The Night They Raided Minsky's

In his book Minsky's Burlesque, Morton Minsky (with Milt Machlin) wrote, "As for April 20, 1925, the day that the raid on which the book was based took place, it was hardly epochal in the history of burlesque, but it did turn out to be a prelude to much greater troubles... Anyway, the raid story was fun, but the raid itself was simply one of dozens to which we had become accustomed; certainly no big crisis."

Minsky's theater, the National Winter Garden on Houston Street, was raided for the first time in 1917 when Mae Dix absentmindedly began removing her costume before she reached the wings. When the crowd cheered, Dix returned to the stage and continued removing her clothing to wild applause. Morton's older brother, Billy, ordered the "accident" repeated every night. This began an endless cycle; to keep their license, the Minskys had to keep their shows clean, but to keep drawing customers, they had to be risqué. Whenever they went too far, however, they were raided.

According to Morton Minsky, Mademoiselle Fifi was actually a woman named Mary Dawson from Pennsylvania. Morton suggests that Billy persuaded Dawson to expose her breasts in order to create a sensation. By 1925, it was permissible for girls in legitimate shows staged by Ziegfeld, George White and Earl Carroll — as well as burlesque — to appear topless as long as they were stationary (as a "living tableau"). Mademoiselle Fifi stripped to the waist, but then moved, triggering the raid. "Although the show in general had been tame," Morton wrote, "Fifi's finale and the publicity that soon followed the raid ensured full houses at the soon-to-be opened [Minsky's] theater uptown [on 42nd Street]." (The Minskys did not stage burlesque on 42nd Street until 1931, when they leased the Republic Theater. They had a short-lived venture at the Park Theater on Columbus Circle in 1922, but left that theater after only a year. They leased the Apollo Theater on 125th Street from 1924 until 1933, after which it became famous as a showcase for African-American talent.)

In 1975, Mary Dawson, then 85, refuted the legend. "I was never a stripteaser. I never did anything risque". She said that novelist Rowland Barber "just put all that in the book to make it better." She wasn't even at the theater that night. Her father was a policeman and a straitlaced Quaker, although he never came to New York City and never led a raid on one of the Minsky burlesque houses.[3]

In April 1961, producer Leonard Key outbid several others for the stage rights to Rowland Barber's book. (Debbie Reynolds reportedly had sought the film rights in 1961 as well.) At that time it was reported to be the highest price ever paid for such rights, and that the novel would be adapted by screenwriter Edward Chodorov.[4] Later in the year, however, Key had enlisted screenwriter Julius J. Epstein.[5] At these early stages, Sammy Cahn as well as Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini were rumored to do the music. The show never found financial backing before the option for the stage rights ran out two years later in 1963.[6]

Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin bought the film rights in September 1965. Lear originally announced that production would begin in the fall of 1966. Dick Shawn was reportedly being considered for the "lead role" (unspecified) in July 1966.[7] However, filming didn't begin until a year later, on October 8, 1967.

On May 23, 1967, the Los Angeles Times reported that William Friedkin was set to direct. Friedkin's first film, Good Times (1967), starring Sonny and Cher, had just been released. A musical comedy which spoofs various movie genres, including mysteries, westerns and spy thrillers, it was a critical and box-office flop. He was quoted as saying that 'The Night They Raided Minsky's will be "poetic reality."[8]

Tony Curtis was cast as Raymond Paine in June 1967, but dropped out a month later because of creative differences.[9] Alan Alda, whose father, Robert Alda, had been in burlesque, was cast as Paine, but was unable to leave his role on Broadway in The Apple Tree.[10] Jason Robards took over the Paine role about a month before filming began. (Raymond Paine was the name of a real straight man who was in the show that night. He was killed in a hit and run accident in 1934.) Elliott Gould, who was then married to Barbra Streisand, was signed in August 1967 and made his film debut as Billy Minsky.

Mickey Rooney was said to be considered for the Chick Williams role,[11] but Joel Grey, then on Broadway in Cabaret, was initially cast. Grey had to drop out, however, because the film had no firm end date and Grey was committed to start rehearsals for George M!, a musical about George M. Cohan, in mid-December.[12] British comedian Norman Wisdom, who had recently been nominated for a Tony Award for his acclaimed performance in the James Van Heusen-Sammy Cahn musical comedy Walking Happy, was cast. Wisdom had made a series of low-budget star-vehicle comedies for the Rank Organisation. Never highly regarded by critics, Wisdom's films had enjoyed good box-office returns in his native country. The Night They Raided Minsky's was his first American film, and he received good notices. A contributor to Variety wrote: "So easily does Wisdom dominate his many scenes, other cast members suffer by comparison", and Time compared him to Buster Keaton.

The songs were written by the Broadway team of composer Charles Strouse and lyricist Lee Adams, who had won a Tony Award for the musical Bye Bye Birdie in 1961, and went on to win Tonys for Applause (1970) and Annie (1977, with lyricist Martin Charnin). Strouse also wrote the theme song "Those Were The Days" for Lear's sitcom All in the Family. The score was orchestrated and conducted by Broadway veteran Philip J. Lang, working on his only film made for theatrical release.

The Night They Raided Minsky's was the first musical shot entirely on location in New York City. The budget exceeded $3 million, making it the most expensive film shot in the city up to that time. A block of East 26th Street between First and Second Avenues was transformed into the Lower East Side c. 1925. (The vacant tenements on the block were scheduled to be torn down as part of an urban renewal project, but the city postponed demolition for the filmmakers.) A portion of an elevated train station 30 feet tall and 56 feet long was built. A scene in a subway car was filmed on the Myrtle Avenue elevated in Brooklyn. Parking meters were disguised by garbage cans and barrels. Exteriors were shot there for two weeks. Some interiors were filmed at Chelsea Studios.[13] The theater sequences were filmed at what was then the Gayety Theater (now the Village East Cinema), at 181 Second Avenue on the Lower East Side.

