As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (24 page)

We were two months into production by the time Billy and his on-screen wife, Carol Kane, arrived on the set on October 15. I had just finished another training session with Peter Diamond when I ran into Rob, who informed me that Billy had arrived.

“Can I go say hi?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Rob said. “He’s in makeup.”

For a moment I wondered if I would experience the unease that comes with meeting someone whose work you’ve long admired. As an actor, if you hang around Hollywood long enough, and if you are lucky, you may get a chance to meet some of your idols. Sometimes it’s disappointing; sometimes it’s exactly what you hope it will be.

Billy was every bit as funny and charming as I had imagined. He is an extremely down-to-earth person, yet seemingly incapable of not cracking jokes and generally just trying to make people smile. Some stand-up comics and some comic actors (Billy is both) are totally different people off-stage than they are onstage. Billy is the same person regardless of his surroundings. He’s genuinely funny and genuinely nice all of the time.

As I entered the makeup department I found him sitting in a chair, patiently allowing his longtime makeup artist, Peter Montagna, to go about the painstaking task of transforming the thirty-nine-year-old
actor into an ancient and cranky, troll-like wizard. We made small talk for a few minutes, with Billy grilling me about how the movie was going and saying how excited he was to be a part of it. Fascinated with his transformation, I asked him how he came up with the look for Max and I remember him telling me he wanted him to be a cross between Casey Stengel and his grandmother.

Then, as Peter began applying the last pieces of wrinkled latex to his face, Billy began reciting lines of dialogue from the script, searching for Max’s character as he stared in the mirror. He even began improvising all these crazy impersonations of everyone who would end up influencing the role. It was absolutely hilarious. I felt like I was being treated to a private screening of a one-man show.

I realized at that moment that
The Princess Bride
was not only going to be a good movie, it had a shot at being a commercially successful one as well. I had initially thought it was such an unusual movie that it was impossible to gauge whether we had hit the mark, let alone whether there was an audience eager to see it. Billy changed all of that—or, at least, changed the way I felt about it.

He knew exactly what he was going to do with his character. Clearly,
Mel Brooks was an inspiration. In fact, in the screenplay, his character is introduced as follows:

From inside the hovel a little man’s voice is heard. If Mel Brooks’s 2000-Year-Old Man was really old, he’d resemble this guy
.

But Billy also wanted Max to be unique in his own right. I had heard there were issues with an earlier makeup test. That the prosthetics looked too comical, almost distracting. So he and Peter worked together for a while in LA before finally agreeing on the look. I watched as Peter applied each new set of prosthetics, occasionally taking a step back to let Billy assess the progress and practice some lines. He’d scrunch up his face, clear an imaginary wad of phlegm from his throat, and shout at his image in the mirror.

“What!? What!? What?!”

I’ll never know whether he was willing the character to life or perhaps just doing his grandmother. Maybe it was a little of both. Either way it was funny.

By the time Peter finally applied the last pieces of Billy’s makeup, the wig and contact lenses, Billy had actually become Miracle Max. He was this other guy, this crotchety old man. Completely transformed. Hilarious. And once he was on the set in full makeup, he stayed in character.

I was also introduced to Carol Kane on that day. I was a huge fan of her work. Besides her performance in
Dog Day Afternoon,
I had also been in awe of her portrayal of Andy Kaufman’s wife, Simka Dahblitz-Gravas, in
Taxi
and her roles in
Carnal Knowledge, Annie Hall,
and
The Last Detail
.
Here was an actress whose incredible body of work spanned more than a decade coming in to do a cameo in our movie. And while Billy’s is the flashier role and the performance people seem to recall most vividly, Carol’s work was also outstanding, and her transformation even more intense.

Today you can look at Miracle Max and you can see and hear Billy’s voice. But Carol is virtually unrecognizable as Max’s shrieking wife, Valerie. She is described in the script as “an ancient fury.” And she was indeed ferocious in the role. But ancient? Hardly. People don’t realize that she was only thirty-four at the time.

