We called our picture High Anxiety, and I would be playing the new head psychiatrist of a place we called “the Institute for the Very Very Nervous.” My character was called Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke and in the movie when he’s asked what the H stands for he says, “Harpo, my mother was a big fan of the Marx Brothers. She loved Harpo.”
As the High Anxiety script took shape, we also thought a lot about casting. For the main villains of the piece, I hired two inspired comic talents, Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman. Harvey had done such a terrific job in Blazing Saddles; I was always looking for how I could use him again. The same goes for Cloris, who was the iconic Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein. As Dr. Charles Montague and Nurse Diesel, they were stuffing the institute with perfectly sane people that they were making crazy and turning it into an enormous cash cow for themselves.
In one scene with Harvey as Dr. Montague, Harvey’s line and his timing were so brilliant that I nearly broke up and ruined the take. It goes like this: I ask Harvey, “Can you tell me the rate of patient recovery here at the institute?”
Harvey replies, “Rate of patient recovery? I’ll have that for you in a moment.” He reaches into his pocket and whips out a small handheld calculator. He taps it once or twice and then says, “Once in a blue moon.”
I don’t know how I held it together.
When Cloris showed up to shoot her first scene as Nurse Diesel, she was wearing a nurse’s uniform with two large, pointed breasts like a Teutonic Valkyrie in Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” At first, I thought that was going overboard, but then I realized she was doing a take on Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest （1975）， which was really perfect. And then I noticed what I thought was a faint mustache under her nose.
When I said, “Cloris, do you realize that in a close-up we can see that you have a mustache?”
She said, “Yes, I know. I put it there.”
“Fine,” I said. （Who was I to argue with the great Cloris Leachman?）
Dick Van Patten played an innocent and hapless psychologist, Dr. Wentworth, who is going to spill the beans, but before he can, Montague and Nurse Diesel get rid of him in a horrific scene in which he’s trapped in his car as the radio （which he can’t turn off） plays a loud rock song called “If You Love Me Baby Tell Me Loud” which gets louder and louder until his eardrums burst. It was a very scary scene, which Dick pulled off perfectly.
I met Dick when the two of us played tennis at Merv Griffin’s ex-wife Julann Griffin’s home. We went on to become close friends. One of the most interesting stories about our friendship involved an emergency call I got from him. Dick was in his home in Sherman Oaks when he became dizzy and unstable. He thought he was having a stroke. He managed to fumble his way to his telephone. His first instinct was not to call a doctor, but to call a comedian. He dialed my number. I picked up the phone.
Dick said, “I’ve got a problem.”
I said, “What’s the matter?”
He said, “I think I’m having a stroke. My whole arm is tingling, and now it’s going to my leg.”
I started yelling at him, “Get to an emergency room! Call the emergency room!”
It turned out it wasn’t a stroke, but just a passing seizure. When people would later ask him, “Why on earth would you call Mel Brooks when you think you’re having a stroke?”
He responded, “Maybe I was just looking for one last laugh on the way out.”
My old friend and colleague from Your Show of Shows, our third banana Howie Morris, played my mentor, who I named Dr. Lilloman, which was just a funny shortening of his description “little old man.” Like having Sid Caesar in Silent Movie, having Howie Morris in High Anxiety gave me a nice feeling of repaying old friends for helping me get to where I was.
Directing the opening airport sequence of High Anxiety.
Another wonderful comic actor was Ron Carey, who played Brophy, my sidekick in the film. Edward Brophy was a character actor in the 1930s and ’40s. He always played a sidekick or henchman against William Powell or Edward G. Robinson in a lot of Warner Bros. and MGM movies. His character would say things like, “Gee, boss, I couldn’t find a cab anywhere.”
The brim of his hat was always up. As opposed to Lee Tracy and Warner Baxter, other actors of that time, whose brims were always down. （You have to know who wore hats with the brim up or the brim down.）
Ron was laugh-out-loud funny in the opening scene when he meets me, his new boss, at the airport. He grabs my large trunk and begins to lift it to get it into the back of the car. In the famous scene he says, “I got it! I got it! I got it!…I ain’t got it.”