Minsky's was Bert Lahr's last film. The 72-year-old comedian, best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, was a veteran of the Columbia burlesque wheel. He was hospitalized on November 21 for what was reported as a back ailment. In Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr, John Lahr wrote: "Bert Lahr died in the early morning of December 4, 1967. Two weeks before, he had returned home at 2 a.m., chilled and feverish, from the damp studio where The Night They Raided Minsky's was being filmed. Ordinarily, a man of his age and reputation would not have had to perform that late into the night, but he had waived that proviso in his contract because of his trust in the producer and his need to work. The newspapers reported the cause of death as pneumonia; but he succumbed to cancer, a disease he feared but never knew he had."

Most of Lahr's scenes had already been shot. Norman Lear told The New York Times that "through judicious editing we will be able to shoot the rest of the film so that his wonderful performance will remain intact." The producers used test footage of Lahr, plus an uncredited voice double and a body double, burlesque legend Joey Faye, to complete the late comedian's role.

Filming began on October 8 and was scheduled to wrap on December 22, 1967. The movie was released exactly a year later, on December 22, 1968.

Film editor Ralph Rosenblum documented his experience working on The Night They Raided Minsky's in his 1979 book (written with Robert Karen), When the Shooting Stops ...The Cutting Begins. ISBN 0-670-75991-0

Rosenblum wrote: "I had taken Minsky's on not because I believed it would be a great editorial challenge but because I saw it as a lark. I had just come off six months on The Producers, a trying experience that pickled my nerve endings, and I badly needed a soothing job...The script revealed a frothy, unimportant film full of musical numbers, the kind of thing that might be snapped into shape in six to eight weeks of editing. I loved cutting musicals; I expected a short stretch of mindless fun." In the end, it took him over nine months to cut the film.

He wrote: "From the very beginning, the idea behind The Night They Raided Minsky's had been to create an 'old-fashioned musical with a New Look'...although what it was and how it was going to be accomplished no one knew...Had anyone dared to acknowledge that the New Look we hoped to achieve in Minsky's was essentially a [Richard] Lester look, we all might have been saved some anguish; but such an acknowledgement would have been considered inappropriate, if not blasphemous, and so it barely crossed our minds."

Rosenblum called the screening of his first cut with Friedkin and Lear "disastrous." "The chief drawback of Minsky's dramatic episodes was their predictability," Rosenblum wrote. "The script had aimed for an old-fashioned charm, but, with a few important exceptions, no new twist of sophistication was added to please a modern audience." When the cut was screened for David Picker, an executive VP of United Artists, he called it "the worst first cut I've ever seen." However, since there was no set release date for the film, Picker told Lear and Rosenblum, "Whatever you want to do, go ahead, take your time, and do it."

Drawing on his background editing documentaries, Rosenblum turned to the huge stock film libraries in New York and began selecting clips from the 1920s. By arduous trial and error, this footage was used not only to evoke a sense of time and place, but also to comment on and enhance scenes in the film. Rosenblum created montages of this material and Friedkin's footage, often marrying vintage footage with new by transitioning from black and white into color. The effect, Rosenblum wrote, was "magical."

While Rosenblum worked over the cut throughout most of 1968, Lear was developing other projects, including one that would become the TV series All in the Family; Friedkin, meanwhile, was in England, directing the film adaptation of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party. Not long after he saw the first cut of Minsky's, Friedkin was interviewed on British television, and called Minsky's "the biggest piece of crap I'd ever worked on." According to Rosenblum, "I'd heard that [Friedkin] would be barred from screenings [of Minsky's] because of his talk show blunder and would have to pay to get in."

Eventually, The Night They Raided Minsky's was remade in the cutting room. "Above all, this emerging Minsky's was highly contemporary," Rosenblum wrote. "One might even conclude it had a New Look. The obvious fact that had eluded us from the beginning suddenly struck me now: The avant-garde quality Richard Lester had achieved in films like Help! could only be accomplished through editing. From the moment the Search for the New Look began, Minsky's was destined to be a cutting-room picture."

Rosenblum claimed that there are 1,440 cuts in the film; by comparison, Annie Hall, a film of the same length, has only 382.

Of course, most of the credit went to Friedkin, who, according to Rosenblum, "may not have even seen the film." Friedkin later admitted to having "no vision" for Minsky's and instead borrowed from Rouben Mamoulian's film Applause (1929), an early talkie about burlesque notable for its innovative camera work.

In 2008, Friedkin recalled, "Minsky's was way over my head. I didn't have a clue what to do. Norman produced it and he was a very difficult, tough guy to work with, but I learned a great deal from him and I was struggling every day on the set. It wasn't a great script...it was a lot of schtick. But it would've been a lot better if I'd been more familiar with that world of burlesque in the 20s, which I wasn't. So because of that I think the film suffers to a great degree from that."[14]

In an online interview in 2012, Friedkin said, "I have few, if any positive, memories of it. But when I made the DVD recently, having not seen the film for 40 years, I thought it had some pleasant and amusing moments."[15]

In his 2013 memoir, The Friedkin Connection, the director wrote: "There were many problems with it, but the biggest was my own ineptitude. I had researched the period but I didn't know how to convey the right tone." At one point he asked Norman Lear to fire him.

The main title sequence was designed by Pablo Ferro[16] (1935–2018), who was also an uncredited editor on the film.