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Title: All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business by Mel Brooks
Details: Copyright 2021, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "At 95, the legendary Mel Brooks continues to set the standard for comedy across television, film, and the stage. Now, for the first time, this EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) winner shares his story in his own words.
For anyone who loves American comedy, the long wait is over. Here are the never-before-told, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and remembrances from a master storyteller, filmmaker, and creator of all things funny.
All About Me! charts Mel Brooks’s meteoric rise from a Depression-era kid in Brooklyn to the recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Whether serving in the United States Army in World War II, or during his burgeoning career as a teenage comedian in the Catskills, Mel was always mining his experiences for material, always looking for the perfect joke. His iconic career began with Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, where he was part of the greatest writers’ room in history, which included Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Larry Gelbart. After co-creating both the mega-hit 2000 Year Old Man comedy albums and the classic television series Get Smart, Brooks’s stellar film career took off. He would go on to write, direct, and star in The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, and Spaceballs, as well as produce groundbreaking and eclectic films, including The Elephant Man, The Fly, and My Favorite Year. Brooks then went on to conquer Broadway with his record-breaking, Tony-winning musical, The Producers.
All About Me! offers fans insight into the inspiration behind the ideas for his outstanding collection of boundary-breaking work, and offers details about the many close friendships and collaborations Brooks had, including those with Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Gene Wilder, Madeleine Kahn, Alfred Hitchcock, and the great love of his life, Anne Bancroft.
From this wonderful book filled with tales of struggle, achievement, and camaraderie (and dozens of photographs), readers will gain a more personal and deeper understanding of the incredible body of work behind one of the most accomplished and beloved entertainers in history."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'm a fan of Mel Brooks's work and Blazing Saddles is one of my favorite movies.
How I Liked It: We ask a lot of our living legends. Mel Brooks, as of both the time of this review and of the publication of this book, is and was still alive. While words like "legend" and "iconic" and thrown around like so much strewn confetti, Brooks is the real deal, having made his mark on television, film, stand-up, and stage. He's an indelible voice of American comedy and any single successful project he's had would be pretty much career-defining success (the 2000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, The Producers on Broadway) if that's all he did. When hunkering down in the early days of the COVID epidemic, he was urged by his author son Max Brooks to write a memoir of his career in show business. What's the problem with that? We'll get to it!
First, Brooks gives a basic, light overview of his life leading to show business and some shades of his personal life with notable omissions (details of his unsuccessful first marriage), largely but not entirely as to how it pertains to his work. He walks us through jumping through various genres and careers and the famous friends, encounters, and acquaintances he has along the way.
I'll say it: this is a genuinely fascinating book. His stories are fascinating, his historical reminiscences are fascinating, the book is flat-out fascinating.
But after a while, you start noticing a pattern.
Brooks isn't just successful, he brings the house down. Brooks isn't just amazing, he's the best anyone has ever seen. He isn't just impressive, the experts consider him a genius talent. Now, most of this is true of course. He's an extremely talented man. But if you're reading this book, you probably already know that and hearing it constantly from the source is incredibly distracting. Also in the 2020s, such boasts very extremely unfortunately call to mind a personality that should never be called to mind with Mel Brooks, a failed former President who never stops hyping himself up even as he declines into dementia and his public appearances have gotten even more unhinged and wandering.
And then there are the notable omissions. Brooks doesn't owe us anything about his private life, but he alludes to a severe anxiety problem that led briefly to panic attacks and other work related stress. Again, not atypical for a man of his generation to gloss over and make comedic (this is Mel Brooks we're talking about), but given the discussions of mental health in the 2020s, Brooks could've compared what happened to him and the way it was treated (or wasn't) to the vast changes in how we treat mental illness now (surely ripe for comic material).
A notable lack of any kind of discussion was his decision in the remake of To Be or Not to Be to portray the homophobia of the Nazis, a controversial and even revolutionary decision at the time. It not only isn't discussed, he unfortunately continues the homophobic tropes that were sadly somewhat par for the course in 1967 when he made The Producers to his work on the 2000s stage adaptation and his 2020s discussion of them.
I was then blessed with a remarkably funny duo- Christopher Hewett as the hilarious Roger De Bris, the world’s worst director, and playing his “roommate,” the over-the-top Carmen Ghia, was Andreas Voutsinas. (pg 173)
One of Brooks's lifelong weak spots, his general writing of female characters and general generation-typical "unconscious bias" sexism (any complimentary description of a woman is almost always referred to as "the beautiful"), is unfortunately on display throughout the book.
We were also very lucky to get Barbara Feldon, a former model, to play Max’s partner, the beautiful Agent 99 (we refused to give her a name). We cast Barbara early on. She was smart, good-looking, and could handle the subtle comedic material. Barbara and Don liked each other personally from the start. Agent 99 was an important foil. She legitimized Max. She was the wise and common-sensical George Burns to Max’s naïve Gracie Allen. Agent 99 was the sane one. Very beautiful and very feminine, so you could see why Max would put up with being always corrected by her, which would have been humiliating to a lesser man (pgs 151 and 152)
In my back pocket I already had the wildly funny Dick Shawn in mind to play LSD- Lorenzo St. DuBois, our hippie Hitler. His Eva Braun turned out to be Renee Taylor, who came to the part with an original idea: Eva Braun would come from the Bronx. And Lee Meredith was the icing on the cake as Bialystock and Bloom’s beautiful and sexy secretary, Ulla.
Bloom says, “A secretary who can’t type?”
