney, 25 from film, 50–1, 53–4, 72–3 High Anxiety, 61, 91–2 from Marx, 89 parody, 112 sitcoms, 50 Spaceballs, 130–1 vaudeville, 85, 86 see also Hollywood films Aragay, Mireia, 17n28, 38 art house films, 27, 159 Asif, Ayaz, 134 Atallah, Paul, 73n3, 78n74 Atari, Ghostbusters: The Video Game, 39 Attack of the Crab Monsters (Corman), 32 Attallah, Paul, 27 audience affections, 58, 59, 90, 124 expectations, 133 memory, 90, 192 participation, 15 pre-sold material, 164 recognition, 54, 90 recycling of material, 62 An Audience with Mel Brooks (ITV), 15, 83, 89, 104 audio records, 34, 79, 81, 88, 91, 98–101, 191, 193; see also 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 Austen, Jane, 98 Pride and Prejudice, 38 Austin, Thomas, 46n77

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inde x Austin Powers (Roach), 111 auteur status, 2–3, 7, 10, 82, 128, 187, 188 authorship, 13–14, 73n4 Aykroyd, Dan, 39 Backley, Ben, 114, 142, 143 bad taste concept, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 185 Baker, Martin, 90 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 16n8, 30, 43n10, 146n10 Ball, Lucille, 193, 194; see also I Love Lucy Ballantine Beer, 88 Bancroft, Anne, 161, 186 Barker, Martin, 43n7, 91 Barnes, Clive, 166 Bart, Roger, 170, 183n88 Basic Instinct (Verhoeven), 46n77 Batman (ABC), 40 Batman (Burton), 34, 40 Batman comic books, 40 Baywatch (NBC), 169, 172 Bazin, André, 8, 156, 157, 158 Beau, 10, 61, 120, 121 Beauty and the Beast (Disney), 170 Bedazzled (Donen), 66 A Behanding in Spokane (McDonagh), 183n92 Benedict, David, 176 Bennett, Susan, Theatre Audiences, 164–5 Bennett, Tony, 91, 104 Berger, Richard, 47n97 Bergman, Ingmar, 114 Berlin, Irving, 125 The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS), 61, 123 Bewitched (ABC), 49, 57, 59, 60 Bewitched (Ephron), 113 Beyond the Multiplex (Klinger), 133–4 Bial, Henry, 140 Acting Jewish, 102 Big Fat Important Movie (Zucker, David), 145 The Big Screen Comedies of Mel Brooks (Crick), 3–4 Billington, Michael, 165, 182n87 Blair, Tony, 98 Blazing Saddles (Brooks), 118–24 appropriation, 61, 65, 119 Broadway content, 122 Brooks in, 65–6, 81 Cawelti on, 115–16 commercial success, 4, 9, 50, 112, 117 critics on, 7, 10, 62, 113, 115–16 ending of, 123, 135

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film/television content, 110 gender stereotyping, 135 hybridisation, 118–19 Jewish comic tradition, 6 Korman in, 69 layering technique, 112, 117 Lepetomane, 90–1, 92, 93, 135 New Hollywood studies, 115 omniscient camera, 63 performance, 89 production costs, 117 racial jokes, 3 recycling, 117, 118–19 slapstick, 143 as source material, 71 television production values, 120–1 theatre adaptation, 11 variety shows, 119–20 Westerns, 118, 119 Blockbuster TV (Staiger), 61 blockbusters, 61–2, 72, 116 Bluestone, George, 8, 17n28 Boddy, William, 74n16, 119 Bolter, Jay David, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 29 Bonanza (NBC), 119, 121 Bond films, 55, 56, 57, 58 Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), 115–16, 157 Bourdieu, Pierre, 27, 164 The Box-Office Clowns (Manchel), 3 Boyle, Peter, 127 Bracewell, Ted, 134 The Brady Bunch Movie (Thomas), 30, 113 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Coppola), 46n77 Brand Hollywood (Grainge), 34 branding, 34, 36, 39, 191 Brando, Marlon, 54 Brant, Robin, 98 Brecht, Bertolt, 159, 160 Mother Courage and Her Children, 160–1 Brent, Simon, 174 Brewster’s Millions (Hill), 131 Bride of Frankenstein (Whale), 124 Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Fielding), 37–8 Bridget Jones’s Diary (Fielding), 37 British Film Institute National Library, 14 Broadway musicals commodification, 170 into film, 156–7, 176 high/low culture, 27–8 shift in culture, 161 as source, 112

217 standardisation, 170–1 ticket prices, 166–7 Broderick, Matthew, 164, 168, 173–4 Brooker, Will, 40, 41 Brooks, Mel Academy Award, 9, 12, 86 accents, 84, 102 as American Rabelais, 3, 16n8 as auteur, 187 biographies of, 3 in Blazing Saddles, 65–6, 81 critics on, 9–10, 113, 188 as cultural anarchist, 6 cultural industries, 1–2 in Curb Your Enthusiasm, 34, 173, 191 Emmys, 79, 97, 99 fear of failure, 189–90 Grammy, 79 as Hollywood film actor, 89–93 idiolect, 80–1, 83 interviewed, 58, 59, 87 lingering poverty mentality, 4, 188–9 as multimedia survivor, 2, 3–4, 7–12, 41–2, 82, 96–7, 113, 114, 185, 186 reputation, 113–14 sociocultural perspective, 185 star persona, 80–1 synchronic careers, 82–3 see also specific texts Brooksfilms, 89, 93, 136 Brosnan, Pierce, 176 Brown, Geoff, 93, 94 Brown, Georgia, 95, 143 Brown, Les, 63–4 Browning, Tod, 141 Brunette, Peter, 94 Bugs Bunny Superstar (Jackson), 122 Burnett, Carol, 69 Burns, George, 65, 83, 84, 186 Burston, Jonathan, 170–1 Burton, Tim, 40, 176–7 Butler, Jeremy G., 159 Byrge, Duane, 132 Cabaret (Fosse), 161, 165, 193 Caesar, Sid, 74–5n17 Brooks’s writing, 4, 13, 48, 124, 188 doubletalk, 75n22 gender comedy, 52–3 Jewishness, 84 Caesar’s Hour (NBC) adaptation, 49, 53–4, 55, 73, 124 Gelbart, 60 gender comedy, 52–3, 126 intermediality, 75n24 La Cage aux Folles (Thiel), 172

