The Producers (2005 film)

It wasn't Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, that's where.

Susan Stroman forgot she was making a film and not a filmed record of the stage version. Example: you use REAL old ladies instead of your 30 year old pals with grey wigs and old lady make-up.

It has its moments. Carmen Ghia & Roger Dupree is all well done.

Forget the clip

Also, Mel Brooks passed on directing it, in favor of first-time film director Susan Stroman (director of the stage version). The result was a film that not only looked annoyingly "stagey", but lacked Brooks' comic timing.

Oh, also, the magnificent Cady Huffman lost her role to the gawd-awful Uma Thurman, braying and clomping her way through the role of Ulla.

The Producers was too gay and too Jewish for the flyover states.

DL fav Karen Ziemba has a small walk-on/extra role in one of the scenes.

who?

It needed to be rethought as a film. Stroman was the wrong person, they should have gotten a film director.

R5 how do you mean 'clomping'?

R5, Mel Brooks co-directed it with Stroman even though she got sole credit. Well, most of it. He was on set every day until the last two weeks when his wife Anne Bancroft entered into her final phase of dying.

r10-clomping, as in stomping around during her dance numbers with the grace of Seattle Slew.

This film can be entertaining at times. But I agree with the poster who said "Strohman forgot she was making a film and not directing a stage version". Both Lane and Broderick look bored at times - they were doing exactly the same schtick and timing from the broadway show. No challenge. They could have slept through it and on occasion, it looked like they did.

The original outshines this drek, despite being made in the 60s. And the original WAS popular in the fly over states, because it was funny.

I thought like others that it looked like it was recorded on a stage. The sets looked terrible and Uma and Will were horrible stunt casting. Ditto lack of realism like the little old ladies being hot young ladies in wigs.

For me the redeeming feature is Nathan Lane. I never saw him do the role on stage but here he is funny and I think his "Betrayed" number is fantastic. It's like his own "Rose's Turn".

And why did they cut "The King of Broadway"???

Oh, but Cady Huffman couldn't have done the film, R5. She's hideous on film. The camera hates her. I mean her face looks like a grotesque death match. Ew! It's very alarming.

I hate Matthew Broderick. I thought he was acting in this and then I went to see "It's Only A Play" and he was the exact same. The annoying voice, the body language, expressions. Every time he appeared onstage I thought I was watching The Producers.

I liked it a lot.

[quote] And why did they cut "The King of Broadway"???

They filmed it but cut it for time. Some people say it works much better with the number put back in.

But I agree it was a mistake for Mel not to direct it himself. No one should remake a Mel Brooks film but Mel Brooks.

I meant a grotesque death MASK. Cady Huffman's face is worse than autopsy photos.

I heard they wanted Nicole Kidman to play Ulla. She could have pulled it off. Why didn't that happen?

Google is your friend, R23.

The original, with Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder, though broad and at times grotesque (particularly Mostel) was funny because the characters BELIEVED in the universe they inhabited. The musical film with Lane and Broderick looks like a cartoon pastiche -- stagey sets, knowing winks to the camera -- with the actors never playing flawed but funny people, but playing "characters" -- one-dimensional archetypes for whom you feel absolutely no empathy. Watch the original. Wilder isn't playing "neurotic", he IS neurotic; Mostel isn't playing a greedy, seedy pig, he IS one. And, in one of the final scenes in the original, Wilder's Leo Bloom has such genuine love for Mostel's Max as he begs the judge to treat his partner with leniency, that in the midst of comedy there is pathos. Then watch the similar scene from the musical -- it rings hollow.

The casting was a big part of it, Lane, Broderick, and Thurman were all flat and lifeless, Lane in particular looked like he was giving his 5,000th stage performance in the same role.

You can't overstate how much Zero Mostel contributed to the original film, he was very funny but intense and magnetic, his presence hit you in the face in a way that you just don't see any more. He MADE the audience believe in what was happening, he grabbed by the noses and yanked them into the story! I mean, it would have been a funny film if Gene Hackman had played Max Bialystock, but not a classic. And yes, Gene Wilder also gave the best performance of his career, but his best scenes are all early in the film, during the second half he lets Mostel walk all over him. Well, what actor could compete with Mostel, if Mostel didn't want him to. Nathan Lane can't, Mostel has been dead for decades and he's still blowing the poor guy off the screen!

