Alfa-Betty Olsen, an unsung wit who became a trusted accomplice to Mel Brooks in the ridiculous, encouraging the irreverent tone of his sitcom “Get Smart” and his movie “The Producers” — and who was a longtime writing partner to Marshall Efron on projects like the quirky PBS series “The Great American Dream Machine” — died on Oct. 5 in Manhattan. She was 88.
Her cousin Norma Levett confirmed the death, in an assisted living facility.
Ms. Olsen, who had known Mr. Brooks socially, recalled being hired as his recording secretary on a tight deadline as he and Buck Henry were completing the TV pilot episode of the spy spoof “Get Smart.”
“One day, he said, ‘You can type, and I can’t,’” she said in a PBS interview in 2018. “‘And I have to hand this in on Monday.’” Her job, while sitting at a typewriter in the corner of a small office, was to jot down rapid-fire one-liners and bonkers concepts like the shoe phone as “Mel and Buck threw around ideas and jokes and things.”
Asked if the job required more than being a stenographer, she replied, “Whoever runs the typewriter has a lot of power.”
In his 2021 memoir, “All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business,” Mr. Brooks recounted that Ms. Olsen “nailed down every thought and every crazy joke and brushstroke of madness we threw out. Nothing escaped her.”
“Get Smart,” an Emmy Award-winning show starring Don Adams as the bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart, ran on NBC from 1965 to 1969 and on CBS from 1969 to 1970.
Ms Olsen witnessed the production of “The Producers” as the casting director and, in Mr. Brooks’ words, a “girl Friday.” The movie, released in 1967, follows a failing producer, Max Bialystock (played by Zero Mostel), and his meek accountant, Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), who scheme to fleece their investors (all little old ladies) by mounting “Springtime for Hitler,” a Broadway musical celebration of the Third Reich that they mistakenly expect — and are counting on — to be a flop and make them rich in the process.
In a low-budget project that was purposefully steeped in extravagant bad taste, Mr. Brooks wrote that he relied on Ms. Olsen’s sound judgment and encouragement. “I would say things like, ‘Can I do this? Is this too crazy?’” he wrote. “And she’d say, ‘No, never too crazy for you.”
Ms. Olsen was given the task of hiring the cast and helping to shape the script, which won an Oscar for best screenplay. After conducting musical research at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, she noticed the Revson Fountain at the complex and thought it would be an ideal location for Bialystock and Bloom to celebrate their corrupt union. Mr. Brooks agreed.
The nighttime scene culminates when Bloom runs and skips around the edge of the fountain. As jets of water soar into the air, Bloom gleefully proclaims, “I’m Leo Bloom! I’m me! I can do whatever I want!”
One character Ms. Olsen cast was Franz Liebkind, the mentally unbalanced, helmet-wearing Nazi who wrote “Springtime for Hitler” as a tribute to the Führer (“a terrific dancer.”) Dustin Hoffman, a young theater actor then, lobbied for the role, Ms. Olsen told Vanity Fair.
“But of course that was impossible,” she said. “Nobody wanted him to be the German.” (Mr. Hoffman did not play any role in “The Producers” but soon went on to star in the Mike Nichols film “The Graduate” with Mr. Brooks’s wife, Anne Bancroft.)
Another actor, Kenneth Mars, was called in to audition for the role of Roger De Bris, the flamboyantly gay director of “Springtime,” but Mr. Mars preferred Liebkind, and an initially reluctant Mr. Brooks relented, at Ms. Olsen’s insistence, by her account. (Christopher Hewett got the part of De Bris.)
When she was asked in 2012, for an “American Masters” documentary about Mr. Brooks, if any cast members had objected to the “Hitler stuff” in the film, she said one of the showgirls who appeared in the “Springtime for Hitler” title number “kind of objected to wearing swastika pasties.”
Alfa-Betty Olsen was born on Nov. 30, 1936, in Brooklyn to Alf and Borghild (Seime) Olsen, Norwegian immigrants. She graduated from high school at 16 and from the University of Iowa in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology.
Ms. Olsen’s career was largely under the radar — first with Mr. Brooks and finally with Mr. Efron, notably partnering with him on “The Great American Dream Machine,” a short-lived mix of short comic films, cartoons, music, investigative journalism and humorous sketches that premiered on public television in 1971. Mr. Efron was a writer of the show and one of its stars.
In a newspaper column that year, the writer Greg Vitiello lauded her as Mr. Efron’s “comic conspirator” in segments on flags, water beds, auto graveyards and much else.
Another segment, about “how to write your own famous last words,” featured Mr. Efron encouraging viewers to plan ahead for those final seconds because, “in all your life, you will have only one opportunity to die.”
They collaborated again on “Marshall Efron’s Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School,” a Sunday morning show on which Mr. Efron humorously enacted Bible stories for children. It premiered in 1973 and ran for four seasons.
“Everybody thinks we outraged the fundamentalists, but it’s not true,” Ms. Olsen told The Boston Globe in 1981. “We received awards from church groups, and letters saying Sunday schools were using our show as part of their studies.”
Ms. Olsen and Mr. Efron, who lived six floors apart in the same building in Greenwich Village for many years, stuck to the religious theme when they wrote a book, “Bible Stories You Can’t Forget — No Matter How Hard You Try” (1976). One story noted how irritable it made Joseph’s siblings to hear how good he always was, making his bed and taking all his own dishes to the sink “without anybody having to ask him.”
Their other books included “Omnivores: They Said They Would Eat Anything — and They Did!” (1979), a humorous examination of high and low cuisine (featuring an “affidavit” from Mr. Brooks attesting to seeing the authors eat what they claimed), and “Gabby the Shrew” (1994), a children’s book about a mole-like mammal, with illustrations by Roz Chast.
“I remember that she was lovely — funny and sweet, and a perfect partner in some undefinable way for Marshall Efron,” Ms. Chast said in an email.
Ms. Olsen left no immediate survivors. Her marriage to David Miller ended in divorce. Mr. Efron died in 2019.
When “The Producers” received an Oscar for best screenplay, Mr. Brooks did not mention Ms. Olsen in his acceptance speech. But in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, Mr. Brooks’ biographer Patrick McGilligan said Ms. Olsen had been happy to work for little recognition just to be in the same orbit of show-business personalities she admired.
Mr. McGilligan called her a “very funny, smart, serious writer who had not really the same drive and ambition to blaze her name in the sky the way Mel does, and was happy to serve for a while as his muse and as his typist and as his secret helper.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
The post Alfa-Betty Olsen, Behind-the-Scenes ‘Comic Conspirator,’ Dies at 88 appeared first on New York Times.
