Work Text:
Max Bialystock had been technically dead for one minute and 27 seconds when his heart suddenly started beating again, and he was shocked back into consciousness. He came back with a mission far more dramatic than a boredom-induced heart attack at the Town Center at Boca Raton.
Max Bialystock, age 97, had a calling to produce one final play. Bialystock and Bloom were coming out of retirement- as soon as they let him out of this hospital.
As always, Leo Bloom, his producing partner and housemate, arrived to pick him up in an ancient white Volvo wagon, wheelchair in the back. Taped to the dash was some sort of blue towel thing, obscuring the radio. And just as he had done for the last three heart attacks, he wheeled Max to the car.
“Leo, my friend, we have a mission!” declared Max.
--
“So, where do we produce this play? It’s 1200 miles to New York, and we don’t know anyone who’s still working. All our friends are dead. Plus, its now $20 million dollars to put on a production.” Leo Bloom might be a retired producer, but he was a retired producer who did kept up with both the news and his accounting skills.
“As much as I would love New York, let’s use the theater in the complex. Nobody has to deal with the TSA.” Max Bialystock had not flown in 20 years, but he, too, kept up with the news. “Cast it entirely with women from the complex, and everyone will pay to see.”
“It could fuel the gossip mill for a year!”
“Now all that remains is the funding,” Leo stated.
“There are a lot of little old ladies in Boca Raton. Although by now they are mostly younger than us ladies. Leave that to me,” Max said with a flourish, tipping an invisible hat.
“I have an idea this time - I was doing Mrs. Cohen’s taxes...”
“Redhead, Blonde, Busty, or Large-Assed Cohen?” Max interrupted.
“Busty Cohen - her name is Margaret. Anyway, I noticed something. The gift limit is up to $13,000 per year per person. That would be $26,000 for the two of us. Instead of asking them to invest, just ask them for the money. Like they were giving to charity or something,” Leo said.
“No investors to pay back. No jail to go to. No taxes to pay. I like it, I like it, I like it!” Max’s enthusiasm was growing, and he had started his wheelchair spinning in tight little circles.
“Now all we need to do is find the play,” said Leo, as he stroked Nero, his security blanket Pomeranian. Nero ignored him and continued chewing on a biscuit and dropping crumbs all over the tile. Security blanket duty did not require much work on the part of Nero, once the business of dying him properly blue had been declared a complete and total failure.
“We should do Springtime for Hitler. Make the last Bialystock & Bloom production the same as the first one!” Max, having exhausted the little circles, was casting about as if he was a drunken chorus girl on wheels, not a 97 year old man with every medical problem ever invented.
“I don’t know, Max. We live in a retirement community which is 80% Jewish. Even for a comedy, how many people are going to give us money for a play about Hitler?”
“Well, Leo, we could always change it, make it more local. You know what else we have in Boca? The other 20%? Cubans. Who do the Cubans hate almost as much as Jews hate Hitler? Fidel Castro. We could do a remake of Springtime for Hitler, make it contemporary, maybe ‘Brokeback Castro’?”
“Brokeback Castro?” Leo stared as Max excitedly flailed his arms.
“The forbidden love of Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro. Just imagine: after the war, Hitler escapes to a Cuban mountain hideaway. There he meets a young shepherd named Fidel Castro. They embark on a twenty year tragic love affair. Hitler offers advice to the young Castro. Helps him plan for the revolution. And all the sheep are played by bikini-wearing 22 year old aerobics instructors. Just think about it, Leo!”
Leo thought about it. “Do they even have mountains in Cuba?”
“Does it matter?” Max replied. “Springtime for Fidel and the Revolutionaries, Autumn for Batista and Lansky. Movimiento 26 de Julio, onward with help from the master race!”
“Do you still have a copy of the script? We can just give Castro all the dialogue that belonged to Eva Braun.”
"I gave mine to the leader of cell block 8, back in Sing Sing. I thought you had a copy"
“I thought you had it!”
—
The next day found Leo, the designated internet user, sitting in front of his ancient laptop, trying to google the script of a play that had closed 40 years earlier.
“You know, Max, if only we hadn’t been extradited back from Brazil, we wouldn’t be having this problem. Just two little plays, that’s all we wanted to put on.”
“Is it my fault that they take the theft of two million Cruzeiros more seriously than they do in America?” Max asked.
For the record: yes, yes, it was the fault of Max Bialystock.
“At least deportation paid for the plane ticket home,” Leo said.
“True. I think we came out ahead there. Two million Cruzeiros was what, $500 US? Shortest exile ever,” said Max. “What does the google say about Springtime?”
“Have you ever heard of an ‘original male dog’ Max?”
“I’ve known men who were dogs.”
“I don’t think this is…” Sudden Leo started rocking, and dumped Nero off his lap. “Make it stop. Make it stop!”
“Leo! Stop rocking.” Max motored over, waving the emergency kitchen blue cloth blankie like a flag. “What happened?”
A few hysterical gasps later, “I found out what ‘Original Male Dog’ stands for.”
“Well? Make that screen bigger, or tell me”.
As per Max’s request, Leo made the words on the screen bigger. Slowly Max pressed the buttons, pushing the screen down a word at a time.
