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Mel Brooks
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Birth Name
Melvin Kaminsky
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Height
5' 4"
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Spouse
Anne Bancroft (5 August 1964 - present) 1 son
Florence Baum (? - ?) (divorced) 3 children
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Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
Comedy writer-director whose satiric touch and farcical stylings are influenced both by vaudeville and Borscht Belt shtick. Brooks started his career as a stand-up comic in the 1940s, heavily influenced by Harry Ritz of The Ritz Brothers. While working the Catskills, he met Sid Caesar, who later hired him as one of the writers for his fledgling TV series. "Your Show of Shows" and its follow-up, "Caesar's Hour," boasted such other writers as Woody Allen, Neil Simon, and costar Carl Reiner.
After years of writing sketches for TV and Broadway revues (one of which, New Faces was filmed in 1954), Brooks made his first mark on film by creating, with Ernie Pintoff, a hilarious Oscar-winning animated short, The Critic (1963). He scored a hit on TV by cocreating "Get Smart" (1965-69), and this won him the backing, from Joseph E. Levine, for his first feature film, The Producers (1968), which he wrote and directed. Dismissed by some as "too Jewish," disliked by others as "too manic," it nonetheless became a success, and won Brooks an Oscar for Best Screenplay. He followed it with another independently made feature, The Twelve Chairs (1970), in which he also costarred. As The Producers was inspired by old show-biz jokes and lore about making money on a flop show, this was based on a famous Russian folk tale that had been filmed several times before. Both were clearly "personal" projects that bore Brooks' unmistakable stamp.
Warner Bros. bankrolled his next film, and while the fears of "inside" material, and too-Jewish humor remained, the cowboy-movie spoof Blazing Saddles (1973) pulverized audiences, and pointed Brooks in a new direction: parody. It also established his "stock company" of actors, and had him working for the first time with cowriters. (Richard Pryor was one of the screenwriters of Blazing Saddles Gene Wilder cowrote Brooks' next great success, Young Frankenstein (1974), a hilarious horror spoof. Future filmmaker Barry Levinson joined his writing team for subsequent features. But Brooks' efforts became more scattershot, and predictable, in Silent Movie (1976), the Hitchcock parody High Anxiety (1977), the historical epic sendup History of the World-Part I (1981) and the space-opera spoof Spaceballs (1987). Brooks also moved in front of the camera; content to play supporting or cameo roles at first, he took the leads in Silent Movie, High Anxiety and History of the World-Part I Manic and irrepressible, he carried the films on his hunched shoulders, slam- ming over corny jokes, puerile double entendres, and silly sight-gags with gusto. He and wife Anne Bancroft even took the Jack Benny and Carole Lombard parts in a middling remake of Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1983).
During the 1980s his production company Brooksfilm produced some uncharacteristically serious films, including David Lynch's first commercial feature The Elephant Man 1980), David Cronenberg's first Hollywood shotThe Fly 1986), The Doctor and the Devils (1985), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987, a vehicle for Bancroft), and Solarbabies (1986), among others. As an actor, Brooks has appeared in The Muppet Movie (1979), and Sunset People (1984), and lent his voice to Look Who's Talking Too (1990).
After a four-year hiatus, Brooks returned to movies with Life Stinks (1991), in which he starred as a tycoon who spent a month living with the homeless in order to win a bet. The very subject matter of his lackluster comedy made audiences uneasy. Brooks learned his lesson, and returned to parody for his next film, Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). |  |
