Mel Brooks

Film Director

• Born: June 28, 1926
• Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York

COMEDIAN, ACTOR, WRITER, AND FILMMAKER

Brooks is a prolific comedic movie maker—from The Producers through Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein to Dracula: Dead and Loving It and then back to The Producers: The Musical. He has made significant contributions to television, film, and the theater, exercising his prodigious talent in many roles—stand-up comic, actor, scriptwriter, song composer, director, and producer—as the ultimate “renaissance” comedian.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Entertainment; music

Early Life

Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky on June 28, 1926, the youngest of four brothers, in Brooklyn, New York, on the family’s kitchen table. His father, Max, died three years later, forcing his mother and the boys to move to a cheap tenement. All had to work to keep the family going during the Great Depression. He adopted the name Mel Brooks when he decided to perform in the Catskills; Mel was a shortened form of his first name, and Brooks was an adaptation of his mother’s maiden name, Brookman.

After he graduated from high school in 1944, Brooks enlisted in the US Army and served during World War II in the 1104th Engineer Central Battalion of the 78th Division. His job was to clear minefields ahead of advancing troops. When not defusing mines, he used his comedic skills to entertain his fellow soldiers as a way to decrease the tension of their job.

When the war ended, Brooks was asked to join Special Services to entertain the troops with his comedy act; during this time he also began to write songs. Upon his return to the United States, he went to work in the theater (first in New Jersey), which may have inspired his later work, The Producers (1968).

Life’s Work

Brooks’s early stand-up comedy in the Catskills was to be of great value to him when he joined the comedy-writing team for the series Your Show of Shows. In addition to writing alongside Sid Caesar, he worked with Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen—talents that would dominate the early Golden Age of Television as well as that of theater and film. Brooks became a gag writer and script doctor for a variety of shows. He also developed a comedy act with Reiner called the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man, which was a staple in shows such as Steve Allen’s and resulted in a hit record album. In 1965, Brooks teamed with fellow writer Buck Henry to cocreate the hit television series Get Smart, which would remain popular decades later in reruns.

In the late 1960s, comedy-writing opportunities began to diminish, and Brooks began to turn toward film. In 1968, he put together a low-budget film that was to become a cult classic and then a Broadway musical hit, The Producers. The screenplay earned Brooks his first Academy Award in 1968.

Brooks followed this with a movie about the Russian Revolution called The Twelve Chairs (1970), which was a straight comedy, instead of a social critique like The Producers. Neither film was a moneymaker, but Brooks was honing his directorial talents and his lyric-writing and compositional skills with such songs as “Springtime for Hitler,” “Prisoners of Love,” and “Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst.”

Brooks’s first big financial hit was with Blazing Saddles (1974), which allowed him to produce, act, and write more songs. The film also brought him back together with Gene Wilder, who had worked so well in the role of Leo Bloom, the accountant in The Producers. Although Blazing Saddles was attacked as crude and crass by critics, theatergoers loved it. Brooks’s film made the natural biological outcome of a group of cowboys, sitting around a campfire eating beans, the subject of riotous laughs and addressed such sensitive topics as the way an all-white town in the Old West would react to a Black sheriff. The film was not only a parody of Western films but also a critique of social ills such as racism, alcoholism, and political corruption. Brooks also showcased his songwriting with the Academy Award–winning title song and the parody of Marlene Dietrich in “I’m Tired.”

The financial success of Blazing Saddles paved the way for what many consider Brooks’s masterpiece, Young Frankenstein (1974). While The Producers and Blazing Saddles are respectively satires of the theatrical world and society as a whole, Young Frankenstein is a masterful homage to the Universal Pictures monster films from the 1930s and 1940s. The film was shot in black and white and used props and dialogue from the original Frankenstein series of films. It is based loosely on the 1939 film Son of Frankenstein but incorporates elements of the original Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The film brings back Brooks’s film regulars Wilder, Kenneth Mars, and Madeline Kahn, adding newcomers Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Peter Boyle, and Marty Feldman as Igor. Brooks does not appear in the film but shines as its director. His willingness to step back and let his actors go on to reach their comic peak must have taken both self-control and self-sacrifice. The movie was a hit with critics and audiences alike. Brooks appeared to reach his peak with Young Frankenstein, for which he received his second Academy Award for writing.

