Trivia / High Anxiety

• Actor-Inspired Element: It was Cloris Leachman's idea for her to have a moustache.
• Approval of God: Mel Brooks consulted with Alfred Hitchcock repeatedly during production and screened the film for him. He liked it enough that he sent him a very expensive case (six bottles) of wine as a thank-you gift and even invited Mel out to dinner afterwards. Brooks has revealed in a recent interview that in several moments of weakness he had consumed all but one bottle.
• Billing Displacement: Even though she is billed second, Madeline Kahn does not appear until more than halfway through the film.
• Cast Incest: Mel Brooks cast his wife Anne Bancroft as his mother in flashback.
• Copiously Credited Creator: Mel Brooks played the lead role, directed, produced, co-wrote the screenplay and for the title song was both composer and lyricist.
• Creator Backlash: Mel Brooks hated his performance in this film, having only taken the role because Gene Wilder was forced to turn it down. Not only does Brooks feel that Wilder would have been funnier, but that this was the one movie where he felt more of an obligation to direct than act (despite his claim that directing is his least favorite job as a filmmaker).
• Creator Couple: Mel Brooks' wife Anne Bancroft plays Thorndyke's mother in flashback.
• Enforced Method Acting: Hilariously enough, the pigeons! The hurricane of bird shit that Thorndyke is pelted with was actually scoops of potato chip dip, shot off-screen as the flock of trained pigeons chased after him, but the pigeons became so frightened that more than a few of those splatters became real.
• Never Work with Children or Animals: During The Birds parody, some of the birds really defecated on Mel Brooks.
• What Could Have Been:
  • As mentioned above, the part of Thorndyke was originally intended to go to Gene Wilder which would have reunited Brooks and Wilder for a fourth time (or fifth if you count Mel's voice cameo in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother). However, Wilder was busy with The World's Greatest Lover and couldn't take the part.
  • Alfred Hitchcock pitched a scene where the hero is running from an assassin and leaps onto a ferry, only to discover that it's arriving rather than departing. Brooks didn't use the scene partly because he couldn't find a place for it and partly because it would have been too expensive to film.

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