Mel Brooks

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Mel Brooks (born Melvin Kaminsky, 1926) is an American writer, writer, comedian, producer, and composer.

He is best known as the creator of broad film farces and comedic parodies.

Brooks began his writing and reporting for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows.

He created The 2000 Year Old Man, a comedic stripe, with Carl Reiner.

He wrote, with Buck Henry, the hit television comedy series Get Smart, which ran from 1965 to 1970. Brooks made a name for himself in middle age, with several of his films ranked among the top ten moneymakers of the year they were released.

The Producers (1967), The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Film (1978), and Men in Tights (1993) were among his best-known films.

From 2001 to 2007, a musical interpretation of his first film, The Producers, appeared on Broadway. With his Tony Award for Producers in 2001, he appeared on an Emmy, a Grammy, and an Academy Award.

In 2009, he received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2010, a Hollywood Walk of Fame actor in 2010, a National Medal of Arts in September 2015, and a BAFTA Fellowship in February 2017.

Three of his films were listed in the top 100 comedy films of the last 100 years (1900–2000), with Blazing Saddles at number 6, The Producers at number 11, and Young Frankenstein at number 13.

Max Brooks, their son, is an actor and writer best known for his book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006).

Early life and education

Brooks was born on a tenement kitchen table in Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York City, on June 28, 1926, to Kate (née Brookman) and Max Kaminsky, and grew up in Williamsburg. His father's family were Jewish people from Gda'sk, Poland; his mother's relatives were Jews from Kyiv, according to the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). Irving, Lenny, and Bernie were all his older brothers. When Brooks was two years old, his father died of tuberculosis of the kidney at 34 years old. "There's an outrage there." He has referred to his father's death. I'm either angry at God or at the world for that. And I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on rage and hostility. I grew up in Williamsburg and learned how to clothe it in comedic humor, much like a punch in the chest."

Brooks was a small, sickly boy who was often mocked and teased by his peers because of his height. He grew up in tenement houses. With his maternal uncle Joe, a taxi driver who brought the Broadway doormen back to Brooklyn for free and was rewarded with the tickets in gratitude, he went to Anything Goes with William Gaxton, Ethel Merman, and Victor Moore at the Alvin Theater, aged nine. He told his uncle after the show that he did not want to work in the garment district like everyone else, but that he was definitely going into show business.

I can't go on!"

Brooks graduated from Eastern District High School in January 1944 and wanted to follow his older brother and enroll in Brooklyn College to study psychology.

Brooks was invited to take the Army General Classification Test, a Stanford-Binet-type intelligence examination, in early 1944 during his senior year at Eastern District High School. Brooks was sent by the Virginia Military Institute to learn electrical engineering, horse riding, and saber combat after scoring well. Brooks was drafted into the Army in 1944. He joined the United States Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, induction center, and was sent to the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for basic instruction and radio operator training. He turned 18 on August 18, 18 weeks later. Brooks was then sent back to Fort Dix for an overseas assignment. About 15 February 1945, Brooks reportedly boarded the SS Sea Owl at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Brooks arrived in France in November 1944 and later in Belgium as a forward artillery observer for the 78th Infantry Division, according to a United States Department of Defense reporter Brooks. Brooks was transferred as a combat engineer to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion, a short while later, during the Battle of the Bulge in February 1945.

As the Allies advanced into Nazi Germany, stationed in Saarbrücken and Baumholder, the battalion was responsible for clearing booby-trapped buildings and defusing land mines. Brooks was given the task of defusing a land mine location, and a specialist was sent to assist; defusing was carried out by a specialist. Brooks responded with a scream when he heard Germans singing over loudspeakers, according to Brooks, who went for Toot, Tootsie, Tootsie (Goo' Bye!) Jewish Al Jolson was the author of a Jewish Al Jolson. Since taking an anti-Semitic heckler's helmet off and smashing him in the chest with his mess kit, Brooks spent time in the store. His company built the first Bailey bridge over the Roer River in Roer River, and later installed bridges across the Rhine River. Brooks' unit carried out reconnaissance missions in the Harz Mountains, Germany, in April 1945, just as the war ended.