And Max lecherously replies, “Not important.” (pg 173)
One of my favorite scenes [in Young Frankenstein] was Teri [Garr]’s unassuming, blushing take when Gene [Wilder] looks at the front door of the castle and sees these incredible iron rings.
When Marty bangs them against the giant door, Gene says: “My god, what knockers!”
And Teri replies, “Vy thank you, Doctor.”
Teri’s performance was spot-on. (pg 235)
The Producers made its out-of-town debut at Chicago’s big, beautiful Cadillac Palace Theatre on February 1, 2001. [...]I was so happy to get to the Cadillac Palace Theatre, which was
always warm and filled with music, laughter, and, not to mention, beautiful showgirls.(pg 423)
We ask a lot from living legends. Sometimes too much. If you're willing to check some reservations at the door, you're going to be blessed with some amazing, truly priceless stories, and stories within stories, like his love of Anne Bancroft and their perfect partnership. So keep your critical thinking in check and enjoy some reminiscences from one of American comedy's most indelible and inspirational voices.
Notable: As I've mentioned, the book isn't all laughs. At some turns it's Brooks's manifesto about what comedy should be and is.
Comedy is a very powerful component of life. It has the most to say about the human condition because if you laugh you can get by. You can struggle when things are bad if you have a sense of humor. Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye. It’s a defense against unhappiness and depression. (pg 36)
And also about his own struggles with his career and what it cost him.
Near the end of Sid [Caesar]’s epic nine- or ten-year run on television [for which Brooks worked], our ratings were dropping fast. I don’t know of any other comedian, including Charlie Chaplin, who could have done nearly ten years of live television. Sid was one of the greatest comedy artists that was ever born into this world. But over a period of years, television ground him into sausages- one sausage a week, until finally there wasn’t much of the muse left. The decline was affecting all of us. I wasn’t sleeping much, and I was angry and ill-tempered most of the time. In 1958 and ’59 the show was losing its top status and we were falling behind in the ratings to, believe it or not, Lawrence Welk, with his bubbly dance music. We were all working day and night to keep the show on the air. My nerves began to fray and I was always in a bad mood. I must have been absolute hell to live with, that’s probably what led to the end of my first marriage. It was one of the worst periods of my life.
I think there is a saying that goes like this: It’s a stormy wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good. So even though the marriage didn’t work out and in the later years was beset with stormy times, the good part of the wind that blew me some good was my three children from that marriage. Stefanie, Nicholas, and Edward were always a source of comfort and happiness. No matter how life was treating me, they were always there for me with their
love and affection. A real blessing. (pg 116)
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Something you might not have expected (or maybe you did) was Brooks's reminiscences of World War II, in which he and his brothers served.
On the day Lenny was supposed to come home, they changed the requirement from twenty-five to fifty missions. On his thirty-sixth mission he was shot down and captured as a prisoner of war. When he
bailed out of the plane, he ripped his dog tags off because they read “A-Blood Type, H” and H meant Hebrew. He had heard that Jewish flyers were being sent to concentration camps, which was likely certain death.
When he was arrested on the ground by the Germans, they threw him into a prisoner of war camp and asked, “Papolsky?” Meaning, “Are you Polish?”
He said, “Yeah. Yeah. Papolsky.”
For nineteen months, he was in a Stalag Luft, an air force prison camp. He got through it, but he never would have made it if the Germans found out that he was Jewish.
We held our breaths for a month and a half until we got word from the Red Cross that he was alive and a prisoner of war. The Red Cross went to prisoners of war and they did a lovely thing, they recorded them saying or singing things and they sent those recordings to their loved ones back home.
Lenny loved to sing so he recorded a song called “Miss You.” My mother would put that little cardboard record on every night and cry. Every single night! Finally I said, “Mom, maybe just hold the record? Maybe don’t put it
on so much? I mean he’s alive, but it’s depressing hearing him sing every night!”
Even though we loved him dearly, truth is he was slightly off-key. (pgs 48 and 49)
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A delicious theme throughout the book is Brooks's rich descriptions of food. From a not-quite Kosher household enjoying early mid-century Brooklyn's treats, to Brooks's eating his way through Europe during the War, the book is full of food.
The neighborhood was full of kids and we never stopped playing games. Ring-a-levio, Johnny-on-the-pony, kick the can, and, a little later on, stickball and roller hockey. On Saturdays and Sundays I was always too busy to come up for lunch, so my mother would often make a sliced tomato sandwich on a buttered kaiser roll and put it in a paper bag and fling it out the fifth-story window for me to catch and have lunch. I almost never missed, but once when I did, the bag hit the sidewalk and flattened out, drenching the kaiser roll with rich tomato juice from the sliced tomatoes. It was one of the best things that I ever tasted. I loved it. From then on, I always missed it on purpose so the sandwich would flatten out. It was probably the first version of a “pizza” I ever ate. (pgs 12 and 13)
Anyway, one Sunday afternoon after we had finished our doodling, Tony Galliani invited me to his home for a Sunday Italian spaghetti and meatballs dinner. Occasionally my mother would make spaghetti for me and my brothers that we thought was okay. It consisted of boiled egg noodles put into a casserole tray then doused with ketchup and baked until it was ready. My mother then cut squares from it and served them to us. It wasn’t bad, but (as I was about to find out) it really wasn’t spaghetti.
Tony’s apartment was redolent with a wonderful aroma of garlic, basil, and oregano. Already things were looking up! His wonderful, welcoming mother served me a great big dish of lightly al dente La Rosa spaghetti and meatballs swimming in a rich sea of tomato sauce and sprinkled with a generous helping of grated Parmesan cheese. What a revelation! It didn’t need anything- I salted it with my own tears of joy.