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218 cameo roles, 92, 97, 98, 139– 40, 173, 191 Canby, Vincent, 121, 139, 140 Candy, John, 131 Cantor, Eddie, 85 Cardwell, Sarah, 38–9, 41, 98, 192 Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks at the Cannes Film Festival, 83 Carlson, Michael, 60 carnivalesque, 16n8 The Carol Burnett Show (CBS), 69, 117, 119–20, 120–1, 122 Carpenter, John, 32 Carrey, Jim, 80 Carson, Johnny, 87 Cart, in Variety, 94 Carter, Bill, 67 Carvey, Dana, 169 Casablanca (Curtiz), 114 Case, Brian, 91–2 cashing in strategy, 21–2 Castellaneta, Dan, 99 Cat Ballou (Silverstein), 118, 119 Catholicism, satirised, 3 Cats (Webber), 167, 171 Cavett, Dick, 87–8, 97, 192 Cawelti, John cinema-centric analysis, 115–16, 117, 127 New Hollywood, 110 The Six Gun Mystique, 118 TV generation, 147n34 celebrity-commodities, 191 Chaney, Jen, 161–2 Chaplin, Charlie, 2, 11, 68, 91 Chaplin and American Culture (Maland), 2, 10–11 Cheers (NBC), 67, 70 Cheng, Jim, 121 Chicago, 161 Chicago (Marshall), 173–4 Chicago-Sun Times, 77n65, 132, 163 Chinatown (Polanski), 110, 115–16 A Christmas Carol (Dickens), 31, 120, 145 Cinefantastique, 125, 127, 141 cinema-centric studies, 115– 16, 117, 127 City Lights (Chaplin), 11 class/culture, 27, 155–6, 164 Clouseau films, 56 ‘The Cobbler’s Daughter’ episode, 53 Coca, Imogen, 54 collaborative art forms, 21–2 Collins, Andrew, 162 Combs, Richard, 118, 122 Comedian Comedy (Seidman), 68–9

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inde x comedy anarchic, 3, 16n8, 81, 85, 86, 163 bad taste, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 185 comedian-centred, 85 controversial, 70–1, 194n1 ethnicity, 71 gender-based, 52–3, 57, 75–6n26 social purpose, 3, 16n8 see also sitcoms The Comic Art of Mel Brooks (Yacowar), 3 comic book characters, 40, 47n97 Comic Politics (Matthews), 65, 135 Comic Visions (Marc), 51–2 commercialisation, 166 commodification, 170, 191 ‘The Commuters’ episode, 53 Connery, Sean, 55 Consumer Culture (Lury), 28, 164 convergence culture Jenkins, 8, 15, 20, 41, 42, 190, 193–4 production trends, 20 prolonged adaptation, 20, 40–1, 193 Convergence Culture (Jenkins), 23–4 Cook, David A., 127, 147n36, 194–5n2 Cool Hand Luke (Rosenberg), 159 Coppola, Francis Ford, 141 Corman, Roger Attack of the Crab Monsters, 32 Death Race 2000, 32 How I Made a Hundred Movies, 31–2 It Conquered the World, 32 Little Shop of Horrors, 32 Not of This Earth, 32 Corrigan, Timothy, 82 The Cosby Show (NBC), 61, 67, 70 Costello, Lou, 68, 125; see also Abbott and Costello films Costner, Kevin, 137–8 Cowell, Simon, 145 Cox, Gordon, 166–7 Cox, Peter, 95 Craven, Wes, 142 The Creative Economy (Howkins), 13 Crewes, Chip, 167 Crick, Robert Alan, The Big Screen Comedies of Mel Brooks, 3–4 The Critic (Pintoff), 86, 87, 193 Croft, Lara, 21 cross-media corporate environment, 82

cross-promotion, 23, 39 Crowther, Bosley, 158 cult, defined, 105n9 cultural industries, 7–8 adaptation, 20, 22–3 adaptation studies, 41 Brooks, 1–2 categories of, 43–4n17 conglomerates, 23 convergence, 190 integration of media, 1–2 internationalisation, 19n59 star personas, 191 The Cultural Industries (Hesmondhalgh), 22 culture class, 155–6 high/low, 26–8, 155, 178n6 mass, 165, 167 Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO), 81–2, 97, 102, 103, 104 Brooks in, 34, 173, 191 Curtis, Richard, 37 Cushing, Peter, 141 Daily Mail, 94 Daily Telegraph, 168, 170 Dance of the Vampires (Polanski), 142 Danza, Tony, 172 The Dating Game (ABC), 129 David, Larry, 16 Curb Your Enthusiasm, 81–2, 103, 173 Seinfeld, 102 Dawson, Jan, 118 Dawson, Jeff, 145, 174, 187, 195n5 Day, Patrick Kevin, 58 De Laurentiis, Dino, 136 De Luca, Rudy, 94 De Montfort University, 18n28 De Vany, Arthur, 41 Hollywood Economics, 23 The Dean Martin Show (NBC), 119–20, 122 Death Race 2000 (Corman), 32 Defoe, Daniel, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 43n7 Delgado, Maria M., Theatre in Crisis?, 165 DeLuise, Dom, 139 Desser, David, 185, 194n1 American Jewish Filmmakers, 5–6 DeVito, Danny, 169 dialogism, 43n10 The Dick Cavett Show (ABC), 66, 87, 91, 92, 104, 188, 193 new edition, 102 Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol, 31, 120, 145 digital technology, 24

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inde x Directors’ Guild of America, 158 Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story on Stage, 173 Dirty Rotten Scoundrels musical, 172 Disney appropriation, 25 artist-focused approach, 41 Beauty and the Beast, 170 fairy tale adaptations, 26 investment, 51 merchandising, 26–7 production strategies, 25–6 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 114 studies, 25, 193 see also Walt Disney World Disney, Walt, 188–9 The Disney Version (Schickel), 8, 25 Disneyland, 26 domestic skits, 48, 52, 56, 62, 126 The Donna Reed Show (ABC), 62 Donner, Clive, 142 Dorr, John H., 125 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 114 double-talk, 53, 75n22 Dr No (Young), 49, 55, 57 Dracula (Browning), 141, 143 Dracula (Coppola), 141, 143 Dracula (Fisher), 141 Dracula: Dead and Loving It (Brooks) Backley on, 114 box-office takings, 9, 113 casting, 142 critics on, 10, 14, 130, 141–2, 144–5, 192 cult magazines on, 141, 142 jokes, 142–4 layering, 112 production strategy, 110, 141 Dragnet (NBC), 74n16 Drake, Philip, 80 Dresser, David, American Jewish Filmmakers, 84 Dreyfuss, Richard, 170 Driver, Minnie, 176 Driving Miss Daisy (Beresford), 84 Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century (Jones), 111 Duck Soup (McCarey), 159, 162 The Dukes of Hazzard (Chandrasekhar), 113 Durante, Jimmy, 85 Earthquake (Robson), 129 Eastwood, Clint, 186 Ebert, Roger, 77n65, 132, 163

