When I was a little kid, my older brothers would take me to see Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd in those zany slapstick silent movies. They would have to drag me home. I loved them so much I wouldn’t leave the theater.
To this day I remember clearly how much I laughed when Charlie Chaplin was eating his shoe in The Gold Rush or brilliantly dancing behind the referee in a boxing match or getting caught up in the huge wheels of machinery in Modern Times. Chaplin was truly an amazing all-around cinematic artist. Like Andreas Voutsinas used to say: “Or you got it or you ain’t.”
Well, in the case of Charlie Chaplin, he certainly got it.
And then there was the angelic face of Buster Keaton, who in Steamboat Bill, Jr. （1928） had an entire house fall on him but somehow was standing in the doorway unhurt. And Harold Lloyd famously dangling in midair from one of the hands on a clock face in Safety Last! （1923）。
I knew it would be a great challenge, but that was also part of its appeal. I loved a good challenge. My first hurdle was selling the idea of making a modern-day silent movie in the year 1975 to Laddie, who was then running Twentieth Century Fox.
“Really? A silent movie?” he said incredulously.
I said, “Yes. Nobody talks. The only dialogue is on title cards, which can be very funny. It’s a salute, like what we did with James Whale. This will be a tribute to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, Mack Sennett, and the Keystone Kops. All the great stars of silent movies. But it will be funny. Just like Young Frankenstein was funny. I won’t do anything that’s just a salute. It will always be funny.”
Laddie said, “So with Young Frankenstein you take away color and now you’re coming to me and you say you want to make a movie that takes away sound? What else are you gonna take away? If I let you go unrestrained, you’re liable to turn Twentieth Century Fox into a vaudeville house!”
I said, “I promise this is the end of my bizarre fight against real films. It will just be Silent Movie. It will be the end. After that, I promise I will make regular movies like everybody else.”
And so, Laddie agreed.
“Okay, I’m going to finance a script and if I like the script, we’ll make the movie.”
“Deal!” I said.
Now I had promised Laddie a script. And it had to be a really good script or there would be no money to make the film. Ron Clark came through again and introduced me to two writers from The Carol Burnett Show that he thought would be perfect for our Silent Movie writing team. They were Rudy De Luca and Barry Levinson.
Rudy was downright funny. Everything he did was funny. Even when he was being serious, he didn’t realize he was still being funny. He became a writing fixture in my organization from that point until today, along with performing comedy acting roles in several of my later movies, and he is still a good friend.
Barry was another gift. He had a great movie mind. He had a talent for both character and story and later became an amazingly successful writer/director in his own right. He would tell me wonderfully funny stories about growing up with his friends in Baltimore. I took him to see I Vitelloni （1953）， Fellini’s first film, which is about a group of friends who grow up together in Italy. He wrote the script to Diner, his first film, in no time at all and I’m sure I Vitelloni helped inspire some of it.
Ron, Rudy, Barry, and I all sat down together to decide what our silent movie was going to be about. I told them that somehow, we should get an engine that pulled our picture along. Something underneath the fun and frolic that drove our movie forward. We came up with a great engine: Money versus Art.
Big commercial companies that had nothing to do with the art of entertainment but were loaded with money were gobbling up old traditional movie studios just for their financial value. I pointed out that Coca-Cola was buying Columbia Pictures, Transamerica now owned United Artists, and Gulf + Western had “engulfed and devoured” Paramount. The bottom line was they had no regard for what kind of movies they were making as long as they brought in money. That would be our premise. Our film would be about an old-fashioned silent movie studio that was in danger of going bankrupt and being taken over by “Engulf and Devour,” a huge monolithic commercial company and a sly （or not so sly） reference to Gulf + Western.
Our heroes’ mission would be to make a movie that would save their studio, Big Pictures. Their motto was “If it’s a big picture, it was made here.”
So who would be in it? Fortunately for Gene Wilder but unfortunately for me, Gene decided to do what he had learned from me—writing and directing his own movies. He was busy writing and making his directorial debut in a movie called The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother （1975）。 So I couldn’t use Gene to be my leading man. Who could I get?