Well-said, R25. I rewatched the original on Blu-ray and I agree with you. It seems that just like with another Gene Wilder film, [italic]Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory[/italic], that got remade the same year (and the film that united him with the man who beat him for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1968, Jack Albertson), giving them a bigger budget stripped away a lot of the heart of the original film. Here, the original was made for less than a million but it still manages to capture the piss-elegance of the worst of Broadway exquisitely. [italic]Wonka[/italic] was the same way; they had only a couple million and shot in Europe, unlike the mega-musicals of the era that had seemingly unlimited amounts of cash to throw at them, and they made the most of them. Tim Burton went back to the book and threw the same large sums of cash and computer graphics at it.

Matthew Broderick has also tried but failed to follow in the footsteps of Robert Preston as Harold Hill and Don Adams as Inspector Gadget.

Broderick is a no talent bum. Anything he's in always sucks.

Stroman forgot to scale down the size of the performances from the stage for film. And no one wants to look at Lane and Broderick (in his fat years) close up for two hours.

The other thing is that the original film was never a big hit but was a cult movie, and the Broadway musical made it so big because it appealed to a very select audience: older Jewish people who like that kind of very broad old-fashioned Borscht Belt humor. That audience is practically non-existent outside of the greater NYC area. I'm sure the film did well in seaside Florida towns, but where else would it appeal?

What was the last filmed role Matthew Broderick was appealing in? "Election"? "You Can Count on Me"? Once he lost his looks it was all over for him on the screen.

I remember hearing something like Mel Brooks was going to baby step Stroman through the process of directing and then Anne Bancroft got fatally ill and he (understandably) abandoned the production that was moving ahead full steam.

It's not uncommon for a director of stature to sit on set and help their apprentice along. That didn't happen here and probably should have. Although to some extent, it helped keep the tarnish of the disaster off of Brooks. For all we know, the movie might have turned out similarly even if he'd stuck around.

Seeing as Mel Brooks hadn't made a genuinely funny film in decades, R31, I doubt that he could have saved the remake of "The Producers". But still, I wonder how much he intended to contribute, if Stroman had never directed a feature film.

Maybe it was a deal something like "A Fish Called Wanda" (1988), where the studio and insurance decided that the marvelous Charles Chrichton was too old to direct (he was in his late 70s), and they insisted that writer/star John Cleese act as co-director. Cleese later said that Chrichton directed the whole damn film, and the one day that Chrichton was sick and he had to take charge, he had no idea what to do. Mel Brooks was just short of 80 when "The Producers" was remade, perhaps the studio hoped for a lot from him, but weren't willing to officially put him in charge at his age.

There must have been signs. Didn't Nicole Kidman suddenly drop out?

She must have smelled a turkey.

I don't see Nicole as Ulla. She's not the buxom type.

they can fix that r34.

Uma wasn't that big either at the time. Maybe when she was younger but in 2005 gravity had already stepped in.

R33 meet R24...

I think Eucalyptus was later named Australia and that production delayed after Russell Crowe pulled out. So technically Kidman could have come back but I gather by then Uma had been hired as her replacement.

[quote]It seems that just like with another Gene Wilder film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, that got remade the same year (and the film that united him with the man who beat him for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1968, Jack Albertson),

I never understood why Wilder wasn't nominated for Best Actor instead of Supporting Actor? I mean, a decade earlier, Jack Lemmon was nominated for Best Actor in SOME LIKE IT HOT, and he was Tony Curtis' co-lead, just like Wilder was Mostel's.

Mostel's is the leading role, Wilder is supporting.

R39 Lane and Broderick were both nominated in Lead at the Tonys, which Lane won.

I must remember the film wrong, 'cause I could've sworn that Bloom and Bialystock were the two co-leads, just like Lemmon and Curtis in SLIH.

just because yoou get a supporting nom doesn't mean you aren't a lead r41.

I agree that the casting was problematic. Think about it. You had Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn and it was outrageous from the first moment with Zero bilking little old ladies out of their fortunes. Nathan Lane wasn't credible, and Matthew Broderick was absolutely not Bloom. Not at all. Gene Wilder owned that character. IMO it was his signature role. It defined his whole career.

I know the guy who was the art director for the production. Is he partially the blame?

