Gene Hackman Came Up With One of Mel Brooks’ Greatest Jokes
Legendary actor Gene Hackman has passed away at the age of 95. Tragically, according to authorities, Hackman’s 64-year-old wife Betsy Arakawa, and a dog, were also found deceased in the couple’s New Mexico home. While “no foul play is suspected” the cause of death has yet to be determined.
It’s hard to overstate Hackman’s impact on the world of film; he starred in all-time classics like The Conversation, Night Moves, Bonnie & Clyde, Superman and, of course, The French Connection. Plus, he had key supporting roles in more modern masterpieces such as Unforgiven and The Royal Tenenbaums (even if he clearly didn’t want to be in the latter).
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Then, after decades of acclaimed performances in countless films, he gave up on the entire industry after making a single Ray Romano movie.
In the latter half of his career, it certainly wasn’t unusual to see Hackman show up in more comedic roles, one of his very best being the lovably clueless B-movie producer Harry Zimm in 1995’s Get Shorty.
But his most memorable comedic turn, arguably, was his scene-stealing cameo in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Hackman played a kindly old blind man, a carbon-copy parody of a scene from 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein.
But Hackman’s character inadvertently burns the monster, who ends up fleeing his shack in terror. The scene then ends with Hackman’s killer punchline: “Where are you going? I was going to make espresso…”
Hackman appearing in a Mel Brooks comedy was certainly unexpected. Young Frankenstein came out in 1974, the same year as The Conversation, and just two years after he won the Best Actor Oscar for playing the gritty, bigoted cop Popeye Doyle in The French Connection.
The cameo only came about because Hackman specifically asked for it. He was tennis buddies with Young Frankenstein star and co-writer Gene Wilder, who he’d met on the set of Bonnie & Clyde. “He invited me to come to his house, and he said, ‘Do you think I could get some tiny little part in Young Frankenstein? I’d love to work with Mel and you,’” Wilder once recalled.
In Young Frankenstein: The Story of the Making of the Film, Brooks claimed that Hackman had been “itching to do comedy” after making so many dramas. Although he had previously flexed his comedic muscles in a 1972 episode of Laugh-In, which was appropriately titled “Guest Starring Gene Hackman.” The actor appeared in a number of wacky sketches, including one in which he played the inventor of the “Drinking Man’s Diet.”
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According to Funny Man: Mel Brooks by Patrick McGilligan, Hackman performed his Young Frankenstein part “free of charge” (although Brooks claims that he “did it for scale”) and opted to go uncredited. “When people saw Young Frankenstein in the theater, nobody knew the blind man was Gene Hackman,” Brooks wrote. “William Tuttle, our makeup artist, had made him this beautiful beard, and no one recognized him because of it.”
Most impressively, Hackman was the one who came up with the scene’s hilarious final line about espresso. “He said, ‘Let me try a few things.’ And that was one of the things he tried, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s a keeper,’” Brooks revealed in an interview.
Brooks also claimed that Hackman told him that working on Young Frankenstein was the “greatest joy” of his life — although that may have been because he was just happy to be making a movie that didn’t require him to risk his life racing through city streets without a permit.
