听 We still don't know why creator Mel Brooks decided to remake his 1968 classic The Producers. Perhaps it was because Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick had made it a success on stage, playing dodgy Broadway impresarios who figure a plan to make money out of a flop musical. Sadly, life didn't imitate art when the film hit cinemas. In fact, director Susan Stroman managed to transform "a smash into a dud" with ticket sales amounting to less than half of its $45m budget.
A Bunch Of Fruits
Matthew Broderick rehearses the number I Wanna Be A Producer in a patchy Analysis Of A Scene featurette. Susan Stroman puts him through his paces, having worked as a choreographer for many years before turning her hand to directing. Meanwhile production designer Mark Friedberg chats a little about his vision for the sets with reference to Singin' In The Rain for its balance of "stylisation and reality". There's also word from costume designer William Ivey Long who says that the dancing "girls in pearls" are actually wearing strings of white grapes dipped in opalescent nail polish. It keeps the girls on their toes because they can't sit down... But other than this little titbit, there's precious little in the way of nuts and bolts info here. Brooks makes himself scarce and likewise, leading players Lane and Broderick get zero talk time.
Eight deleted scenes are mostly extended versions of the big song-and-dance numbers. Lanes does his full rendition of King Of Broadway and a wild-eyed Will Ferrell does a brief reprise at the end of his Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop. Other than that, Bloom (Broderick) and Bialystock (Lane) drink a toast to failure at the Astor Bar and the latter plays a cheeky game of hide and seek with his crotchety sugar mommy "Hold Me, Touch Me" Eileen Essell. Elsewhere, an outtakes reel sees Lane groping Essell a little more than is necessary...
Singing From The Hymn Sheet
"Surprisingly Eileen liked it when Nathan got physical with her," insists Stroman in her feature commentary. Often it sounds like she's reading from a script and this gives the track an uncomfortable, stilted feel. However, it also means she's quite efficient on the technical details and occasionally finds time to drop in the odd anecdote. She reveals how the character of Bialystock was based on someone Mel Brooks had known, but she too remembers working with a fly-by-night producer who had a penchant for furniture with wheels. "One day I went to pick up my cheque," she explains, "He was gone - and so was the furniture."
The same principle applies to this DVD, which feels hurriedly cobbled together and skims over the nitty-gritty of actually making the film. Apart from that, the lack of any contribution from Mel Brooks and the headlining stars confirms the status of the film as a cut-price understudy for its much more famous predecessor.
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