A few notes on last night's viewing of Young Frankenstein

• Brooks was really unsure about my favorite scene.  According to the "Making of" documentary included with the DVD (which is mostly Wilder, Brooks did not participate), Brooks called it a 'conceit' to Wilder's face, but backed down when Wilder reacted strongly.  An entry in TVTropes says Brooks only decided to keep the scene after seeing the crew struggling to not laugh during filming.
• "For safety's sake - DON'T HUMILIATE HIM!"

• Those cool laboratory sets?  Some are from the original Frankenstein movies.

• In previous viewings I found Frau Blücher tiresome.  Now I find her hilarious.
• "He was MY BOYFRIEND!"

• Teri Garr, man.  Wow.  One of a very small number of modern black and white screen goddesses.  See under "The camera is in love with..." (Interesting compare and contrast: Patti Boyd in A Hard Day's Night).  


• This movie looks great.  In the DVD commentary cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld explains that the overall photography was intended to be like the original Universal Pictures films, but - at Brooks' insistence - more so.  But when they did interior close-ups, having established the settings, they would zoom in and put a lot of light around the actors.  This brought to mind an episode in Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By in which a group of silent movie enthusiasts brought von Sternberg into a London studio in the 1960s to learn how he set up a shot, and were stunned as he transformed a local model into a luminous near-Dietrich:

• Ok, in my teen years I sort of missed the significance of the book in secret library:  How I did it, by Victor Frankenstein.  Not available on Amazon, but Goodreads reviewers clearly enjoyed it.

Also, I always wondered who that great character actor was:

Gene Hackman in Young Frankenstein