The Producers (1968 film)

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The Producers (1968)

Directed by	Mel Brooks
Produced by	Sidney Glazier
Written by	Mel Brooks
Starring	Zero Mostel Gene Wilder Kenneth Mars
Music by	Brian Morris John Morris
Cinematography	Joseph Coffey
Editing by	Ralph Rosenblum
Distributed by	Embassy Pictures
Release date(s)	March 18, 1968
Running time	90 min.
Country	U.S.A.
Language	English
Budget	$941,000 USD (est.)
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The Producers is a 1968 feature-length comedy film set in New York City, in which two con men (Bialystock and Bloom) attempt to cheat theatre 'angels' (investors) out of their investment money. This was the first film that Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony winner Mel Brooks directed. Despite getting horrible reveiws and being a dud at the box office it sparked Brooks's carrer and later became one of the most popular shows on Broadway in years. It received a PG rating by the MPAA for brief mild language.

The film was adapted by its writer/director, Mel Brooks, into The Producers, a Broadway musical, in 2001. The Producers, a film based in turn on that musical, was released on December 25, 2005.

1 Cast
2 Plot
3 Awards
4 Trivia
5 Quotations
6 External links

[edit] Cast

Zero Mostel - Max Bialystock

Gene Wilder - Leo Bloom

Kenneth Mars - Franz Liebkind

Lee Meredith - Ulla

Estelle Winwood - Hold Me-Touch Me

Christopher Hewett - Roger DeBris

Andréas Voutsinas - Carmen Ghia

Dick Shawn - Lorenzo St. DuBois (L.S.D.)

Renée Taylor - Eva Braun

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Max Bialystock (Mostel) is a failed, aging Broadway producer who ekes out a living romancing rich old women in exchange for money for his "next play." He encounters the nebbish accountant Leo Bloom (Wilder) when the latter is sent to Bialystock's office to do his books; in the process of this, a chance comment by Bloom inspires a scheme to massively oversell shares in a Broadway production, then purposely make a horrific flop, so that no one will ever audit its books, thus avoiding a payout and leaving the duo free to flee to Brazil with the profits. After an extensive search they find an unproduced play which Bialystock gleefully describes as "a love letter to Hitler," written in total sincerity by a deranged ex-Nazi named Franz Liebkind (Mars). They convince Liebkind to sign over the rights, then collect money from dozens of little old ladies - ultimately selling 25,000 percent of the play - and hire the monumentally untalented director Roger De Bris (Hewett) to stage the production. The part of Hitler goes to a charismatic hippie named Lorenzo St. Dubois (Shawn), who wanders into the wrong theater by accident during the casting call.

The result of all of this is Springtime for Hitler, a cheerfully upbeat (and apocalyptically tasteless) musical comedy detailing the dictator's life, which opens with a lavish production number celebrating Nazi Germany overrunning Europe. Unfortunately for the protagonists, their attempt to make an unwatchable play backfires as, after initial dumbfounded disbelief, the audience finds the inept production so funny that they view it as an over-the-top satire on Nazism and universally hail it as a hit.

After an enraged Liebkind attempts to shoot the producers in their office, the three of them band together and, in desperation, blow up the theatre to end the production. They get caught in the explosion and are hauled off to jail. Found "incredibly guilty" in their criminal trial, they are sent to prison, where they proceed to create a new play starring their fellow convicts entitled "Prisoners Of Love", running the exact same scam as before.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Awards

The Producers won an Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen and was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Gene Wilder). The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

[edit] Trivia

Max Bialystock is named after the Polish city of Białystok.
Leo Bloom is named for the subject of the novel Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. Leo meets Max on June 16, the date that all of the action in Ulysses takes place.
Liebkinds' last name means literally love child in German
At one point during his search for "the worst play ever written," Max reads a sentence about a man waking up one morning finding himself transformed into a giant cockroach. Max rejects the story, on the grounds that it is "too good." Despite the seemingly ridiculous content of the sentence, it is indeed "too good": it is the opening sentence to Franz Kafka's classic short story, The Metamorphosis.
Carmen Ghia is named after the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.
The writer-director Mel Brooks' appears very briefly in the film, singing "Don't be stupid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party" in the song Springtime For Hitler. His version of line is also dubbed into each performance of the musical and in the movie version of the musical.
At its theatrical release in Sweden, the film was given the Swedish title Producenterna (The Producers), but it was not a success then. After it was re-released under the title Det Våras För Hitler (Springtime for Hitler), it did score with the Swedish audience. Because of this, all of Mel Brooks' films were given a title with Det våras för... (Springtime For...) in Sweden, up until Life Stinks. (For example, Blazing Saddles was retitled Det Våras För Sheriffen (Springtime For The Sheriff) and Spaceballs was retitled Det Våras För Rymden (Springtime For Space). After this, Mel Brooks himself has complained at the Swedish habit of always calling his films something with 'Springtime For...' and so, his last two films have been called Robin Hood: Karlar I Trikåer (Robin Hood: Men In Tights) and Dracula: Död Men Lycklig (Dracula: Dead and Loving It), although the latter is called Det Våras För Dracula on the Swedish DVD cover).
The foreman of the jury is Bill Macy, who would later star in the 1970s sitcom, Maude.
Dustin Hoffman was originally cast as Franz Liebkind, but bowed out to star in The Graduate.
Peter Sellers was a huge fan and appeared on Michael Parkinson's BBC1 chat show Parkinson in a Nazi helmet reciting the entire "Hitler was a better painter than Churchill" speech.
The title of the U2 album Achtung Baby comes from a line in the movie.
A spoof of The Producers is the Goof Troop episode "Pete's Day at the Races" {Black Pete tries to pull a scam by overselling a racehorse}.
This film is number 12 on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies".

[edit] Quotations

From Mel Brooks' interview: "I was never crazy about Hitler...If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win...That's what they do so well: they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can't win. You show how crazy they are."