Strohman was the wrong director. That's what was wrong. MISS BROADWAY GENIUS was NOT a fucking film director and for whatever reason someone greenlit letting that poseur direct the film version, they had their head up their ass. Film and stage for two totally different mediums, which has been the battle between Broadway and Hollywood since the first state production was filmed. None of the Rodgers and Hammerstein movies are like the stage productions. Rob Marshall somehow, some way, was able to translate Chicago to film with some fresh energy but I think that was a one off bit of a fluke. They should have given the Producers to a FILM director. Period.

The MY FAIR LADY film suffers from the same problem (i.e. it looks/plays like a filmed production of the stage show) but it was still a huge hit and won a ton of Oscars, including Best Picture (inexplicably). The sets are obviously sets, and the camera pretty much stays stationery (don't know how it won for cinematography). But most of all, it's pretty much the stage show, verbatim. Every scene and song is in its original form. Don't know how it got a nod for Adapted Screenplay, since they didn't change much (if anything) when adapting it to the screen. I mean, look at THE SOUND OF MUSIC. It's a very different animal from the stage show; in fact, much better. I always found the stage version a snoozefest, but the film is marvelous! With MFL, I prefer the stage show than the film, which is a chore to sit through, especially Part II, after the ball.

R44 - since you know the art director does he have any dirt on the filming?

It doesn't matter if Nicole Kidman or Uma Thurman weren't as hot as fuck or were feeling the pull of gravity a little, each was still way hotter than anything that Bialystock or Bloom could pull without money and fame. And it would have worked to have a tall, beautiful woman towering over those little trolls as if she were a member of another species, if the film was funny.

I'll ask R44. He's usually very close lipped about productions he's worked on, he tries to be professional. He worked on 'Glitter' (either art direction or production design) and I couldn't get one Mariah Carey tidbit out of him. Other than, "she spent a lot of time in her trailer."

The original DP John Bailey was fired after about 7 weeks on the job for going behind Stroman's back and telling department heads they should go to him directly if they have a problem because he knew about film and Stroman didn't.

Too gay? The Producers is so homophobic. They should've warned gay people not to bother. Most mirthless evening in the theatre ever.

I've got an even better question: why do a remake in the first place? The film from the 60s is just fine the way it is.

Basically, I never believed Lane and Broderick were straight, which heavily bears on all their actions in the story. Mostel and Wilder, weird as they were, nevertheless come off as straight in the original. But L&B present as winking at the audience, "playing" at being straight.

Which is the main problem with the musical "Producers" movie. They're all winking at you. I'm glad they get the joke, but they're not sharing it with anyone. Makes it look like they all had a lot of fun making it, and they all thought they'd get the same hit response from audiences. But they're just too obvious, always trying to squeeze out laughs. The original played the whole thing serious, which is why it was screamingly funny.

Also, remember, by the time the "Producers" musical made it to the screen, audiences were already in on the joke. The original was a gas, when they played "Springtime for Hitler" onscreen, but in the remake everyone is waiting for it. And what can they do in the musical, but try to make the production number even bigger and gaudier, which it really doesn't need.

Frankly, I don't think it's a very good musical. The songs are inserted into the old film, which all the time stops for them. Just a big, bloated self-centered mess. It just lies there.

(And I'm still resentful that the stage version took all the Tonys in its year, when the musical of "The Full Monty" was ever so much better: heartfelt, beautifully acted and sung. "Monty" was everything "Producers" should have been; yet it was swamped in the phony adulation that Mel Brooks got. All those Broadway audiences that wanted a return to the "good old days" of wink-wink musicals. Yikes!)

I remember everyone and their mother was predicting the movie to be a big Oscar contender (e.g. Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, etc.)... but then the movie was released. That same season, RENT was also expected to be a big awards contender, until it opened. Not a good year for musicals, 2005.

The trouble started in Dusseldorf in springtime.

The musical version wows you with the "Springtime for Hitler" number, dropping the Dick Shawn bit from the original film which made the production look as terrible as it was supposed to be with Shawn's ad-libbing all the "man's". Therefore it's no surprise that the show in the story was a hit, because it was not designed to be bad, despite the premise of hiring a bad director and having a bad script. Playing Hitler as a gay fop, to a New York theatre audience, is really not that offensive (or radical), even in 1959.

I like the Springtime for Hitler number in the musical.

I also love "Everybody Has AIDS" in Team America.

R57 they're lampooning RENT, or more specifically the opening title song from that show.

