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 Screening
rooms are a lot like libraries: silence reigns supreme. Most critics
don’t need anyone to shush them; they’re kept in check by peer
pressure, and part of the game is to stifle your reactions so no one
knows what you’re thinking. But the night I saw
The Producers early
last December, the crowd was doubled over with laughter. So imagine
my surprise when I started
reading all the negative reviews.
The Producers holds a
prestigious Broadway
record: it won 12 Tony awards in 2001, taking the prize in every
possible category in which it was a contender. Nevertheless domestic
box office grosses for the film adaptation were dismal. So far, the
film has recouped less than half of its $45 million production
budget. Four Golden Globe nominations failed to produce a single
Oscar nomination. What went wrong?
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Photo Credit: Andrew Schwartz.
Copyright: © 2005 Universal Studios.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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"It ain’t no myst’ry
If it’s politics or hist’ry.
The thing ya gotta know is
Ev’rything is show biz!"
The Producers
is now available
on DVD.
Gary Beach hams it up as “renown
theatrical director
Roger De Bris” in the Mel Brook spoof The Producers.
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The first version of The Producers was an
88-minute farce
made for under $1 million. The screenplay, the first of the eleven
he’s seen filmed, won Mel Brooks his only Oscar to date (“Best
Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen”) in 1969. By contrast,
both the 2001 Broadway stage version of The Producers and the 2005
film version are elaborately staged musicals. Although most of the
basic plot points remain constant, the storytelling formats are
completely incommensurate.
For the sake of the uninitiated, here’s an overview:
One fine day, Manhattan accounting firm Whitehall & Marks dispatches
nebbishy Leo Bloom to audit the books of washed-up impresario Max
Bialystock. While quizzing Max about a minor discrepancy, Leo makes
a starting discovery: “You can make more money with a flop than with
a hit.” Exhausted by his recent string of failures, Max seizes on
this “cockamamie scheme,” convincing Leo they can bilk the IRS and
escape to Rio de Janeiro. Working together, they diligently scrape
the bottom of every talent barrel, but instead of failure the result
is a smashing success. Their musical extravaganza “Springtime for
Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolph and Eva in the Bergesgarten” is so
over-the-top, it’s irresistible. Convicted of fraud and sent to Sing
Sing, Max and Leo immediately start selling shares in a new
production to their fellow prisoners.
The success of the original was built on two critical factors: star
power and deliberate bad taste. When Brooks cast Zero Mostel as Max,
he was Broadway’s miracle man. The original production of Fiddler on
the Roof, which opened in 1964, was supposed to be a box office
failure (“too ethnic”), but with Mostel playing the central part of
Teyve, it became a box office giant. Fiddler made yiddishkeit
respectable, enabling Jewish audiences to publicly mourn the shtetls
destroyed in the Holocaust, while good-hearted people everywhere
empathized.
The move from sentimentality to transgressive comedy was made
possible by the “Six Day War” in 1967. Like their ancient king David
facing off against Goliath, the people of Israel had scored an
amazing victory against the combined Arab armies. Jews had proven
themselves as warriors, so who better than “Tevye” to “dance on
Hitler’s grave,” and thereby embody the aphorism “He who laughs
last, laughs best!”
Of course, most people didn’t get it, and many Jews who had personal
memories of World War II were deeply offended by Brooks’
determination to treat Hitler as a subject for comedy. But over the
years, the cult status of The Producers grew, and thirty years
later, a movie about the making of a Broadway musical was reclaimed
as a Broadway musical. Laugh lines in the original were transformed
into melodies. Aesthetic elements evolved from cheap kitsch into
deliriously extravagant costumes and props. Supporting players like
Ulla (the secretary) and Fritz (the playwright) became fully-drawn
characters, and, best of all, Brooks jiggered the plot so that Roger
De Bris (the director) could move from back stage to center stage in
order to take on the role of Hitler on Opening Night.
If you just don’t like musicals, and many people don’t, then none of
this matters, but if you do, then there’s no contest: the musical
version of The Producers is much funnier than the original and,
despite its length, it moves at a much brisker pace. When I saw the
stage version, I laughed my head off. When I saw the screen version,
I laughed even harder. All the tiny little details, the things no
one sitting in front of the proscenium can really see, kept me in
stitches: the poster of “King Leer” in Max’s office, the animatronic
birds wearing swastikas, the Iron Cross medals adorning Ulla’s tits,
all hilarious. How great to see Leo visualizing the dancers in his
dream sequence as “beautiful girls wearing nothing but pearls.” And
watching Roger play Hitler, so desperate for affirmation, you can
understand why the audience is seduced.
