The following is a reprint from an April 15, 2001, New York Times article.

"The Music Man in Mel Brooks"
by MEL BROOKS   

LONG, long ago. The early summer of 1935. I was 9 years old, happy as a lark, and living with my widowed mother and three older brothers in an $18-a-month fifth-floor walkup in a tenement at 365 South Third Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

We lived in the back. Though it was the depths of the Depression, there was music in the air. Music everywhere. Not Vivaldi or Verdi, but the popular music of the day -- Bing Crosby singing "From Monday On" on the radio, the Millers in the next apartment playing Russ Columbo records on their wind-up Victrola, a wannabe Benny Goodman practicing "Don't Be That Way" on his squeaky clarinet in the apartment across the backyard, a piano player in the open window of Heller's Music Emporium down the street, knocking out Broadway tunes as a come-on to peddle sheet music.

There was music coming out of me, too. A kid who grew up with his ear glued to the radio, I knew the lyrics of all of 1935's biggest hits and loudly sang them all day long as I happily danced along the sidewalks. Actually, I was a pretty good singer, on pitch and usually able to hit all of the top notes, and I always got 'em at family parties with my imitations of Jolson singing "Toot, Toot, Tootsie" and Eddie Cantor doing "If You Knew Susie."

And then there was whistling, which I was also pretty good at. But the greatest whistler I ever knew was my mother's brother, my Uncle Joe, a taxi driver who seemed to know every song ever written. He was a happy-go-lucky little guy, Uncle Joe, and I mean little, barely 5 feet tall. When you saw a cab coming down the street without a driver, that was Uncle Joe. In fact, he'd had to put in specially built-up "Adler's Elevator" clutch and gas pedals in order for his feet to reach them, while to see over his steering wheel, he sat up on a stack of five or six telephone books. (In the Depression, when practically nobody could afford a phone, the books were a lot thinner than they are now.) And he always whistled while he worked, 12 hours a day driving his clunky Checker cab all over Brooklyn and the lesser boroughs, like Manhattan.

My father died when I was 2 years old, and Uncle Joe, keenly aware that I was missing a dad, always took a special interest in me — bounced me on his knee, pulled my sled through the show, and bought me chocolate creams at Loft's.

And it was Uncle Joe, one famous Friday evening, who breezed into our apartment with the news that one of his fares, in exchange for a free ride out to Coney Island, had given him two tickets to what was then the biggest hit musical on Broadway — Cole Porter's "Anything Goes," starring William Gaxton, Victor Moore and none other than Miss Ethel Merman.

The tickets were for the next afternoon, Saturday matinee, and Uncle Joe announced that if I wanted to go along with him to the show, he'd take me.

Did I want to go? You never heard a louder or faster "Yessss!" in your life! I hadn't ever seen a musical, on Broadway or anywhere else, but in those days when most of America's most popular songs were from Broadway shows, I already knew the tunes and the lyrics to a whole bunch of the numbers from "Anything Goes."

Even in 1935 it was illegal for a New York taxi driver to carry a passenger in his car when he had his off-duty flag up, and so whenever Uncle Joe took me anywhere in his cab I had to hide on the floor in the back. And that's how, on that long-ago Saturday afternoon in June of 1935, I went to my first Broadway show — scrunched down in the back of Uncle Joe's bumpy old taxi. I could tell by the hum of the tires on the steel grid when we were crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, but the rest of the ride was pure guesswork as we journeyed from South Third Street to West 52nd Street in Manhattan and the Alvin Theater (now named after my longtime friend Neil Simon), where "Anything Goes" was playing. Uncle Joe sat up on his phone books as he drove, whistling one Cole Porter tune after another, while I sang along with him from the back floor.

SO our seats weren't exactly two on the aisle in the fourth row of the orchestra. How about in the next to the last row at the top of the balcony? But I couldn't have been happier. I was actually listening to Ethel Merman herself singing "I Get a Kick Out of You" on a stage, live, with me there. There were no microphones in theaters back then and we were miles away, but Uncle Joe and I nonetheless agreed that Merman sang just a little too loud. But, wow, I still thought she was the greatest thing since chocolate milk. I had goose bumps. I almost fainted. And what a score by Cole Porter! Soaring melodies, astonishing lyrics, one great song after another — not only "I Get a Kick Out of You" but also "You're the Top," "It's Delovely," "All Through the Night" and, of course, the show's wonderful title song, "Anything Goes."