[quote]Rob Marshall somehow, some way, was able to translate Chicago to film with some fresh energy but I think that was a one off bit of a fluke

Then why is everything else he directed range from mediocre to terrible? I think in this case Bill Condon's screenplay helped a lot.

R46: [italic]My Fair Lady[/italic] didn't need a bunch of flashy gimmicks or arbitrary changes to make it work on screen. George Cukor knew how to balance the theatrical and the cinematic and make them complement each other, not compete with each other, and he proved that by now he could handle a big studio production in a way he could not 25 years earlier when he got removed from [italic]Gone with the Wind[/italic] and [italic]The Wizard of Oz[/italic]. I have never had a problem with any of the pacing and the staging, and it deserved each and every Oscar it won then and now. But Susan Stroman is no George Cukor and this show is no [italic]My Fair Lady[/italic]. If they had taken stuff out or changed thing, you'd be out for their blood along with the same perpetually bitter Julie Andrews fangurls who can't just be happy she won the Oscar, even though that empty-headed [italic]Song of the South[/italic] knockoff she won it for is not her best work by ANY stretch of the imagination, nor even the best performance she gave that year.

And let's face it, [italic]The Sound of Music[/italic] needed changes in order to work as a movie; the whole idea of the kids bonding with Maria instantly over "Do-Re-Mi" without just a little bit of resistance doesn't really work dramatically regardless of the medium, and Ernest Lehman knew this. He had a keen sense of what worked and what didn't in the original and that movie is also better off. Different shows require different approaches and what needs to be done to make it work as a film is something one must take on a case-by-case basis.

Part of the reason the original is so good is that Gene Wilder didn't seem to be playing a crazy nebbish, he WAS a crazy nebbish! And Zero Mostel wasn't playing a desperate, grasping sleazeball, he WAS a desperate, grasping, sleazeball - you could smell the greed and self-loathing coming off of him!

That sort of authentic film performance is very, very difficult to carry into a musical, if not impossible. The desperate and crazy just don't break into big smiling dance numbers.

[quote]And let's face it, The Sound of Music needed changes in order to work as a movie; the whole idea of the kids bonding with Maria instantly over "Do-Re-Mi" without just a little bit of resistance doesn't really work dramatically regardless of the medium,

The kids were pretty antagonistic toward Maria when she first arrived, including putting a toad in her pocket and a pine cone on her dining room chair. They didn't bond until the night storm, when Maria sang "My Favorite Things". to ease their fears. "Do Re Mi" isn't sung until later, when it's used as a passage of time, while the Captain is away and Maria teaches the kids how to sing.

R61 how come Mostel didn't get an Oscar nod? Was he jealous of Wilder? Well, at least he was nominated for the Golden Globe, which Wilder was not.

[quote]The kids were pretty antagonistic toward Maria when she first arrived, including putting a toad in her pocket and a pine cone on her dining room chair. They didn't bond until the night storm, when Maria sang "My Favorite Things". to ease their fears. "Do Re Mi" isn't sung until later, when it's used as a passage of time, while the Captain is away and Maria teaches the kids how to sing.

That's how it played out in the movie, but not the play. In the play, Maria sings "Do-Re-Mi" and the kids instantly know their scales and adore her.

[quote]The desperate and crazy just don't break into big smiling dance numbers.

And the non-desperate and sane do?

Where did the film go wrong? It was entirely unnecessary, but still they made it. That's where it went wrong.

There was no stage version of the non-musical script, so the musical stage play was unique. But as a movie, it had to stand next to a brilliant classic film that is filled with considerable genius. Inevitably, it fails under the weight of that comparison.

R66 I thought you were going to do a revised rendition of "Where Did We Go Right," from the show.

A perfect example for Strohman's non-cinematic eye: Ulla/Uma's "Springtime For Hitler" costume reveal, where she gloriously spreads her German Eagle wings -- in CLOSEUP!

I have a theater queen friend who despises THE SOUND OF MUSIC because it's 'not true to the stage show,' but adores THE PRODUCERS because it is pretty much the stage show on film, save a cut song here or there.

If they'd tried to make it true to the stage show, there might not be a 20th Century Fox today.

[quote]They're all winking at you. I'm glad they get the joke, but they're not sharing it with anyone. Makes it look like they all had a lot of fun making it, and they all thought they'd get the same hit response from audiences. But they're just too obvious, always trying to squeeze out laughs.