That night when I got back to our apartment I screamed, “I’ve tasted spaghetti! I know what spaghetti is now, and, Mom, no offense, but you don’t make spaghetti.”
I didn’t want to make a pest of myself, but every once in a while I would beg Tony to invite me to another Sunday afternoon spaghetti and meatballs dinner. Later on in my life, I think one of the reasons I married Anne Bancroft was the fact that her real name was Anne Italiano and, boy, could she make spaghetti. (pg 22)
As a kid, any time I could put five cents together, I would run across the street to Feingold’s candy store and get an egg cream. What is an egg cream? It is a delicious chocolate drink that is made with neither eggs nor cream. Why was it called an egg cream? I don’t know. For generations, Talmudic scholars have never been able to answer this profound question. Let me describe this nectar of the gods for you: Into what you might know as the typical Coca-Cola glass with the big round bulge at the top, Mr. Feingold would pump about an inch and a half of U-Bet chocolate syrup (if it wasn’t U-Bet, it wasn’t honest-to-God chocolate syrup) and on top of that he would put about an inch of milk (in those days we only had whole milk), then he’d move it to the soda squirter which had two functions, one was a powerful thin burst of soda, which would mix the chocolate syrup and the milk together, followed by a soft stream of soda, which would bring the heavenly mixture to its frothy top. He stirred it with a long spoon once or twice and then put it on the marble counter with a slight thud. That thud told you everything. It was indeed an egg cream. The trick was to sip it slowly and make it last as long as possible. And at the end, we always pushed the glass back across the counter to Mr. Feingold and said, “There’s still a little chocolate syrup at the bottom, could you give it another spritz?” He’d shake his head and sigh, but he
always gave us another spritz. Heaven, pure heaven. (pg 23)
As a family, we were not very religious and did not keep kosher. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite sandwiches was ham and cheese. However, my grandmother, who for a time lived in the same building, was very observant. Thank god for the long hallways in those old railroad apartments. It gave us at least two minutes to clear the kitchen of non-kosher food before my grandmother could get there. She was a pretty good ice box detective, so my mother hid things like ham in a little tray behind the ice. (pg 31)
Being from Brooklyn, VMI took a lot of getting used to. I had never even seen a cheeseburger before, and they had a cola drink that was only popular in the South then called Dr. Pepper. Talk about a little Brooklyn fish out of water! (pg 49)
So interesting to learn that cheeseburgers were not widespread in the 1940s. You'd really think living in a place like Brooklyn would expose Brooks to more foods, but it took traveling to the South during the War to try it.
The regular Army was an education. A really rough education. I’d never gone to the toilet before with sixteen other guys sitting next to me. I would go crazy waiting for the latrine to be free of people so I could rush in, do my stuff, and rush out. It took a lot of getting used to.
And then there was chow time. Breakfast in the mess hall was an experience. First of all, you got on line. Everything in the Army is first you get on line. I looked over at the breakfast setup. There were huge grills on top of which was a sight I’ve never seen before in my life- it was amazing and a little scary. On top of one of the huge grills there were about a hundred eggs all cooking sunny-side up. You said give me two, three, four, whatever. You had to be careful about how much you took, because of the huge sign above the cooking area that read TAKE ALL YOU WANT, BUT EAT ALL YOU TAKE. So I never took more than two eggs, because I might want something else like
oatmeal, cornflakes, or bacon. Not that anybody really watched how much you took and how much you left.
Sitting with twelve other guys having breakfast was another new experience. Everything was “Pass the butter! Pass the milk! Pass the sugar! Pass the jam!” There was a strict code. When somebody said, “Pass the jam,” you weren’t allowed to stop the jam and put any on your own plate. That was called shortcutting and was not allowed. You had to pass the jam to the person who said, “Pass the jam” even though the jam looked good and you wanted to take a little on the way, you didn’t. It was forbidden. The mess hall was good-natured but incredibly noisy and busy. It took some getting used to.
One morning at breakfast as I went through the chow line they put something strange on my plate. I brought it back to my table and said to one of the GIs, “What is this?”
He said, “It’s called shit on a shingle!”
“Shit on a shingle?” I said.
“Yeah, but actually it’s chipped beef and cream gravy on toast.”
I watched the other guys at my table, they were eating it and they didn’t seem upset. So I tried it. It was weird; I couldn’t make sense out of the taste. But I was eighteen and always crazy hungry. So I ate it. It wasn’t good; it
wasn’t bad. It was food and it was filling. Later on, I kind of got used to it and came to like it. It was just good old Army chow. But I’ll never forget the first time I stared down at the confused mess on my plate and heard the expression “shit on a shingle.”
When we were on bivouac (a temporary campsite away from the barracks), we were on the chow line with our mess kits. Mess kits were two small oval aluminum trays with indentations for food and an aluminum knife, fork, and spoon attached. You waited on line with your mess kit and they’d throw some beef stew in one of the indentations. Then came the mashed potatoes, and even though there were other indentations for the mashed potatoes they always threw it right on top of the stew. Then- you won’t believe this- for dessert there were usually sliced peaches. Which of course, you expected they would put into in one of the remaining empty places in the mess kit. But what did they do? You’ve got it! They hurled it right on top of your mashed potatoes and your beef stew. They simply didn’t care. And we were starving so we gobbled it down.
(And for some reason, to this day I’m vaguely nostalgic for some sliced peaches on top of my beef bourguignon.)