Brooks was to try his hand at television again with a short-lived show called When Things Were Rotten, a parody of the Robin Hood legend that proved to be a flop. In the 1980s, he made a parody, Silent Movie (1976), and an homage to Alfred Hitchcock with High Anxiety (1977), which did not come close to achieving the box-office success of his previous films. He tried to return to his early television roots with the movie The History of the World, Part I (1981), which contains a series of comic vignettes from prehistoric times to the French Revolution. Most fall flat, but a few, such as the Inquisition vignette, are quite funny. Brooks tried an homage film again with wife Anne Bancroft in a remake of the Jack Benny film To Be or Not to Be (1983), which found no audience. He ended the 1980s with another parody film, Spaceballs (1987), which was a takeoff of Star Wars (1977) and a number of other science-fiction films.

While Brooks’s films seemed to wander from homage to parody with minimal success in the 1980s, he proved to be more successful in purchasing rights to films such as The Elephant Man (1980). He hired David Lynch to direct the film, which was hailed as a dramatic success. Brooks would produce several more serious films in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the 1990s, he tried a serious film as director-actor, called Life Stinks (1991), but it received little attention. Returning to the homage-parody approach, Brooks then produced Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), which found appreciative audiences. Both had respectable success at the box office, but nothing compared to Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles.

In April 2001, Brooks took a new direction: The Producers opened as a musical on Broadway, becoming a megahit and winning three Tony Awards in the categories of best book of a musical, best musical, and best original score. Brooks also took home three Drama Desk Awards for it. The remake of The Producers (2005) as a movie musical was also a success, if lacking some of the charm and freshness of the original. Recognizing this appreciation for his early work, Brooks reworked Young Frankenstein as a musical Off-Broadway with hopes of recapturing his earlier success. It was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding lyrics thanks to Brooks's efforts.

In later years, Brooks guest-starred in such popular television sitcoms as Frasier and Mad about You, winning an Emmy for his appearances in the latter. In 2008, Brooks created and performed in an animated television series based on his '80s hit film Spaceballs. He has also provided voice-overs for animated films including Jakers! (2003), Robots (2005), Mr. Peabody and Sherman (2014), several installments of the Hotel Transylvania franchise, Toy Story 4 (2019), and Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank (2022). He revisited another of his creations as narrator of the television series History of the World: Part II in 2023. He also had a memorable cameo as himself in the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building in 2023.

Significance

In addition to being a certified legend and renaissance man as a writer, producer, director, and lyricist, Brooks opened the way for others, such as Allen and his films Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975), Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), and the Zucker brothers, David and Jerry, who created Airplane! (1980) and the Police Squad! television series. Lines written by Brooks have also been enshrined in popular culture, from “Could be worse could be raining” to “Put the candle back.” Brooks is also notable for his pointed social satire and for writing groundbreaking comedy about violent periods of history, such as the Inquisition, American slavery, and the Holocaust.

Brooks has many nominations to his name, including multiple Academy Award nods. In 2024, he received an honorary Academy Award for his body of work. He was also the recipient of a lifetime achievement award in 2013 from the American Film Institute, a 2017 BAFTA fellowship, and holds three Grammy Awards. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2010 and Kennedy Center Honors in 2009.

Bibliography

Crick, Robert Alan. The Big Screen Comedies of Mel Brooks. London: McFarland, 2002. Print.

Brooks, Mel. “Mel Brooks on How to Play Hitler, and How He Almost Died Making Spaceballs.” Interview by Steve Heisler. A.V. Club. Onion Inc., 13 Dec. 2012. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

Brooks, Mel. “Mel Brooks:‘The Only Weapon I’ve Got Is Comedy.’” Interview by Stephen Deusner. Salon. Salon Media Group, 13 Nov. 2012. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

"Mel Brooks." IMDb, 2024, www.imdb.com/name/nm0000316/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Parish, James Robert. It’s Good to Be the King. Hoboken: Wiley, 2007. Print.

Yacowar, Maurice, Method in Madness. New York: St. Martin’s, 1981. Print.