“Oh, that’s nothing. You should have seen this one time during the war, we were in Tijuana….” Max had a wistful look on his face, as the one lone remaining hair curled on his head fell down to his eye. "They always said Hitler loved animals."
“Max, people are writing stories about Springtime. Look at this - there’s hundreds of them.” Leo said
“That’s perfect. Hundreds of people all ready for the sequel. Pick one, it can be the scrip. Hey, what’s this?” Max pointed at the screen. “Apparently Poland loves cockrings.”
“How do you put a cockring on a country?” Leo asked.
--
A few days later, Leo had an answer to that question. While Max was busy fundraising with as many little old ladies as he could find (little old ladies who were now significantly younger than he was), Busty Cohen’s 40 year old granddaughter was staying with her, despite Century Village requiring all residents be rules about guests being over 55. As the youngest person that Leo knew, she was able to provide him with answers that the google didn’t divulge.
“Hey, Max! I have the answer to the mystery.” Leo bounded back into their condo with surprising energy for a man pushing 80. “Springtime for Hitler - all those stories are something called a ‘fandom’.”
“Wha? Not now, Mrs. Stienbach, that’s not how you play find the pickle.” He jerked his head up.
“People write pornography about us and Springtime on the internet. There’s a whole archive devoted to this fandom stuff. They do it for everything.” Leo scowled the scowl of people still trying to grasp a concept.
“Is any of it good?” Max asked.
“Is what good?” Leo replied.
"The pornography on the internet.”
“I’ve no idea. But they mention all the people who were involved in the production of Springtime for Hitler. Roger De Bris, Carmen Ghia, Franz Liebkind, everyone. I’m a character. I’ve never been a character before.” Leo was slightly flattered by the attention.
“I’ve been a character for all my life,” was Max’s response. “And if any of it was good, it would help with fundraising.”
The answer, although Leo and Max would never know it, was that most of it was terrible. Which did not stop the word of fandom existing from spreading well beyond Busty Cohen’s bridge night, and right on to being the talk of Century Village. It spread to all hundred buildings: from bridge night to water aerobics, from water aerobics to knitting, from knitting to pottery, and from pottery to the book club.
Max found fundraising even easier than expected. Add to that a gossipy pool of volunteer actors, set designers and costumers, a choreographer who figured out a way for Fidel and Adolf to sit for much of the play, and It was the most excitement of at least a month. Younger members of the community went about with smartphones in hand, documenting the experience.
—
“So how does it feel to be a producer again, Max?” Leo asked, as they stood outside the theater waiting for the (very slow) outflow of the audience.
“It’s beautiful. That play was,” sniff, “was terrible! The sheep all missed their cues, the beer hats were filled with actual beer, and a pair of 80 year old women played both Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro. What more could a producer possibly want?”
“Money, women, fame?” Leo replied, as Nero tried to nibble at his shoelaces.
“I’ve had that. But this was a great way to finish. Just think! After tonight, I’ll never have to eat with an actor again.” Max set himself spinning in a happy circle, causing Leo to attempt to pick up Nero, lest the dog lose a tail.
The result was a collision of heads. And when they had finally sorted themselves out - Max tilted upright, Leo on his feet, Nero scampering unscathed and unmolested - there were giant golden fireworks overhead.
“We even have fireworks to celebrate!”
Later, they would learn that the fireworks were actually in honor of the death of the real Fidel Castro, who had died of a heart attack at about the time that the fake Castro was training sheep in the proper usage of small arms.
--
Springtime for Hitler was the worst play ever produced, and the funniest Broadway show of 1968. Forty years later, Bialystok & Bloom created an unexpected sequel. As for everyone else :
- Director Roger De Bris’ 2008 wedding to his common law assistant Carmen Ghia was such a De Bris production that it was single handedly responsible for the passing of Proposition 8. His 2009 funeral was a ceremony of unexpected class and good taste. It was a key factor in building public support for Proposition 8's eventual repeal.
- Former Bialystock & Bloom receptionist Dr. Ulla Magnusson won the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, for her series of novels providing a touching and nuanced look at life in the United States and Sweden during the feminist revolution. As of this writing, she is one of the Swedish representatives to the European Parliament.
- Playwright Franz Liebkind moved to Argentina after his release from prison. He continued to raise pigeons and write plays about Hitler. None were produced.
- Lorenzo St. Dubois moved to upstate New York, and was last seen running an organic goat farm and marijuana dispensary. His goats were the most blissed out in the country.
- Max Bialystock would die in his sleep a few years after his last production. He was napping with a little old lady who was at least 20 years his junior. He received a featured novelty obituary in the New York Times. It went viral. The obituary resulted in a Springtime for Hitler revival. The songs went viral.
Four months later, a version of Springtime as sung by a shark on water-skis, with goose stepping geese, and a sad panda as Poland was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short film.
- Leo Bloom remained in the Century Village condo with Nero, enjoying a well earned retirement. He too was destined to die at a ripe old age.
Leo's death at 90 triggered a revival of the Springtime meme started a decade decade earlier. The new storm troopers from the 9th Star Wars film would fill in the part of the German storm troopers. The production itself would be entirely in Chinese.
- Nero the Pomeranian continued to serve as a (non-blue) walking security blanket. His placidity towards people was was matched only by the ferocity of his actions towards the stuffed animals and squirrels of Century Village.