We loved it; we thought it was an inspired turn-about-is-fair-play concept. But when we screened it, it didn’t get a single laugh. An absurdly funny almost genius idea, but no laughs. So out it went! Because the final judgment was always left up to the audience, no matter how I felt about it. If it was supposed to be funny and it didn’t get laughs, it went the way of all the misfires that preceded it, onto the cutting-room floor.
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Since there was no dialogue in Silent Movie, music was even more important than in any of my other films. The music became the rhythm of the picture. There was no verbal rhythm to play against or into. John Morris once again rose to the occasion. In our now fifth collaboration, John composed more original music than for any other Mel Brooks movie. It was all big orchestra in big combinations. We were trying to resurrect an old genre without falling back into old clichés. John was very careful not to use a single note of the inevitable silent movie piano in any of the score. His exuberant, upbeat score complemented the na?ve good cheer and good hearts of the three protagonists: Mel, Marty, and Dom, three unstoppable innocents in pursuit of a vision of making a silent movie and the box office stars with which to populate it. From the upbeat “Silent Movie March” to the narcissistic, lush Hollywood theme “At Burt Reynolds’s House,” John Morris was never better.
Silent Movie was released on June 17, 1976, and did surprisingly well at the box office. Roger Ebert, the well-known film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote:
There’s a moment very early in “Silent Movie” （before the opening credits, in fact） when Mel Brooks, Marty Feldman, and Dom DeLuise are tooling through Los Angeles in a tiny sports car. They pass a pregnant lady at a bus stop. “That’s a very pregnant lady!” Brooks says （on a title card, of course, since this is a silent movie）。 “Let’s give her a lift!” The lady gets into the back of the car, which tilts back onto its rear wheels. Mel drives off with the front wheels in the air.
This is far from being the funniest scene in a very funny movie, but it helps to illustrate my point, which is that Mel Brooks will do anything for a laugh. Anything. He has no shame. He’s an anarchist; his movies inhabit a universe in which everything is possible and the outrageous is probable, and Silent Movie, where Brooks has taken a considerable stylistic risk and pulled it off triumphantly, made me laugh a lot.
Privately I was very worried about the effrontery to do a silent movie in 1976, but that review calmed all my fears.
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In December 1976, the Exhibitors of America had placed me fifth on their annual list of the twenty-five stars that exert the greatest box-office appeal. I was very proud of that, especially since this was my first starring role and one where I didn’t even speak!
Burt Reynolds was rated sixth that year. He had to put up with picking up the phone at his home and hearing me announce, “Hello, Six. This is Five speaking.’’
So in the end, this crazy idea of doing a silent movie was a success and I could look our studio head Laddie in the eye and not be the object of an “I told you so.”
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Many years later in 2011, the silent movie The Artist won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Picture. When I met Michel Hazanavicius, the brilliant French director who made the film, I praised his movie, and then I teased him with, “It’s in black and white and it’s silent; who knows, I might have unconsciously shown you the way with Young Frankenstein in black and white and then with my own Silent Movie.”
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With your permission, let me digress. I had that conversation with Michel Hazanavicius at one of my regular Friday lunches, which started around 1999. Young Frankenstein producer Michael Gruskoff and I had lunch on the outdoor patio of a now closed famous restaurant in Beverly Hills called Orso, where a lot of celebrities gathered to dine. We were reminiscing about our wonderful years on the third floor in the executive building at Twentieth Century Fox. Mike had a beautiful dog back then that used to come to work with him, an Irish setter called Lightning. Also on the third floor with us was a talented producer named Marvin Worth, who made some terrific films like Lenny （1974）， Malcolm X （1992）， and Carl Reiner’s unforgettable Where’s Poppa? （1970）。 Marvin was a sharp dresser and always sported a lot of gold chains. I used to joke that when I heard a lot of jangling chains in the hallway, I never knew whether it was Gruskoff’s dog Lightning or Marvin Worth. They both jingled and jangled all the way up the stairs!