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The Ed Sullivan Show (CBS), 87 8 Mile (Hanson), 145 Elfman, Danny, 176 Elliott, David, Film Heritage, 90 Ellis, John, 35, 46n80 Elwes, Cary, 138 Eminem, 145 Empire Collins in, 162 Dawson in, 145 Graydon in, 66 McCane in, 143 on The Producers 2005 film, 174, 176 Smith in, 113, 140 The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner), 132 Empty Nest (NBC), 67 Enter the Dragon (Clouse), 129 Entertainment Weekly, 98–9, 113, 173 ethnicity, 62, 71; see also racial jokes Evening Standard, 10, 94, 96, 143 ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’, 137 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (Allen), 114 Fabray, Nanette, 53 Fabrikant, Geraldine, 190 Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore), 145 Family Matters (ABC), 67, 68 Family Ties (NBC), 31, 62 Fangoria, 141, 142, 143, 144 Farley, Chris, 144 Fatal Instinct (Reiner), 133, 143 Father Knows Best (CBS), 62 Fawlty Towers (BBC), 68 Feingold, Ben, 34 Feinman, Jeffrey, Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman, 4, 48, 87, 138, 188 Feldman, Marty, 15, 125–6, 139, 149n79 Feldon, Barbara, 59 Fences, 183n92 Fermaglich, Kirsten, 6–7, 185, 194n1 Ferrell, Will, 173–4 A Few Good Men (Reiner), 101 Fiddler on the Roof, 161 Fielding, Helen Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, 37–8 Bridget Jones’s Diary, 37 film appropriation from, 50–1, 53–4, 72–3 art-house, 27, 159 and Broadway shows, 161–2

219 French, 155, 159 as low culture industry, 27 realism, 158 repurposed for theatre, 156 respectability, 157, 159 and theatre, 154 see also Hollywood films; New Hollywood Film Adaptation (Naremore), 20 Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Leitch), 30–1 Film Comedy (King), 79–80 Film Daily, 157–8 Film Heritage (Elliott), 90 Film Parody (Harries), 7, 62, 110–11 Film Quarterly, 6 Film Review, 174 Films and Filming, 86, 92, 119, 125 The Films of Mel Brooks (Sinvard), 3 Firstenberg, Jean Picker, 113 A Fish Called Wanda (Crichton), 68 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 187 Flaherty, Mike, 113 A Flintstones Christmas Carol (ABC), 31 Flynn, Errol, 138–9 Forbes, 189 Forbidden Planet (Wilcox), 57 Ford, Harrison, 131 formatting technique, 22–3 formulaic writing, 55, 62, 139 Fortier, Mark, 170 Fosse, Bob, 16, 161, 193, 194 Fox, 15, 55 franchising, 36–7 The Frank Skinner Show (ITV), 15, 97, 170 Frankenstein (Whale), 124 Frasier (NBC), 169 Freddy vs. Jason (Yu), 47n96 Free Spirit (ABC), 67 Freeman, Morgan, 84 ‘The French Dis-Connection’, 65 French films, 155, 159 ‘A Frick Called Wanda’ episode, 68 Friedfeld, Eddy, 74–5n17 Friedman, Lester D., 185, 194n1 American Jewish Filmmakers, 5–6, 84 Friends (NBC), 169 Fritz, Ben, 33 From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann), 54 ‘From Here to Obscurity’ episode, 54 From Russia With Love (Young), 55–6 The Fugitive (Davis), 30, 137

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220 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 161, 168 Gans, Herbert J., 27 Gardner, Paul, 56 Garlin, Jeff, 103 Gaudreault, Andre, 32–3, 190–1, 196n23 Gehring, Wes D., 87, 110, 128, 185, 194–5n2 Parody As Film Genre, 7 Gelbart, Larry, 60 Gelder, Paul, Mel Brooks and the Spoof Movie, 4–5 gender comedy, 52–3, 57, 75–6n26 gender stereotyping, 126, 135 The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (CBS), 52, 59, 65 Geraghty, Christine, 8, 17n28, 112, 192 Now a Major Motion Picture, 111–12 Gervais, Ricky, 16, 72–3, 78n77, 98–9 Get Smart (Brooks et al.), 55–60 awards for, 55 cinematic techniques, 59–60 film content incorporated, 57–8 gimmicks, 49 hybridity, 73 jokes recycled, 36, 192 length of run, 9 production costs, 59–60 runner gags, 58 visual jokes, 73n4 Get Smart (Segal), 55, 113 Get Smart Again (Nelson), 55 Ghostbusters (Reitman), 39 Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Atari), 39 Ghostbusters II (Reitman), 135 Gilbey, Ryan, 172, 173 Gleason, Jackie, 51, 193, 194 globalisation of market, 166 Go West (Buzzell), 86 Godard, Jean-Luc, Sympathy for the Devil, 160 The Godfather (Coppola), 68 Golden, Daniel, 124 The Golden Girls (NBC), 67, 68 The Golden Palace (CBS), 68 Goldfinger (Hamilton), 56 Gomery, Douglas, 147n39 Goodman, Henry, 168 Gow, Gordon, 119, 125 Films and Filming, 86, 92 The Graduate (Nichols), 157, 158 Graham, Ronnie, 69

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inde x Grainge, Paul, 8, 41, 190 Brand Hollywood, 34 Grammer, Kelsey, 172 Grant, Cary, 87, 91, 92 Gray, Joel, 165 Graydon, Danny, 66 Grease (Kleiser), 161, 179n32 Grease musical, 161 Greenspun, Roger, 160 Greggio, Ezio, 108n59 Grimm Brothers, 26 Grusin, Richard, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 29 Guardian Billington in, 182n87 Carlson in, 60 Hickling in, 168, 176 Hollywood-to-Broadway stars, 183n92 Hytner in, 182n87 Jones in, 103 Nadelson in, 166 Gubar, Susan, 6, 185, 194n1 Gulf and Western, 36 Gunsmoke (CBS), 121 Hairspray (Shankman), 177 Hairspray (Waters), 177, 184n110 Hairspray musical, 172 Hamilton, George, 142 Hardware Wars (Fosselius), 132 Haring-Smith, Tori, 167–8 Hark, Ina Rae, 20, 29–30, 41 Harries, Dan, 62, 110, 111, 112, 185, 194–5n2 Film Parody, 7, 62, 110–11 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling), 24 Harvey, Dennis, 177 Hasselhoff, David, 169, 172 Hawks, Howard, 119 Heffernan, Virginia, 102, 192 Hello, Dolly!, 171 Henry, Buck, 49, 55, 56, 58, 59 Herbstman, Mandel, 157–8 Hertzberg, Michael, 120 Hesmondhalgh, David, 7–8, 19n59, 20, 41, 42, 43–4n17, 190 The Cultural Industries, 22 Hickling, Alfred, 168 High Anxiety (Brooks), 188 adaptation, 91–2, 193 appropriations from, 61 camera shots, 70 commercial success, 50 imitations of singers, 91, 104 Jewish comic tradition, 6 Korman in, 69 Yiddish persona, 92 Hinson, Hal, 89, 132

Hirschfeld, Gerland, 126 Hirschfeld, Marc, 169 History of the World: Part I (Brooks) anti-Catholicism, 3 cameo role, 92 gender stereotyping, 135 Madame Defarge, 144 Marx as influence, 89 moustache, 93 vulgarity, 5 Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars (Murray), 50 Hitchcock, Alfred, 2, 10, 91, 172; see also specific films Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Kapsis), 2, 10 The Hitler Rap, 82–3 Hoberman, J., 162–3, 175 Hoffman, Dustin, 159 Hollywood Economics (De Vany), 23 Hollywood film studios, 51, 117 Hollywood films and Broadway musicals, 176, 183n92 hybridisation, 112–13 as influence, 60, 61–2, 66, 68, 72 and sitcoms, 55, 56–7, 60 and television, 147n39 Hollywood Reporter, 119, 125, 130, 132, 136, 137, 162 The Hollywood Squares (NBC), 66 Hollywood TV (Anderson), 51 Hollywood walk of fame, 9 Holtzman, William, Seesaw: A Dual Biography of Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks, 3 ‘Homer vs. Patty and Selma’ episode, 99 The Honeymooners, 51, 53, 123, 193 Hope, Bob, 68, 111 Horizons West (Kitses), 118 Horkheimer, Max, 22 horror film genre, 124 Horton, Andrew, 97 Hot Shots! (Abrahams), 133, 143 How I Made a Hundred Movies (Corman), 31–2 Howe, Desson, 140 Howkins, John, The Creative Economy, 13 Hunt, Helen, 100 Hurt, John, 133 husband-and-wife skits, 54, 56, 57; see also gender comedy Hutcheon, Linda, 8 A Theory of Adaptation, 21 A Theory of Parody, 115

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inde x Hutchinson, Tom, 95 hybridisation, 30–2, 45n62 as adaptation strategy, 28, 48–9 Blazing Saddles, 118–19 film/television content, 48, 110 formula writing, 55 Hollywood films, 112–13 parody film genre, 127–8 parody/sitcom, 50 and remediation, 20, 41, 185 Spaceballs, 132–3 Hytner, Nicholas, 182n87 I Dream of Jeannie (NBC), 56, 57, 59 ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’, 122 I Love Lucy (CBS), 50, 53, 57, 59, 74n16, 75–6n26, 193 re-runs, 123 I Married A Witch (Clair), 57 I Married Joan (NBC), 59 idiolect, 80–1, 83, 96, 103 Idle, Eric, 123 In Living Color (Fox), 80 In the Heat of the Night (Jewison), 159 Independent, 37, 95, 175Independent on Sunday, 142 Industrial Light and Magic, 130 integration of media, 1–2, 23, 42, 154 Intellect publishers, 17n28 intermediality, 32–3 adaptation, 28, 41, 185, 190 Caesar’s Hour, 75n24 Gaudreault, 196n23 Hollywood film studios, 51 Korman, 69 New Hollywood, 115–17 parody genre, 61, 111 sitcoms, 50–5, 61 Young Frankenstein, 126–7 Internet Movie Database, 103, 133, 134, 135 intertextuality, 38, 54, 65 interviews as performance, 87 Isherwood, Charles, 169–70 Israeli Six Day War, 7 It Conquered the World (Corman), 32 It’s Good to Be the King (Parish), 4, 195n5 It’s Marty (BBC), 126 J. R. T., 161 The Jackie Gleason Show (CBS), 51 Jackson, Kevin, 142 Jacobsen Entertainment, 173 Jaffe, Andrea, 137, 138 Jameson, Fredric, 114–15 Postmodernism, 191

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Japanisation, 27 Jaws (Spielberg), 116, 147n36 Jenkins, Henry, 2 on Brooks, 83–4 convergence culture, 8, 15, 20, 41, 190, 194 Convergence Culture, 23–4 on The Matrix, 24 on South Park, 134 on Star Wars, 25 transmedia, 33 What Made Pistachio Nuts?, 85 Jerry Springer: The Opera (Lee), 182n87 The Jetsons, 31, 56 Jewishness comic tradition, 6, 83–4, 194n1 cultural identity, 6–7, 83, 140, 185, 192 ethnicity, 1, 5–6 outsider status, 84, 87 social acceptance, 102 speech patterns, 84–5, 102 see also Yiddish accent; Yiddish identity Johansson, Scarlett, 183n92 Johnstone, Sheila, 95 jokes bad taste, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 185 ethnicity, 62 formulaic, 62–3, 64, 139 prolonged adaptation, 139, 142–4, 192 racial, 3, 62, 71 recycled, 36, 175–6 repetition, 58–9, 140 visual, 73n4 Jones, Jonathan, 103 Jones, Terry, 123 Jordan, Michael, 191 Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 17n28 Journal of Popular Film and Television, 6 Jump Cut, 124 Jurassic Park (Spielberg), 137 ‘Just in Time’ episode, 104 Kael, Pauline, 10, 107n39, 157 Kahn, Madeline, 92, 125, 126 Kapsis, Robert E., Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, 2, 10 Karras, Alex, 122 Kate and Allie (CBS), 62 Kay, Peter, 169, 172 Keep ’em Laughing, 161 Kelly, Gene, 122 Kempley, Rita, 114 Kennedy Center Honors, 9, 187 The Kentucky Fried Movie (Landis), 113, 129, 131, 133

221 Keveney, Bill, 75n22 King, Barry, 81 King, Geoff, 2, 82, 91, 117 Film Comedy, 79–80 New Hollywood Cinema, 147n31 King, Susan, 120–1 The Kiss (Heise), 42n7 Kitses, Jim, Horizons West, 118 Kline, Kevin, 169 Klinger, Barbara Beyond the Multiplex, 133–4 Melodrama and Meaning, 11–12 Knight, Steven, 140–1 Kompare, Derek, 126 Rerun Nation, 123, 124 Kopell, Bernie, 65 Korman, Harvey, 68, 69, 120–1, 143 Kramer, Peter, 157 The New Hollywood, 156 Kronke, David, 144 Lahr, John, 166, 168–9 Laine, Frankie, 119 Lake, Veronica, 57 Landis, John, 129 Landlay, Lori, 50, 55 Lane, Nathan, 164, 168, 169, 173–4 Late Night with David Letterman (NBC), 138 Laverne and Shirley (ABC), 61, 64, 68 layering technique, 112, 117, 192 Leachman, Cloris, 69, 144 Lee, Bruce, 129 Lee, Stuart, 182n87 Leitch, Thomas, 8, 17n28, 20, 41, 42n7, 120, 155, 156 Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, 30–1 Levine, Joseph E., 14, 157 Levitow, Roberta, 165 Lewis, Richard, 138, 139 Lewisohn, Mark, 71–2 Leydon, Joe, 141, 142, 144, 192 Liar Liar (Shadyac), 80 Liebkind, Franz, 171 Life Stinks (Brooks), 93–7 critical reception, 10, 95–6, 186 eccentricity, 192 persona shift, 93, 94–7 as transitional text, 93–7 vaudeville, 94 Limelight (Chaplin), 11 The Lion King, film/show, 165–6 Little, Cleavon, 65, 122, 123 Little Big Man (Penn), 115–16 Little Shop of Horrors (Corman), 32, 172

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222 Loaded Weapon 1 (Quintano), 133, 143 London Weekend Television, 89 Lopez, Gemma, 38 The Lord of the Rings (Jackson), 36–7 Los Angeles Times, 58, 120–1, 144 Lost in Space (CBS), 56, 57 Love and Death (Allen), 114 Love at First Bite (Dragoti), 142 Lucas, George, 2, 5, 110; see also Star Wars Lucasfilm, 25, 130, 134 Luhrmann, Baz, 39 Lury, Celia, 166 Consumer Culture, 28, 164 Lydon, Peter, 162 McCane, Bob, 143 McCarter, Jeremy, 11 McCarthy, Todd, 174 McCarthyism, 11 McCartney, Simon, 175 McDonagh, Martin, 183n92 McGrath, Kirstin, 179n32 McNab, Andy, 188 Mad About You (NBC) cameo roles, 97, 104, 191, 192 Emmy, 79 synergy, 83, 104 Uncle Phil, 81, 99–100 The Magnificent Seven (Sturges), 118 Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (BBC), 140–1 Mail on Sunday, 95 Major Dad (CBS), 67 Make Room for Daddy (ABC), 59 Maland, Charles J., Chaplin and American Culture, 2, 10–11 Mamma Mia! (Lloyd), 176 The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (NBC), 56 The Man with Two Brains (Reiner), 128 Manchel, Frank, The BoxOffice Clowns, 3 Marc, David, 55, 62 Comic Visions, 51–2 Marcus, Miriam, 189 Martin, Dean, 118 Martin, Steve, 80, 128, 135 Martin Wright, Terry, 26 Marty (BBC), 15 The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine (ABC), 117, 125–6 Marx, Groucho, 81, 85, 86, 89, 90, 162–3 Marx Brothers, 85, 159, 162

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inde x Mary Poppins (Stevenson), 172 M*A*S*H (CBS), 60, 72 Maslin, Janet, 95–6, 129–30, 132 Mast, Gerald, 16n8, 85 The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers), 24 Matthews, Nicole, Comic Politics, 65, 135 Maverick (Donner), 30 Meehan, Eileen R., 37 Why TV is Not Our Fault, 36 Meehan, Thomas, 166, 177 megamusicals, 170–1 Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman (Adler & Feinman), 4, 48, 87 Mel Brooks and the Spoof Movie (Smurthwaite & Gelder), 4–5 Mellencamp, Patricia, 75–6n26 Melodrama and Meaning (Klinger), 11–12 ‘Mel’s Offer’ episode, 103, 104 Men in Black (Sonnenfeld), 82 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 163 merchandising, 25, 26–7, 132, 151n109 meta-texts, 98, 192 microtexts, 120 Midnight in Paris (Allen), 96 Miller, Arthur, 183n92 Mills, Brett, 70–1, 99–100 Television Sitcom, 70 Mills Brothers, 122 Milne, Tom, 86, 125 Mission Impossible (CBS), 56 Mission Impossible (De Palma), 30 Monthly Film Bulletin, 86, 118, 125 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 117, 123 Moore, Dudley, 65, 66 Moore, Michael, 145 Moranis, Ricky, 143 Mostel, Zero acting style, 159–60, 160–1 critical acclaim, 162–3, 169 and Wilder, 156, 157, 162, 163–4, 168, 173 Mother Courage and Her Children (Brecht), 160–1 Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol (ABC), 31 Mullally, Megan, 183n88 multimedia conglomerates, 24 The Munsters (CBS), 56–7 Murphy, Eddie, 142 Murray, Bill, 135 Murray, Susan, 55, 59 Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars, 50 musicals see Broadway musicals

My Fair Lady (Cukor), 156 My Favorite Husband (CBS), 50, 193 My Favorite Martian (CBS), 56 Nachman, Gerald, Seriously Funny, 5, 54 Nadelson, Reggie, 166 The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (Zucker, D.), 77n65, 113 The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (Zucker, D.), 143 The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (Segal), 143 Naremore, James, 21, 91 Film Adaptation, 20 Natural Born Killers (Stone), 46n77 naturalistic acting, 159 naturalistic personality, 94–7 NBC Entertainment, 72, 73, 169 NBC Nightly News, 189 New Hollywood, 147n31 Cawelti, 110 cinema-centred studies, 115–16 directors, 82 intermediality, 115–17 naturalistic acting, 159 The New Hollywood (Kramer), 156 New Hollywood Cinema (King), 147n31 The New Hollywood Squares (NBC), 138 The New Steve Allen Show (ABC), 87 New World Pictures, 32 New York Film Critics, 158 New York Post, 101, 166 New York Review of Books, 163 New York magazine, 11 New York Times Adler, R. in, 86, 159 Brooks in, 117 on Brooks’s voice, 83 Canby in, 121, 139, 140 Carter in, 67 Crowther in, 158 Fabrikant in, 190 Gardner in, 56 Greenspun in, 160 Heffernan in, 102, 192 Hoberman in, 162–3 Isherwood in, 169–70 Kael in, 157 Maslin in, 95–6, 129–30, 132 O’Connor in, 64 on The Producers, 6, 162 Ryzik in, 173 Sarris in, 157 Stang in, 57, 59

