The Producers (1967 film)
| The Producers | |
|---|---|
| DVD cover of the 1968 film The Producers | |
| Directed by | Mel Brooks |
| Written by | Mel Brooks |
| Produced by | Sidney Glazier |
| Starring | Zero Mostel Gene Wilder Kenneth Mars |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
Running time | 88 min |
| Budget | $941,000 USD (est.) |
The Producers is a 1968 feature length comedy film set in New York City in which two con-men attempt to cheat theatre "angels" (investors) out of their investment money. Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) is a failed, aging Broadway producer who encounters nebbish accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder). The film was adapted by its writer/director, Mel Brooks into a Broadway musical in 2001.
Cast
| Max Bialystock | Zero Mostel |
| Leo Bloom | Gene Wilder |
| Franz Liebkind | Kenneth Mars |
| Hold me, Touch me | Estelle Winwood |
| Eva Braun | Renée Taylor |
| Roger De Bris | Christopher Hewett |
| Ulla | Lee Meredith |
| The drunk | William Hickey |
| Carmen Giya | Andréas Voutsinas |
| Doc Goebbels | David Patch |
| Lorenzo St Dubois (L.S.D.) | Dick Shawn |
Their plan is to oversell shares in a show and then go bankrupt and keep all the unspent funds. They set out to purposely make a flop, so that no one will ever audit the flop's books. Springtime for Hitler, a musical comedy about Adolf Hitler, is the result. Unfortunately for the con artists, their attempt to make an unwatchable play backfires as the audience finds the inept production so funny that they misinterpret it as an over the top satire on Nazism and hail it as a hit. Franz Liebkind (the writer, played by Kenneth Mars), who really believed they were producing a tribute to Hitler, is insulted by the audience's laughter. He and the producers blow up the theatre to end the production. The producers see it as a final — yet futile — plan to reap their ill-gotten gains. However, the producers end up in prison where they cast a new show amongst the prisoners while running the same scam as before.
It 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.
Film remake
A film based on the musical has been announced and set for a December 26, 2005 release. See: The Producers: The Movie Musical.
Trivia
- Max Bialystock is named after the Polish city of Białystok.
- At one point during their search for 'the worst play ever written,' Max reads a sentence about a man waking up one morning finding himself turned into a giant cockroach. Leo rejects it, 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 'The Metamorphosis
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."
External links
- The Producers (1968) at IMDb
- Roger Ebert's Great Movies review of The Producers [1]