Mel Brooks...Ta Da!
Mel Brooks Riffs on ‘Young Frankenstein,’ Laddie and the Biz
Steven Gaydos
Vice President, Executive Editor variety.com
SEPTEMBER 9, 2014 | 10:00AM PT
SEPTEMBER 9, 2014 | 10:00AM PT
The four guys sitting around the lunch table in Beverly Hills have been business associates and friends for decades.
Many decades.
This includes the decade known as the ’70s, when lunchee Mel Brooks directed and co-wrote “Young Frankenstein” (1974) for fellow lunchees, former Fox studio chief Alan Ladd Jr. and the film’s producer, Michael Gruskoff, as well as longtime Ladd associate Jay Kanter, who once repped the likes of Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe.
But this is clearly Brooks’ show, a point he reinforces when Gruskoff tries to tell their guest about the day the two of them and star Gene Wilder pitched the “Young Frankenstein” project to the top brass at Columbia Pictures.
Gruskoff may have gotten through the first word of the first sentence but he quickly and wisely lets Brooks finish: “LET ME TELL THE STORY I CAN TELL IT BETTER THAN YOU.”
“So everything was great, they loved the pitch, the budget was no problem,” recalls Brooks, “and I think we were almost out to Gower Street when I whispered, ‘Oh one more thing: it’s going to be in black and white.’ Suddenly there was a thundering herd of Jews descending on us; ‘What are you talking about??!!’”
But Brooks quickly gets to the real point of his story: “Then we took it to Laddie (Ladd Jr.) who had only been at Fox a few months and when we told him it had to be in black and white he said, ‘Of course it does.’ There’s the difference.”
Today Brooks is a genuine Comedy God with seven legendary decades of hits under his belt in virtually all genres, including records (with fellow God Carl Reiner), television, films and Broadway. But in 1973 when he and Gruskoff were trying to set up “Young Frankenstein,” which started as a Wilder treatment, Gruskoff was coming off the Dennis Hopper drug-addled epic fail “The Last Movie” and Brooks had just swan-dived at the box office with “The Twelve Chairs.”
“‘The Producers’ made a penny and ‘Twelve Chairs’ less than a penny,” recalls Brooks. “We had no script but we had Gene, Peter Boyle and Marty Feldman and none of them meant anything.”
Now, 40 years later, with Fox Home Entertainment rolling out a commemorative Blu-ray, Brooks’ Hands and Feet Ceremony Sept. 8 at the Chinese Theatre and a tribute screening Sept. 9 at the Goldwyn, Brooks acknowledges the current studio scene would be a tough place to replicate the Ladd-led Fox lot of 1974.
“Laddie had faith in the people who were making the films,” recalls Brooks. “He trusted (Robert) Altman to deliver the movie he said he was going to deliver. You didn’t get a lot of notes from Laddie. He wasn’t a fool, but it was more about the filmmakers than the films. Columbia had told us we needed to cut the budget from $2 million to $1.8. Laddie said it should be $2.2 (million).”
The Ladd bet paid off handsomely for Fox, winding up in the Christmas season as one of the year’s five top-grossing films.
But Ladd’s sigh of relief probably came much earlier in the year when “Blazing Saddles,” the film that Brooks made for Warner Bros. after “Twelve Years,” but unreleased when “Young” was greenlit, hit theaters in February. It ended up being 1974’s biggest hit, and provided the one-two punch that sent Wilder’s career into the comedy stratosphere.
And what was it like for Gruskoff to follow the Peruvian oddball odyssey of “Last Movie” and partner with Brooks to bring “Young Frankenstein” to mega-hit life? Words fail the garrulous Gruskoff so he turns to song, warbling to Brooks across the table: “Night and Day, you are the one …” Mel Brooks does not claim to be able sing Cole Porter better than Gruskoff, so we move on.
One Earth at Night, Under One Sky
Spain and Portugal glow at night. The city of Madrid is the bright spot just above the center of the picture.
Credit: NASA
NASA Wants You to Help Sort Astronaut Photos of Earth at Night
Kelly Dickerson space.com | September 05, 2014
Scientists want your help to sort through gorgeous images of Earth at night snapped by orbiting astronauts.
Studying such photographs could show how light pollution is affecting human health and reveal ways to save energy and improve public safety, researchers said. But the pictures need to be catalogued first, and that's where you come in.
"Anyone can help," Alejandro Sanchez, a graduate student at Complutense University in Spain who is working on the project, said in a statement. "In fact, without the help of citizens, it is almost impossible to use these images scientifically. Algorithms cannot distinguish between stars, cities and other objects, such as the moon. Humans are much more efficient for complex image analysis."
The photos are in a database called The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. The images range from those taken in the early 1960s during NASA's Mercury program all the way to present-day pictures taken from the International Space Station.
New photos are added every day. As of August, there were about 1.8 million images in the database, and about 30 percent of those were taken at night, researchers said.
The citizen-science project, which is led by a group of researchers at Complutense University, is called "Cities at Night." You can learn more about the project by visiting http://www.citiesatnight.org
"Cities at Night" consists of three separate parts. The simplest one, called "Dark Skies," requires people to sort images into three categories: cities, stars or other objects.
The second part, called "Night Cities," asks the public to match places in the images with points on maps. Establishing the location of the photographs will help scientists create light maps of cities and could provide some insight into energy usage.
"Lost at Night" is the third and most complicated part of the project, asking citizens to identify cities in photos with a 310-mile (500 kilometers) circumference.
"We don’t know which direction the astronaut pointed the camera, only where the station was at the time the image was taken," Sanchez said. "Some images are bright cities but others are small towns. It is like a puzzle with 300,000 pieces."
Volunteers have classified almost 20,000 images so far, but scientists require multiple volunteers to classify the same image to ensure accuracy. The open catalog of data is free and available for anyone to use.
The project team hopes that scientists can examine the colors of light in each photo and determine the type of energy a city is using and evaluate its energy efficiency. The images could also reveal areas where lighting around roads is lacking and thus help improve public safety. The data can also pinpoint areas where light pollution could be influencing human health and biodiversity, researchers said.
The high resolution of some of the images comes from the European Space Agency's "NightPod," which was installed on the space station in 2012. NightPod is a motorized tripod that adjusts to match the space station's 17,500 mph (28,160 km/h) orbital speed. Before NightPod, the motion of the station and the motion of Earth below blurred images even if astronauts used high-speed film.