This Clown is Crying on the Outside

Writers are often told to write "what you know," but success may depend on writing "who you know" or at least "who you want to cast."

The late-great Anne Bancroft (The Graduate, Jesus of Nazareth, The Miracle Worker, The Turning Point, Agnes of God) wrote and directed this story about a fat man tormented by his weight and trying, in desperation, to "take off those unwanted pounds." It's not hard to imagine why a studio would trust Bancroft with this story. She had a Tony (Two for the Seesaw), an Emmy ("Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man"), an Oscar (The Miracle Worker) and was the legendary "Mrs. Robinson" from The Graduate. She had 1978 Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for The Turning Point.

How do you say "no" to talent like that?

But there was a catch: What bankable star would want to play a fat man, let alone someone fat enough to take the title role in a movie named "Fatso"?

The answer was Dom DeLuise, whose star was on the rise. For the last decade, DeLuise had made a name for himself as a sidekick character audiences would pay to see. Bancroft wrote him a script that would finally give one of the best second-bananas in the business the liquid hydrogen he'd need to launch his own shot at the stars. If nothing else, the project had cojones.

PREMISE

After his cousin dies of a heart-attack, a similarly-obese Dominick DiNapoli (Dom Deluise) tries to lose weight. His sister, Antoinette (Anne Bancroft) and his brother, Frankie (Ron Carey) are worried that if he doesn't drop some pounds, he'll end up just as dead. So Dominick goes on a diet. He's going to turn this whole thing around. But the more he tries to do it, the more the food calls out to him - even in the middle of the night. In fact, the more weight he tries to lose, the more obsessed he becomes about eating.

That's when fate throws him a bone.

Meeting Lydia (Candice Azzara), Dominick falls head over heels in love. In fact, this woman so grabs him that food takes a distant second. Dominick may have found the cure for obesity: love. But what should happen to his hopes and dreams if anything should happen to her?

IS THIS MOVIE ANY GOOD?

It's hard to reconstruct how people felt about a film more than 25 years ago, but if box-office numbers count, Fatso was a flop. Its domestic take of $7 million (today's equivalent of $18 million) gave it a rank of 70 for the year, below The Last Flight of Noah's Ark, Saturn 3 and The Formula. Given its casting, expectations were just a little bit higher.

But does that make this a terrible film?

Ironically, Anne Bancroft's script and direction, while a little maudlin at times, rises to the occasion of telling a story the public was simply unwilling to enjoy. The idea of a big teddy bear of a man, hurting inside because he feels loved by the very food that's killing him, is beyond poignant. But this is a love story, and love stories are not about reality. They're about the fantasy of falling in love. That's why they're generally populated by sexy people in the prime of their lives. It's also why these people dwell in digs that would make your jaw drop. The correlation between romantic comedy and the tendency to bathe the production in mental-health colors is anything but accidental. In the meantime, neither DeLuise nor Candice Azzara are exactly inspiring in that respect.

More to the point, in terms of audience reaction, this is not the Dom DeLuise you see in all the Mel Brooks and Burt Reynolds films. This is a much more morose and pathetic figure. His pathos may be real but it's like paying to see Schwarzeneggar perform Shakespeare. Even if, on some planet, Arnie could pronounce the words without sounding like Henry Kissinger gargling marbles, nobody wants to see Shakespearean Arnie any more than they want to see a crying clown. It may be remarkable when Leonardo DiCaprio can be trained to speak like a South African, or when Jodie Foster talks like a Brit. But the magic act of sounding like someone else - after spending so much time and effort to create a public persona - is a waste of resources.

Sam Elliott makes a great cowboy. I'll go for any character he has a mind to create, as long as it's an extension of the cowboy - including soldiers, right-wing congressmen, prosecutors, construction workers, whatever. If you've got some macho to sell, Sam Elliott is your man. If, on the other hand, you're selling the opposite - maybe a self-doubting, transvestite, pacifist, bipolar, suicidal mathematician who wets himself when he gets a papercut - Sam Elliott is hardly your first choice.

I'm not saying that Dom DeLuise can never do any serious acting. What I'm saying is that it's a myth to suggest that the only serious acting is acting that's sappy, maudlin soap-operatic mush. On an episode of Law and Order, funnyman Martin Shore played a rapist - and a chilling one at that. But he didn't do it by scrapping his public persona. He did it by being a toned-down version of his public mask, but in a context in which that mask proved creepy. There are lots of things Dom DeLuise could do to widen his range, but none of them should force him to stop being Dom DeLuise.

As indicated by the title, Fatso hints at a certain amount of comedy, but it produces too much angst. It's as if DeLuise and Bancroft had conspired to give us serious drama, even while exploiting DeLuise's celebrity. It would have been better to have made this funny - and sad - the way Forrest Gump modulated between hilarity and weepy-eyed tragedy. Even 25 years ago, I wasn't ready for the slacker version of Death of a Salesman.

