By Stephen Silver
In the 1979 film “The Frisco Kid,” Gene Wilder (left) plays a Polish rabbi alongside Harrison Ford. (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images, via JTA)
While filming “The Producers” in 1967, Mel Brooks recalls a studio executive approaching and saying, “The curly-haired guy — he’s funny looking. Fire him.”
Brooks responded he would do so, but never did it. And when “The Producers” came out it became a classic, in no small part because of the Academy Award-nominated performance of that “curly-haired guy,” otherwise known as Gene Wilder.
That story is one of many retold in “Remembering Gene Wilder,” a new documentary about the comedic actor who died in August of 2016.
The relationship between Wilder and Brooks is a key subject of the film. The two worked together on three classic films: “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” and were close friends.
But according to Ron Frank, director of the documentary, it’s notable that Wilder’s Jewish comedic sensibilities came from a very different place than Brooks.
“His style was a little bit different. He wasn’t a Borscht Belt comedian, but he certainly learned from them,” Frank said. “Take Mel Brooks, a New York Jew through and through, and pair him with Gene Wilder, a Wisconsin Jew.”
In his Milwaukee childhood home, Wilder grew up watching on TV such Jewish comedians as Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis. But Frank said he himself “wasn’t a comedian — he was a comedy actor. He played it real. Most of his performances, he didn’t force the comedy, he didn’t force the humor, he was more or less himself, and that made it real and funnier.”
Born Jerome Silberman, Wilder first developed his comedic gifts at a young age when his mother became ill and a doctor told young Gene to try to make her laugh.
“Jokes are in the genes when it comes to Jewish comedy,” said Frank. “I’d say that’s helped Jews survive for centuries.”
After a stint in the U.S. Army, Wilder headed to New York’s theater scene and began his movie career in the late 1960s. His debut was the 1967 classic “Bonnie and Clyde,” in which he played a hostage of the titular couple. His second film, the following year, was “The Producers.”
Wilder continued to star in popular movies throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, including the iconic 1971 children’s film “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” and a series of comedies with Richard Pryor. In the 1990s, he appeared in a pair of “Will & Grace” episodes,” one of which won him an Emmy.
Wilder died at the age of 83 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. Frank said the documentary had been in the works since 2018.
Perhaps Wilder’s most Jewish role was in 1979’s “The Frisco Kid,” in which he plays a rabbi who travels from Poland to the American West and meets an outlaw played by Harrison Ford. Wilder’s character sports a black hat and bushy beard, and chants a convincing rendition of the end of the weekday morning prayer service, with correct Hebrew pronunciation, while wearing tefillin and a tallit.
In reality, Wilder’s Jewish identity was mostly secular. “I feel very Jewish and I feel very grateful to be Jewish,” Wilder said in the 2005 book “Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish” (Crown) by Abigail Pogrebin. “But I don’t believe in God or anything to do with the Jewish religion.”
In the documentary, Brooks, now 97, shares many stories from his work with Wilder.
“I don’t think we could tell this story without him,” Frank said of Brooks. “Mel said, ‘I’ll give you a half an hour,’ and we ended up staying an hour. And he told stories that I wish I could put in the film, but it would probably be a three-hour movie.”
Other interview subjects include Jewish film historian Ben Mankiewicz, singer Harry Connick, Jr., actress Carol Kane, actor Alan Alda and Baltimore-based actress Rain Pryor.
The archival footage extensively features Wilder with his third wife, the Jewish comedy legend and “Saturday Night Live” original cast member Gilda Radner, who died of cancer in 1989. Frank said the couple’s often unhappy marriage was one of the things he hadn’t known about Wilder coming into the project.
Wilder’s own voice-over from his audiobook serves as narration for the film, and it contains a wealth of clips, whether from his movies, numerous talk show appearances or home movies.
Frank noted that Jewish audiences, in particular, have reacted quite positively to the film, including a test screening held in Beverly Hills with Brooks in attendance.
“It appealed to them in all sorts of ways, and it’s not necessarily Jewish jokes,” Frank said. “When they laugh really hard, you know it’s great when the laughs cover the following lines. That’s how long the laughs last. That’s what happened there.”
But Frank said he expects that to carry over to general audiences. “People just love Gene,” he said, “all across the country, Jewish or not Jewish.”
A Philadelphia-based writer, Stephen Silver wrote this article for the JTA global Jewish news source.
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