But there’s a worm in the apple that even I couldn’t ignore: Matthew
Broderick. Broderick is best-known for his staring role in the John
Hughes 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That was twenty years
ago, and the years have finally caught up with him. Film audiences
don’t really care about the acclaim his performance generated on
Broadway; we simply reject him as Leo, the same way we reject Omar
Sharif in Funny Girl and Natalie Wood in West Side Story.
The part of Leo Bloom was created by Gene Wilder in his first major
movie role (preceded only by a small but memorable scene in Bonnie
and Clyde). The opening credits leave no doubt that the star of The
Producers is Zero Mostel, but their onscreen chemistry is magic.
Their faces are perfect complements: Mostel’s is huge, decrepit, and
vaguely deranged; Wilder’s is tiny, soft, and childish. When their
faces share the same frame, Leo’s wide-eyed terror is perfectly
understandable.
Alas, whatever chemistry Broderick’s Leo had with Nathan Lane’s Max
on stage, the camera destroyed it. Their joint close-ups are a
disaster, silently eating away at the visual reality of the Max/Leo
relationship, and thereby undermining the whole film.
Luckily Broderick is a talented song-and-dance man with a warm comic
persona, so once he and Lane leave Max’s office and begin
interacting with the other characters, Broderick is fine. He holds
his own with Uma Thurman as Ulla, Jon Lovitz as Mr. Marks, and Will
Ferrell as Fritz, and he’s at his best when surrounded by his
beautiful girls in pearls.
Nathan Lane, on the other hand, is a joy in every scene, including
the ones rescued for the DVD. Adapting their film from stage to
screen, Brooks and his co-writer Tom Meehan
decided to
follow the lead of Chicago, eliminating some of Max’s scenes and
embellishing some of Leo’s. (The film version of Chicago turned
Velma from Roxie’s co-star into a supporting player in her fantasy
life.) Brooks assumed his theatre audiences would enjoy Broadway
references – like the African-American accountant singing “Oh, I
debits in the morning and I credits in the evening, until these
ledgers be done” in homage to Paul Robson’s timeless rendition of
“Old Man River” from Show Boat – but uninitiated movie audiences
could probably care less. The big number Lane loses comes right at
the beginning of the stage version. “I Used to be the King” not only
introduces Max’s back story, it also exorcises the ghost of Zero
Mostel, playing havoc by inverting Tevye’s lyrics in “If I Were a
Rich Man.” It’s now the first and the best of the DVD’s deleted
scenes.
The DVD also contains a featurette unpacking “I Want to be a
Producer,” Leo’s biggest number. Like Chicago, The Producers
benefits greatly from the collaborative efforts of expert lighting
designers
Peggy
Eisenhauer and Jules Fisher.
Do your own compare & contrast: both versions
of The Producers are now available to all on DVD.
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Susan Stroman,
one of only three women in Broadway history to win a Tony for
Directing, has already received 5 Tony Awards, 2 Olivier Awards, 5
Drama Desk Awards, 8 Outer Critics Circle Awards, a record 4
Astaire Awards and the Lucille Lortel Award, but members of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) refused to be
impressed with her cinematic debut.
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Director Susan Stroman
Photo Credit: Andrew Schwartz.
Copyright: © 2005 Universal Studios.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Leo Bloom’s fantasy world: “beautiful girls wearing nothing but
pearls.”
Photo Credit: Andrew Schwartz. Copyright: © 2005 Universal
Studios.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Shock & Awe: The grand finale to “Springtime for Hitler.”
Photo Credit: Andrew Schwartz.
Copyright: © 2005 Universal Studios.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
In the end, though, it’s all about Hitler,
perfectly played here by Gary Beach
(recreating the role which brought him Tony and Drama Desk awards
in 2001). Mel Brooks clearly believes that Hitler was history’s
greatest buffoon. He promised his people a “thousand year Reich,”
but delivered barely a decade. However horrible his legacy (for
Jews, for Russians, for Poles, etc, etc), he did his greatest
damage to Germany. The people who believed in him, the people who
voted for him, paid a very dear price for his brand of
infotainment. Who is the real monster here? Is it the leader or
the audience members egging him on? That’s the bitter after-taste
to this superior confection. |
.........................................................................................................................
Jan Lisa Huttner is the managing editor of
Films for Two: The Online Guide for
Busy Couples. In addition to freelance work for a variety of print
and online publications, Jan writes regular columns for the
JUF News, Chicago's
Jewish community monthly, and
Chicago Woman, a
bi-monthly published by The Woman's Newspapers. She is an active
member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Illinois
Woman's Press Association.
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