But in 1970, Brooks stood at a crossroads between being a rising star and becoming a national treasure-1970 was the year of The Twelve Chairs. In the decades to come, Brooks would eclipse these accomplishments with an even greater legacy: Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, History of the World: Part I, and more-and transforming the cult hit The Producers into a blockbuster Broadway musical.

His dream of wealth destroyed, Ostap decides to break up his partnership with the old man, but he relents when Vorobyaninov goes into his routine of feigning epilepsy as a crowd gathers.īy 1970, Mel Brooks had already achieved a lifetime's worth of remarkable success: co-writer on the seminal Your Show of Shows, mastermind behind the 2,000 Year Old Man comedy franchise, co-creator of Get Smart, and his 1968 debut feature The Producers won Brooks the award for Best Original Screenplay, among other impressive nominations (the picture was not a commercial success, but you can't have everything). Finally, they come upon the last chair in a railroad workers' clubhouse only to discover that the jewels were found by the workers and used to buy chess sets and other items for their recreation room. Desperate for money, the two men perform a begging act in which Vorobyaninov feigns an epileptic seizure as Ostap passes his hat to sympathetic onlookers. Another chair, used by a tightrope walker in a circus, is searched, also to no avail. Ostap and Vorobyaninov then learn that several more of the chairs are being used as props by the Columbus Repertory Theatre Group they join the troupe, search the chairs, but again find no gems. Meanwhile, Vorobyaninov and Ostap locate several of the chairs in the Moscow Museum of Furniture, and after closing time, they sneak out of hiding, search through the chairs, but find no jewels. Ostap, posing as a clerk in the Bureau of Housing, tricks Father Fyodor into traveling to Siberia to the home of engineer Bruns, who he is told is in possession of the chairs.

Together they set out in search of the chairs and soon discover that Father Fyodor, a Russian Orthodox priest who heard Vorobyaninov's mother's last confession, is also in search of the jewels. He returns to his ancestral home to retrieve the inheritance, but he mistakenly reveals his secret to beggar Ostap Bender and is forced to accept the young man as a partner. In Russia in 1927, Vorobyaninov, an elderly license clerk who was once a nobleman, is informed by his dying mother that she hid a fortune in jewels in one of 12 matching chairs during the 1917 Revolution.

The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf