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Because They Asked Me To
- Abstract
I write this in a Paris hotel bedroom while waiting to see a producer whom I have never met, and never previously heard of, to discuss a project with a young director whose only film I have yet to see, with a view to writing a movie based on a book which, if I worked for Alfred A. Knopf, or had my own publishing firm, I would have nixed after half a dozen pages. Since I went on and finished it, and went through it again as you do through your empty pockets for the car key that has to be there somewhere, and still isn’t, I can assure you that I would’ve been right the first time. Why do they want to make terrible books into movies?
Most movies are, of course, terrible, dating back to the beginning, even many that were once said to be masterpieces. A recent biography, by Jeffrey Vance, promised that Douglas Fairbanks was not only the first superstar but also “a great artist.” Have you looked at any of his movies recently? I have; never again. The Thief of Baghdad? I wouldn’t steal it. Nostalgia gets worse: by chance, the other night, I tripped on a TCM screening of The Producers, not the recent inflated and joyless musical but the original Zero Mostel/Gene Wilder version. Pure gold, if I remembered aright. I remembered a-wrong: I came in on Mostel looking down at that white limo in the street and calling out, “That’s right, baby: if you’ve got it, flaunt it.” Okay. Then we came to the line about the cardboard belt. Ace. But then . . . who would ever want to see again the protracted scene, frantically hammed, in which Mel Brooks sets up the premise of the movie: that a Broadway flop could make more money than a hit? After a sad little while, you realize that the camera did nothing that gagman supreme Brooks couldn’t have done without it. The Producers is, in a word or three, a radio show.
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