Brooks was posted as a comedian touring Army bases in Europe, and he was made corporal and put in charge of entertainment at Wiesbaden. I performed at Fort Dix and performed there. Brooks was honorably discharged from service as a corporal in June 1946.

Personal life

On Broadway, Brooks met Florence Baum, a dancer in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. They were married from 1953 to 1962 and divorced in 1962. Stephanie, Nicky, and Eddie were three children.

After his salary increased from $5,000 a week to $85 a week as a freelance writer, he went from Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour. He had few gigs for five years and was living in Greenwich Village on Perry Street in a fourth-floor walk-up, and he had been there for five years. Brooks and a friend were sent to Los Angeles in 1960 to escape his loneliness. Baum had begun suing him for legal separation in 1961, after his return to New York. Marriage Is A Dirty Rotten Fraud was an autobiographical script based on his marriage. The Zero Mostel Show pilot's position was as a building superintendent/janitor of Greenwich Village apartments. Brooks was "living in a very old but comfortable New York town house" by 1966.

In 1964, Brooks married actor Anne Bancroft, and they remained together until her death in 2005. They met at a rehearsal for the Perry Como Variety Show in 1961 and were married three years later at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau on August 5, 1964. Max Brooks was born in 1972 and Henry Michael Brooks, their grandson, was born in 2005.

"We were glued together" from the day, before her death, Brooks credited Bancroft as "the driving force" behind his creation of The Producers and Young Frankenstein for the musical theater.

Regarding religion, Brooks stated:

On Jewish cinema, Brooks said:

In his first public endorsement of a political nominee, Brooks supported Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

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Career

Brooks' mother had arranged him as a clerk at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but Brooks "got into a taxi and ordered him to the Catskills," where he began working in several Borscht Belt resorts and nightclubs in the Catskill Mountains as a drummer and pianist. Brooks began working as a regular comedian at one of the clubs, making jokes and doing movie-star impressions. He also started working in summer stock in Red Bank, New Jersey, and did some radio work. He rose to Grossinger's, one of Borscht Belt's most popular resorts, in a comedicically demanding role.

He found more fulfilling work behind the scenes, including becoming a television comedy writer. Sid Caesar, his friend, hired him to write parody for the DuMont/NBC series The Admiral Broadway Revue, costing him $50 a week, off-the-books.

Caesar created the revolutionary variety comedy series Your Show of Shows in 1950 and recruited Brooks as a writer, as well as Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, and head writer Mel Tolkin. The writing staff at a large company were very popular. Reiner, the show's producer, based Morey Amsterdam's Buddy Sorell on Brooks. In the same vein, the film My Favorite Year (1982) is loosely based on Brooks' time as a writer on the series, which also included an interview with actor Errol Flynn. The play Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993) by Neil Simon is also based on the show's design, and Ira Stone's character Ira Stone is based on Brooks. Imogene Coca, the show's founder, died in 1954 when she was invited to host her own exhibition. Caesar's Hour was created with the majority of the same cast and writers (including Brooks and Larry Gelbart) during Caesar's time (including Brooks and adding Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart). It ran from 1954 to 1957.

When they weren't working, Brooks and co-writer Reiner became close friends and began to casually improvise comedy routines. Mel Tolkin (standing in for Carl Reiner) and Mel Brooks performed in October 1959 at a Random House book launch of Moss Hart's autobiography, Act One, at Mamma Leone's, and Kenneth Tynan recalled it. Reiner performed as anything from a Tibetan monk to an explorer in a straight-man interview and set Brooks up as anything from a Tibetan monk to an explorer. "We'd go to a dance in the evening, and I'd pick a character for him to play," Reiner explained. I never told him what it was going to be like." Reiner's concern concerned a 2000-year-old man who had been to the store but never bought anything) had been married many hundred times and had "more than 100,000 children," he said, "and not one came to visit me." Brooks and Reiner began performing the routine for family members at first, but by the late 1950s, the company gained a following in New York City. Kenneth Tynan saw the comedy pair perform at a party in 1959 and wrote that Brooks "was the most original comedy improvisor I've ever seen."

