In 1979, Jonathan Sanger, a young film producer from Brooklyn, found himself working with the great Mel Brooks. Their current project was “Fatso,” a comedy starring, written and directed by Brooks’ wife, Anne Bancroft.
Sanger’s passion project, however, seemed a non-starter: a dramatic script, with no pedigree, about a gravely deformed 19th century Londoner. The co-author was Sanger’s babysitter’s boyfriend. Sanger showed it to a few trusted colleagues — but not to Brooks, who got hold of it anyway.
After reading, Brooks immediately called Sanger.
“Jonathan, what is this?” Brooks asked.
“Oh, that’s ‘The Elephant Man,’ ” Sanger said. “It’s a script I optioned.”
“You own this?” Brooks asked.
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
“Well, I think this is great,” Brooks said. “I’d like it to be our next film.”
So began the creation of an unlikely cinematic masterpiece.
As Sanger recounts in his recent book, “Making the Elephant Man,” Brooks had recently set up his own production company in hopes of redefining himself as more than a satirist. Few people realized that Brooks was an intellectual who loved Russian writers or that his artistic sensibilities were forged in early grief: The death of his father when he was just 2 years old, his childhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bullied relentlessly for his small stature, his ill health.
“The Elephant Man” was based on the true story of Joseph Merrick, the deformed man who became Europe’s ultimate freak show. The script spoke to Brooks, then one of the most powerful people in Hollywood.
“What about casting?” Brooks asked Sanger. “My lawyer tells me that Dustin might be interested.”
David Lynch said “golly” and “gee whiz” often and unironically and reminded Sanger of Ron Howard in “Happy Days.”
Sanger soon realized that “Mel treated you in whatever capacity he found you. I had never been in a conversation at this level and Mel was treating me as an equal. He actually seemed to be interested in my replies.”
Sanger thought that audiences would never fully suspend disbelief, that instead of seeing the Elephant Man they’d be looking for Dustin Hoffman under makeup. Brooks agreed.
They learned that Jon Voight was interested in directing. “Ah, yes,” Brooks said. “But how will we ever know that he’s not just acting like a great director?”
Sanger had a suggestion. He’d just seen an art-house film called “Eraserhead,” which somehow managed to be grotesque yet thoroughly watchable. He arranged a meeting with the director, a young man named David Lynch.
Lynch suggested they meet at Bob’s Big Boy on Santa Monica Boulevard. “I was anticipating a dark, brooding intellectual type,” Sanger writes, “but David was the antithesis of that.”
There he sat, a blond Midwesterner with an open face and a cup of black coffee and a chocolate milk shake in front of him. He was wearing khaki pants, a white Oxford shirt buttoned all the way to the neck and a plastic pocket protector with two pens tucked inside, an outfit Sanger would realize was his uniform. Lynch said “golly” and “gee whiz” often and unironically and reminded Sanger of Ron Howard in “Happy Days.” He was a Reagan Republican whose hobbies were building sheds and watching foreign films.
Lynch wanted to direct “The Elephant Man.” He had a vision. The film should be in black and white. The Industrial Revolution needed to be a major theme. The tone and atmosphere should be realistic yet reverential, and Lynch wanted to shoot with anamorphic lenses so that the film would be widescreen, epic in feel.
Sanger was sold. He arranged a screening of “Eraserhead” for Brooks, unsure of how he’d react.
“It’s an adolescent’s nightmare of responsibility,” Brooks said. “I like it. I like it.” When Brooks met David Lynch, he liked him even more.
“He’s just like Jimmy Stewart,” Brooks said, “if Jimmy Stewart had been born on the planet Venus.”
Their next hurdle was casting the part of Merrick, called John in the script. Brooks and Sanger had seen the British actor John Hurt in a film called “The Naked Civil Servant” and thought he might be right but worried that Hurt, like any actor, would cede to vanity — why act if an audience couldn’t see his face under a heavy mask of craniofacial deformities? A meeting was arranged in Brooks’ LA office.
“Gee whiz, John,” Lynch said. “I’m so glad you could come and meet us.”
Brooks took a more direct tack. “Our movie is going to get you Best Actor,” he said.
Brooks, Sanger and Lynch had plastered one wall with blown-up images of Merrick. “Nothing we could say,” Sanger writes, “would be as persuasive as these horrific portraits.”