(pgs 53, 54, and 55)
Every once in a while at Fort Sill, I would be struck with bouts of homesickness. Especially when I heard Bing Crosby on the radio. He would sing songs like “Moonlight Becomes You,” a sweet tune by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke that I remembered from a wonderful picture called Road to Morocco with Bing and Bob Hope and always their same love interest, Dorothy Lamour. I would think of my mother, singing along with Bing and dressing me in the morning under the covers when I was a little kid. I missed my brothers, I missed my friends in Williamsburg, and I even missed my strict teachers. I missed things like penny candy, egg creams, and
charlotte russes. For those of you who are not worldly, a charlotte russe is a little round circle of yellow cake in a cardboard container liberally filled with a swirl of thick, sweet whipped cream and topped with a maraschino cherry. When I was on those long twenty-mile hikes at Fort Sill- Oh! How I would long for the good old days of egg creams and charlotte russes. (pg 57)
When I finished basic training at Fort Sill, I was shipped back to Fort Dix for
overseas assignment. I was lucky to get a weekend in New York so I could see my mom, my grandma, my aunts and uncles, and the few friends that were also in the service but hadn’t shipped out yet. I stuffed as much of my mom’s delicious food as possible down my gullet, because I knew I’d be on Army chow for the foreseeable future. She made me things I loved like matzo ball soup, potato pancakes, and stuffed cabbage- things I knew were hardly ever served on an Army chow line. (pg 58)
Small groups of men left the truck and were deposited at different villages. Eight men including me got off at a little farmhouse with a sign on the entrance that said MON REPOS. It occurred to me that Mon Repos was a rather grandiose name for maybe the summer home of a retired nobleman. “My repose” is very fancy indeed.
But it turned out to be just a simple little country farmhouse with this grand name. It was in the village of Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie. The village was near a larger town called Offranville, not far from the fairly big and busy port of Dieppe on the English Channel.
We were quartered in the main farmhouse, and the family that owned and occupied the farm was in a smaller house on the property. It wasn’t such a bad deal. They had cows so there was fresh milk and they provided most of the charcuterie for the village. Charcuterie is cured meats like sausage, salami, ham, etc. So like I said, the eats were good. We were not dependent on Army chow. The farmer and his family were very gracious. There was a little kid on a tricycle named Henri; he got to be my pal and kept looking for me. Maybe it was because I gave him chewing gum and chocolate. He’d shout my name, “Private Mel, Private Mel!”
There is more to this story than just being a soldier learning how to be a combat engineer in a little farmhouse in Normandy. Because, if I may digress, some thirty-five years later I had created a company called Brooksfilms and we were busy with David Lynch at the helm making a film called The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man screenplay was written by Eric Bergren and Christopher De Vore, based on the book by Frederick Treves. I was in England, where the sets were in the last stages of construction at Shepperton Studios. It would be ten days or so before we were to start shooting, so I had a brilliant idea. Eric and Chris had done such a wonderful job on the screenplay, and I was thinking of what I could do to give them a little extra something. And then it hit me. Bang! Why not go back to that little village of Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie and show them Mon Repos, the little
farmhouse that I had trained in? The writers loved the idea of the trip. So before you could turn around we were on a ferry, then on a train to Paris, and from our hotel in Paris we hired a car for the journey to Normandy.
After a couple of hours we arrived. I got chills seeing that same little sign, MON REPOS, as we entered the property. The farmhouse had been repainted and a few things changed, but it was mostly just like I remembered as a kid in uniform back then. I knocked on the door. It opened to reveal a huge man sporting a big black beard framed in the doorway. I said in halting French, “J’étais un soldat en quarante-cinq stationné ici dans cette chambre à
l’étage.” In English, “I was a soldier back in forty-five stationed here in that bedroom upstairs.” His eyes widened, he swallowed hard and shouted, “Mon dieu! Private Mel?”
And I replied, “Petit Henri?” He crushed me in his big bearlike arms. Little Henri was no longer petite.
It was one of the best afternoons I’ve ever spent. Henri showed us around. He took me to the little apple tree on the property that I used to eat green apples from (forgetting my vow at Camp Sussex never to eat little green
apples again). It was now a huge tree sporting hundreds of apples. He fêted us with all kinds of charcuterie and fromage (which they were still making) and topped it all off with a toast with the great French apple brandy that Normandy is known for, calvados. (pgs 61, 62, and 63)
We were stationed in Saarbrücken, which was right on the border of France and Germany. Even though the war was still on, there was a French-German restaurateur who kept his restaurant open. It was a blessing in disguise. You could actually get Alsatian dishes. So instead of Army chow my buddies and I would get to eat onion soup, bratwurst, sauerkraut, German potato salad, and French bread. And to drink there was either German beer or French wine! It was a lucky little island of gastronomic happiness. As I said, it was right on the border between France and Germany. There was a huge period painting hanging over the fireplace of the restaurant and it was double-sided. Depending on which side was winning, the painting would either display a picture of the kaiser on one side or, on the other side, Napoleon. We were lucky to get the Napoleon side. (pg 66)
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The book is full of celebrity stories, and here are just a few.
Okay, get ready for another digression. It’s many years later and I’ve just finished performing on The Johnny Carson Show. Needless to say, I was great. As I was marching back to my dressing room at NBC I heard a familiar voice say, “Hey, kid. That was pretty funny.”
Could it be? Yes! It was. It was Bob Hope. He had just seen the show. I turned to him and said, “Mr. Hope! I can’t tell you what hearing words like that from you means to me.”
He said, “Put it there, pal,”- shaking my hand- “it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
I said, “Bob, this is not the first time we’ve actually met. Right after the war ended you were doing a USO show somewhere in Germany and when you were just about to exit the stage a crazy soldier grabbed the cuff of your pants and wouldn’t let you go until you signed his autograph.”
“Oh my god! I remember that crazy soldier!”
“Bob, that crazy soldier was me!”
“Wow, I don’t know what to say. Thanks for your service.”
“Thanks for your autograph!” We both laughed. Life is funny. (pgs 68 and 69)
I was kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel, earnings-wise, when I got an offer from Jerry Lewis to work on a new screenplay with him. It was called The Ladies Man and was all about the janitor of a hotel for young ladies in Hollywood.
Working with Jerry was both wonderful and terrible. He was really gifted and funny as hell. That was the wonderful part. The terrible part was writing with him. He was not easy to work with and quite often we’d get into a terrible spat. Finally, it became impossible, so eventually either I quit, or he fired me- I’m not sure which. (pg 137)
Mario Puzo (the future author of The Godfather) was by far the best eater. In all of our stomachs is a thing called the vagus nerve, which tells us when we are full and to stop eating. For some reason, Mario was not blessed with a vagus nerve. He could eat until the cows came home, and if one of them was
unlucky enough to stumble into his apartment, he’d eat it! Normally, when people leave a Chinese restaurant, they often take with them some cardboard containers of leftovers. Thanks to Mario, we never had any leftovers. (pg 140)
It took Buck [Henry] and me about three and a half months to write the pilot script. We could have done it in a couple of weeks, but we loved playing pool. We would also play against the various guests who would visit the offices. If we thought we could beat them we’d place bets and we’d make a little money on the side. Every once in a while, Peter Falk would stop by. He was a pool shark. He would always beat us and take our money. I think Peter Falk had one real eye and one glass eye, and having one eye was probably better for shooting pool than having two. (pg 149)
His secretary answered and I said, “Could you tell Mr. Hitchcock this is Mel Brooks? I make movies and I’d just love to talk to him.”
He gets on the phone. I don’t know what to say. I just start babbling, “Hello, Mr. Hitchcock? This is Mel Brooks.”
And before I could say another word, he cuts me off, “Is this really Mel Brooks? I love your films. I loved Blazing Saddles. It’s absolutely miraculously funny.”
“Coming from you that really means more than I can say.” (pg 277)
Over the weeks we became pretty good chums. He was just wonderful. He was like a silent partner. He would give me notes on the script and what he thought I should push. We would eat lunch after, which was set up in the next room. It was always a beautifully prepared meal. I could smell the roast beef and the roast potatoes, the succulent aromas emanating from the adjoining dining room. At that point in his life, Hitch had arthritis and problems with his knees. So unfortunately, one day he was in the doorway between his office and the luncheon room and got kind of stuck there. I don’t know what possessed me, but I had a crazy comedy urge and I acted on it. I banged my knee into his tush and said, “Come on, Al. Get moving. We’re hungry!”
I immediately realized, What have I done?
And then he just broke out into a big laugh. He said, “You naughty boy.”
He loved it. I think he enjoyed my basically crude Brooklyn humor. He liked the juxtaposition of it against his proper English background. (pg 278)
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Brooks gives some amazing, invaluable inside inspiration to much of his work.
Part of my motive for doing the 2000 Year Old Man was to preserve the Yiddish dialect and the sounds that I grew up with. I was doing my grandparents. My father’s father and mother, and my mother’s father, and their friends. I loved them. Hearing those voices always made me feel safe. The 2000 Year Old Man is a feisty fellow, a tough guy, and a survivor. He’s the Eastern European immigrant Jew, pronouncing himself forcefully, struggling to make it in America. He’s got to know all the answers, because it’s about survival. He’s a no-nonsense, no-bullshit guy. He tells a lot of human truths, whether he knows them or not. Like the German Professor from the Sid Caesar shows, it’s not lying..it’s self-promotion! He doesn’t give you any bad advice. In his exaggeration and fabrication there’s always a little truth. (pg 126)
Maxwell Smart needed to be stupid and innocent, but also a noble and heroic character. Don Adams was absolutely perfect in the leading role. I knew I was going to name the main character Max, because at that point I had named all of my main characters Max. The Producers had Max Bialystock. My
father’s name was Max, his grandfather’s name was Max, and later I named my youngest son Max. It made sense to use Smart as a second name because of the cliché “get smart.” As in “don’t get too smart,” and “wise up.” Also, everybody was chasing Maxwell Smart. Ergo, Get Smart. And it worked, and it still works.
Max was Secret Agent 86. I came up with using the number 86 because when I worked as a busboy whenever we were out of anything that was ordered, somebody in the kitchen would yell, “Eighty-six on the rye bread; eighty-six on the cream cheese, and eighty-six pickled herring.”
Which was restaurant shorthand for “we’re out of it.” At critical moments in the story, sometimes Max was completely out of brains. So I thought that “86” was an apt number for him. (pgs 149 and 150)
I created the shoe-phone that Max used to field calls. One day, every phone in my office started ringing. I took off my shoe and pretended to answer it. I thought the most bizarre place to put a secret telephone would be in the heel of your shoe, and I thought we could have a lot of fun with that. If you got a very important call, you had to stop and take off your shoe. One wrong step and the phone breaks. For years afterward, Don couldn’t eat in restaurants without grateful patrons taking off their shoes and saluting him with them like they were toasting him with wine.
