Exclusive: New Marty Feldman Bio Goes Behind the Scenes of Young Frankenstein

Wilder had just wrapped on Mel Brooks' cowboy film pastiche, Blazing Saddles which, after critical successes with The Producers and The Twelve Chairs would put Brooks firmly at the top of the list of American film comedy directors. Brooks was still uncertain about lending his name and talents to a project that wasn't entirely his but he had a solution. He would contribute to Gene Wilder's completed script and claim a co-writing credit. His name attached to the project also helped get the budget upped from 1.7 million dollars to 2.3 million dollars. Producer Michael Gruskoff secured the support of Alan Ladd Jnr over at 20th Century Fox when Columbia Pictures pulled out.

Mel Brooks, choosing not to appear in the film, gathered together his familiar repertory company of stars; Madeline Kahn as Frankenstein's snobbish fiancée and Kenneth Mars as the oft en impenetrable Germanic police officer. The distinguished Cloris Leachman had recently won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in The Last Picture Show, while Teri Garr was a film novice who had caught the eye of Brooks through her television success on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. All of them were brilliant. All of them were over-shadowed by Marty. "For me he is probably the heart and soul of the film," says producer Michael Gruskoff. "The bizarre world that we all entered into when we walked onto that set was epitomized by Marty."

Mel Brooks agreed, explaining that, "When you're a comedy writer you pray for Marty Feldman because what you pray for is that they'll meet the material. They'll do what you wrote. Marty Feldman not only met your material, he lifted it. He gave it that extra magic. That magic touch."

It is clear that Marty's performance served as a pick-me-up and an inspiration to the American cast and crew. His Igor would be, at turns, sensitive and mischievous. Genuinely frightening at times, "Marty was," according to Mel Brooks, "the hunchback assistant as played by a music hall comedian. Or vaudeville if you were American. That's why we put in all that Yiddish shtick. He throws in lines straight out of the pages of Variety at certain points. The whole thing is dripping with Jewish humour, of course, and the scene that I consider closes the second act is when the monster breaks out of the castle and goes off on his own. Gene shouts out the line: 'What have I done!' Which is the line that would close every second act in every Jewish play in New York. Marty and Teri reacted beautifully to it by copying [Wilder's] hand to mouth gesture. Lovely. There were bits of the [Catskill] mountain[s] comic in there. When Gene goes in to face the monster and Marty throws away the line: 'Nice working with you.' That was what every mountain comedian would say when he sensed impending danger. Everything was thrown into the mix."

Everything is right. Marty would lapse into song within a scene: the slow pan across the "three years dead", "two years dead", "six months dead", "freshly dead" heads is one of the film's stand-out moments. For the "freshly dead" head is a very much alive but perfectly still Marty, who suddenly bursts into both life and song with a rendition of 'I Ain't Got No Body'. The first two skulls were the genuine article as borrowed from a local laboratory, the third was constructed within the Fox Art Department and the fourth -- Marty -- was "one only God could make" as Mel Brooks remembers. The scene was one of many where Marty would add something extra to the script. "He loved the drums. He was learning or about to start learning. I know he loved music and he knew that I played the drums a little. There are drum passages called rim-shots. [After the song] Marty did them for me. To make me smile. It worked. I loved his reading of that scene."

Marty, like a kid in a Hollywood candy store, would also include elements of his comedy heroes that had now become friends and colleagues. Groucho Marx proved extremely useful in a particularly difficult scene. It's what Gene Wilder calls: "Mel's most brilliant day on set. Madeline [Kahn] arrives as my fiancée and Mel had us improvise this on the spot. Marty says, 'OK, you take the blonde, I'll take the one in the turban.' He was doing Groucho Marx, basically, but Mel wanted more than that. He told Marty to bite the head off the fox fur that [Madeline] was wearing. I would say, conservatively, that it took eight or nine takes because every time he bit that fox fur there was always fur left in his mouth and we couldn't not laugh. We tried. We just couldn't help it. We finally got to the eighth or ninth take. I held in the laughter. It took great moral strength but I held on. It might look like I'm trying to hold back some kind of anger toward him but I was really holding back the quivering mouth of not wanting to laugh. We laughed all the time. Marty was just so funny doing all his bits of business."

Mel Brooks remembers that scene as: "Just impossible to get. It was pure gold, of course, but every line got a laugh. On the set while we were filming none of the actors could keep it together. It took me about twenty takes and hours and hours of cutting and cutaways from one to the other to cobble together that scene and make it look like the actors played it with a straight face. It was outrageous. Quite certainly the best and the worst day of my life!"

Marty Feldman: The Biography of a Comedy Legend arrives on shelves Oct. 25 wherever books are sold. Excerpt courtesy Titan Books.

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