Brooks went from New York to Hollywood in 1960, without his family. On The Steve Allen Show, he and Reiner's "2000 Year Old Man" performance began. Their appearances culminated in the launch of the comedy series 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, which sold over a million copies in 1961. They soon diversified their repertoire with two more albums in 1961 and 1962, a 1975 animated TV special, and a reunion album in 1998. The 2000 Year Old Man's best sales at one time, when Brooks was struggling financially and professionally, were his main source of income.

In the 1960s, Brooks adapted the 2000 Year Old Man to create the 2500-Year-Old Brewmaster for Ballantine Beer. The Brewmaster (in a German accent as opposed to the 2000 Year Old Man's Yiddish accent) was interviewed by Dick Cavett in a series of commercials and "may have used a six-pack of fresh air."

Brooks appeared on Broadway in 1962, and he was involved in the development of the Broadway musical All American, which debuted on Broadway. He produced the play with lyrics by Lee Adams and music by Charles Strouse. Ray Bolger, a southern science professor at a large university who employs engineering principles, has a football team at a large university, and the team is winning games. Joshua Logan, who script-doctored the second act and gave the plot a gay subtext, was involved in the production. It was a huge success, with two Tony Award nominations on its way.

Brooks developed and directed Ernest Pintoff's animated short film The Critic (1963), a satire of arty, esoteric cinema. As the befuddled moviegoer trying to make sense of the obscure images, Brooks provided running commentary. It received the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.

Buck Henry, a comedy writer, produced a television comedy show called Get Smart about a bumbling James Bond-inspired spy. "I was sick of worrying about all the nice, healthy situation comedies," Brooks said. They were life deceptions... I wanted to do something other than a family. No one had ever seen a film about an idiot before. "I wanted to be the first" in the world. Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, appeared on television from 1965 to 1970, although Brooks had no involvement after the first season. It was highly rated for the majority of its production and received seven Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series in 1968 and 1969.

"What are you going to do next?" a reporter asked during a press conference for All Americans. Perhaps riffing on Henry's Springtime, Brooks replied, "Springtime for Hitler." Brooks wrestled with a bizarre and unexpected notion of Adolf Hitler's musical comedy for many years. He first thought of writing a script before deciding to write one. Joseph E. Levine and Sidney Glazier became the first film to finance it (1968).

The Producers were so keen in their parody that major studios would not touch it, nor would many exhibitors. Brooks finally found an independent distributor who sold it as an art film, rather than a tourist attraction. Brooks received the Best Original Screenplay award at the 41st Academy Awards for the film's co-writer Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes. The Producers became a national college hit, first on the national college circuit, then in revivals and home video. On November 22, 1967, it premiered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a small audience before achieving a wide release in 1968. Brooks converted it into a musical, which was hugely popular on Broadway and received an unprecedented 12 Tony awards.

Glazier sponsored Brooks' next film, The Twelve Chairs (1970), due to the film's modest financial success. It's based on Ilf and Petrov's 1928 Russian novel of the same name about greedy materialism in post-revolutionary Russia that it all revolves around, it stars Ron Moody, Frank Langella, and Dom DeLuise as three men searching for a fortune in diamonds hidden in a pair of 12 antique chairs, each with Ron Moody, Frank Langella and Dom DeLuise. Brooks appears on "years for the regular beatings of yesteryear." The film was shot in Yugoslavia for $1.5 million. It received poor feedback and was not financially profitable.

