SYNOPSIS

Max Bialystock is a failing Broadway producer who has been reduced to wearing a cardboard belt and taking money from elderly women in exchange for fulfilling their sexual fantasies. His luck changes for the better when he meets Leo Bloom, a neurotic accountant who inadvertently gives him an idea of how to turn failure into fortune -- solicit a huge financial investment for a play, produce a guaranteed flop, and pocket the investors' money. Armed with Springtime for Hitler, the worst play they can find, Max and Leo set out to conquer Broadway--by closing in one night.

Director: Mel Brooks

Producer: Joseph E. Levine, Sidney Glazier
Screenplay: Mel Brooks
Cinematography: Joseph Coffey
Editing: Ralph Rosenblum
Music: Mel Brooks, John Morris
Cast: Zero Mostel (Max Bialystock), Gene Wilder (Leo Bloom), Christopher Hewett (Roger De Bris), Kenneth Mars (Franz Liebkind), Dick Shawn (Lorenzo Saint DuBois), Lee Meredith (Ulla), Andreas Voutsinas (Carmen Ghia).
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Why THE PRODUCERS Is Essentials

The Producers plays like a demented parody of the Hollywood musical, particularly the ones where Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney decide to "put on a show in the old barn." It's also a blistering assault on the dubious ethics at work on Broadway and in the film industry.

Filled with some of the funniest dialogue in contemporary screen comedy, The Producers reconnected audiences with a tradition of American film humor that had not been seen since the heyday of W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers. Furthermore, it encouraged other comedy writers like Woody Allen to take up directing in order to express their own comic vision. The film's freewheeling style and unique mixture of sight and sound gags, vaudeville routines, and blackout sketches pushed the envelope with potentially tasteless jokes and humor.

Critics and audiences who saw The Producers during its scattershot theatrical run obviously relished the film's irreverent humor and it quickly acquired a cult following in its subsequent repertory and college screenings. It also established Mel Brooks, already a well-known television comedy writer (Your Show of Shows) and producer (Get Smart), as a promising film director and won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Brooks would continue to develop his "anything goes" style of humor which audiences would come to expect and love in such films as Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974). It was this anarchic comic approach that would inspire future filmmakers like John Landis (National Lampoon's Animal House, 1978) and Jim Abrahams, Jerry and David Zucker (Airplane!, 1980).

The Producers was responsible for making Gene Wilder a star and the role of Leo Bloom earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

For Mel Brooks, The Producers was the gift that kept on giving. Thirty years after its theatrical release, he turned it into a smash hit Broadway musical. Following the musical's success, another film version was shot in 2005 starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.

by Andrea Passafiume & Scott McGee