dir: Mel Brooks
THE MAKING OF SILENT MOVIE
Cracked #138, December 1976
a: John Severin
This, as far as I'm concerned, is when Mel Brooks started to jump the shark. His movies worked best when he had Gene Wilder as the star, his spoofs looked like the real thing, and he wasn't the star himself. He's funny in supporting roles but as the lead character it doesn't work. People slightly younger than me swear by Spaceballs but I never really liked it. It didn't have his usual repertory cast and and he seemed to feel the need to do Star Wars. Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein worked because he grew up with westerns and monster movies. He was 51 when Star Wars came out.
But that's neither here nor there. The plot is simply that it's silent and it's about him making a silent movie. Mel Funn (Mel Brooks) pitches his idea a movie executive (Sid Caesar), then with Dom Bell (Dom Deluise, and Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman), they try to get famous actors like Paul Newman, Burt Reynolds, Bernadette Peters, and Anne Bancroft (who Mel Brooks was married to in real life) to be in it to no avail. It gets made and shown to an audience. But like I said, it doesn't look like a real silent movie.
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