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inde x New Yorker Allen in, 88 Kael in, 10, 107n39 Lahr in, 166, 168–9 on The Producers, 6, 162 on Robin Hood: Men in Tights, 138 Sragow in, 141 Newman, Paul, 92 Nichols, Mike, 158, 159 Nicholson, Jack, 101, 186 Nielsen, Leslie, 142–3 A Nightmare on Elm Street (Bayer), 39, 47n96 A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven), 39, 47n96 Nintendo Entertainment System, 132 North by Northwest (Hitchcock), 91, 92 Not of This Earth (Corman), 32 Not Only . . . But Also (BBC), 66 Nottingham City Library, 14 Now a Major Motion Picture (Geraghty), 111–12 The Nude Bomb (Donner), 55 The Nutt House (NBC), 67–73 camera angles, 70 cancellation, 9, 60, 78n68 hybridity, 33 innovation, 49–50, 60–1 jokes/narrative, 70–1 from parody films, 62 as parody-com, 72, 191 Obama, Barack, 9 O’Connor, John, 64 The Office (NBC), 50, 72, 73 old romantic persona, 95 Oliver!, 182n87 One Froggy Evening (Jones), 133 ‘Opening Night’, 104 O’Reilly, Bill, 145 The O’Reilly Factor (Fox), 145 Oxford University Press, 18n28 Paleface (McLeod), 111 Paramount Communications, 36, 64 Parenthood (Howard), 135 Parish, James Robert, It’s Good to Be the King, 4, 195n5 Park Wars (Asif & Bracewell), 134 Parker, Trey, 134 parody appropriation, 112 audience recognition, 54 Bakhtin, 146n10 Brooks, 1, 2, 185, 194–5n2 failures, 10 Harries, 112

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incongruity, 63 intermediality, 61, 111 Jameson, 114–15 and sitcom, 50 Parody As Film Genre (Gehring), 7 parody film genre Allen, 114 Brooks, 4–5, 7, 61, 186, 194–5n2 Harries, 110 hybridisation, 127–8 innovation, 128, 129 production strategies, 111 prolonged adaptation, 127–8 timeframes, 132 parody-coms, 61, 66, 72 pastiche, 115 ‘The Penis’ episode, 100 Penn, Arthur, 159 Pennington, Roy, 119 performance idiolect, 80 Shakespearean, 163 as spectacle, 79–80 performative method, 91 The Phantom of the Opera (Schumacher), 176 The Phantom of the Opera (Webber), 167, 170 Phoenix Nights (C4), 169, 172 Pickens, Slim, 121–2 Pierce, David Hyde, 169 The Pink Panther (Levy), 49, 55 Pintoff, Ernest, 86 Play it Again, Sam (Allen), 114 Playbill, 172 Pogrebin, Robin, 184n110 Polanski, Roman, 110, 142 Police Squad! (Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker), 50, 66, 67, 72, 77n65, 142 Porter, Cole, 122 Postmodernism (Jameson), 191 prefigurative experiences, 90, 165 presold material, 20, 22, 37, 42n5, 50, 91, 92, 117, 164 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 38 Primetime Glick (Comedy Central), 97 The Princess Bride (Reiner), 138 The Producers: How We Did It (Brooks), 37 The Producers 1968 film (Brooks), 156–61 Academy Award, 12 canonised, 133 casting, 156 commercial success, 11

223 critics on, 6–7, 10, 12, 157–8, 161–73 as cult, 154, 174, 177–8n1, 186 Fermaglich on, 6–7 on Nazism, 3, 6, 34 production costs, 157 production values, 158, 161, 163 remediated, 154, 171 repurposed, 172 synergy, 103 theatrical qualities, 162, 191 vaudeville-style, 159 The Producers 2001 Broadway show (Brooks), 163–73 casting, 104, 163–4, 182n87 cinematic qualities, 191 and film, 154 musical numbers, 170 reinventing self, 186 remediation, 29 success, 37 synergy, 34 television celebrities, 169 ticket pricing, 166–7 The Producers 2005 film (Brooks) box-office takings, 175 critics on, 175–6 prolonged adaptation, 173–4 recycling of jokes, 175–6 sources, 154 production conscious moments, 70, 92, 123 production strategy adaptation, 22 Disney, 25–6 Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 141 parody films, 111 Robin Hood: Men in Tights, 137–9 prolonged adaptation, 28, 35–41, 185 audience memories, 192 convergence culture, 20, 40–1, 193 husband-and-wife skits, 53 jokes, 139, 142–4, 192 longevity, 104 meaningfulness, 38–40 parody films, 127–8 The Producers 2005 film, 173–4 remediation, 79 star status, 79 success/failure, 192–3 2000 Year Old Man routine, 98, 140, 193 Pullman, Bill, 131 ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’, 125, 127 Quantum Leap (NBC), 67

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224 racial jokes, 3, 62, 71 radio advertisements, 88 Rafelson, Bob, 159 Ramis, Harold, 39 Rawhide (CBS), 119, 121 Raz, Aviad E., 26–7, 193 The Real Ghostbusters (ABC), 39 Recording The Producers (Brooks), 37 recycling audience taste, 62 Blazing Saddles, 118–19 presold content, 20, 22, 37, 42n5, 50 Reiner, Carl, 5, 83–6, 99, 101, 128, 186 remediation, 29–30 adaptation, 28 comic book characters, 40, 47n97 and hybridisation, 20, 41, 185 The Producers, 171 prolonged adaptation, 79 theatre-to-film, 176 Remediation: Understanding New Media (Bolter & Grusin), 29 Rent, 166, 167, 176 Rent (Columbus), 176 repetition, 58–9, 140; see also recycling Repossessed (Logan), 113, 133, 142 reputation/reception, 2, 8–9, 11–12, 97–8 Rerun Nation (Kompare), 123, 124 Return of the Jedi (Marquand), 132 Reynolds, Nigel, 168, 170 Rice, Susan, 124 Rich, Frank, 161 Rickles, Don, 58 Ridgely, Robert, 139 Rieser, Paul, 100 Rio Bravo (Hawks), 118, 119 Ritz Brothers, 68 Rivers, Joan, 131 Roadshow Era, 156 Robin Hood: Men in Tights (Brooks), 136–41 and Blazing Saddles, 139 box-office takings, 113 cameo role, 139–40 casting strategy, 138 commercial success, 136–7 critics on, 130, 141 Kempley on, 114 layering, 112 production costs, 136–7 production strategy, 110, 137–9 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Reynolds), 137–8

