“About a million dollars,” Sidney replied. “But don’t worry, I can raise half of it. If you can come up with half a million, we can make the movie for a million bucks, with a forty-day shooting schedule.”
He agreed to do it. His first question was, “Who’s going to direct?”
My quick response was, “I’ll direct.”
He logically responded, “Have you directed before?”
I told him that I directed in the Catskills and I also directed the floor comedy on Your Show of Shows, basically a segment producer. I had also directed a play in Red Bank, New Jersey.
But I hadn’t yet directed a film.
“So what makes you think you can direct a film?” he asked.
“Because I’m the writer. I created it,” I confidently responded. “All those little scenes that I wrote, they’re in my head already. I can see them. It’ll save us a fortune! I don’t have to search for the setups and the lighting because I know what it should look like in advance. If you get another director, he won’t have those scenes in his head already; he’ll have to make them up.”
He said, “Nobody’s ever said that; that’s pretty smart. All right. If you don’t ask for too much, you can be the director.”
And then he said, “As you know, my background is in exhibition. I own theaters in Boston, New York, and Chicago. I know a lot of exhibitors. After reading your script I tried your title, Springtime for Hitler on all of them. I got a resounding no. They said they would never put ‘HITLER’ on their marquees. So you’ve gotta come up with another title.”
I instantly said, “Okay!”
If that was his only objection, I wasn’t going to stand in the way of writing and directing my first film because of a title. I immediately came up with, “How about The Producers? Bialystock and Bloom are anything but producers. It’s ironic.”
He said, “Great! I love it. Just one more thing…go out and direct something. A commercial, anything. Just so you have a little more directing experience under your belt.”
“Fine,” I said. “Done!”
We shook hands all around; it was a great day.
To make Joe feel more comfortable I reached out to a friend named Steve Frankfurt, who was a genius who worked at Young & Rubicam, the advertising agency.
I asked him, “What have you got that I can direct?”
And he got me two commercials for Frito-Lay. I went to New Jersey and directed these crazy commercials. I learned a little about how to deal with a camera, a set, and a crew. I got exactly what I should have gotten out of it: fourteen hundred dollars for the commercials, a huge free box of Frito-Lay chips, and the beginning of a career as a film director.
I never thought about being a director. I thought I’d be very happy as a writer and comedian. On Your Show of Shows I had watched some very good directors work. But sometimes they chose a close-up or something that to me was very bizarre. I would say, Go to the recipient of the joke! Don’t zoom in on the guy telling the joke—which seemed natural to them, but was all wrong to me. Many writers become directors initially to protect their own work and then they fall in love with directing as an art form. While the writer is the proprietor of the vision, the director becomes the author of the film, because the director crafts the style, feelings, and casting. But the director will never get the writer’s initial look and progressions. So I decided to become a writer/director to protect my vision.
* * *
—
I always considered myself, first and foremost, a writer. As much as I respect directing, I will always respect writing more. Anne and I once had a fight. She was preparing for a movie and said, “This scene! I can’t. I can’t get a handle on this character. I’m going crazy. It’s impossible! I can’t. It’s hard!”
I took a blank piece of paper and I said, “You know what’s even harder? Writing. Look!” I tapped the blank page. “That’s writing. The blank piece of paper. You have to fill it! Fill it with thoughts, with characters, with ideas. Fill it with continuity, with a beginning, a middle, and an end! And you have to make it memorable!”
Even before I wrote the screenplay, I wrote a description of my leading characters:
Max Bialystock: A Seedy Producer in His Middle Fifties.
Max Bialystock is a living crescendo of flesh and noise. Bialystock is not an ordinary man. He is a FORCE—a massive cyclone of furious energy, bellowing, threatening, weeping, cajoling, and generally bullying his way through life.