Remembering Gene Wilder

BY CHARLES BRAMESCO

Generations of viewers first got to know Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, and with a new documentary about the beloved actor, director Ron Frank argues that that’s as good a place to start as any.

The twinkling strains of Pure Imagination open the affectionately wrought Remembering Gene Wilder, transporting the audience back into fond memories of the candyman’s immortal introduction: he hobbles out to meet his adoring public with cane in hand, staggers a bit, starts to stumble, then somersaults himself into a sprightly upright stance. Like  so many of Wilder’s finest moments, it was a surprise to his scene partners proving his nimble versatility as performer. He could mine humor from tension, aggravation or anxiety, but his desire to keep the public on their toes always gave way to a welcoming friendliness in his art as in his life.

In surveying the broad strokes of Wilder’s biography, however, Frank’s film acknowledges that his brilliance often posed challenges for which America wasn’t always ready. The spiky take on Roald Dahl’s famed chocolatier enchanted Roger Ebert, whose four-star review declared the adaptation the finest kids’ picture since The Wizard of Oz. But parents bristled at this Wonka, a mercurial oddball delighting in bad things happening to bad apples. “When [Willy Wonka] came out in the 70s, they thought that what itdid to children – and Gene outlined this in his own book – was cruel,” Franktells the Guardian from his home in Connecticut. “One kid disappears in achocolate tube, another one blows up, one shrinks down. Mothers thought itwasn’t good for their children, and it died in the box office. It was only revived with the home video sales.”

In ways that weren’t always comfortable for the public to accept, the antic and serious coexisted in uneasy cooperation in the work of Wilder, starting from childhood. He often repeated a boyhood memory in which a doctor informed him that with his mother’s heart condition, he had to make her laugh instead of making her angry, or she could drop dead. Wilder grew up under the premise that comedy and pain were close cousins, evident in the development of a screen persona constantly teetering on the brink of a breakdown. (“He was good as the ‘Why is this happening to me?’ guy,” Frank says.) Family stoked his passions along with his nerves, as Wilder set a trackf or the footlights of New York to follow his sister. “The first time he saw his sister act, he was 11 years old, she was onstage doing a solo act,” Frank says.“The lights went down, the audience applauded, she commanded the stage,and Gene was swept away by it all. He was overcome with emotion and saw himself up there, too.”

He entered the entertainment biz just as the hilarity of neurosis was breaking out of Borscht Belt standup stages and into the mainstream, his combination of shtick and personal dysfunction a hit with an America dipping its toe into therapy and pop-psych. After cutting his teeth on and off Broadway, he landed his first film role in Bonnie and Clyde as a hostage who develops Stockholm syndrome in record time before his captors give him the heave-ho; he played a doctor wrapped up in amour fou with a sheep for nebbish extraordinaire Woody Allen in Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* (But Were Afraid to Ask). At the same time, beneath the mania, “he had a very sincere gentle quality”, Frank says.

Wilder got to show off both sides to himself with his name-making role in The Producers, the first collaboration with frequent director and life long friend Mel Brooks. Frank structures his film with Wilder as narrator,providing voice over from beyond the grave via the audiobook of his memoir. “I did not want to see another interview-type film with Gene,” he says. “He died in 2016, so we didn’t even have that option. We let him tell his own story, first-person.” In one such anecdote, the Embassy Pictures head, Joseph Levine, ordered Brooks to fire Wilder, who had been deemed off-putting and insufficiently famous. “You bet”, replied Brooks, only to continue shooting with Wilder until they had so much footage, it would’ve been impossible to start over. “That’s how Mel worked,” Frank laughs. “He would listen to producers, nod in agreement, and then not do anything they said.”

In addition to sharing a great love of French wines, Wilder and Brooks gave the world some of the most indelible comedies defining a bawdy, subversive era. Young Frankenstein – thrown together by Wilder’s agent, casting his only three clients in the lead roles – allowed both men to indulge their love ofold Hollywood by meticulously recreating it, the studio suits persuaded to allow black-and-white cinematography. Blazing Saddles gestured to a different sector of the past while looking forward, its satire on race relations and the western using now-outmoded language to put forth progressive ideas about prejudice. “I get asked a lot if Blazing Saddles could be made today,” Frank says. “I think it depends more on who the audience is. Some tastes and sensitivities are so different now, that even though it pokes fun atracism, there’s a risk that it might not be seen that way.” ...

“When we talked to Alan Alda, he shared a story about worrying before one of the films he directed came out, what the critics might say,” Frank recalls. “He was commiserating with Gene, who told him, ‘What difference will it make? If they pan the film, so what? Big deal! You made it, it’s finished, it’s over. Be proud of it.’ He shared that comfort with him. Gene knew how to live life well.”