The Producers is a 1967 American satirical black comedy film written and directed by Mel Brooks and starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, and Kenneth Mars. The film is about a theater producer and his accountant who scheme to get rich by fraudulently overselling interests in a stage musical purposely designed to fail. They find a script celebrating Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and bring it to the stage. Because of this theme, The Producers was controversial from the start and received mixed reviews. It became a cult film and found a more positive critical reception later.
The Producers was Brooks's directorial debut. For the film, he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. In 1996, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and placed eleventh on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list. It was later adapted by Brooks and Thomas Meehan as a stage musical, which itself was adapted into a film.
Plot
Max Bialystock is an aging Broadway producer whose career has veered from great success to the depths of near failure. He now ekes out a hand-to-mouth existence romancing lascivious, wealthy elderly women in exchange for money for a "next play" that may never be produced. Accountant Leopold "Leo" Bloom, a nervous young man prone to hysterics, arrives at Max's office to audit his accounts and discovers a $2,000 discrepancy in the accounts of Max's last play. Max persuades Leo to hide the relatively minor fraud, and while shuffling numbers, Leo realizes that, as a flop is expected to lose money, the IRS will not investigate its finances, so a producer could earn more from a flop than from a hit by overselling interests and embezzling the funds. For this same reason, no duped investor will be aware of the many others, thus protecting the pair from charges of fraud. Max instantly puts this scheme into action. They will oversell shares on a massive scale and produce a play that will close on opening night, thus avoiding payouts and leaving the duo free to flee to Rio de Janeiro with the profits. Leo is afraid such a criminal venture will fail and they will go to prison, but Max convinces him that his current drab existence is no better than prison.
The partners find the ideal play for their scheme: Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden: a genuine "love letter to Hitler" written by deranged ex-Nazi soldier Franz Liebkind. Max and Leo bond with Liebkind over Schnapps, and tell him they want to show the world a positive representation of Hitler. Now with the stage rights, Max sells 25,000% of the play to his regular investors and immediately starts using the money on fixing his office and hiring Ulla, a beautiful Swedish receptionist. To guarantee the show's failure, they hire Roger De Bris, a flamboyant transvestite director whose plays "close on the first day of rehearsal." The part of Hitler goes to a charismatic but barely coherent hippie named Lorenzo Saint DuBois, also known, in a reference to the counterculture drug, as L. S. D., who mistakenly wandered into the theater during the casting call. At the theater on opening night, Max tries to ensure a truly terrible review by attempting to bribe the critic who came to see the show. As expected, the man is outraged and hurls the money Max wrapped around the tickets he gave him at Max's feet.
The play opens with a lavish production of the title song, "Springtime for Hitler", which celebrates Nazi Germany conquering Europe ("Springtime for Hitler and Germany/Winter for Poland and France"). The audience is horrified and rises en masse after the number, while Max and Leo sneak away. L.S.D. then comes on stage as Hitler, and his beatnik-like portrayal of Hitler reveals that De Bris has altered the script and directed the play as a satire. Franz drops the curtain, rushes out on stage, and furiously rants to the audience about the treatment of his beloved play. He is knocked out and removed from the stage, and the audience assumes that his rant was part of the act. To Max and Leo's shock and horror, Springtime for Hitler is declared a comic smash hit, so their investors will be expecting a larger financial return than can be paid out.
