Though Brooks asked Glazier to accompany him to Hollywood and work on such films as Blazing Saddles (1974), the producer decided to remain in New York when his second marriage broke up. None of it – all of this wonderful, magical stuff – would be, if it wasn’t for the faith and courage of this terrific guy.After The Producers, Glazier formed a distribution company, Universal Marion Corporation Pictures. He was an executive producer on several films, including such offbeat comedies as Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (1969), Waris Hussein’s Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970) starring Gene Wilder, and Mel Brooks’s The Twelve Chairs (1970), and his company handled the US distribution of Luis Bu?’s The Milky Way (1969) and Dario Argento’s Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970).Glazier also produced the television drama Catholics (1973), an adaptation of Brian Moore’s thoughtful novel about the battle between tradition and reform in a monastery. But at the Tony ceremony I made a speech thanking Sidney Glazier for making it all happen I knew he’d be listening to the Tonys. Brooks said, He became ill the year the show was born and couldn’t leave his rest home. It won an unprecedented 12 Tony Awards, but Glazier never saw the show. I never laughed so hard in my life.In April 2001 a Broadway musical based on the film opened to phenomenal acclaim on Broadway, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick brilliantly taking on the roles originally created by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder.

Levine at Avco Embassy, and he browbeat Joe into letting me direct the movie He said I was a genius director. Nobody knew that, because I hadn’t directed anything.In a 1997 interview with Billboard, Glazier said of Brooks, He had a remarkable sense of how to create humour in the moment, which is why I loved it when he acted out the script for me, improvising the unfinished parts from a three-page synopsis, doing all the German accents. The enthusiastic Glazier took it to several studios without initial success Brooks said, He finally got it to Joseph E. “At this stage of my life,” he recalled, I’d had four years of analysis to deal with the tragedy and abuse I had as a kid, and I was in a better position to empathise with other people’s pain. The charismatic Glazier, described by Brooks as “a big, tall, good-looking man”, displayed such flair that he was appointed executive director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Foundation.

“That’s where I first smoked pot, saw Duke Ellington play, and met Billie Holiday,” he said. Under the GI Bill, he then worked as an apprentice jeweller, but left that job to become a salesman of bonds for the new state of Israel. He was working as the manager of the Mayfair Theatre in Ohio when Pearl Harbor was attacked and he joined the Army, rising to the rank of second lieutenant.After his discharge he moved to Manhattan, where he became night manager of the Apollo Bar on 125th Street. “I instantly realised that films would always be the loveliest and best escape from the troubled life I inherited,” he later confessed. At the age of 15 he was able to leave the orphanage for good, taking a job as an usher at a burlesque theatre which showed movies between stage acts.

Glazier and his brothers were placed in the Hebrew Orphan Home in Philadelphia. Glazier’s father, a carpenter, died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and when Glazier was five years old his mother married a man who already had three children and did not want hers in the house. The world must see this picture.” Sidney really is responsible for my film career, for giving me that leg up and helping me.Glazier was born in Philadelphia in 1916, the second of three sons of a Russian-Polish couple who had immigrated four years earlier from Minsk, in what is now Belarus. “He spit out his coffee and tuna sandwich and couldn’t stop laughing,” said Brooks He said, “I vow to get this movie made. (It was not an entirely original idea, as a similar theme had been utilised in a minor RKO musical, New Faces of 1937.) In Brooks’s script, the producers try to ensure failure by taking a terrible play described by its author as “a gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgarten” and turning it into a musical complete with a goose-stepping chorus line.Brooks described how Glazier was eating lunch in his office when Brooks began acting out the story for him and singing “Springtime for Hitler”. “Glazier was responsible for the film seeing the light of day,” said Brooks “It was his stick-to-itiveness and perseverance. Sidney Glazier, film producer: born Philadelphia 29 May 1916; twice married (one daughter); died Bennington, Vermont 14 December 2002.