00:08Hello, Ben Mankiewicz with you.
00:10You're watching TCM,
00:11where we're in the middle of another lineup of con artist movies.
00:14We've been doing this Friday nights in June.
00:17We just had Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda
00:19in the screwball comedy classic, The Lady Eve.
00:22Up next, another landmark comedy,
00:25this time from the singularly irreverent mind of Mel Brooks.
00:29From Embassy Pictures in 1967, written and directed by Brooks,
00:34Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder are the producers.
00:37The movie is built around a pretty simple idea, an ingenious idea.
00:42If a Broadway show flops and closes, the producers are off the hook
00:46and not required to repay their investors.
00:49With that in mind, producer Max Bialystok, that's Mostel,
00:54decides he can turn around his failing career
00:57by raising a ton of money and producing a show that's guaranteed to bomb.
01:02Joining him in this elaborate scam is his accountant, that's Wilder.
01:07Together, they find the perfect material to produce a surefire miss,
01:12a musical written by a former Nazi called Springtime for Hitler.
01:17Originally, Springtime for Hitler was more than the name of the play inside the movie.
01:23It was also Mel Brooks' plan for the film's title,
01:26until executive producer Joseph E. Levine changed Brooks' mind.
01:31Levine said no Jewish theater owner would put Springtime for Hitler on the marquee.
01:37Plus, it saved the joke if it were the title of the musical inside the movie, and Brooks agreed.
01:44Levine and another producer, Sidney Glaser, saw more in Brooks' idea than anybody else in Hollywood.
01:51Weirdly, the consensus was that Adolf Hitler wasn't that funny.
01:56But Brooks, a Jewish comedy writer from Brooklyn who served in Europe during World War II,
02:03knew funny better than anybody in town.
02:05He still does.
02:06And Mel turns 99 tomorrow, so happy birthday, Mel.
02:11To convince Levine to back his movie, Mel's first as a director,
02:16he acted out his 30-page treatment for Glaser with such bravura that Glaser couldn't resist.
02:22He was sitting there, eating his tuna sandwich and drinking black coffee, Brooks said,
02:27and the tuna fish is flying out of his mouth, and he's on the floor laughing and yelling,
02:32we're gonna make it!
02:33I don't know how, but we're gonna make this movie.
02:36And they did.
02:37In just 40 days, on a budget of roughly a million dollars.
02:40From 1967, also with Kenneth Mars, Dick Sean, and Lee Meredith, the producers.
