Bialystock is extravagantly alive. He is dramatically sensitive to all that surrounds him. A perfect seedless grape starts him pirouetting through the air in a wild ballet of joy. A beautiful spring day sends him to the ground in a dead faint. The smell of fresh rye bread makes him bang his head against the wall in a fit of ecstasy.
There is nothing small about Max Bialystock. He talks big, he eats big, he drinks big, and he lives big. Not only doth his cup runneth over but it spilleth all over the floor.
Leo Bloom: A Timid Accountant in His Early Forties.
Leo Bloom is a well-mannered, curly-haired, blue-eyed, forty-two-year-old walking anxiety attack. Leo Bloom and Pinocchio would probably have been very good friends. Both of them desperately want to become real live boys.
Franz Liebkind: A Bad Playwright in His Late Forties Who Speaks with a Thick German Accent.
Franz Liebkind is crazy. He always wears a German helmet. When Germany lost the war Liebkind immigrated to South America hoping to find Hitler. （He had it from very good sources that the Führer was working as a headwaiter in Buenos Aires.） After a fruitless search and several embarrassing incidents （twice he was arrested for following headwaiters home）， he moved to New York where our heroes find him.
I stole the name Leo Bloom from Ulysses. I don’t know what it meant to James Joyce, but to me Leo Bloom always meant a vulnerable Jew with curly hair. In the course of any narrative, the major characters have to metamorphose. They have to go through an experience that forces them to learn something and change. So Leo was going to change; he was going from a little nobody to a big somebody. He was actually going to bloom. Hence, Leo’s last name: Bloom.
He would start out as a little man who salutes whatever society teaches him to salute. But in Leo Bloom’s heart, there was a much more complicated and protean creature. The guy he’d never dare to be, because he ain’t gonna take them chances. He was going to play it straight and trudge right to his grave…until he ran into Max Bialystock.
Here I am cradled in the arms of the great Zero Mostel on the set of The Producers.
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Bialystock is a Broadway producer who’s so broke he’s wearing a cardboard belt. He makes love to little old ladies on their way to the cemetery. They stop off to have quick affairs on the cracked leather couch in his office, which charms them so much that they write out checks for his current production, usually named CASH. Compared with Bloom, Bialystock is the id. Bite, kiss, take, grab, lavish, urinate—whatever you can do that’s physical, he will do.
When Bloom first meets him, he’s appalled. But then they get embroiled in each other’s lives and they catalyze each other. Bialystock has a profound effect on Bloom. So much so that this innocent young guy comes up with the idea of making a fortune by producing a surefire flop. On the other hand, Bloom evokes the first sparks of decency and humanity in Bialystock. It was a nice give-and-take.
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It seems that in a lot of my movies there is a recurring philosophical dilemma about money versus love. I often have the characters decide that love and friendship are better than riches. Max and Leo end up getting arrested and in court during their trial, Leo confesses how much Max means to him and how happy they are to have found each other. Leo was just a caterpillar who would never become a butterfly until Max became his catalyst. And Max was just a crook that didn’t care about people, art, or theater until Leo awakened in him a dormant feeling of brotherly love that connected him with the passion and glory of what he was actually doing: producing a Broadway show.
As far as casting was concerned, there was nobody else in the world to play Max Bialystock but Zero Mostel. Even as I was writing the screenplay, I always saw Zero as Max. Zero was a bit of a genius. He never hid anything; he let it all hang out. He was incredibly talented. Zero won Tony Awards for Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in 1961 and Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1963, and also originated the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, winning the Tony for that role in 1965. He had energy, brains, power, and he immediately understood who his character was at all times.
If I couldn’t get Zero Mostel to play Max Bialystock, I don’t think I would have done the film.
…Leo Bloom was a whole other story.
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I first met Gene Wilder in 1963 when he was in a production of the Bertolt Brecht play Mother Courage and Her Children, starring Anne. When I saw the play, this particular actor playing the chaplain caught my eye. He had something. There was a radiant innocence in his performance. Like Chaplin, he could be sad and funny almost at the same time. I asked Anne about him. She thought he was one of the best actors in the play.