Mel Brooks’ ‘Spaceballs’ Cost More Than Twice as Much to Make as ‘Star Wars’
While Young Frankenstein had to spend money on monster makeup and vintage props, and Blazing Saddles no doubt had to hire horses and horse-poop cleaner-uppers, Mel Brooks’ 1987 Star Wars spoof Spaceballs ended up being his most expensive movie up until that point — by quite a lot.
In a vintage clip that was recently shared online by Today, Brooks sat down for an interview with film critic and mustache enthusiast, Gene Shalit, just weeks before Spaceballs hit theaters. And the very first question concerned reports of the inflated budget. “How come Spaceballs cost more than all of Mel Brooks’ other movies put together?” Shalit asked.
“There was a mistake made somewhere,” Brooks joked. “It was supposed to be $2.2 million, but somebody put the point after the second 2 and suddenly it was $22 million. They gave it to us so we spent it. Mostly we spent it on limos. Everybody loves a limo.”
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Shalit’s claim that Spaceballs cost more than every other Brooks movie combined wasn’t totally accurate, but it wasn’t too far off, either. Brooks’ next most expensive movie, History of the World, Part 1, reportedly cost around $11 million to make. And with a budget of $22.7 million, Spaceballs cost more than 10 times the budget of Blazing Saddles, which was $2.6 million in 1974.
“You spend $22 million, because if you try to spend anything less, you’re not going to give the audience a fair shake,” Brooks explained. “You’re not going to get a beautiful, gorgeous space movie.”
“This looks like Star Wars,” Shalit agreed. “The effects are as good as they are.”
In fact, Spaceballs’ budget was more than twice that of Star Wars. George Lucas’ classic blockbuster was produced for just $11 million. To be fair, it was made a full decade earlier, and Lucas didn’t spring for a character made of melted cheese and pepperoni.
The reason why the Spaceballs effects looked so good is because Brooks hired some legit visual effects legends to properly emulate Star Wars. In later interviews Brooks has claimed that George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic “did all the space effects and postproduction for us.” But Brooks may have been misremembering things slightly — the model ship effects were created by Apogee Inc, the company founded by former ILM effects artist John Dykstra, who won an Academy Award for his work on Star Wars.
ILM did work on the film as well, creating the singing, dancing chest-buster for the Alien parody.
Visual effects supervisor Peter Donen, who Brooks was thrilled to discover was the son of Singin’ in the Rain director Stanley Donen, wanted to make Spaceballs look as realistic as possible. And because so many gags relied on visual effects, Brooks and Donen were constantly discussing how much each joke was really worth. “We looked at each of the joke shots and asked ourselves, ‘Is this a $100,000 or a $10,000 joke?’” Donen once revealed in an interview. “There were some that were more complicated and more expensive than he thought, and he’d say, ‘That’s not a $50,000 joke, it’s only a $25,000 joke. If you can figure out a way to do it for $25,000 we’ll keep it in the movie, otherwise lose it.”
Sadly, due to Brooks’ arrangement with Lucas, he wasn’t able to make that money back with tie-in cereals and Spaceballs-branded flamethrowers.
