Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks | |
---|---|
Born | Melvin James Kaminsky June 28, 1926 New York City, U.S. |
Alma mater | Virginia Military Institute |
Occupations |
|
Years active | 1949–present |
Works | Full list |
Spouses |
|
Children | 4, including Max |
Awards | Full list |
Melvin James Brooks (
With a career spanning over seven decades, Brooks is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies.[2] A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 19 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2024.
Brooks began his career as a comic and a writer for
Brooks rose to prominence becoming one of the most successful film directors of the 1970s. His films include The Producers (1967), The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World, Part I (1981), Spaceballs (1987), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).[4] A musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, ran on Broadway from 2001 to 2007 and was itself remade into a musical film in 2005. He wrote and produced the Hulu series History of the World, Part II (2023).
Brooks was married to actress
Early life and education
Brooks was born on a
Brooks was a small, sickly boy who often was bullied and teased by his classmates because of his size.[16] He grew up in tenement housing. At age nine, Brooks went to a Broadway show with his maternal[17] uncle Joe—a taxi driver who drove the Broadway doormen back to Brooklyn for free and was given the tickets in gratitude—and saw Anything Goes with William Gaxton, Ethel Merman and Victor Moore at the Alvin Theater. After the show, he told his uncle that he was not going to work in the garment district like everyone else but was absolutely going into show business.[18]
When Brooks was 14 he gained employment as a
1944–1946: World War II service
In early 1944, in his senior year in high school, Brooks was recruited to take the
He made high scores and was sent to theAlong the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier.[33]
Stationed in
With the
Career
1949–1959: Early work and breakthrough
After the war, Brooks' mother had secured him a job as a clerk at the
In the years after the war, Brooks' hero was comedian Sid Caesar. Back in New York, Brooks would slink[42] around trying to catch Caesar in between meetings to pitch him joke ideas. Eventually Caesar cracked and paid Brooks a little cash to throw him gags....At 24, Brooks got his break as a full-time writer.[43]
Brooks found more rewarding work behind the scenes, becoming a comedy writer for television. In 1949, his friend
Caesar then created Caesar's Hour with most of the same cast and writers (including Brooks and adding Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart). It ran from 1954 until 1957.[51][52] Brooks told The New York Times, "When I was a fledgling comedy writer working for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, our head writer was Mel Tolkin... I really looked up to him. (By the way, I was 5-foot-7 and he was six feet tall.) He was a bona fide intellectual, thoroughly steeped in the traditions of great Russian literature. One day he handed me a book. He said to me, 'Mel, you're an animal from Brooklyn, but I think you have the beginnings of something called a mind.' The book was Dead Souls by the magnificent genius Nikolai Gogol. It was a revelation. I'd never read anything like it. It was hysterically funny and incredibly moving at the same time... It was a life-changing gift, and I still read it once a year to remind myself of what great comic writing can be."[53]
1958–1969: Rise to prominence
Brooks and co-writer Reiner had become close friends and began to casually improvise comedy routines when they were not working. In October 1959, for a
In 1960, Brooks, without his family, moved from New York to Hollywood, returning in 1961.
Brooks was involved in the creation of the Broadway musical
With comedy writer
During a press conference for All American, a reporter asked, "What are you going to do next?" and Brooks replied, "Springtime for Hitler," perhaps riffing on Springtime for Henry.[59] For several years, Brooks toyed with a bizarre and unconventional idea about a musical comedy of Adolf Hitler.[60] He explored the idea as a novel and a play before finally writing a script.[20] He eventually found two producers to fund it, Joseph E. Levine and Sidney Glazier, and made his first feature film, The Producers (1968).[61]
The Producers was so brazen in its satire that major studios would not touch it, nor would many exhibitors. Brooks finally found an independent distributor who released it as an art film, a specialized attraction. At the 41st Academy Awards, Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film over fellow writers Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes.[62] The Producers became a smash underground hit, first on the nationwide college circuit, then in revivals and on home video. It premiered to a limited audience in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on November 22, 1967, before achieving a wide release in 1968. Peter Sellers personally championed the film, paying out of pocket to take out full page ads in Variety and The New York Times.[63] Brooks later adapted it into a musical along with his collaborator Thomas Meehan, which was hugely successful on Broadway and received an unprecedented 12 Tony awards. In 2000, Roger Ebert included The Producers in his canon of Great Movies, and remembered being in an elevator with Brooks and Anne Bancroft shortly after the movie was released: "A woman got on the elevator, recognized him and said, 'I have to tell you, Mr. Brooks, that your movie is vulgar.' Brooks smiled benevolently. 'Lady', he said, 'it rose below vulgarity.'"[64]
1970–1979: Career stardom
With the moderate financial success of the film The Producers, Glazier financed Brooks' next film, The Twelve Chairs (1970). Loosely based on Ilf and Petrov's 1928 Russian novel of the same name about greedy materialism in post-revolutionary Russia, it stars Ron Moody, Frank Langella and Dom DeLuise as three men individually searching for a fortune in diamonds hidden in a set of 12 antique chairs. Brooks makes a cameo appearance as an alcoholic ex-serf who "yearns for the regular beatings of yesteryear". The film was shot in Yugoslavia with a budget of $1.5 million. It received poor reviews and was not financially successful.[20]
Brooks then wrote an adaptation of Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, but was unable to sell the idea to any studio and believed that his career was over. In 1972, he met agent David Begelman, who helped him set up a deal with Warner Bros. to hire Brooks (as well as Richard Pryor, Andrew Bergman, Norman Steinberg, and Alan Uger) as a script doctor for an unproduced script called Tex-X. Eventually, Brooks was hired as director for what became Blazing Saddles (1974), his third film.[20] Blazing Saddles starred Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens, Madeline Kahn, Alex Karras, and Brooks himself, with cameos by Dom DeLuise and Count Basie. It had music by Brooks and John Morris, and a modest budget of $2.6 million. A satire on the Western film genre, it references older films such as Destry Rides Again (1939), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), High Noon (1952) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). In a surreal sequence towards the end, it references the extravagant musicals of Busby Berkeley.
Despite mixed reviews, Blazing Saddles was a success with younger audiences. It became the second-highest US grossing film of 1974, grossing $119.5 million in the United States and Canada. It was nominated for three
When Gene Wilder replaced
Young Frankenstein was the third-highest-grossing film domestically of 1974, just behind Blazing Saddles with a gross of $86 million. It also received two Academy Award nominations for
Brooks followed up his two hit films with an audacious idea: the first feature-length silent comedy in four decades. Silent Movie (1976) was written by Brooks and Ron Clark, and starred Brooks in his first leading role, with Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, Sid Caesar, Bernadette Peters, and in cameo roles playing themselves: Paul Newman, Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft, and the mime Marcel Marceau, who uttered the film's only word of audible dialogue: "Non!" It is an homage to silent comedians Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, among others. It was not as successful as Brooks' previous two films but did gross $36 million. Later that year, he was named fifth on the Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll.[20] Reviews were generally favorable; Roger Ebert praised it as "not only funny, but fun. It's clear at almost every moment that the filmmakers had a ball making it." Regarding the film's inside jokes, Ebert wrote that "the thing about Brooks' inside jokes is that their outsides are funny, too."[67]
1980–2001: Established career
By 1980, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert had referred to Mel Brooks and Woody Allen as "the two most successful comedy directors in the world today ... America's two funniest filmmakers".[68] Released that year was the dramatic film The Elephant Man directed by David Lynch and produced by Brooks. Knowing that anyone seeing a poster reading "Mel Brooks presents The Elephant Man" would expect a comedy, he set up the company Brooksfilms. It has since produced a number of non-comedy films, including Frances (1982), The Fly (1986), and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) starring Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft—as well as comedies, including Richard Benjamin's My Favorite Year (1982), partially based on Mel Brooks' real life. Brooks sought to purchase the rights to 84 Charing Cross Road for his wife, Anne Bancroft, for many years. He also produced the comedy Fatso (1980) that Bancroft directed.
In 1981, Brooks joked that the only genres that he hadn't spoofed were historical epics and Biblical spectacles.
