A Music Business Lesson From The Producers
When many people think about The Producers they think of the Mathew Broderick/Nathan Lane Broadway version that was eventually made into a film.
“The horror….”
The original version of The Producers was a Mel Brooks comedy that was released in 1968 and starred Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. One of my favorite films of all time (and certainly my favorite comedy), it was re-released on DVD a while ago and had some really great extra features talking about the film.
.
The Film
.
If not brilliant, the script is certainly inspired. Mel Brooks took two real life experiences he had (working with a New York producer who seduced little old ladies to get funding for his plays, and anecdotal knowledge of a couple of other producers who were spending money lavishly on themselves while producing flop after flop) and merged them into Zero Mostel’s Max Bialystock. After a nebbish accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) goes over the books, Bloom realizes that if a producer raises more money than it costs to produce a play and if the play is a flop – then the producer could pocket the difference. However, if the play was a success – the producer would go to jail because he could never pay back the dividends on the play investment. The film then goes on a search for the worst play, the worst director and the worst actors (the irony being that in going for the worst of everything they actually make a play so bad that audiences love it). .
.
Lesson 1:
Write from truth. If you share genuine experiences with people, you’ll move them.
.
Additionally, the cast is untouchable. In addition to Mostel and Wilder, you have Kenny Mars as the wonderfully unhinged Franz Liebkind, Dick Shawn as Lorenzo St. Dubois, Andreas Voutsinas as Carmen Giya and Lee Meredith as Ulla the bombshell Swedish receptionist who can’t speak any English. Every characterization is so over the top that it goes into caricature and it’s hard to be offended (even during the overture to the actual play, “Springtime for Hitler” – by then you’re guffawing by just the sheer brashness of it all).
.
Lesson 2:
Work with the best people you can. They’ll elevate both you and the material.
.
The Film’s release:
.
Here’s where the story get’s interesting. As over the top as the film is now – as a comedy it must have been positively avant-garde in the late 1960s. Many distributors didn’t want to touch it because it was seen as vulgar. In the re-issue of the DVD, Mel Brooks talks about how there was only one theater that they did a test screening in Pittsburg and (other than Brooks and the other people he brought from New York) only one person came in and it bombed. They gave it a limited release.
Brooks and his wife went home and lamented on what to do. In the meantime, Peter Sellars had a chance encounter to see a print of the film. (It’s really worth your time to find the DVD and hear Paul Mazursky relate the full story). Sellars was so impressed that he paid for a full-page ad in Variety lauding the film and signed it. He then started calling film producers and showing the film to as many of them as he could.
.
Lesson 3:
Even with backers and financial support, you can have the best material in the world and be unable to generate outside interest initially.
.
Lesson 4:
You never know when or where a break is going to come from. The important thing is that you get the best work you can out into the world.
.
Several months later the film opened in New York. It was savaged by a number of important critics, including The Times’ Renata Adler and Pauline Kael from the New Yorker. Sellers took out another full-page ad, on his dime, in The Times and the film did blockbuster business in its initial run. In the documentary, it was mentioned that it played in a New York film house for over a year after its initial release. It went on to become a highly influential film and was inducted into the National Registry for film preservation in 1996.
.
Lesson 5:
Charles Bukowski once said, “Endurance is more important than the truth.” but in some cases, endurance actually leads us to the truth. It’s only after the passage of time that we can see things more clearly and be able to really assess their value.
.
A work of art is really a frozen moment in time. The Producers is really a documentary of where Mel Brooks was as a writer and a director in 1967. Any work that we create is only a reflection of where we are at the time we create it. I will come back to this in much more detail in another post, but:
.
As artists:
all you have to do from the creative side is make the best and most honest thing you possibly can at the time that you make it.
.
As entrepreneurs :
if your work is good, honest, prolific and out in the world people will eventually make a connection to it and you will get noticed.
.
It might not be how you planned on getting noticed – but you will get noticed - and the more you do it, the more people will notice you.
.
Opportunites are as much what we prepare for as what circumstances we take advantage of. The Producers could have been the greatest film that no one ever saw – but one person was so moved by the experience that he went to extraordinary lengths to get it out into the world.
.
If you move people, they will move you as well.
.
As always, thanks for reading!
-SC
.
If you like this post you may also like:
