Bancroft also has a role in the film, playing DeLuise's nagging, shrewish sister, but this movie is most notable as her single writing and directing credit. It was produced by Bancroft's husband, comedy maestro Mel Brooks, as the first release under his new Brooksfilms production banner. Brooks built quite a career as a producer alongside his own work as writer-director, and he didn't just stick to comedy. Hot on the heels of Fatso, he produced David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980), and later on Frances (1982) and The Fly (1986), among others.
Shooting took place mainly on the Fox lot, but the production also spent a few days in East Los Angeles and a week in some Italian neighborhoods of New York City. Bancroft was determined that the food in the film should be true to her memory of growing up in New York. "When the people eat bakery goods in this film," she said, "they actually come from a bakery that was just around the corner from my childhood home." When a batch of cookies arrived in Hollywood looking smaller than Bancroft remembered them being, she called the bakery and found that they had changed the recipe over the years; the bakery agreed to produce a new batch to the previous specifications.
But these details didn't matter much to the film's reception. Fatso grossed a modest $7 million for Twentieth Century-Fox and was not well received by critics. Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it "sentimental and unfocused... the jokes aren't very funny... The best shot in the movie is a close-up of a piece of lasagna." Variety was equally critical: "A lamentable affair... bumbling and sluggish... ricochets uncontrollably between attempts at hilarity and pathos." Indeed, Bancroft's handling of the movie's tone, and the transitions into and out of comedy, were especially singled out.
Dom DeLuise had previously appeared in three films for (director) Mel Brooks: The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974) and Silent Movie (1976).
Fatso's production notes claim that this was the first major (unionized) Hollywood feature to employ a woman as director of photography: Brianne Murphy. Murphy shot a few further features, but the bulk of her career was in television, for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award and three Primetime Emmy nominations.
By Jeremy Arnold