Brooks produced and starred in (but did not write or direct) a remake of
The second movie Brooks directed in the 1980s was Spaceballs (1987), a parody of science fiction, mainly Star Wars. It starred Bill Pullman, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Daphne Zuniga, Dick Van Patten, Joan Rivers, Dom DeLuise, and Brooks.
In 1989, Brooks (with co-executive producer
2001–present
Brooks created the
In early April 2006, Brooks began
Brooks has also supplied vocal roles for animation. He voiced Bigweld, the master inventor, in the animated film Robots (2005), and in the later animated film Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014) he had a cameo appearance as Albert Einstein. He returned, to voice Dracula's father, Vlad, in Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)[71] and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018). Brooks joked about the concept of a musical adaptation of Blazing Saddles in the final number in Young Frankenstein, in which the full company sings, "next year, Blazing Saddles!" In 2010, Brooks confirmed this, saying that the musical could be finished within a year; however, no creative team or plan has been announced.[72]
In 2021, at age 95, Brooks published a memoir titled All About Me!.[5] On October 18, 2021, it was announced that Brooks would write and produce History of the World, Part II, a follow-up TV series on Hulu to his 1981 movie.[73] He received a nomination for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for his role as the narrator in the series.
Acting credits and accolades
Brooks is one of the
Brooks also won a Hugo Award and Nebula Award for Young Frankenstein.[75] In a 2005 poll by Channel 4 to find The Comedian's Comedian, he was voted No. 50 of the top 50 comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.[76] The American Film Institute (AFI) lists three of Brooks' films on its AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list: Blazing Saddles (#6), The Producers (#11), and Young Frankenstein (#13).
On December 5, 2009, Brooks was one of five recipients of the 2009
Personal life
Marriages
Brooks met Florence Baum,[85] a dancer in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, on Broadway.[86][87] They were married from 1953 until their divorce in 1962. They had three children: Stefanie, Nicholas, and Edward.[88] After earning a salary of $5,000 a week on Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour,[89] his salary dropped to $85 a week as a freelance writer. For five years he had few gigs, and was living in Greenwich Village on Perry Street in a fourth-floor walk-up.[59] In 1960, to escape his situation, Brooks moved in with a friend, in Los Angeles.[55] In 1961, after his return to New York, he found that Baum had begun suing him for legal separation. Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud[90] was an autobiographical script based on his marriage.[43][17] By 1966, Brooks was "living in a fairly old but comfortable New York town house".[56]
Brooks married actress
Interests
Brooks is a voracious reader; in a profile for The New Yorker, Kenneth Tynan describes "Brooks the secret connoisseur, worshiper of good writing, and expert on the Russian classics, with special reference to Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, and Tolstoy."[96] In The Producers, Bialystock refers to Bloom as "Prince Myshkin", a character from Dostoevsky's The Idiot. And the name Leo Bloom is a reference to Leopold Bloom, hero of Joyce's Ulysses.[97]
Religious beliefs
Regarding religion, Brooks stated, "I'm rather secular. I'm basically Jewish. But I think I'm Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all. I think it's the relationship with the people and the pride I have. The tribe surviving so many misfortunes, and being so brave and contributing so much knowledge to the world and showing courage".[98] On Jewish cinema, Brooks said, "They can be anything and anywhere ... if there's a tribal thing, like, the 'please God, protect us' feeling ... we don't know where and how it's gonna come out. Avatar was a Jewish movie ... these people on the run, chasing—and being pursued".[99]
Politics
Brooks endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, in his first-ever public endorsement of a political candidate.[100][101]
Discography
Comedy albums
- 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (World Pacific Records, 1960)[102]
- 2001 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (Capitol Records, 1961)
- Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks at the Cannes Film Festival (Capitol Records, 1962)
- 2000 and Thirteen with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (Warner Bros. Records, 1973)[103]
- The Incomplete Works of Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks (Warner Bros. Records, 1973)
- Excerpts from The Complete 2000 Year Old Man (Rhino Records, 1994)[104]
- The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 (Rhino Records, 1997)
Soundtracks
- The Producers(RCA Victor, 1968)
- High Anxiety – Original Soundtrack (Asylum Records, 1978)
- History of the World Part I(Warner Bros. Records, 1981)
- To Be or Not to Be (Island Records, 1984)
- The Producers: Original Broadway Recording (Sony Classical, 2001)
References
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- ^ "History of the World Part II Series". Variety. October 18, 2021. Retrieved December 20, 2021.