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inde x Robin Hood source story, 64 Rock, Chris, 144 Rogan, Seth, 98 Rolling Stones, 160 Romeo + Juliet (Luhrmann), 39 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 39 Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli), 39 Rowling, J.K., 37 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 24 runner gags, 58 Ryzik, Melena Z., 173 Sabin, Roger, 43n7 Sanders, Jule, 8, 46n80 Adaptation and Appropriation, 128–9 Sarris, Andrew, 157, 158, 159–60 Saturday Night Fever (Badham), 66 Saturday Night Live (NBC), 82, 144, 169 Scary Movie (Wayans), 145 Scary Movie 2 (Wayans), 145 Scary Movie 3 (Zucker, D.), 145 Scary Movie 4 (Zucker, D.), 145 Schatz, Thomas, 116, 127, 159 Schickel, Richard, 188–9, 193 The Disney Version, 8, 25 Schwimmer, David, 169 sci-fi/comedy hybridisation, 32 Scorsese, Martin, 82, 101 Scott, A. O., 176 Screen International, 174 Screw Loose (Greggio), 108n59 Seesaw: A Dual Biography of Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks (Holtzman), 3 Seidman, Steve, 91 Comedian Comedy, 68–9 Seinfeld (NBC), 102, 103, 145 self-referentiality, 134–5 Sellers, Peter, 55, 106n28 Sergeant York (Hawks), 118 Sergi, Gianluca, 84 Seriously Funny (Nachman), 5, 54 sexist attitudes, 92–3 Shakespeare, William, 8, 38–9 Shakespearean performance, 163 Shane (Stevens), 118 Sherak, Tom, 137 Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother (Wilder), 107n39 Shinbone Alley, 189, 195n5 shoe phone gag, 58 Short, Martin, 169 Sight and Sound Backley in, 114, 142, 143

Combs in, 118, 122 Gilbey in, 172, 173 Lydon in, 162 McNab in, 188 Taylor in, 124–5 Silent Movie (Brooks et al.), 91 Silverman, Sarah, 7 Silverman Zinman, Tony, 84–5 Simon, Anthony, 175 The Simpsons (Fox), 83, 97, 98–9, 101, 104 The Sims videogame, 24 Sinatra, Frank, 91 Singin’ in the Rain (Donen), 174 Sinvard, Neil, The Films of Mel Brooks, 3 Sirk, Douglas, 11–12 Sister Kate (NBC), 67 sitcoms adaptation, 51–2 appropriation, 50 audience affection, 58, 59 blockbusters, 61–2, 72 cameo roles, 97, 191 fantastic families, 56 formulaic writing, 62 Hollywood films, 55, 56–7, 60 intermediality, 50–5, 61 parody and, 50 perceived stagnation, 72, 74n16, 78n74 production, 33, 49, 61 sponsorship, 60 television variety shows, 50–1 theme tunes, 57–8 three camera style, 59, 60 traditional, 67, 73n3 transformed, 60–3 workplace, 67, 68 The Six Gun Mystique (Cawelti), 118 Sky News, 9 Sleeper (Allen), 114 Sleeping Beauty (Geronimi), 25 Smith, Adam, 113, 130 Smith, Will, 2, 16, 82 Smurthwaite, Nick, Mel Brooks and the Spoof Movie, 4–5 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Cottrell & Hand), 25–6, 114 Son of Frankenstein (Lee), 124 Sondheim, Stephen, 176 Sontag, Susan, 155, 156, 157 Sony Computer Entertainment, 33–4 Sony Pictures, 33–4 The Sound of Music (Wise), 156 South Park (Comedy Central), 134

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inde x Spaceballs (Brooks), 130–6 appropriation, 130–1 cameo role, 92, 135 change of strategy, 110 characters, 131–2 commercial success, 113, 130 critics on, 62, 111, 130, 136 gender stereotyping, 135 Graham in, 69 hybridisation, 132–3 influences on, 89 Internet Movie Database, 133 layering, 112 moustache, 93 novelised, 151n110 self-referentiality, 134–5 slapstick, 143 Star Wars fans, 134 Variety on, 114 Spamalot, 172 Spelling, Aaron, 136 Spencer, Alan, 71 Spielberg, Steven, 5 Spigel, Lynn, 56 Splash (Howard), 131 sponsorship, 60 ‘Springtime for Hitler’, 6, 164, 171 Sragow, Michael, 141 Stadtmiller, Mandy, 101 Staiger, Janet, 64, 72, 73n4 Blockbuster TV, 61 Stallone, Sylvester, 101 Stam, Robert, 8, 42–3n7, 154–5, 156 standardisation film parody genre, 111 musicals, 170–1 theatrical performance, 164, 167–8, 172 Stang, Joanne, 57, 59 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 159 star personas, 79, 80–1, 96, 191 Star Trek (NBC), 29–30, 36, 37 Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Wise), 29–30, 36 Star Trek: The Motion Picture Make-Your-Own Costume Book, 36 Star Wars (Lucas) and Annie Hall, 188 appropriations from, 131 as cult film, 151n109 Jenkins/convergence culture, 25 merchandising, 132, 151n109 production values, 130 recycling strategy, 110 Schatz on, 116 spin-offs, 132 Star Wars: Droids (ABC), 132

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Starburst magazine, 141 Stealth (Cohen), 33–4 Steinberg, Norman, 64 stereotyping gender, 126, 135 racial, 71 Stewart, French, 169 Stewart, James, 91 Stone, Matt, 134 Streep, Meryl, 176 ‘A Streetcar Named???’, 54 A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan), 54 Streisand, Barbra, 102, 140 Strickfaden, Kenneth, 124 Stroman, Susan, 174 ‘Suites, Lies and Videotape’, 68, 69–70 Sun, 95 Sunday Times, 175 Survivor (CBS), 24 Susman, Gary, 98–9 Svich, Caridad, 165 Sweeney Todd (Burton), 176–7 Sweeney Todd (Sondheim), 176 Symons, A., 6 Sympathy for the Devil (Godard), 157, 160 synergy, 28, 33–4 cross-media, 83, 101, 104, 173, 185, 191 cross-promotion, 39 Smith, 82 Take One, 124 Take the Money and Run (Allen), 111 talk show appearances, 87, 97, 188 Tarantino, Quentin, 82 Taxi (ABC), 169, 172 Taylor, John Russell, 124–5 television adaptations, 137 American production values, 54–5, 120 celebrities, 169, 173 cinematography, 126 comedy, 43–4n17, 48 duration of shows, 14, 73–4n4 Hollywood films, 147n39 low cultural status, 27–8 talk show appearances, 87, 97, 188 variety shows, 50–1, 73n4, 119–20, 123 see also sitcoms; TV generation Television Sitcom (Mills), 70 The Terminator (Cameron), 39 Terminator Salvation (McG), 39 theatre acting styles, 158, 162

