He said, “I have this idea for a movie about Baron Frankenstein’s grandson. He’s an uptight scientist who doesn’t believe any of that nonsense about bringing the dead back to life. Even though he is clinically a scientist, he is as crazy as any Frankenstein. It’s in his heart. It’s in his blood. It’s in the marrow of his bones…only he doesn’t know it yet.”
“Sounds interesting,” I said. “What is your dream for this movie?”
He said, “My dream is for you to write it with me and direct the movie.”
I said, “You got any money on you?”
“I have fifty-seven dollars,” Gene said.
（This is true.）
“It’s a beginning,” I said. “I’ll take it. I’ll take it as a down payment on writing Young Frankenstein with you. And if I like what we’ve done, I’ll direct it.”
That was the beginning.
* * *
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That night, I went over to Gene’s bungalow, at the Hotel Bel-Air, to discuss the concept. We stayed up until the early hours of the morning talking about the story line over Earl Grey tea and English digestive biscuits. We talked about being very faithful to the tempo and the look of James Whale’s marvelous black-and-white films, Frankenstein from 1931 and Bride of Frankenstein from 1935.
James Whale’s talent was in how he told the Frankenstein story visually. Gene and I watched Whale’s movies together multiple times. We saw how he took his time. Whale wanted everything to be deep, dark, and somber. He had worked in the theater before he started in film, which is where he met Colin Clive, the actor who plays the insane Dr. Frankenstein. When Whale’s Frankenstein came out, it was a smash hit, and catapulted Boris Karloff, who played the monster, to stardom. Whale got pigeonholed as a horror director and would go on to direct The Old Dark House （1932）， The Invisible Man （1933）， and The Bride of Frankenstein, which we later referenced liberally. Whale knew exactly how to scare the hell out of you, but he was also a great artist who was not appreciated for those talents as much as he should have been. We decided to base the look and spirit of Young Frankenstein on the James Whale classics.
* * *
—
Gene and I quickly got into a rhythm of working together. Each night after I finished in the editing room on Blazing Saddles and had dinner, I’d go to Gene’s hotel. At the beginning we concentrated on satirizing and saluting the James Whale films, but later we expanded it into our own story line. We knew exactly where we were going. Gene wrote everything in pencil on his yellow legal pads, which my secretary typed up the next day.
Gene said I taught him the most important lesson he ever learned about screenwriting: “The first draft is just concepts. Then you take a sledgehammer and knock the pillars of the story line as hard as you can. If they hold up, you keep it in. If they start to crumble, you have to rewrite, because the structure is everything.”
Gene and I never stopped writing Young Frankenstein. We wrote and rewrote, then wrote and rewrote, then wrote and rewrote once again. We always went back to a scene until we were more or less satisfied.
* * *
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In addition to James Whale’s films, we also relied on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818, for inspiration. Gene and I had both read Mary Shelley’s book when we sat down to write this script. Only nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein; she was on a summer holiday in Switzerland with her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friend and fellow poet Lord Byron. They were part of a famous group of writers who gave birth to a literary period known as the Romantic Age. Legend has it that they had a contest to see who could write the scariest ghost story. We never found out what Shelley or Byron wrote, but the teenaged Mary’s tale lives on to this day. She ended up penning what would become one of the first true works of science fiction and the ultimate story about men playing god.
The concept that has made Frankenstein’s monster such an enduring character in film and literature is that at its core he is a deformed creature who has love in his heart, wants to be loved, but is misunderstood. Even though we were doing a crazy comedy, those important qualities were still there. That was no doubt key to the success and longevity of the film.
* * *
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You never know where and how a stroke of luck is going to cross your path. For instance, we thought about casting even before the script was halfway finished. Right from the beginning we knew that Gene had to be “Dr. Fronkensteen.” But who would play the monster, and who would end up playing the weird, funny, humpbacked Igor?