The Producers

“The Producers” Never Fails to Please

The 2024 White Mountain Jewish Film Festival, focused this year on Jewish comedy, comes to a close on Thursday, September 5, with The Producers, a 1967 American satirical cult classic movie written and directed by Mel Brooks. It stars Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, and Kenneth Mars. The film is about a con artist theater producer and his accountant who scheme to get rich by fraudulently overselling interests in a stage musical purposely designed to fail. Searching for the worst script imaginable, they find a drama celebrating Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and bring it to the stage. Because of this theme, The Producers was controversial from the start, but it soon became a cult film favorite.

The Producers was Brooks’ directorial debut, and for the script, 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.” It placed eleventh on the American Film Institute’s “100 Years…100 Laughs” list.

Roger Ebert wrote in 2000, “This is one of the funniest movies ever made. To see it now is to understand that. To see it for the first time in 1968, when I did, was to witness audacity so liberating that not even “There’s Something About Mary” rivals it. The movie was like a bomb going off inside the audience’s sense of propriety. There is such rapacity in its heroes, such gleeful fraud, such greed, such lust, such a willingness to compromise every principle, that we cave in and go along.”

Guest speaker Rick Winston will introduce the film and answer questions after the screening. Winston was the co-owner of Montpelier’s Savoy Theater for 29 years, and was Programming Director for the Green Mountain Film Festival for 14 years. He has taught film history at Burlington College, Community College of Vermont, Goddard College, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and has made presentations throughout Vermont on film history.

A patio party, with complimentary refreshments and beverages, is included in the cost of admission ($10 for the general public). The box office opens at 5:30 pm, the party begins at 6 pm, the guest speaker introduces the film at 6:30 pm, and the film begins at 7 pm.

Tickets are sold at the door or online. For more information, visit https://www.bethlehemsynagogue.org/film-series-2024