I didn’t realize it, but I might have just created the first cellphone. Had I patented it, I probably would’ve made so much money that I wouldn’t have had to write this book. (pgs 150 and 151)
A lot of comedy business came from Don Adams. He created “Would You Believe?” which was a sequence of exaggerations that kept getting smaller and smaller.
MAXWELL SMART: And I happen to know that at this very minute, seven Coast Guard cutters are converging on this boat. Would you believe it, seven?
MR. BIG: I find that pretty hard to believe.
MAXWELL SMART: Would you believe six?
MR. BIG: I don’t think so.
MAXWELL SMART: How about two cops in a rowboat?
It originally was part of Don Adams’s stage act as a stand-up comedian. His act was based in part on an imitation of William Powell, who was a famous movie star. Powell played Nick Charles, who played against Myrna Loy’s Nora in the successful Thin Man series. Don wrote a routine that was based on the end of every Thin Man movie, where the murder suspects were all gathered in a room and Nick would walk around and sum up the facts and
expose the murderer in a very dynamic way. (pg 151)
While I was writing the screenplay, I hit a stone wall. I would need a production number so awful that it would send the first-night audience flying out of the theater. I had a great title; a big musical celebration of the Third Reich called “Springtime for Hitler.” But who could write the song? I mentioned my dilemma to Anne.
“I know who could write it,” she said.
“Who?” I asked.
“You,” she said. “You’re musical. You’re a good singer. You never stop singing around the house! And besides, you’re a born songwriter. No one else could write ‘Springtime for Hitler’ but you. So here’s a pad and a pencil. Go
into the next room, and I bet within an hour you’ll come out with the beginning of a song.” (pg 161)
Another rough spot was that we were running out of time one day and I had scheduled the blue blanket hysterical scene in which Gene Wilder goes berserk. I knew I had to get it done because we were changing the set the next day and I would be out of the office set. We had rehearsed the scene and Gene was exhausted.
When I told him we had to shoot it right then he said, “I can’t. Please, Mel, let’s do it tomorrow when I’ll have enough energy to do it right.”
I said, “Gene, we’re in trouble. We’ve got to do it right now. Tomorrow we’re in a different set.” I asked him, “What can I do to help you?”
He said, “Get me Hershey bars. I need quick energy.”
I said, “With or without almonds?”
He said, “Without, without! The nuts might get stuck in my throat.”
Faster than you could say “abracadabra,” we got him two Hershey bars (without almonds). He ate them, drank a glass of water, and dove into the scene. He was magnificent.
To prove I’m not lying, get a copy of The Producers and watch the blue blanket scene. It was hysterically funny then and it will be hysterically funny forever. (pg 176)
I was going to have them skip with joy all around the fountain celebrating their new enterprise, but I was afraid that the water from the fountain that was spilling over onto the ledge would make their skipping dangerous. Especially for Zero, who had a bad leg. So I gave Zero a carton of ice cream and had
Bloom skip around the fountain and every time he passed Bialystock, Max would shove a spoonful of ice cream into his mouth. (pgs 178 and 179)
The Producers took eight weeks to film and cost $941,000. I brought it in at
$35k under budget. Under budget- a phenomenon that stayed with me throughout my film career.
Joseph E. Levine saw the rough cut and had several changes he wanted to be made. But my brilliant lawyer snuck a little paragraph into the contract that read “The director, Mel Brooks, will receive final cut of the film.”
That means that nobody, including the studio, is allowed to change the final version of the movie. My ultimate protection, no one could change the movie but me. All thanks to my aforementioned lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, whom I met after Your Show of Shows was finished and he did my contracts for pickup jobs like the Victor Borge and Andy Williams shows. We hit it off immediately; I loved my lawyer, and he was so supportive, cheering me up in
those dark days of scattered employment, trying to keep my nose above water.
When I asked him, “What the hell is the U for in Alan U. Schwartz?”
He said with a big smile on his face, “It stands for United States Supreme Court Justice.”
