Boy, was I wrong.
Two days later he called to tell me he got the part. He had already signed a contract with me, so I could have bollixed up everything by legally stopping him, but I let him go and wished him luck. I added one small caveat: “You’re going to be playing opposite my wife—don’t fool around.”
* * *
—
Now, what to do, what to do? I needed a new Franz Liebkind. So for the next week I auditioned about a dozen actors for the role. Some of them near misses, but nobody perfect. And then, Kenny Mars came through the door wearing a pigeon-splattered German helmet.
Sometimes in show business, something bad happens but then you take a good bounce. Let me explain…I lost Dustin Hoffman, who probably would have been a wonderful Franz Liebkind. But because of it I took that good bounce and got Kenny Mars, who would turn out to be a truly memorable Franz Liebkind.
I’ll never forget the laugh he got when he was ranting about what a bad painter Winston Churchill was: “Churchill! With his cigars. With his brandy. And his rotten painting, rotten! Hitler, there was a painter. He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon! Two coats!”
Nobody could have delivered those lines as sensationally as Kenny Mars.
* * *
—
I was then blessed with a remarkably funny duo—Christopher Hewett as the hilarious Roger De Bris, the world’s worst director, and playing his “roommate,” the over-the-top Carmen Ghia, was Andreas Voutsinas. In my back pocket I already had the wildly funny Dick Shawn in mind to play LSD—Lorenzo St. DuBois, our hippie Hitler. His Eva Braun turned out to be Renee Taylor, who came to the part with an original idea: Eva Braun would come from the Bronx. And Lee Meredith was the icing on the cake as Bialystock and Bloom’s beautiful and sexy secretary, Ulla.
Bloom says, “A secretary who can’t type?”
And Max lecherously replies, “Not important.”
* * *
—
On the first day of shooting, everybody was nervous—a crazy story and a director who had never directed a movie before at the helm.
After the assistant director said, “Quiet on the set!”
I began directing by shouting “Cut!” Everybody broke up. I said, “Oh! That’s right. First I say ‘action,’ and then I say ‘cut.’？” But it worked. Everybody on the set relaxed. Even I relaxed. And then we began shooting.
My heart took wing when I saw how beautifully Zero and Gene seamlessly melded into Bialystock and Bloom. I was thrilled when they were doing this scene, where Bialystock shows Bloom the unbelievable script:
BIALYSTOCK
Smell it. See it. Touch it.
BLOOM
What is it?
BIALYSTOCK
What is it. We’ve struck gold.
Not fool’s gold, but real gold.
The mother lode. The mother lode.
The mother of them all. Kiss it.
BLOOM
[brightening]
You found a flop!
BIALYSTOCK
A flop, that’s putting it mildly.
We found a disaster! A catastrophe! An outrage!
A guaranteed-to-close-in-one-night beauty!
BLOOM
Let’s see it.
BIALYSTOCK
This is freedom from want forever. This is a house
in the country. This is a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley.
This is wine, women, and song and women.
BLOOM
SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER,
A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgaden.
Fantastic!
BIALYSTOCK
It’s practically a love letter to Hitler!
BLOOM
[ecstatic]
This won’t run a week!
BIALYSTOCK
Run a week? Are you kidding?
This play has got to close on page four.
* * *
—
We started filming on May 22, 1967. Most of filming went well, but in the making of every movie there are always a couple of unforeseen rough spots.
Like when we were at the Playhouse Theatre on Forty-eighth Street to film our big production number, “Springtime for Hitler.” We were blessed with the talents of our choreographer, Alan Johnson. One of the big numbers in every burlesque show is a parade of girls coming down the steps to the rhythm of a tenor singing “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” Alan did the same thing, only he dressed the girls in German clichés: German helmets, bratwurst, pretzels, and beer. As “Springtime for Hitler” reached its musical climax, I had an overhead camera shoot the chorus forming a huge swastika slowly rotating in the magical tempo of Ravel’s “Boléro.”
That was the first unforeseen rough spot I had to get over. It seemed that Joseph E. Levine, who’d been invited to watch the filming of the number, furiously objected to the big swastika climax. He said it had to go or he’d stop the production.