Brooks' comedy films are consistently ranked among the best of all time.
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- "Fantasy Mansion Becomes an Inn". The New York Times. February 13, 1977.
...David Weisgal, the 44‐year‐old son of a wealthy philanthropist—a $235,000 fantasy that he could afford. Mr. Weisgal purchased the 33‐room mansion, situated on 21 acres of Berkshire pine forest and with Florence Brooks‐Dunay, his fiancée...
- Huberdeau, Jennifer (September 22, 2016). "The Cottager: Wheatleigh, Where the Berkshires ends and Italian country begins". The Berkshire Eagle. Retrieved September 28, 2022.
In 1976, Wheatleigh was sold to David Weisgal and his fiancee, Florence Brooks-Dunay, a professional dancer, for $235,000. They ran Wheatleigh as a country inn until 1982, when current owners Linfield and Susan Simon fell in love with the property and purchased it
- "Fantasy Mansion Becomes an Inn". The New York Times. February 13, 1977.
- ^
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- ^
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- ^ "Tablet Magazine". Tablet Magazine. June 28, 2016. Retrieved April 5, 2020.
- ^ Moreau, Jordan (October 21, 2020). "Mel Brooks Endorses Biden for President in First-Ever Political Video". Variety.
- ^ Max Brooks [@maxbrooksauthor] (October 21, 2020). "My father, @MelBrooks, is 94. He has never made a political video. Until now. / #MelBrooks4JoeBiden / #BidenHarris / #GrassrootsDemHQ" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
- ^ Bernstein, Adam (July 1, 2020). "Carl Reiner, TV comedy pioneer and probing straight man to Mel Brooks, dies at 98". The Washington Post. Retrieved July 2, 2020.
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- Discogs.com. 1994. Retrieved July 2, 2020.
Bibliography
- Adler, Bill, and Jeffrey Feinman. Mel Brooks: The Irreverent Funnyman. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976. OCLC 3121552.
- Brooks, Mel; Keegan, Rebecca (October 18, 2016). Young Frankenstein: A Mel Brooks Book: The Story of the Making of the Film. ISBN 978-0-316-31546-3.
- Brooks, Mel. All About Me: My Remarkable Life in Show Business. New York: Ballantine, 2021.
- Crick, Robert A. The Big Screen Comedies of Mel Brooks. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. OCLC 49991416.
- Holtzman, William. Seesaw, a Dual Biography of Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979. ISBN 978-0-385-13076-9.
- ISBN 978-0062560995.
- Parish, James Robert (2007). It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. OCLC 69331761.
- Symons, Alex. Mel Brooks in the Cultural Industries: Survival and Prolonged Adaptation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. OCLC 806201078.
- Yacowar, Maurice. Method in Madness: The Comic Art of Mel Brooks. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981. OCLC 7556005.
External links
- Official website[dead link]
- Mel Brooks at the TCM Movie Database
- Mel Brooks at the Internet Broadway Database
- Mel Brooks at Emmys.com
- Mel Brooks at AllMusic
- Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks discography at Discogs
- Mel Brooks – Box Office Data Movie Director at The Numbers
- Mel Brooks – Box Office Data Movie Star at The Numbers
- Mel Brooks at IMDb
- Mel Brooks at Virtual-History.com (Photographs and Books)
- Topic: Mel Brooks's channel on YouTube(2000 Year Old Man)
- The Official MEL BROOKS's channel on YouTube
Interviews
- Mel Brooks interview with Studs Terkel on WFMT, July 2, 1968
- Mel Brooks interview on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, July 4, 1978
- Mel Brooks Interview (2001)[dead link]—Tony Awards
- Mel Brooks interview on NPR's Fresh Air (January 1, 2004)
- Mel Brooks interview on NPR's Fresh Air (December 7, 2021)
- Biographer James Robert Parish interview (2007)—Alt Film Guide