They were right. Hurt agreed to play the part on the spot. Anthony Hopkins signed on to play Dr. Frederick Treves, who rescued Merrick from the freak-show circuit to live and work in London Hospital, and Anne Bancroft lent her star power to a supporting role. The film would shoot entirely in London.
Production was delayed by Lynch’s insistence that he alone could build the Elephant Man’s makeup. He spent weeks working on a giant mask that was ultimately too ill-fitting and crude, and Lynch was so despondent he nearly quit the movie until his wife convinced him otherwise.
“There was like a ten-thousandth of a second when I put [the mask] on John Hurt the first time when it looked all right,” Lynch later said. “And then in the next ten-thousandth of a second it hit me so hard that there was no way. And the next week and a half was one of the darkest times of my life.” Sanger turned to famed makeup artist Christopher Tucker, who worked for the BBC.
“I’m only surprised it took you this long to come to me,” Tucker told them. “I’m one of very few people who can do this.”
Tucker said he’d need six weeks to finish the work and that Hurt would have to come by immediately, head shaved, so he could measure the actor’s skull. Tucker’s final request: He needed Merrick’s actual life cast, taken after his death in 1890 and housed in London Hospital.
Sanger blanched. “There was only one of them,” he writes. “If it was dropped, it would turn to dust.” Yet the hospital museum’s curator, convinced of Lynch’s good intentions, agreed.
Tucker created a replica of Merrick’s complicated deformities. There were 17 discrete parts applied to Hurt’s skull, and the actor wore a dental prosthetic that reshaped his mouth and speech.
Transforming Hurt into Merrick was so grueling that the actor shot on alternate days. When he worked, Hurt would arrive to set at 5.30 am to begin his eight hours in the makeup chair, then shoot until 10 at night, unable to eat under his prosthetics, unable to lie down and take a nap or sit and read a book. (He did, however, manage to smoke.)
After day one, Hurt called his wife. “I think they finally managed to make me hate acting,” he said.
Yet Hurt never complained on set, and because the crew never saw Hurt out of makeup or costume, a sense of awe took over.
“It was as if we were working with the real man and not an actor,” Sanger writes. “On those shooting days we all only saw John Hurt as John Merrick. And his inability to eat or get comfortable lit a fire under everyone to get things done fast and efficiently to help alleviate his pain and suffering, much of it real. And if we ever doubted the wretchedness of the historical Merrick, just watching John work brought us all to a common understanding.”
‘The Elephant Man” opened on Oct. 2, 1980, its initial release pushed back, Sanger writes, because actor-director Robert Redford worried that his Oscar contender, “Ordinary People,” would be overshadowed. How ironic: the golden boy of Hollywood, threatened by a biopic about such an unsightly, unfortunate man.
Brooks, concerned that audiences might associate his name with a comedy, removed his executive producer credit. As Brooks wrote in the Guardian in 2008: “How does a guy who is known for the best fart jokes in cinema go on to make ‘The Elephant Man’? . . . My films, even if they’re comic, they’re about: ‘Let’s accept the bizarre. Let’s learn more about these creatures or these Jews.’ I know the Elephant Man wasn’t Jewish, but, to me, the story had all the aspects of anti-Semitism, and Merrick had all the traits of the classic wandering Jew.”
“The Elephant Man” opened to rave reviews and, on a budget of $5 million, grossed $26 million in North America alone.
The most-remembered line of dialogue is spoken by Hurt, as Merrick, pleading with a frenzied mob chasing him through London’s streets: “I am not an animal! I am a human being. I am a man.”
The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. Despite Brooks’ promise to Hurt, the film won nothing — and lost Best Picture to Redford’s “Ordinary People.” One year later, responding to industry outrage that “The Elephant Man” hadn’t won an honorary Oscar for visual effects, the Academy established a separate category for makeup.
Hurt, who passed away a few weeks ago at age 77, did win a BAFTA for his portrayal of Merrick. For all the agony it caused him, Hurt took the cast of Merrick’s head as a souvenir. He considered the film a litmus test of compassion.
“I would say that if you could manage to get to the end of ‘The Elephant Man’ without being moved,” Hurt said, “I don’t think you’d be someone I’d want to know.”
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