And, oh, the glory of the sound that came from that orchestra pit, led by the brass section, those blaring trumpets and thrilling trombones reaching for the moon. "Anything Goes" was funny too — falling-down funny. When the final curtain fell, I leaped to my feet and cheered my 9-year-old head off; way up there at the top of the balcony, I figured that I was as close to heaven as I'd ever get.

I fell in love forever with Broadway musical comedy that afternoon and also began a lifetime of admiration for the music and lyrics of Cole Porter, who is still my all-time No. 1 favorite songwriter. (Years later, when I discovered to my amazement that Cole Porter wasn't Jewish, I was taken aback for a moment but then quickly forgave him. I'd become a practicing Episcopalian, too, if I could write songs like his.) I remember thinking while lying awake in bed that night after seeing "Anything Goes" that when I grew up I wanted somehow to be involved in a musical comedy, maybe even as the writer of its songs. Being a Broadway songwriter, I decided, would be even better than playing shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers, which up until then had been my most fantastic dream.

Something happened. Life got in the way of my becoming the next Cole Porter. At the age of 14, I got a paying job in music, but as a drummer rather than a songwriter, playing in a band every summer at a place called the Butler Lodge in the Catskills, where one night when I was 16 the comic M.C. suddenly took sick and I jumped in to take his place.

I got big laughs with terrible jokes like, "The girl I went out with last night was so skinny that when I took her to a restaurant the headwaiter said, `Check your umbrella?' "

I never went back to the drums again — I was now a $25-a-week comic, and on my dressing room they'd hung a six-pointed star. In those days, every Catskill comic had his own introductory song — "My name is Donny, they say I'm funny," etc. And so I did at last write my first song, which I'm proud and ashamed to say went like this:

Here I am, I'm Melvin Brooks,
I've come to stop the show,
Just a ham who's minus looks,
But in your hearts I'll grow.
I'll tell ya gags, I'll sing you songs,
Just happy little snappy tunes
That roll along.
I'm out of my mind, so won't you be kind,
And please love . . . Melvin Brooks!
 

World War II. Out of the Catskills and into the Army, which amazingly enough first sent me to college: I became a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute. (Talk about a little Jewish fish out of water, although I loved V.M.I., and the gracious Virginians couldn't have been nicer to the brash kid from Brooklyn.) But then the Army got serious and I was next a combat engineer being shot at by Germans in Belgium and the Rhineland, after which, when the shooting stopped, I was transferred into Special Services and became a G.I. comedian entertaining the troops with song parodies like Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" morphed into "When we begin to clean the latrine."

Out of the Army, back in New York, and sticking with comedy rather than songwriting, on to a whole lot of frantically happy years spent turning out comic sketches for television's "Your Show of Shows." Fast forward to 1964, when I risked a steady paycheck from television to quit my job in order to write my first movie, "The Producers," a comedy that for plot purposes needed a couple of original songs.

I said to my then wife, the incredibly beautiful and incredibly talented Anne Bancroft, whom I'm happy to say is also still my now wife, that I needed to find someone to write the songs.

"I know who could write them," she said.

"Who?" I asked.

"You," she said. "You're musical, you're a good singer, and besides, you've been talking my head off ever since I met you about how much you want to be a songwriter. So take a pad, a pencil, go into the next room, and I bet within an hour you'll come out with a very nice song."

I did what she said. I took a pad, a pencil and went into the next room. And lo and behold, one hour and one month later came out with "Springtime for Hitler." (I had come up with not only the lyrics but also the tune, which I'd heard in my head, picked out on a piano, and then hummed into a tape recorder — a full 32-bar song that a musicologist friend of mine then transcribed into actual notes on actual music paper, a method of composing I've since used for all of my songs. (I went to V.M.I., not Juilliard.) I also wrote a second song for "The Producers" entitled "Prisoners of Love." I can't tell you how thrilled I was to see the first copies of the sheet music of my songs and the credit in the upper-right-hand corner: "Words & Music by Mel Brooks."

When it was first released, sad to say, "The Producers" was neither a critical nor a commercial success. As a matter of fact, it was slammed by critics all over the place, including even by the critic who wrote for the very newspaper you're now reading. Scathing reviews and the initial failure of the picture at the box office everywhere but in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles left me more discouraged than I can tell you. I nearly gave up show business and was seriously considering going back to college. I'd major in organic chemistry, I figured, become a pharmacist, and open a little drugstore back in Williamsburg, at the corner of South Third and Hooper.

Fast forward again, to three years ago, the spring of 1998, when I got a phone call in my office at the Culver Studios in Los Angeles. I hadn't become a pharmacist after all. I'd become a moviemaker. The call was from a very important man who shall remain nameless, David Geffen. David, in case you haven't heard, is a slightly well-off record-industry legend who together with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg founded and now runs Hollywood's newest movie studio, DreamWorks SKG.

I consider David to be one of the wisest men in all of show business, and so when he told me over the phone that he wanted me to turn "The Producers" into a Broadway musical comedy that he would personally produce, I didn't dismiss the notion out of hand but nonetheless ultimately gave him a polite no. (For years, a number of other producers had been after me to make a musical out of "The Producers" and I'd given each of them a polite no, too.) But David Geffen doesn't take no, polite or otherwise, for an answer. Every time I picked up the phone, he was at the other end. In fact, after the 16th increasingly persuasive call in eight days, my polite no all of a sudden turned into a resounding yes! Of course I'll do it! But when I suggested that I'd like to try to write the songs for the show, music as well as lyrics, he said he already had another songwriter in mind, none other than Jerry Herman.

I could scarcely quarrel with his choice — I'd been an admirer of Jerry Herman ever since his first Broadway show, "Milk and Honey," and I'd been in the audience marveling at his words and music at other memorable shows of his — "Hello, Dolly!" "Mame," "Dear World," "Mack and Mabel" and "La Cage aux Folles." So even though I wanted more than anything else to at least have a shot at writing my own score, I agreed to meet with Jerry. I went to his home in the hills of Beverly, where he led me into his music room and immediately told me two things — 1) how much he loved "The Producers," and 2) how sorry he was that he didn't think he was the right man to write the songs for it.

But, he went on, he knew of another songwriter who would be absolutely perfect.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Let me play you some of his songs," said Jerry, sitting down at his grand piano and first playing `'I'm Tired," a song that the unforgettable Madeline Kahn sang in "Blazing Saddles," and then "Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst," from my second movie, "The Twelve Chairs."

"Wait a moment, hold it," I said. "I wrote those songs."

"Of course you did," said Jerry with a grin, "and you also wrote `High Anxiety' — you're a very good songwriter."

"I am?" I asked.

"You are," he said. "What's more, you'd be crazy to do a Broadway musical of `The Producers' without including `Springtime for Hitler' and `Prisoners of Love.' So you've already got two major songs written. All you have to do is write a dozen or so more and you've got yourself a Broadway score. Go, with my blessings, do it!"

And I did. In fact, I wrote 17 more songs. With a lot of help along the way from a lot of people, but especially three very special people. First, Thomas Meehan, an old friend and the Tony Award-winning writer of the book of "Annie," who wrote the book of "The Producers" with me, and who, during two and a half years of working at my side, showed me where the musical should sing and where it shouldn't, helped me to figure out what sort of songs I should write and what they should be about, and sat in with me on countless lyric-writing idea sessions.

Second, Glen Kelly, a musical genius and brilliant arranger who took my rude, simple 32-bar songs and turned them into — I'm both hoping and nervously believe — glorious Broadway show tunes.

AND finally, Susan Stroman, the show's incredible Tony Award- winning choreographer and director, whose innovative ideas for staging have made my score work in the theater in ways that I would never have imagined. My songs were, like Adam, crudely formed out of the clay of the earth, and just as God blew life into Adam, Stro, as she is known to one and all, breathed life into my score — made it sing, made it dance.

As things turned out, when we finished the first draft of the show, a year ago, and I was champing at the bit to get it onstage, David Geffen found himself far too busy with various projects at DreamWorks to be able to spend a year in New York as a hands-on Broadway producer and so graciously stepped aside to let other producers take over the show. "All I want is a couple of tickets down front for opening night," said David, "so I can stand up in the crowd and cheer you on!"

So now the long-ago dream of the 9-year- old Brooklyn boy who was once me has at last come true. This Thursday evening, a brand-new Broadway musical comedy called "The Producers" will open at the St. James Theater with the credit line I'd imagined a mere 66 years ago: "Music and Lyrics by Mel Brooks."

And, uh-oh, I am once again facing the critics with something called "The Producers." I hope for the best, expect the worst, and of course there is always, waiting for me in Williamsburg, that little drugstore at the corner of South Third and Hooper.   

Mel Brooks wrote the music and lyrics and 
co-wrote the book for the musical The Producers.