Behind-The-Scenes Stories About Nostalgic Comedies That Made Us Say, 'Wait, Really?'

In Wild and Crazy Guys, author Nick de Semlyen writes that Candy enjoyed making Steve Martin laugh on the set of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. De Semlyen also reveals one of Candy's most touching lines in the film was improvised:

Martin and Candy, clad in a topcoat and parka, respectively, were freezing their butts off. But they knew they were making gold. Between takes, Candy would crack up Martin by pretending to act out a cheesy gladiator movie, moving his lips in a way that made it sound like he was dubbed.

And Martin was particularly impressed by one bit of improv by his co-star: During the scene where Del reveals that his wife has died and explains that’s why he attaches himself to people, Candy added the line, “But this time I couldn’t let go.” Long after Candy’s death, Martin would get a tear in his eye remembering it.

Mel Brooks is known for pushing the envelope, and it’s natural that his films would do the same. Blazing Saddles truly pulled no punches with either its satire of prejudice or its raunchier moments, but there was one joke Brooks pulled at the last minute.

When Lili Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn) seduces Bart the sheriff (Cleavon Little) in the dark, Von Shtupp asks Bart if a certain size-related stereotype is actually true. A confused Bart responds, "I hate to disillusion you, ma'am, but you're sucking on my arm."

1974's Young Frankenstein is bursting with memorable gags, quotable lines, and delightfully weird characters. Arguably, the funniest scene comes near the end, when Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) puts on a soft shoe routine with his monster (Peter Boyle). 

However, when Wilder was writing the script for the film, he had to fight with director Mel Brooks to keep this routine in the final draft. As he recalled to NPR in 2005:

...I was writing every day, and then Mel would come to the house and read what I'd written. And then he'd say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, yeah, OK. But we need a villain or we need whatever it was." And we'd talk a little bit and then he'd go away, and I would write all the next day. And he'd come and look at it.

And then one day when he read the pages I had written about Dr. Frankenstein and the creature sing and dance to "Puttin' On The Ritz." He said, "Are you crazy? This is frivolous. You're just being frivolous." Well, my temperature rose, and after 20 minutes or so of arguing, my color went from red to, I think, blue or purple. I was - started screaming and then all of a sudden, he said, "OK, it's in."

And I said, "Well, why did you put me through this?" And he said, "I wasn't sure if it was right. And I thought if you didn't argue for it, then it was wrong. And if you did, it was right. So you convinced me."

“The wisdom in town was that I had made a terrible mistake,” Frank Price, former Columbia chairman, told Vanity Fair vis-à-vis his greenlighting Ghostbusters. Even the Columbia studio executives were divided, with some viewing the project as a "horrendously" expensive risk, given how much special effects were required, something virtually unheard of for comedies at the time. 

Tom Shales, co-author of Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, recalled, “This was not Animal House or Caddyshack or Stripes. Those were all little movies. This was a big, big gamble.”

Fortunately, Ghostbusters ended up being the second highest grossing film of 1984 and is still today in the top 50 highest grossing movies of all time.

Before he became a film director, Jonathan Lynn received a law degree from Cambridge University. On My Cousin Vinny's DVD commentary, he talks about how important it was to him to get the law exactly right during the movie's courtroom scenes:

I get terribly irritated when I see films in which the legal procedure is obviously wrong. I’m very pleased with the fact that, although this is heightened for comedic purposes, everything you see legally in this film could happen and is approximately correct. Which, by the way, makes it the more frightening.

Lynn's meticulous attention to detail paid off. Lawyers and judges largely regard My Cousin Vinny as one of the most accurate law movies ever made, and it is often used in law schools as an educational aid. The American Bar Association ranked the comedy No. 3 on its list of the 25 Greatest Legal Movies. 

Additionally, John Marshall Law School professor Alberto Bernabe lauded Vinny Gambini's (Joe Pesci) knowledge of how to correctly do several important things that aren't typically taught in law school:

[How to] interview clients, to gather facts, to prepare a theory of a case, to negotiate, to know when to ask a question and when to remain quiet, to cross examine a witness forcefully (but with charm) in order to expose the weaknesses in their testimony.

In the 1970s, Rick Moranis was a fixture on Canada's SCTV sketch comedy show, and he starred in some of the '80s' best comedies. Spaceballs' Dark Helmet is one of his most ridiculous and beloved characters.

"Rick would try and break me up just before we would do a take, but he would drop the visor," recalled George Wyner, who played Colonel Sandurz. "So he could laugh his little tuchus off, and no one knew. And I'm ruining the take, because I'm laughing. And all I see are his little knees shaking a little bit."

In 2015, Rick Moranis told The Hollywood Reporter that he improvised the dialogue from the scene where Lord Helmet plays with Spaceballs action figures, including the "Your helmet is so big" line:

What I remember is not feeling that well that day. I think I had a fever. I wasn’t at the top of my game, but somehow was able to come up with that.