Brooks wrote an adaptation of Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, but was unable to convince any studio that his career was over. David Begelman, who helped him with the arrangement with Warner Brothers to recruit Brooks (as well as Richard Pryor, Andrew Bergman, Norman Steinberg, and Alan Uger) as a script doctor for an unproduced script called Tex-X in 1972. Brooks was eventually hired as the director of Blazing Saddles (1974), his third film.

Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens, Madeline Kahn, Alex Karras, and Brooks himself performed on Blazing Saddles, with cameos by Dom DeLuise and Count Basie. It had music by Brooks and John Morris as well as a modest budget of $2.6 million. This is a satire on the Western film genre, it includes older films such as Destry Rides Again (1939), High Noon (1952), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). It refers to Busby Berkeley's extravagant musicals in a bizarre sequence near the end.

Despite mixed reviews, Blazing Saddles was a hit among younger audiences. It was the second-highest grossing film of 1974, grossing $119.5 million in the United States and Canada. It was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Actress in a Support Role for Madeline Kahn, Best Film Editing, and Best Music, Original Song. It was named "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress in 2006 and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, and it was nominated for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen. According to Brooks, the film "has to do with love more than anything else." When the black guy rodes into that Old Western town, I mean, even a little old lady says, 'Up yours, nigger!' You should know that his heart is broken.' So the tale of the heart being mended is really the tale.

Gene Wilder replaced Gig Young as the Waco Kid only after Brooks agreed that his next film would be a script that Wilder had been working on: a spoof of the Universal series of Frankenstein films from many decades ago. Wilder and Brooks began writing the script for Young Frankenstein and shot it in the spring of 1974 after the filming of Blazing Saddles was finished. Wilder, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, and Kenneth Mars appeared in a cameo role. In a scene with Kenneth Mars, Brooks' voice can be heard three times: as the wolf howls as the characters approach the castle; as the voice of Victor Frankenstein; and as the sound of a cat as Gene Wilder mistakenly throws a dart out of the window. John Morris composed the score once more, and Universal monsters special effects veteran Kenneth Strickfaden appeared on the film.

Young Frankenstein was the third-highest-grossing film of 1974, just behind Blazing Saddles with a gross of $86 million. Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound were also nominated for two Academy Award nominations for Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound. It received some of Brooks' best reviews. "Brooks makes a leap as a producer because, although the plot doesn't expand, he does carry the plot along until [he] gets to the end of the only comedy of recent years that doesn't collapses," Even notoriously difficult-to-please critic Pauline Kael liked it.

Brooks tried television again in 1975, a Robin Hood parody that lasted only 13 episodes, at the height of his film career. Nearly 20 years after, she made another Robin Hood parody, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). Several pieces of dialogue from his TV showdown as well as older Brooks films were revived.

Brooks' second hit films were followed by an audacious plan: the first full-length silent comedy in four decades. Silent Movie (1976) was written by Brooks and Ron Clark and starred Brooks in his first leading role, alongside Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, Sid Caesar, Bernadette Peters, Bernadette Peters, and the unassuming Marcel Marceau, who sporadically said the film's sole word of audible dialogue: "Non!" Silent Movie was a hit, although not as popular as Brooks' previous two films, grossing $36 million. He was ranked fifth on the Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll in late 2005.

Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca, and Barry Levinson wrote High Anxiety (1977), Brooks' parody of Alfred Hitchcock's films, and Barry Levinson directed the first film Brooks produced himself. It stars Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman, Ron Carey, Howard Morris, and Dick Van Patten. Vertigo, Spellbound, Psycho, The Birds, North by Northwest, Dial M for Murder and Suspicion are among the satirizations of such Hitchcock films as Vertigo, Spellbound, Psycho, The Birds. Brooks plays Professor Richard H. (for Harpo) Thorndyke, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who suffers from "high anxiety."