That’s obviously a figment of his imagination. I think it stands for nothing. He probably just shoved it in there because he thought it looked more impressive to be a lawyer with a middle initial. (pgs 179 and 180)
The Producers was my first skirmish with Adolf Hitler (not counting my adventures in World War II). Most people got the joke. They loved it. They knew what I was doing. I did get almost a hundred letters from rabbis, students, scholars, and representatives of Jewish organizations who were very angry with me. I wrote back to every single one and tried to explain to them that the way you bring down Hitler and his ideology is not by getting on a soapbox with him, but if you can reduce him to something laughable, you win. That’s my job. (pgs 183 and 184)
Let me tell you a little side story here about a foreign release of The Producers. It did fairly well in Europe, especially in Sweden. I had become friends with a Swedish journalist and film reviewer named Björn Fremer. Björn asked my permission to use an alternate title in his review, instead of
calling it Producenterna (“The Producers”) he wanted to use my original title, Springtime for Hitler- Det våras för Hitler. It caught on, and the marquee in every theater in Sweden playing The Producers displayed my original title, Springtime for Hitler. It worked! Det våras för Hitler was a big hit. So much so that the Swedish film distributors decided to put a new title with Det våras för...(“Springtime for...”) in front of all my subsequent films that played in Sweden. For instance, instead of Blazing Saddles it was Det våras för Sherriffen, “Springtime for the Sheriff,” and instead of Young Frankenstein it was Det våras för Frankenstein, “Springtime for Frankenstein.” And so it went, every one of my movies that ever played in Sweden had a “springtime” in front of it. I both blamed it on and profusely thanked Björn Fremer and his Swedish film journalist cohorts for all that Swedish success. (pg 184)
The first person I asked for [for Blazing Saddles] besides Andy Bergman was Richard Pryor. Since this story was about a Black sheriff in a white Western town, I knew I needed Richard Pryor to be one of the writers. He was a friend and a brilliant comedian who hadn’t really broken out yet. Richard was not only a gifted writer, but in my opinion there was no better stand-up comic that ever lived. Comics could be either wine or water, and Richard was a fine wine. Nobody could tell stories about family with such vigor, passion, and insanity and comedy like Richard Pryor. His comedy came from the humanity that he had experienced. There was something so profoundly and infinitely soulful, sweet, and moving about Richard. He never lied. His monologues were explanations of his life and his adventures. It was memory- and character-driven comedy. That’s why, like I said, he was the best stand-up comic that ever lived and a perfect writer for this movie. (pg 206)
That was a good simple standard plot. We decided to twist it, turn it, and stand it on its ear. We threw crazy comedy bits into the mix. In one scene Bart becomes Bugs Bunny. We just stole it, but it was a Warner Bros. cartoon, and since we were also a Warner Bros. picture, we knew we could get away with it. I also included the “we don’t need no stinkin’ badges” reference from the Humphrey Bogart and John Huston film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre- also a Warner Bros. film. (pg 208)
My biggest problem was finding the Waco Kid. For the Waco Kid I wanted to cast either a well-known Western hero or a well-known alcoholic- or if I was lucky, maybe a combination of both.
One day, when I was having lunch in the Warner Bros. commissary, I saw at a table across the room the one and only John Wayne.
Wow! I thought, what a stroke of fortune it would be to get John Wayne to play the Waco Kid. So I held my breath, walked over to his table, and introduced myself.
I said, “Mr. Wayne, you don’t know me. My name is Mel Brooks and I’m making a picture here at Warner Bros.”
He said, “I know you. You’re Mel Brooks. You made The Producers! It’s one of my favorite comedies. So what are you making now?”
“I’m making a Western like there’s never been a Western before. It breaks all the rules- except for one: The good guys come out on top. And I’d like you to be one of the good guys.”
He said, “Send it over to my office. I promise I’ll read it tonight. Meet me at the same table tomorrow at the same time.”
Wow! I did just as he said and could hardly sleep that night. Wow, could John Wayne possibly be the Waco Kid?
I met him at exactly the same table at the same time the next day. He had the script in his hand, and he said, “Mel, this is one of the craziest and funniest things I have ever read. But I can’t do it. It’s just too dirty. My fans will accept almost anything, but they won’t take dirty. They’re not that kind of audience. So like I said, I can’t do it. But I’ll tell you this: When it opens, I’ll be the first in line to see it.”
I thanked him profusely and went forward with my search for the Waco Kid. So I couldn’t get my Western hero, but maybe I could get my alcoholic? (pgs 216 and 217)
I reached out to Gig Young, who was normally a light comedy actor. For example, his delicious performance in Joe Bologna and Renee Taylor’s Lovers and Other Strangers. But he was also devastatingly emotional as the alcoholic lead in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with Jane Fonda, for which
he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He was a remarkably good actor, and I knew he could be the Waco Kid because he had comedy in his background and was capable of rich drama. But I was still cautious about the alcohol business, because he had a reputation of hitting the bottle now and then. But his agent assured me he’d been on the wagon for more than a year and was totally trustworthy when it came to showing up sober. Good enough for me- I hired him.
Wait a minute...We all know that Gig Young is not the Waco Kid. That memorable role is played by the great Gene Wilder.
What is Mel talking about? Let Mel explain.
For some reason, our first day of shooting was scheduled on a Friday. The first scene was a simple introductory meeting between the new sheriff and the Waco Kid. Gig Young as the Waco Kid was hung upside down from his bunk in the jail cell of the sheriff’s office. He is trying to recover from a bad hangover.
Cleavon as the sheriff asks him, “Are we awake?”
And upon seeing the Black sheriff he’s supposed to respond, “We’re not sure, are we Black?”
Instead Gig replies, “We’re not sure, are we bla...are we bla- BLA?”
I turned to my assistant and whispered, “Wow, look what we’re getting. He’s so real.”
And then the shit hit the fan. Instead of finishing the line, Gig started spewing green vomit all over the jail cell. It was like Mount Vesuvius erupting in green.
I said, “This is a little too real. Call an ambulance.”
Obviously, Gig was not a recovering alcoholic, recovering had played no part in it. He was still in a lot of trouble. The ambulance came and took him to a local hospital. The doctor who was attending him called me and said he had the d.t.’s (delirium tremens, severe alcohol withdrawal) and was much too sick to perform for the next few months.
It was a Friday night, and I knew what I had to do to save the picture: I called Gene Wilder. Through tears I told him what had happened and begged him to save me.
He said, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I’ll be on a plane tomorrow morning.” (pgs 217 and 218)
By the way, many years later when I was asked to put my own hands and feet in that famous sidewalk cement [Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood], I decided that I had been well behaved for such a long time...that I needed to be mischievous again! I arranged to have the prop masters from The Walking Dead TV series build me a sixth finger on my left hand. I wanted one of the hundreds of tourists that would visit the Chinese Theatre sidewalk that day to shout, “Hey! Did you know that Mel Brooks had SIX fingers on his left hand!”
