Wit intact, Wilder looks back, wryly

The longtime actor has fond memories of his time on the ‘Young Frankenstein’ set.

Scripps Howard

The day before shooting ended on “Young Frankenstein,” the brilliantly fashioned 1974 comedy and enduring cult favorite, Gene Wilder was all but inconsolable as he sat on a bed on the set. His director and co-scriptwriter, Mel Brooks, found him there and asked him why he was so sad.

Wilder knew what was wrong but just couldn’t express it. Not only was the movie that had been more fun to make than any he’d ever worked on about to be finished — he played the title role in a cast that included Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Gene Hackman, Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman — but he was going back to an unhappy life in a miserable marriage.

“Transylvania was heaven,” Wilder told a packed house at a recent screening of the film in San Francisco.

For the audience, “Young Frankenstein” clearly retained its celestial allure. So did a string of other films that embedded Wilder in the comic DNA of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Questions to Wilder touched on “The Producers,” “Willy Wonka the Chocolate Factory,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Silver Streak” (the first of Wilder’s collaborations with Richard Pryor) and the lightly regarded “Hanky Panky” (in which he played opposite his wife-to-be, Gilda Radner).

Wilder was at once generous, frank and funny in his answers. Trim if a little stiff-jointed at 74, his unruly hair now thinned, he remains keen and quick-witted, with a softly burnished wryness.

Wilder offered assorted moviemaking anecdotes, including one about a scene that was falling flat in “Young Frankenstein” until Brooks gave Feldman’s hunchbacked servant Igor a Groucho Marxian double-entendre line. Feldman added the lunatic touch of biting a white fox fur that Kahn was wearing. Wilder ticked off, in the order they affected him, his formative comic influences — Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar.

Asked for quick takes on various collaborators, Wilder said that Kahn “could be funny in a way you never imagined from looking at the script”; called Leachman “the funniest actress I ever worked with”; described Feldman “as very shy, except if he had a few drinks,” at which point he would take to shouting at authority figures; and said of Radner, who died of cancer in 1989: “Her spirit just lit up the world, but she had a need to be loved always, all the time. It was extremely exhausting for her.”

As entertaining as he can be in this vein, Wilder is anything but a show-business graybeard living on past glories and settling old scores. In yet another fresh development from an artist who migrated from stage acting to films and subsequently added both screenwriting and directing to his r sum , Wilder has taken to prose in recent years. Along with “Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art,” an intimate and revealing memoir published in 2005, Wilder has written two novels. The first, a recycled screenplay called “My French Whore,” appeared in 2007. His latest, “The Woman Who Wouldn’t,” has just been published by St. Martin’s Press.

When Wilder talks about writing, as he did in another setting, he recounts a blissful, solitary regime of working from morning till late afternoon in his quiet country house in Connecticut, emerging only for tea, a light lunch and a kiss with his fourth wife, Karen, to whom he’s been happily married for 16 years. “Will I ever act again?” he mused. “I’d say it’s unlikely.”

But there’s also a direct throughline from acting to writing for Wilder, who made his film debut as a hostage in 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” In both activities, as he sees them, solitude is essential. “Stanislavski called [acting] being alone in public,” said Wilder, citing the famed teacher of theater technique. First drawn to performing as a teen-ager in Milwaukee, Wilder (born Jerome Silberman) loved the personal freedom he felt onstage. He came to prefer acting in film, with the camera’s “eye of God” upon him. Wilder elaborates on the point in a television conversation with Alec Baldwin that airs April 15 on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). “I always feel safer on a movie set. They can’t come and get you,” he says. “I feel alone and safe in public.”