Not only do they scream all their lines at each other, they actually pause after saying funny lines to hold for laughter, the way stage actors have to. The last movie musical I can recall where the cast held for laughs after the punchlines was the Eddie Cantor film Whoopee! made in 1930, when film makers didn't yet realize that talking pictures didn't have to replicate stage timing.

R68 reminds me of this moment in EVITA that always irritated me, when Madonna sings the final chorus of "Don't Cry for Me Argentina," but the camera hasn't cut back to her yet. The music swells at that point, and it calls for a close-up of Eva, which the camera eventually does, but it should'd happened a few seconds earlier, at the moment of swelling. I don't know what Alan Parker was thinking. IMO, he was the wrong choice for this movie. He directed it like PINK FLOYD'S THE WALL, which is just endless montage and wall-to-wall music. I wish Oliver Stone hadn't dropped out.

R4, Bart played his role perfectly; fabulous and magnificent.

R63, I have no idea why Mostel didn't get an Oscar nom for a performance that has us lauding away fifty years later, except that the AMPAS is notorious for preferring dramatic performances over comic ones. Mostel was beaten by Cliff Robertson in the weepy "Charly", and all the Best Actor nominees for that year but one were from dramatic films. The one exception is Ron Moody for "Oliver", a musical that was, well, dramatic rather than comic.

Here's a link to the 1969 Oscars, knock yourself out clucking over what they got wrong.

PS: I just want to say that the one bad performance in the original film was Dick Shawn as an unrealistic and overaged beatnik type. He's the one character in the film who seems like a poorly drawn stereotype rather than a real person, and that's saying a lot when the other characters are people like the pigeon-loving Nazi Franz and Roger DeBris.

Uma was one of the only things I liked about this version, actually. Although it was funny to see noted heterosexual Nathan Lane straining to leer at her, and in her dance number while she looks great she's waving those big feet of hers around in the camera, a little distracting. She's of actual Scandinavian origin though, at least in part, and I thought she was fun.

Frankly? Play adapted to a movie adapted to a play adapted to a movie. That's the problem. It's like Bilbo Baggins says -- butter scraped over too much bread.

Wait I added an extra "play" in there at the beginning -- cut it out!!!

Nathan Lane has ruined every movie he's been in with the exception of Mousehunt which was a good family film.

[quote] Nathan Lane has ruined every movie he's been in with the exception of Mousehunt which was a good family film.

Ahem.

No film has ever made me laugh so hysterically, and I'm referring to the original.

In the original, Mostel and Wilder's characters are individually such train wrecks, and then they team up and it's a 747 wreck! It's mesmerizing to watch, what a disaster they are together, yet how they complete each other in a strange way.

You don't get that feel in the remake at all. Not even slightly.

I couldn't stand to watch the original film. It felt like a Norman Lear sitcom -- all that shouting, especially from Wilder. I had to turn it off.

Try it again someone, R81, after you've had a few drinks and you're watching it with a group.

Don't worry R81 -- Datalounge is here as a safe space for you in your post-Producers trauma. I hope it didn't trigger you.

[quote]I have a theater queen friend who despises THE SOUND OF MUSIC because it's 'not true to the stage show,'

So then he LOVED my version, right?

R81 - you make me laugh. Did you expect something subtle from Mel Brooks?!

[quote]I couldn't stand to watch the original film. It felt like a Norman Lear sitcom -- all that shouting, especially from Wilder. I had to turn it off.

Hey, don't knock Norman Lear -- his 1971 movie COLD TURKEY was some funny shit!

Jane Krakowski would have made a fun Ulla for the film version.

John Barrowman was way too "straight" as the "Springtime for Hitler" soloist. He should have been a lot more goofy.

I saw "The Producers" in its first week of previews, knowing nothing about it other than it was based on the movie, and I laughed the whole way through. It was a great night out, and the audience hadn't been told it would be a monster hit so their responses were genuine.

I also saw The Producers in its final days of previews. Unlike Fanny at R88, I got the distinct impression that the audience was giddy with glee knowing full well we were witnessing the birth of a monster hit. I agree with Fanny though that the show was hilarious and the audience were ecstatic with mirth. I have never laughed harder or longer at any show in my life. I was stunned when I saw the movie on home video and discovered how utterly unfunny it is. I bailed less than halfway through.

p.s. Nathan Lane on stage in The Producers gave one of the all-time great performances in the history of Broadway musicals.

Roger Ebert gave it 3 stars.