Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder Almost Had a Fistfight Over ‘Puttin on the Ritz’
Mel Brooks initially felt that the film’s famous song-and-dance sequence — in which Wilder’s Frankenstein performs “Puttin’ on the Ritz” with Boyle’s monster — “was too silly and would tear the continuity of the film to pieces.”
“We fought and we fought. Our tempers rose and we almost got into a fistfight over it,” Brooks wrote. Finally Wilder calmed him down and ask that they shoot it and consider it, and agreed to cut it if it didn’t work.
It worked. After a test screening, Brooks told Wilder, “Not only does it work, but it may be one of the best things in the whole movie,” according to his memoir. Audiences for the last 50 years have agreed.
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