225 and film, class distinctions, 164 globalisation of market, 166 as high culture industry, 27 integration with television, 182n87 mass culture business, 165 performance standardised, 167–8 Theatre Audiences (Bennett), 164–5 Theatre in Crisis? (Delgado & Svich), 165 theme parks, 26 theme tunes, 57–8 A Theory of Parody (Hutcheon), 115 They Live (Carpenter), 32 Thingvall, Joel, 125, 127 3rd Rock From the Sun (NBC), 169 The 39 Steps (Hitchcock), 172 This is Spinal Tap (Reiner), 72–3 three camera style, 59, 60, 67 Three Men and a Baby (Nimoy), 68 Three Stooges, 93, 94 Thurman, Uma, 174 tie-in products, 34, 37 Till Death Us Do Part (BBC), 71 Time, 83, 85, 88, 161, 188 Time Out, 10, 91–2, 139, 141 Time Warner, 34 The Times, 93, 94, 96, 161, 174, 187 To Be or Not to Be (Brooks), 82, 89 Tokyo Disneyland, 26–7 Tolstoy, Leo, 114 Tomb Raider games, 21 The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (NBC), 87, 88 Tony awards, 9 Top Hat (Sandrich), 156 Top-Notchers, 161 Torn Curtain (Hitchcock), 92 The Towering Inferno (Guillermin), 129 transmedia storytelling, 33 Turner, Graeme, Understanding Celebrity, 191 Turner Classic Movies, 102 TV generation, 147n34 The Twelve Chairs (Brooks), 3, 91 Twentieth Century Fox, 117, 136–7 ‘21 Men and a Baby’, 68 2000 and One Years, 83, 86 2000 and Thirteen, 5, 83 The 2000 Year Old Man Goes to School (Brooks), 34

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226 The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 (Brooks & Reiner), 79, 83, 101, 191, 193 2000 Year Old Man routine adaptations, 83–9 as cartoon, 106n28 cult/classic, 104, 105n9, 192 early performances, 5 in Get Smart, 36 as meta-text, 101 persona, 92, 192 prolonged adaptation, 98, 140, 193 Reiner, 186 in The Simpsons, 97 Yiddish persona, 81, 84, 88, 89, 92, 102, 192 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, 83 Understanding Celebrity (Turner), 191 USA Today, 121, 169 Usher, Shaun, 94 Valentine, Kym, 173 Vampire (Donner), 142 Vampire in Brooklyn (Craven), 142 vampire tradition, 142, 143 Vanity Fair, 52, 157 Variety Beau in, 10, 120, 121 on Cabaret, 161 Cart in, 94 Cox in, 166–7 Fritz in, 33 Harvey in, 177 Leydon in, 141, 142, 144, 192 McCarthy in, 174 on Police Squad!, 66 on Robin Hood: Men in Tights, 139 on The Simpsons, 98 on Spaceballs, 114 variety shows see television: variety shows vaudeville, 85, 86, 93, 94, 143, 159 Vertigo (Hitchcock), 91 videogames, 21, 24, 33, 39, 132 A View from the Bridge (Miller), 183n92 Village Voice, 6, 83, 95, 143, 162, 175 Vogel, Scott, 187 voice characteristics, 83–4, 101–2; see also Yiddish accent

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inde x Wachowski Brothers, 2, 24 Wacky Wildlife (Avery), 111 Walken, Christopher, 183n92 Walker, Alexander, 10, 94, 96, 143 Wall Street Journal, 186 Walsh, John, 37–8 Walt Disney World, 26 Warner Bros, 51, 111, 117, 119, 133 Warren, Bill, 142 Washington, Denzel, 183n92 Washington Post Chaney in, 161–2 Crewes in, 167 Hinson in, 89, 132 Howe in, 140 Kempley in, 114 Kennedy Center Honors, 187 Washington Times, 83 Wasko, Janet, 36–7 Waters, John, 177 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 16, 182n87 Cats, 171 The Phantom of the Opera, 170 ‘The Wedding Bell Blues’ episode, 65 West, Adam, 40 West Side Story (Robbins & Wise), 156 Whale, James, 124–5 What Made Pistachio Nuts? (Jenkins), 85 When Things Were Rotten (Brooks), 63–6 innovative, 49–50, 60–1 from parody films, 62 as parody-com, 72 and Robin Hood film, 138 short-lived, 9, 48, 60–1 Who’s the Boss? (ABC), 169 Why TV is Not Our Fault (Meehan), 36 Wickstrom, Maurya, 165–6 Wideout Pure videogame, 33–4 The Widow Jones, 42n7 Wild Wild West (Sonnenfeld), 82 Wilder, Gene acting style, 160–1 in Blazing Saddles, 118–19 and Little, 123 and Mostel, 156, 157, 162, 163–4, 168, 173 in The Producers, 107n39, 156, 157, 159–60 in Young Frankenstein, 91, 107n39, 124, 125, 127 Will and Grace (NBC), 183n88 Williams, Brian, 189

Williams, Robin, 80 Wilson, Owen, 96 The Wiz, 161 The Wizard of Oz (Fleming), 161 Worland, Rick, 124 Wright, Terri Martin, 193 Wright Wexman, Virginia, 50–1, 55, 159 Yacowar, Maurice, 64 The Comic Art of Mel Brooks, 3 Yiddish accent, 84, 102 Yiddish identity, 81, 105n9, 139–40, 192 Young Frankenstein (Brooks), 124–7 appropriations from, 61 box-office sales, 117 Brooks’s adaptation, 172 casting strategy, 125–6 commercial success, 9, 11, 50, 112–13 critical acclaim, 7, 113 Feldman in, 15, 139, 149n79 film/television content, 110 intermediality, 126–7 Jewish comedy tradition, 6 layering technique, 112, 117, 125 Leachman, 144 New Hollywood studies, 115 production costs, 117 production values, 126 recycling, 117 Wilder in, 91, 107n39, 124, 125, 127 Young Frankenstein Broadway show, 189 Your Show of Shows (NBC), 3, 13, 49, 52, 53–4, 55, 124, 126 The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood (Austin), 140–1 Zeffirelli, Franco, 39 Zucker, David, 16 Airplane!, 66, 193 Airplane II: The Sequel, 129–30 Big Fat Important Movie, 145 Police Squad!, 72, 142, 143, 193 Zucker, Jerry, 16 Airplane!, 66, 193 Airplane II: The Sequel, 129–30 Police Squad!, 72, 142, 143, 193

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