“Max will say a joke and slam the door,” she explains. “Or Leo and Ulla will be kissing and the door will open and they almost get caught. Franz Liebkind falls down the stairs and yells ‘I broke my leg!’ and Bialystock shuts the door. Sometimes it’s not funny if the door opens from left to right; it may be funnier the other way. So I’ve worked closely with Mark on all of these doors.”
Tony Award-winning costume designer William Ivey Long suggests that working on the movie has been like “a graduate course in film design. Because I’m learning from the production designer and the sound designer and I’m asking a million questions,” he explains. “It’s as if I’m being paid to take this great graduate course in satire and magic.”
Among the differences he observes between theater and film may be costume “wearability.” When designing for stage actors and dancers who may appear in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of live performances, the costumes simply need to hold up longer than an outfit that is needed for a day or two of filming. That may be one of the reasons why Long had so much fun designing a wardrobe for the statuesque Thurman.
“As Ulla, Uma gets to sashay a bit. But she doesn’t have to do eight shows a week for a year or two on Broadway, so we’ve made things skintight. There’s nothing between her and these clothes…Perfume, maybe,” he laughs.
Thurman returns the compliment with “William approaches it like an artist. He does beautiful paintings of you as the character.”
Ulla’s dazzling blue dresses, one a deep turquoise and the other a crystal blue evening gown, drew applause from the crew when Thurman first made her arrival on the set.
But in contrast to Ulla’s sexy, romantic wardrobe, Long also designed the navy blue costumes for the little old ladies whose checks bankroll all of Bialystock’s productions. “Honestly, they’re all based on my great Aunt Mary from Baltimore,” Long explains. “She wore this lace dress that had a little capelet sewn in. So as a child, I was always waiting for her to fly.”
Adapting Bloom’s imaginary showgirls from stage to screen was also a kick for Long. “Twenty beautiful girls wearing nothing but pearls are actually wearing about 20 pounds of nothing but pearls,” he comments. “I made a nude leotard for each lady, and then I drew a sort of pearl corset on them, with all the jewels sewn in place. It’s totally see-through. So it may look light as a feather, but it’s actually a lot of pearls.”
It took an army of dancers, actors, musicians, designers, crew members and Broadway lovers to bring The Producers to life on the screen. Though the beloved characters have lived in his head for almost forty years, Brooks is thrilled to once again bring his brainchild to audiences in yet another incarnation. In the words of Max Bialystock, “Worlds are turned on such thoughts.”
Brooks concludes, “Life is often very difficult and very hard to live through. But for two hours you really can forget your worries. You really can live in this delicious cloud of musical comedy.”
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