POST-REVIEW: THE CRAZY, WILD, AMAZING BACKSTORY

While he had taken on a serious role in the 1964 melodrama, Failsafe, the TV work he got out of it - including 1966 stints on "The Munsters", "Please Don't Eat the Daisies", "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E." and the Dean Martin Summer Show quickly established him as a comedic character in films like The Glass Bottom Boat (1966), The Busy Body 1967) and What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968). This got him his own his TV gig, "The Dom DeLuise Show" (1968) which, in turn, put him on the radar of a rising Mel Brooks, who just happened to be married to - you guessed it - Anne Bancroft.

In 1968, Brooks was poised to make his directorial debut with The Producers. His own career, as a writer, had gone back to 1949's "The Admiral Broadway Revue" - which had launched a decade of writing for TV ("Your Show of Shows", "Caesar's Hour", "The Man in the Moon", "Play of the Week" and Arthur Hiller's Inside Danny Baker. In the early 60s, Brooks had parlayed his writing into some TV stints as an actor on "The New Steve Allen Show" and The Critic but Brooks' real gains were probably made as a writer on Get Smart, which lasted from 1965 to 1970.

With Get Smart, Brooks had gotten the recognition he needed to pitch his first project, The Producers, which would become his first collaboration with a rising Gene Wilder. Like Brooks, Wilder had been trying to break into acting - and had landed some stints on TV shows like "The Defenders", "Armstrong Circle Theater" and "The DuPont Show of the Week" - but his real break had come with the offbeat role of an abducted undertaker in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Ironically, Wilder had previously cast for the Broadway play, Mother Courage and Her Children, along with Anne Bancroft, making him a natural choice for her to recommend to her husband when Brooks shot The Producers.

It was the success of The Producers that catapaulted both Brooks and Wilder to the star level. In 1969, Brooks won an Oscar for Best Screenplay while Wilder was nominated for Best Actor. When Wilder went on to make Start the Revolution Without Me (1970), Brooks cast DeLuise as the zany Father Fyodor in his adaptation of the Twelve Chairs. It turned out to be a break-out role for him, gaining DeLuise two more movie deals and steady TV work. Ironically, while Brooks was nominated by the WGA for Best Adapted Screenplay, he wouldn't do a follow-up film until 1974 - after Wilder's success with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and an all-star stint in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask (1972).

In 1974, Brooks re-teamed with Wilder on Blazing Saddles - a western spoof based on a story by Andrew Bergman (So Fine, Fletch, Honeymoon in Vegas). The film had 5 writers, including Bergman, Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Alan Uger and a stand-up comedian Brooks had originally hoped to cast as the first black sheriff of his all-white town: Richard Pryor.

DeLuise was cast for the film's climactic sequence, which brought him more TV work while Brooks and Wilder went to work on Wilder's script for Young Frankenstein, another huge hit. But despite the film's success, which netted Brooks and Wilder an Oscar nomination, Wilder and Brooks split up over issues of creative credit (It was Wilder who wrote the film and brought it to Brooks.)

In 1975, when Wilder wrote and directed his own feature, Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother - and cast Young Frankenstein stars: Madeline Kahn and Marty Feldman - DeLuise came aboard. It was like a Mel Brooks feature without Mel Brooks. It was also a box-office disappointment, perhaps the best argument that Wilder's gifts as a writer, director and star were not enough to make up for the loss of Brooks. Rather than reconcile with Brooks, Wilder found an on-screen collaborator - Richard Pryor. Together, Wilder and Pryor would hit the big time with Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980), though their last collaboration - See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) - came up a little short (#27 for the year, with a domestic gross of $46 million - today's equivalent of $77 million).

When Brooks, in turn, tried to direct a hit without casting Wilder, he had mixed success. In 1976, when he shot "Mel Brooks'" Silent Movie, he not only put his name in the title; he cast himself as the lead. Perhaps hoping to draw upon previous success, he flanked himself with Feldman and DeLuise. This trio, representing a group of filmmakers, recruit a group of stars to be in their silent film: including Anne Bancroft, Paul Newman, Liza Minelli, James Caan - and a rising new star of buddy films: Burt Reynolds. Despite positive critical reviews, the film did modestly at the box office. By contrast, Silver Streak hit #4 for the year.

When Brooks went on to his next film, High Anxiety (1977), he again cast himself in the lead (and the film went to #12) but DeLuise crossed the street and appeared in The World's Greatest Lover, a spoof of Valentino films, written, directed and produced by its star, Gene Wilder. Ironically, what was Valentino if not the first sex symbol of "silent film?" You can call this one "Gene Wilder's Silent Movie."

This is where Dom DeLuise got off the bus. While DeLuise would team up with Brooks on future projects (History of the World: Part I, Spaceballs, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights) and team up again with Wilder on Haunted Honeymoon (1984), in 1978, DeLuise paired up with Burt Reynolds in The End, beginning the first of a series of Burt Reynolds including: Smokey and the Bandit II, The Cannonball Run, The Best Little Wh*rehouse in Texas, Cannonball Run II and All Dogs Go to Heaven.