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert had referred to Mel Brooks and Woody Allen as "the two most influential comedy directors in the country today" by 1980... America's two funniest filmmakers." The Elephant Man, a dramatic film directed by David Lynch and produced by Brooks, was released earlier this year. Knowing that anyone reading "Mel Brooks Presents The Elephant Man" will expect a comedic comedy, he formed Brooksfilms. Since that time, it has produced several 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 based on Mel Brooks' real life (1982). Anne Bancroft, Brooks' wife, was trying to buy the rights to 84 Charing Cross Road for many years. Bancroft produced Fatso (1980), which Bancroft also wrote.

Brooks joked that the only genres he hadn't spoofed were historical epics and Biblical spectacles in 1981. Part I of the World Part I was a tongue-in-cheek glimpse at human history from the Dawn of Man to the French Revolution. It was written, produced, and directed by Brooks, with narration by Orson Welles. It was another modest financial hit, with a budget of $31 million. It received mixed critical feedback. "Whether you get stuck thinking about the bad taste or you let yourself laugh at the obscenity in the joke when doing Buuel's perverse dirty jokes," critic Pauline Kael said.

Brooks produced and appeared in a recreation of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 film To Be or Not to Be. Brooks, Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, Tim Matheson, Jose Ferrer, and Christopher Lloyd produced his 1983 film. It received international attention for a controversial song on its soundtrack, "To Be or Not to Be (The Hitler Rap),"—satirizing German society in the 1940s, with Brooks playing Hitler.

Spaceballs (1987), a parody of science fiction, mainly Star Wars, was Brooks' second film in the 1980s. It starred Bill Pullman, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Daphne Zuniga, Dick Van Patten, Joan Rivers, Dom DeLuise, and Brooks.

Brooks (with co-executive producer Alan Spencer) made another attempt at television success with the comedy The Nutt House, which starred Brooks regulars Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman in 1989. It was originally broadcast on NBC, but only five of the eleven produced episodes were broadcast before the network decided to cancel the show. Brooks produced Life Stinks (1991), Robin Hood: Tights (1993), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). "Anyone in a mood for a serious laugh would not do better than Robin Hood: Men in Tights," a People magazine column said, "Anyone in a mood for a laugh could not do better than this one: Robin Hood: A parody of Robin Hood, particularly Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves." It's packed with one-liners and the occasional crack of the fourth wall, like Brooks' other films. Robin Hood: Men in Tights was Brooks' second time exploring Robin Hood's life (the first being his 1975 television show When Things Were Rotten). Life Stinks was a financial and cultural disappointment, but it is also notable that it was Brooks' only film that was neither a parody nor a film about other films or theater. (The Twelve Chairs was a parody of the original book.)

With 12 wins, Brooks' musical version of his film The Producers on Broadway broke the Tony Award system, a record previously held for 37 years by Hello, Dolly! With ten wins, the tournament was a success. Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Gary Beach, and Roger Bart all appeared on stage, as well as new cast members Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell, in a 2005 big-screen adaptation/remake. Brooks began composing the score to a Young Frankenstein musical adaptation in early April, which he describes as "the best film [he] ever made." The world premiere at Seattle's Paramount Theater, which opened on September 7, 2007, the same theater that had opened on Broadway at the old Lyric Theater in New York on October 11, 2007. The critics gave it mixed praise. Brooks appeared on G4 TV in 2000 as an animated series sequel to Spaceballs named Spaceballs: The Animated Series.

Brooks has also performed in animated films. In the animated film Robots (2005), he played Bigweld, the master inventor, and Mr. Peas (2006), he appeared in the later animated film Mr. Peader & Sherman (2014) as Albert Einstein. In Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015) and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018), he returned to speak for Dracula's father, Vlad.

In the final number in Young Frankenstein, Brooks joked about the possibility of a musical interpretation of Blazing Saddles, in which the complete company performs, "next year, Blazing Saddles!" Brooks said in 2010 that the musical would be finished within a year; however, no creative team or programme has been confirmed.

Brooks would write and produce History of the World Part II, a follow-up to his 1981 film, on October 18, 2021. Brooks wrote All About Me, a memoir that appeared in 2021, at the age of 95.

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