He is an actor-comedian, screenwriter, director, and producer who has mined the vein of vulgar comedy with excellent results. Critics often dismiss his films for their scatological humor, but Brooks has been one of the most outrageously comic film creators of the last 25 years, stretching the bounds of film humor and creating several comedy classics in the process. Along with WOODY ALLEN, Mel Brooks shapes his own comic vision with virtually complete artistic control.
Born Melvin Kaminsky, he was the son of a process server who died when Brooks was two and a half years old. He started his show business career at the age of 14, entertaining guests around the pool of a Catskill Mountains resort hotel in upstate New York. After serving in World War II, Brooks began his stand-up comedy career in earnest, working at several Catskill hotels until he met Sid Caesar, who took Brooks on as a writer for Caesar’s influential TV comedy/variety series, Your Show of Shows, during the early 1950s. Brooks was earning $5,000 per week as a writer until the program went off the air, and then he soon fell into relative obscurity during the rest of the 1950s, until he and Carl Reiner released a record album of their party routine “The Two Thousand Year Old Man” (played by Brooks). The album, 2,000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (1960), and its sequels resurrected Brooks’s career.
In the 1960s, he and Buck Henry created the hit TV series Get Smart, and in the 1970s, Brooks tried again with the somewhat less successful TV series When Things Were Rotten. Despite his long association with TV, Brooks’s best, most outrageous humor has been exhibited in his movies. Brooks’s first film was not The Producers, which he made in 1967, but rather a cartoon he created and narrated called The Critic (1964), for which he won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Subject. Brooks’s failed attempts to write for the legitimate stage during the 1950s and early 1960s were the likely inspiration for The Producers, a film many still consider the writer-director’s greatest movie. Its inspired lunacy, culminating in the “Springtime for Hitler” (the original title of the film) musical number, remains a cinematic milestone in hilarious bad taste. Brooks won an Oscar for Best Screenplay for his very first feature-length film; and though it was not an immediate success at the box office, it has flourished ever since as a cult favorite.
Brooks wrote and directed The Twelve Chairs (1970), another very funny film that flopped. It took Brooks four years to obtain the financing to make his next movie, Blazing Saddles (1974), but it became the most successful comedy of its time, earning $45,200,000 in North America alone. Brooks played a small role in The Twelve Chairs and two parts in Blazing Saddles, establishing himself as a screen comedian, but it wasn’t until he took a major role in Silent Movie (1976) and the lead role in High Anxiety (1977) that Brooks appeared center stage in his own films. Yet Brooks has consistently surrounded himself with fine comic actors, using many of the same people in his films, such as GENE WILDER, the late Madeline Kahn, the late Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, and Ron Carey.
From the very beginning of his career as a writerdirector, most of Brooks’s films have been parodies of movie genres. For instance, The Producers made fun of backstage musicals, Young Frankenstein (1974) horror films, Silent Movie silent-film conventions (even to the point of eschewing dialogue); High Anxiety spoofed Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, History of the World—Part I (1981) lampooned just about every kind of movie genre, and Spaceballs (1987) sent up science fiction films such as Star Wars.
His latter films have not been terribly successful at the box office. History of the World—Part I, in particular, was a major flop. To Be or Not to Be (1983), a remake of the 1942 ERNST LUBITSCH classic, had mixed results with both critics and ticket buyers. Spaceballs (1987) was one of the rare Brooks films to be reasonably well received by the critics; it was also his first hit comedy of the decade. Unfortunately, Life Stinks (1991), was considered a failure, but Brooks was partly redeemed by Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), a film parody of Errol Flynn’s 1938 “classic” but, surely more to the point, a parody of the Kevin Costner Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), a film that took itself far too seriously to be a successful swashbuckler.
Given his penchant for parody, Brooks appeared in a cameo role in The Silence of the Hams, parodying the Jonathan Demme/Thomas Harris horror film of 1991. Another parody was Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), in which Brooks played Abraham Van Helsing, to exorcise himself after being both screenwriter and director. Later films included Screw Loose (1999). During the late 1990s Brooks was also active on television, receiving Emmy Awards for his performances in the television series Mad About You.
Brooks has shown another side of his personality as a film producer through his company Brooksfilm, making such diverse movies as The Elephant Man (1980) and Solarbabies (1986). In 2002 Brooks reminded Americans of his outsized, outrageous comic talents when he repackaged his 1968 hit movie The Producers as a Broadway production with a cast led by Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. This Tony Award–winning musical quickly became the hottest ticket on the Great White Way. Brooks has been married to actress Anne Bancroft since 1964. It is his second marriage.
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