Hey, if you decided to skip the Conan/Mel interview just before this item, try a little of it. I've heard zillions of Mel Brooks interviews and they're usually the same stories over and over. This one's different and it's the old Conan asking the questions. He was a very good interviewer when he wasn't playing to the audience and trying to top his guests…and it turns out he still is.
Years ago, I did a job for two weeks, punching up the comedy in a screenplay. It was a bunch of us writers all sitting around in an office at 20th Century Fox, trying to add humor to a script that was deemed to be in need of more. Ultimately, the studio threw out our rewrite and had someone else write an entirely new script which they also decided wasn't good enough to film. The project went into turnaround, wound up getting made at another studio and…well, I just looked it up and Leonard Maltin gave it his coveted "BOMB" rating. I saw it and he was being kind.
Anyway, our office at Fox was down the hall from Mel's and he was then doing dozens of press interviews to promote High Anxiety. He liked an audience so some woman — his secretary, I guess — would scurry from office to office saying, "Mel's giving an interview. Come listen." For some reason, our producer — the man who had a lot of his career riding on the screenplay we were trying to improve — would say, "Hey, let's go listen to Mel." So we went and listened to Mel. Three times, I believe, we went and sat on his couch or floor as he held court before some reporter who couldn't believe he was interviewing Mel Brooks. Mel liked having me there because when he momentarily stalled on some proper name and couldn't remember it, I usually could.
Like I said, we did this three times and for the most part, we heard the same interview three times. It was the same questions evoking the same anecdotes. The third time, the interviewer requested the story about Sid Caesar trying to pull the cab driver through the tiny car window port. Mel said, "I don't want to tell that story. I'm sick of telling that story." Then he turned to me and said, "You tell it."
So it's real nice to hear this interview conducted by Mr. O'Brien. I hope this is the first in a series.