The recent passing of actor Gene Wilder reminded me that it was time to revisit my “10” movies list, seeing as how he appears in several of them.
I decided to stage a mini-Gene-Wilder-Film-Festival, in the comfort of my own home.
Or rather, I tried to.
But apparently, half the world had the same thought, days before me — resulting in strategic gaps on the library shelves and in Amazon being completely “out” of “Blazing Saddles”! Actually sold out!
This is how I ended up watching whatever DVDs were already in our possession… which in turn is how I came to be captivated by “Young Frankenstein,” a film I had seen before, but not put on my original list.
“Young Frankenstein” was apparently Wilder’s idea.
He wrote the story and screenplay with Mel Brooks, who directed the film.
As I watched, I realized that scene after scene contained classic “bits” that had already taken up residence in my mind.
Who could hear the words, “Walk this way” ever again, without seeing Marty Feldman’s hunchbacked character, the servant Igor, shuffling down the platform at Transylvania Station?
For that matter, who could hear one of my relatives insisting that “It’s Ep-STINE, not Ep-steen,” without remembering the priceless scene of Wilder’s character insisting “It’s Fron-ken-shteen!”
A few lines later, Feldman’s character gets his own back: “It’s pronounced Eye-gor,” he insists to his new boss.
In interviews, Wilder explained his high-tech method.
One day, “I took a yellow legal pad and a blue felt pen, went upstairs for half an hour, and at the top wrote ‘Young Frankenstein.’ ”
In 2005, NPR’s Terry Gross asked him, “What gave you the idea? Did you love the Frankenstein movie?”
Wilder replied, “At the time I didn’t know why. But I know now that when I was a little boy, I was scared to death of the “Frankenstein” film — films, actually, because there were four of them in particular that influenced me. And in all these years later, I wanted it to come out with a happy ending.”
Considering how powerful the Frankenstein story has proven, it is all the more amazing that it was not handed down from the mists of time, but was invented whole as the Gothic novel “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus,” by British writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in 1818.
The undoubted high point of Wilder’s version comes in the scene where Wilder and his “monster,” played by Peter Boyle, do “Puttin’ On The Ritz” in top hats and tails.
It brought me, helpless, to my knees. But it almost didn’t happen!
As Wilder told Terry Gross, “I was writing every day, and then Mel would come to the house and read what I’d written.… And we’d talk a little bit and then he’d go away, and I would write all the next day.… And then one day, when he read the pages I had written about Dr. Frankenstein and the creature sing and dance to “Puttin’ On The Ritz,” he said, “Are you crazy? This is frivolous. You’re just being frivolous.”
Listening to this, I was amazed.
Mel Brooks, creator of countless zany and unbelievable moments in television and film — the inventor of a singing and dancing Hitler! — thought something should be out because it was “frivolous”?
But Wilder fought for his idea: “After 20 minutes or so of arguing, I …started screaming and then all of a sudden, he said, OK, it’s in. And I said, well, why did you put me through this? And he said, I wasn’t sure if it was right. I thought if you didn’t argue for it, then it was wrong. And if you did, it was right. So you convinced me.”
This interview moment touched a chord, for me.
Back when I was writing 30- and 60-second promos for A World of Ideas with Bill Moyers, I tried to draft the most serious and high-minded material I could.
And yet, more than once, Bill would pass over my serious offerings for something odd or wacky that I had left in the margins.
If it can happen to Gene Wilder, it can happen to anybody.
And it’s a valuable reminder not to let anyone — not Mel Brooks, not even your own cautious self — censor your creations.
It can be precisely the bit you doubt the most, that others will relate to the best.
