Brian Scott Mednick's biography, Gene Wilder: Funny and Sad (published by BearManor Media), was a labor of love. While other kids in his '80s middle school hung posters of Madonna or Tom Cruise in their lockers, he felt that the frizzy-haired comedian spoke to him. (Was there ever a Gene Wilder poster?) Although the actor-director refused to cooperate with the biography, Mednick's fandom continues unabated. As he says in his introduction, he met Wilder once, briefly, and found "he was just as charming, soft-spoken, and nice as I imagined he would be."
Maybe that's because Wilder was raised in well-mannered Milwaukee? Mednick's chronicle begins here, where Wilder grew up on the North Side. His stage debut was as Balthasar in a Milwaukee Playhouse production of Romeo and Juliet. After graduating from Washington High School in 1951, Wilder left town and never looked back (except for a short reference in his film The World's Greatest Lover). But it took him years of advertising voice work and small parts on Broadway and in long forgotten TV shows before he finally struck gold as the unconfident but crafty Leo Bloom in Mel Brooks' The Producers (1968), one of the funniest films of all time.
The greatest revelation in Mednick's accountlargely though not entirely compiled from scrutinizing trade papers, film reviews, memoirs of others stars and every published interview with Wilder he could findspeaks to the inception of the actor's sweetly innocent yet neurotic, inhibited shtick. He began to be funny in childhood as a desperate way to entertain his semi-invalid mother. Somehow, it's not surprising that the benignly befuddled characters played by Danny Kaye were his first role models.
Along with such Mel Brooks' favorites as Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974), Wilder starred in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) and opposite Richard Pryor in Silver Streak (1976). Since the '70s his career has been spottier, and his efforts at directing have not won universal acclaim, but his unique comic gift continued to find outlets. In 2003 he received an Emmy for his guest appearance on "Will & Grace." Mednick has recorded most everything we need to know about Wilder's life and career.
