They reset for another take. Again, Broderick went through the motions, with nary a lobsterlike grasp in the bunch. Stroman watched the monitor; her face fell again. She seemed frustrated, as though trying to untie a knot. The lunch break was looming. At this point, I thought she might pull him aside to ask for what she wanted. Instead, she turned to the assistant director and asked, “Could we do one more?” They reset the shot. Again, Broderick flicked at the bottoms. Stroman called cut, then pulled her headphones from her head. “We’ll get it in another shot,” she said, and the cast and crew broke for lunch.

Later in the summer, after filming had wrapped, Brooks arrived at a midtown soundstage where Stroman was working on some last-minute music edits for the cut they were preparing for the studio. Bancroft had died a few weeks earlier, and when Brooks entered, the room quieted. Stroman rose from her chair to greet him and gave him a hug. “Hey, Mel,” she said. He smiled and said, “So, what did you make today?”

Then Brooks, who started his career as a drummer in the Catskills, started tapping a tattoo on the back of Glen Kelly, the show’s musical arranger, standing nearby. “Do you know what that is?” he asked. “It’s the opening bars from Gene Krupa’s ‘Sing Sing Sing.’ ” Then he said to the room, “When this film opens in Germany, let me know. I’ll be in Brooklyn. Call me and let me know how it goes over.”

His manner—kidding, smiling, nailing the punch lines—recalled a day during the filming when Stroman enlisted him for a surprise cameo. In it, he appears in a tux and a fedora to sing the climactic line to a song. He posed on a glittering stairway, surrounded by beautiful showgirls, each of whom seemed giddy and slightly hesitant to be crowding the comedy legend. “Closer, closer!” Stroman instructed them. Then she called action and the camera rolled. The set fell silent. Brooks delivered his punch line, again and again, belting it out, in a dozen different variations. It felt as though he were conducting a master’s class in just the kind of comic timing that, in reality, can never be taught. I asked Stroman about it later. “He had a good two hours there,” she says. “He gave a hundred percent, full out. Then he went to Sloan-Kettering.”

Since The Producers wrapped, Brooks has withdrawn in California. The film, which started as an effort to preserve a career-topping triumph that all of them had shared, has, for Brooks, been consumed by a larger shadow. He did a couple of interviews to promote the film, then canceled the rest of his press. By e-mail, he said, “Susan did a magnificent job. She invented incredible movements and moments, and she was very loving with Nathan and Matthew. No one has ever, including Gene Kelly in An American in Paris and even Singin’ in the Rain, done better production numbers than the ones that Susan Stroman has done in this film. Stroman was born to do it.” He’s hoping to travel to London to do press for the film there, but for now, he’s avoiding all public appearances.

“Mel has been through the worst year of his life,” Meehan told me. “I spent quite a bit of time with him all last summer in New York and then out in California. We’re sort of working”—they’re sketching out a new project, a Young Frankenstein musical—“but I’m also like his grief therapist. It’s been very difficult for him.” When Stroman lost her husband, “she thought she’d never work again,” says Meehan. “Which is what Mel first said: ‘I’ll never work again.’ ”

The film’s gala New York premiere was scheduled for a Sunday in December at the Ziegfeld. It’s the first time Broderick, Lane, Stroman, and Meehan would be together to watch the finished work. Brooks, however, would be staying in California. He’d decided he couldn’t attend.

Stroman’s midtown office, just south of Columbus Circle, is a stark contrast to her familiar black uniform: The office is white, all white, with white leather furniture and a white board table with white chairs, the whole setup reflected infinitely in a room surrounded on all sides with mirrored walls. We met there in late November, and she was no longer wearing her trademark black. She wore a faded denim shirt, and her long blonde hair, freshly washed, hung loose. She’d just returned from L.A., where she’d wrapped a final bit of editing on the film.

“As Kander and Ebb say, it was a quiet thing,” she said. “When I finished, I walked out into this big empty parking lot, drove back to the hotel, and went to bed. In the theater, everybody’s in the pool, and you either drown together or you get an Olympic medal together. And you’re always celebrating something. You celebrate the last day of rehearsal. You celebrate the first preview. You celebrate opening night. It’s not that way in film. It is hard work, technical work. It was a very different feeling.”