Gene buried his face in his hands and said, “Mel, I don’t want to go home. I want to stay here. This is the happiest time of my life.”
It really was. I loved everybody who worked on that film, both cast and crew. When we finished shooting, we were all emotional. It was hard to let it go. I knew what Gene was feeling because the movie we had just finished was not only funny; it was also sweet and sad. I think it’s easier to make people cry than laugh. Laughter is the true test of your talent. Of course, there are cheap jokes and then there are the more exquisite jokes. A story-point laugh is worth its weight in gold. People can laugh wildly at a movie and then come out and say it wasn’t any good, it was cheap laughter.
In The Twelve Chairs I served audiences Russian soul food and got big laughs. In Blazing Saddles I made a conscious effort to attack racial prejudice while still garnering monumental belly laughs. If the story line doesn’t work, the laughs won’t work. But I was still mostly going for humor. Young Frankenstein was my first attempt at fifty-fifty, laughs and story. It’s a love story, and like The Producers, it’s an emotional give-and-take. After watching Young Frankenstein I wanted you to feel emotionally satisfied and have deep affection for the characters and, like us, maybe not want to leave the theater at all.
But I was lucky, because for me the job wasn’t over.
I had met John Howard when he was my editor on Blazing Saddles. It was a great collaboration and I immediately hired him to work with me on Young Frankenstein as well. John Howard was so confident, and he had the right to be. Prior to making Blazing Saddles, he edited Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid （1969）。 I used him on every movie I could. Normally an editor provides the director with his own “rough cut” of the movie and then the director works with him on a “final cut.” John knew not to cut a single frame of the movie without me being there. I wanted both of us to vote on every scene right from the beginning.
（And on the rare occasion that he didn’t vote with me, I went with my vote because I’m the director.）
By the time I was in the editing room on Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles had come out and become a huge success. As a result, Laddie and the studio completely trusted me and left me to edit without the interference that most directors get from heads of studios during post-production.
The first cut we put together for a test screening was two hours and twenty-two minutes long. That was pretty long for one of my films. The Producers was only eighty-eight minutes. While Young Frankenstein ran long, I didn’t want to leave out anything that might possibly catch fire with an audience. I screened it at the Little Theater on the Twentieth Century Fox lot for people who worked on the lot. The theater was packed, and we didn’t get all the laughs we were aiming for. It went well, but not well enough for me. It was just too long.
When the picture was over, I got up in front of the audience and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you have just seen a two-hour-and-twenty-two-minute failure. In less than three weeks from today, I want you back here to see a ninety-five-minute smash hit movie. I want every one of you back!”
Editing was both easy and difficult. Easy because when something was supposed to get a laugh and it didn’t, I simply cut it. Difficult because I was in love with too many moments and had to cut them for the good of the overall film. Sometimes, you have to kill your darlings.
I worked diligently almost day and night, editing like crazy. In keeping with James Whale, I went back to old-fashioned 1930s editing techniques—the iris outs, the spins, and the wipes. Not only did they lend the film a feeling of authenticity to Whale’s era, they also helped me move seamlessly between comedy and art. Sometimes I didn’t take a scene out, I just shaved it down to where it was valuable. And sometimes scenes weren’t cut, they were just rearranged. There is a lot you can change without reshooting. Hundreds of little pieces of film can be arranged in hundreds of different ways.
Of course, it was more than three weeks later when I reassembled most of that same audience at the Little Theater. It was actually closer to three months later. But I had a cut that was pretty damn good and wanted to show it. It went like gangbusters! Every single scene in the picture worked. The audience not only laughed their heads off, but there was a palpable feeling of sweet sadness when the film ended.
My composer, John Morris, and I were re-teamed for our now fourth film together. I told John to give me a theme that would define the emotion of the film. He came up with a melody that was absolutely beyond my wildest dreams. It’s the “Transylvanian Lullaby,” and it captured the soul of the monster. John Morris conducted the orchestra recording the score, and when they played the music under the opening title, his “Transylvanian Lullaby,” the first violinist Jerry Vinci played an incredibly beautiful obbligato （a counter melody） against the theme. I have to admit, it brought tears to my eyes.