With each introduction of a new cast member, I felt more and more like a kid at theater camp who has been suddenly plucked from the ranks of the ordinary and tossed onto a Broadway stage.

With Billy and Carol, the effect was intensified by two factors: the sheer amount of makeup and prosthetics, and the fact that they arrived so deep into the production and stayed for such a short amount of time. To be honest, I rarely saw either one of them when they weren’t disguised as Miracle Max and Valerie. And it could not have been comfortable, slogging around for twelve, fourteen hours in thick makeup, wearing heavy burlap costumes, and toiling under hot lights. Norman Garwood had designed a magnificent little cabin in a fake forest to serve
as their home. It looked perfect, but, man, was it hot in there once all the lights were switched on.

Not that Billy or Carol seemed even slightly distracted by any of that. Both of them brought their “A-game,” so to speak, and in so doing created not only one of the most recognizable scenes in the movie but some of the most memorable days of filming.

All I recall from those three days of shooting at Miracle Max’s cabin is that they were days filled with insane laughter. Rob said he wanted the scene to be outrageous, so he basically gave Billy free license to run with the character. Not that Billy needed much prodding. From the first shot in which cantankerous Max appears, poking his head through a wooden peephole in the door (very much like the doorman who greets Dorothy when she and her friends reach Oz), he began ad-libbing.

For three days straight and ten hours a day, Billy improvised thirteenth-century period jokes, never saying the same thing or the same line twice. Such was the hilarity of his ad-libbing that he actually caused Mandy to injure himself while fighting to suppress the need to laugh. Therefore you can only imagine what it did to me and to Rob, who had to leave the set because his boisterous laugh was ruining too many early takes.

Some of the improvs made it into the film. For example, when Max opens the peep door, the original script called for him to say merely, “The king’s stinking son fired me . . . ,” in response to Inigo asking whether he is the same Miracle Max “who worked for the king all those years.”

To better illustrate his character’s bitterness toward the king, Billy decided to add the line “And thank you so much for bringing up such a painful subject. While you’re at it, why don’t you give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it?”

He also came up with the twisted notion of rating “true love” on a scale of the most important things in life with a sandwich.

“Sonny, true love is the greatest thing in the world . . . except for a nice MLT—mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe.”

André, dummy me, Billy, and Mandy

A quote that has since followed him in some form or variation into every deli and restaurant for the rest of his life.

Some of the funniest takes were just too blue, which is why they ended up on the cutting room floor. After all,
The Princess Bride
is a family-friendly PG film, meant to be appropriate and enjoyable for viewers of nearly all ages, so as you can imagine we really couldn’t have
Max comparing true love to a vigorous bowel movement, funny though it was. Nor could you have him explain his foul mood by saying, “Don’t rush me, sonny. I had a difficult night last night. I found my nephew with a sheep!” which couldn’t have been used anyway since the entire crew, and especially Rob, lost it after he delivered the line.

In fact, these lines and countless others led to unusable takes ruined by us all giggling, and if you go to YouTube to find the outtakes, you can hear us all cracking up. For those of us who had never worked with him before, we realized that all Billy needs is a receptive audience and there is just no stopping him.

In some ways I had the most difficult task of all, as I had to present the illusion of someone who is supposed to be “mostly dead.” Rob told me that I could not move at all. Not even a twitch. I wasn’t even supposed to look like I was breathing, let alone laughing, as the camera would be able to see my chest moving. But the insanity of trying not to laugh while Billy was doing his ancient Yiddish stand-up would prove impossible even for me. I think he was actually trying to make me crack up during my one line in the scene when he pushes air out of my stomach, and guess what? He succeeded.

I just couldn’t do it. After I had botched a number of takes, the decision was made to replace me on the table with the rubber dummy that André had been carrying around. I had to join Rob at a monitor set up in the hallway outside the soundstage where we had both now been banished by the sound department for laughing too much.

And it should also be noted that Carol truly enhanced the magic of all of her moments with her improvising as well. She created the whole bit with Billy regarding the chocolate-covered pill, bringing it to a level of hilarity that stands up to this day—offering helpful tips regarding ingestion and dosage: