Many years later, Dick and I recorded a wonderful conversation we had onstage that became a really funny HBO special called Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again （2011）。 I always looked forward to working with Dick Cavett, he is so bright and funny and a real pleasure to work with.
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Still needing money to date Anne Bancroft in style, I did any project big or small that came my way. The Critic, a short animated film, was the brainchild of Ernie Pintoff, who was a cartoonist extraordinaire. He was a brilliant talent at both stills and animation, including New Yorker magazine cartoons. He had an idea. He wanted to do a takeoff on Norman McLaren, who was a Canadian animator and cartoonist who did avant-garde creations. Ernie thought that my interpretation of it with an English accent could be a clever idea.
But I said, “Wait a minute, what if I’m an old Jew who wanders into a movie house, and in between a double feature accidentally sees Norman McLaren’s very avant-garde cartoon? And I try to make some sense of it?”
I said, “You do the animation and just let me ad-lib.”
So he did a kind of Norman McLaren, Picasso-ish, Braque-ish animated short. And I, as a little old Jewish man, recorded the voiceover, trying to make sense out of it.
It was downright hilarious. I said things like:
“This is cute, what the hell is it? I know what it is. It’s garbage, that’s what it is.”
“It must be some symbolism. It must be symbolic of…junk!”
“I didn’t come pay two dollars in a movie to see cockroaches.”
“I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I’d say this is a dirty picture.”
People had never seen anything like it.
The Critic debuted at the Sutton Theatre, a well-known art house on Third Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. The audience loved it. It was about three and a half minutes long and they laughed uproariously from start to finish.
And miraculously enough, it went on to win the Academy Award for Best Short Subject （Cartoon） that year.
Chapter 9
Get Smart
Anne and I were seeing each other every day and every night. I knew I wanted to marry her, but couldn’t think seriously about it because I was not earning enough money to support her. Not only in the style to which she was accustomed, but frankly, in any style.
And then in 1964—a stroke of luck!
I was called by one of the partners of a successful showbiz company called Talent Associates. His name was Danny Melnick. He ran the company with David Susskind, the well-known host of The David Susskind Show. I went to their offices on Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street in the Newsweek Building. They said, “We need a show and we want you to write it. Inspector Clouseau and James Bond are the biggest things in the world now. Got any ideas?”
They then asked if I would like to write it with anybody. They suggested a list of names. One of the names on the list was Buck Henry. I liked Buck Henry a lot, and admired his talent. He would later go on to write The Graduate and Heaven Can Wait.
He could also shoot pool, and Talent Associates had taken out their conference room table and replaced it with a pool table. What a perfect partner.
This was the year of the secret agent, both in film and television. Sean Connery was James Bond in the recent megahit Goldfinger, and Robert Vaughn and David McCallum were in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of piece about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about a CIA agent who was also an imbecile. I decided to be the first. I called it Get Smart, based on the leading character’s name, Maxwell Smart.
Buck was very intelligent and extremely witty. The more we worked on the pilot, the funnier and more insightful we got. Another stroke of luck was getting Alfa-Betty Olsen, a friend of mine at the time, to be our recording secretary. She nailed down every thought and every crazy joke and brushstroke of madness we threw out. Nothing escaped her.
（Later, when I was doing The Producers she became my right-hand gal and was invaluable in the forging of that script.）
It took Buck and me about three and a half months to write the pilot script. We could have done it in a couple of weeks, but we loved playing pool. We would also play against the various guests who would visit the offices. If we thought we could beat them we’d place bets and we’d make a little money on the side. Every once in a while, Peter Falk would stop by. He was a pool shark. He would always beat us and take our money. I think Peter Falk had one real eye and one glass eye, and having one eye was probably better for shooting pool than having two.