AARP Bulletin September 2014
My assignment was to get Mel to tell me a funny story about the making of Young Frankenstein. He threw in a bonus bit from, of all movies, The Elephant Man.
“We were shooting Young Frankenstein, the scene where Madeline Kahn arrives at the castle and Marty Feldman falls instantly and inexplicably in love with her. And there’s this absolutely crazy shot where he starts trying to bite the head off of her fox fur.
Well, we couldn’t get that shot because everybody kept cracking up. I mean, Marty was just so funny, with those hard-boiled-egg eyes. The actors were breaking up, the crew was breaking up. We did 30 takes, none good. Finally, I sent a guy out to Robinson’s department store on Wilshire Boulevard to buy 100 white handkerchiefs. I don’t know, it cost me something like 150 bucks. So he came back and I gave the white handkerchiefs to the crew and everybody else around — not the actors, of course, because that would have looked ridiculous.
And I made a speech: ‘Look, when Marty Feldman bites the head off the fox, stick this white handkerchief in your mouth, so you won’t laugh and spoil the scene.’ On the 32nd take, the actors finally held it together, and I turned around, and I saw a sea of white handkerchiefs, and I knew I had a hit.
I produced The Elephant Man, which was, of course, a serious film. It took five hours to get poor John Hurt into that makeup and another five hours to get him out.
But he had to have lunch, so one day we put that Elephant Man cloth over his head and took him to a little restaurant near the Shepperton Studios in England. He had this tiny side pocket in his mouth where we could slip in some little pieces of Dover sole.
We tried to hide him in a booth where no one could see, but then this one lady came by, peered in, screamed and fainted! So I started hissing with this desperate whisper, “Get the hood on him! Get the hood on him, quick!” and I paid the bill and we all ran out.
It was just like The Elephant Man for real, only John didn’t think to say “I am not an animal!'”
Bill Newcott At Large 