‘Remembering Gene Wilder’ highlights a Jewish comic genius

Speaking about the unique qualities of the late American-Jewish comedic actor/writer/director Gene Wilder in the new documentary, Remembering Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, who directed Wilder in a number of movies, says, “He’s naïve, he’s innocent, he’s sweet, simple and honest, but when he got excited, he was a volcano. You’ll never find another Gene Wilder.”

Brooks is one of many interviewees in the movie, which is being shown as part of a diverse and exciting program at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, which runs from January 11-25. The festival will open with James Hawes’s One Life, a fact-based drama about Nicholas Winton (Anthony Hopkins), a British man who helped start the Kindertransport rescue program in World War II. The closing-night movie will be Avi Nesher’s The Monkey House, a literary mystery starring Adir Miller. The festival features a mix of the latest and best features and documentaries of Jewish interest from all over the world, programmed by the festival’s executive director, Igor Shteyrenberg. The Israeli movies include Ayelet Menahemi’s Seven Blessings, the 2023 Ophir Award winner, and Amit Ulman’s brilliant Hebrew hip-hop noir opera, The City, with multihyphenate Ulman in attendance.

Remembering Gene Wilder, which has won awards at a number of festivals, will also be screened at this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival in January. The documentary will be released theatrically in several US cities in the spring and there are tentative plans to bring the film to Israel later this year.

Wilder had an unusual and wonderful career in Hollywood comedies and starred in many classics. He is best known today for a trio of movies he made with Brooks, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein (which he co-wrote). He also had a show-stopping turn as a gynecologist who falls in love with a sheep in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask, and the lead role in the musical, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. He went on to write and direct a number of films, including The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother and The Woman in Red. Late in his career, he teamed up with Richard Pryor for a few caper comedies such as Silver Streak and Stir Crazy.

But despite his success in front of and behind the camera, Wilder may not be as well known today among young audiences as some other funnymen of his era. The duo behind Remembering Gene Wilder, Peabody Award-winning Ron Frank and Glenn Kirschbaum (Frank is credited as director and Kirschbaum as writer, but the two say they collaborated on every aspect of the film) were approached by producers Julie Nimoy (yes, she’s Leonard’s daughter) and David Knight to make a film about Wilder’s struggles with Alzheimer’s Disease, which he developed late in life. “We decided we would take it on, but we agreed we would do something much bigger than that, it was going to be his life and career.” Said Kirschbaum, “Our movie was done with love, we have so much respect for Gene... Wilder was widely respected, even loved, by his colleagues. You can feel the love in every interview.” In addition to Brooks, the interviewees include Wilder’s widow, Karen Boyer, as well as such admirers as Harry Connick Jr. and Alan Alda. There is also archival footage of interviews with comedians Gilda Radner, to whom Wilder was married until her tragically early death from cancer, and Richard Pryor.

Born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee, Wilder was told as a child by a doctor not to argue with his ailing mother, who had a heart condition, and to make her laugh. The filmmakers and many of the interviewees speculate that this was the key to Wilder’s attraction to acting and comedy, as well as a major factor in the nerves and neuroses that plagued him for much of his life.

Gene Wilder's "brushes with irony"

In recorded excerpts from Wilder’s memoirs and interviews, Wilder speaks about “mysterious brushes with irony” that shaped his fate, among them being cast, or, as he says, “miscast” by Jerome Robbins in 1963 to appear in a Broadway stage production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage opposite Anne Bancroft, who was then dating Mel Brooks (they later married). Had he not gotten the part, he says, he might never have met Brooks. “And if I hadn’t met Mel Brooks,” muses Wilder, “I would probably be a patient in some neuropsychiatric hospital, looking through the bars of a physical therapy window as I made wallets.”

Bancroft knew that Brooks was writing a script for a comedy that was originally called Springtime for Hitler, a title that was later changed to The Producers, and thought Wilder had an innocent quality that would be perfect for the lead character, Leo Bloom. The rest, as they say, is history, and it’s as hard to imagine The Producers without Wilder’s sweetly frazzled lunacy as it is to think what the movie would be like without Zero Mostel as wild, rapacious Max Bialystock. The crazy, perfect chemistry between the two made the movie into a cult classic, which inspired the Broadway musical version that followed decades later.

“It was a marriage made in heaven,” recalls Brooks of the Wilder-Mostel pairing. “It was the first movie I ever directed. It was like getting into a big canoe and gliding down the river. That’s how easy they made it for me. And sometimes they ad-libbed stuff that was a lot better than stuff I had written.” But the film’s producer, Joseph E. Levine, didn’t share Brooks’s high opinion of Wilder, and wanted him fired after seeing early footage from the film, telling the director to replace him with a “leading-man type.” Brooks reveals the secret of how he made so many quirky movies in Hollywood, explaining, “This is the first time I said it, and in every single movie, I said to the head of the studio, ‘Yeah, you’re right. You got it,’ and never, ever did what they wanted me to do.”

Another fascinating anecdote in the movie is how Brooks was unconvinced by Wilder’s idea to have Dr. Frankenstein (Wilder) and his monster (Peter Boyle) dance to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in Young Frankenstein. Wilder fought for it, and it is unquestionably one of the comic highlights of the film. Said Kirschbaum, “When we heard something great, some nugget of information we never knew, that was how we decided what went into the film... It’s those kinds of stories, we just wanted to make sure they weren’t lost to history.”

The documentary also details the poignant third act to Wilder’s life, in which he married Karen Boyer, who was a clinical supervisor for the New York League for the Hard of Hearing. They met when he was playing a deaf character in See No Evil, Hear No Evil and was doing research. He ended up thriving with her as he spent years writing novels and painting watercolors, and taking occasional acting jobs in film, television, and theater. Eventually, when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, Karen was by his side, easing him through the ravages of the disease. Even when it was in its late stages, he was still his kind, befuddled self, and a clip of him attending his nephew’s wedding not long before his death is very moving.

Frank said, “He didn’t like the [movie] business, he hated the business. He was a creative... He wanted to do what he wanted to do. He wanted to experience creativity. And when he didn’t do it in acting, he did it in writing, he did it in painting, and ultimately in theater.”

Although they learned a great deal about Wilder making the film, something about this comic genius remained elusive. Said Frank, “Gene always seemed to be hiding something in a lot of his movies. There was a sort of mystery about him, on screen and off.”