Marty Rubin - San Francisco Internal Film Festival History Site - San ...

done it better in Horse Feathers. So our compromise was to include both scenes, and his scene
played much, much better with the audience. He was right. He knew his audience.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Interesting.
MARTY RUBIN: And who was I to presume to tell Mel Brooks what works with an audience!
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: From reading the press from that, that was one of the big, big hits
of the Festival. His appearance and how he did schtick, you know, he just was on the whole time.
MARTY RUBIN: Oh, yeah. Absolutely! His adrenaline level must be incredible. Through the
roof!
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: With Mark Chase doing the interviews, did he come to the dress
rehearsal so he would know what to talk about?
MARTY RUBIN: No, I don’t recall that at all. He would just prepare, do research, read articles
and stuff like that.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: It’s funny now, because with the prevalence of video, we forget
that to see these films was difficult.
MARTY RUBIN: It certainly was. And rounding up the prints. It was Lorena Cantrell who
basically did the print traffic and getting the prints. She was behind the scenes a very key person,
because people, it’s true, they don’t appreciate how difficult that was. And not every studio
would be cooperative. Some of them, we just couldn’t get prints from. Universal in those days
was a notoriously uncooperative company. Paramount was very difficult. They might give us one
print or something like that. One or two, if you really begged for them. So, yeah, it was tough to
put those shows together just on a physical level, of actually getting the material.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: And what happened when you weren’t able to get a film that you
wanted?
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