Paul on Mazursky

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968)

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968) Harold Fine: Am I being a real person? Mazursky’s Tecolote Productions—which feels more like a living room than a place of business—comprises a narrow reception area, a pleasantly unkempt conference room with a television, and Mazursky’s office, tucked away in the back. It’s a small room furnished without flourish: just a few chairs, a couple of couches around a coffee table, and a desk for Mazursky. With the exception of a single window overlooking Beverly Drive, every inch of wall space is covered with photos from all phases of Mazursky’s fifty years in show business, giving one the feeling of having stepped inside a giant zoetrope. (If only the room spun, we could have another Mazursky movie.) Mazursky himself sits on the far side of the room; his desk hidden under a quilt of week-old Varietys, half-drunken water bottles, and shots of his family taken, it seems, all over the world. As I pull a chair from the coffee table to Mazursky’s desk, I see he’s opened the day’s New York Times to the Arts section, and is reading intently. On the paper sits the better part of a chocolate donut, which Mazursky picks at, carefully breaking off one chunk at a time, without taking his eyes off the page. There are crumbs on his T-shirt. pm: What can I do for you, sir? sw: We’re going to talk Toklas, but first, I wanted to ask about Woody Allen’s first film as writer-director, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? Apparently you wrote some additional dialogue. How did that come about? pm: When I was a comedian at the Renaissance, which is now the House of Blues on Sunset, the guy who ran it was Ben Shapiro, later Miles Davis’s manger. He was the hipster of hipsters. When he had a stroke, I went to see him at Midway Hospital, and he was lying there in bed smoking a joint. That’s how hip the guy was. He had just had a stroke! So he could only hold the joint in one side of his face. I said, ‘‘Benny, you can’t go that far!’’ He was a great guy. Anyway, he knew someone who was involved with Woody’s movie, but Woody was off it now, he had moved onto something else, but they needed a few more jokes. So Larry and I came in and wrote a few. The under-the-counter price we were paid was two round-trip tickets to Spain. I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! : 27 sw: Why Spain? pm: Because I wanted to do research for this idea I had for a script called H-Bomb Beach Party!∏ That trip alone was hilarious. First of all, Larry couldn’t fit in a normal seat. They had to put him in a seat where they could take the arm out. This was 1965. Larry at this point weighed about four hundred pounds. sw: He’s actually getting fatter. pm: Oh, yeah. When we did Alex in Wonderland, he was actually at five hundred. In Spain, he was so fat the hotels wouldn’t take us. They’d take one look at Larry and they’d go, ‘‘Gordo.’’ I said, ‘‘What the fuck business is it of yours?’’ They’d say, ‘‘We don’t have a chair he can sit on or a bed he can lie in.’’ So we go from hotel to hotel and we’re turned down everywhere. Remember, this was the Franco era. Finally, we get a hotel that will take us. Well, we go up to the room, Larry decides he wants to take a bath, and so he runs the water and makes his way into this round tub. A few moments later I hear water running onto the floor so I go over. He’s stuck in the bathtub! [Laughs] He can’t get out! At this point, within fifteen minutes, there’s screaming and shouting from the people below that the water is dripping down from their ceiling. Soon the management is up in our room, knocking at the door, yelling at us in Spanish. I say, ‘‘Por favor, help me get this naked fat man out of the tub!’’ So we go in there to get him out and water’s everywhere and we’re sliding around and everyone’s cursing and laughing. You...