We pulled it off, and the prosthetic looked so real that I decided to wear my sixth finger on Conan O’Brien’s show that same night. Nobody from his production team told Conan about it, so that when I revealed it in the middle of our interview, he went absolutely bananas! (pg 222)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
His love for Anne Bancroft shines throughout the book, even before he meets her.
All in all, I have many fond memories of making To Be or Not to Be, it was so much fun. Especially singing and dancing with my gorgeous and sensationally talented wife. Anne really understood me, or at least enough to tolerate me, especially when I was being myself. I truly believe that when you’re with the right person, they love you not in spite of your flaws, but because of them. Anne once told a reporter that after meeting me she told her shrink, “Let’s speed this process up. I’ve met the right man.”
During an interview with both of us on the Today show, Gene Shalit asked Anne whether she was content in her marriage. She stared at him, surprised at the question. Then she said, “I’m more than content! When I hear his key in the lock at night my heart starts to beat faster. I’m just so happy he’s coming home. We have so much fun.” (pg 342)
In addition to being a wonderful wife and partner, Anne was a truly great mother. Max was diagnosed with dyslexia at a time when it was relatively unheard of. They didn’t even call it a learning disability back then. It was dismissed as just laziness, goofing off, or “you’re not trying hard enough.” So my Annie, one of the greatest, most successful actresses of her day, set aside her career to raise Max and become his educational advocate. She taught herself all about dyslexia and developed coping mechanisms for Max. She met with all of his teachers and made sure that they understood what he was going through. She found ways Max could learn in a nontraditional format. Every year she took all of his schoolbooks to the Braille Institute and had them all read onto audiocassettes so that Max could listen to all of his reading assignments. Had she not done that, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for Max to have graduated from high school.
If that wasn’t enough, Annie was figuring out how technology could help Max. When he was in eighth grade, she forced him to take a typing class. He hated it. She said, “Technology and computers are the way of the future.
You’re gonna be a writer. This is a writer’s tool. You are gonna learn how to type so you can be a writer. You will never have to dictate and you will never have to be dependent on anyone else.”
She knew Max’s gifts even before he did. He developed a wonderful narrative skill. His images are beautiful, and you always know just where you are and what’s happening. As I mentioned earlier in the book, Max grew up to be a brilliant and successful writer- in no small part thanks to the efforts of his wonderful mother. (pgs 342 and 343)
Anne always pushed me. She has always been an inspiration. She always thought I was talented. She believed in me right from the beginning, as a songwriter as well as a screenplay writer or whatever it was I wanted to do.
Anne, who nicknamed me Mibby (a conflation of Mel and Brooks), always said, “You can do it.” She was a gift from God. (pg 344)
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STRAY OBSERVATIONS
Dustin said, “You won’t believe this. I just got a call from Mike Nichols in L.A. He wants me to fly out tomorrow to do a screen test.”
I said, “For what? Mike Nichols is in Hollywood doing The Graduate with my wife, Annie.”
He said, “Yes. That’s it, that’s it! He wants to audition me for the part of Benjamin Braddock.”
I said, “This can’t be happening! But anyway, I’m not worried. No offense, but you’re not the handsomest guy in town. The minute they see you they’ll send you flying back into my arms and back into The Producers.”
Boy, was I wrong.
Two days later he called to tell me he got the part. He had already signed a contract with me, so I could have bollixed up everything by legally stopping him, but I let him go and wished him luck. I added one small caveat:
“You’re going to be playing opposite my wife- don’t fool around.” (pg 172 and 173)
Probably a good caveat, as Hoffman by his own admission was trying to score with Katharine Ross who played Elaine in the film (and multiple sexual harassment and assault allegations against him tells us more than a bit about him as a person).
Stuart took me to the Nuart Theatre, a small out-of-the-way movie house
on Santa Monica Boulevard known for showing different films like John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972). (pg 298)
Mel Brooks mentioning John Waters gives me a thrill.
I got a resounding barrage of no’s from almost every studio in town [while shopping The Elephant Man]. The notable exception was Paramount Pictures, run at the time by future Disney chief Michael Eisner. Michael told me that he had read the script overnight, and when he finished it, he was brought to tears. Eisner and Paramount signed on to distribute the film. I will be forever grateful for studio heads like that (pg 299)
Positive stories about Michael Eisner are so strange, they're kind of like reading a positive story about a Disney villain.
I know that my intention in writing this book was mainly to share my adventures in show business, and not to indulge in too many stories of my private life... but I’ve been thinking that every once in a while, I would like to share some of the fun that happened in my other life, the life I lived along the
way. (pg 344)
An interesting note, since he'd already done that multiple times already in the book.
On one of those weekends [spent with famous friends], I thought I had a great idea. Half of the group was going to have to actually get out of their pajamas to go out shopping, the other half were lucky enough to stay at the house in their bedclothes. Anne and I were in the group that got to stay at home. So I proposed an outrageous practical joke. I said, “Let’s make believe that while they were out shopping someone came to the house and murdered us all. We can lay on the floor and cover ourselves in ketchup, but from a distance it’ll look like blood.”
Everyone was immediately on board. We all lay on the floor and Dom DeLuise assumed the task of ketchup dispenser and doused us all with a liberal coating of ketchup- faces, arms, chests, everything! The works! For about ten minutes we all just lay there awaiting the shoppers return [sic] and suppressing our laughter. I shouted, “When you hear the key in the door don’t make a sound!”
When the door finally opened they came in talking to each other and then for moment- utter silence. We knew we had them. They were in shock!...until somebody smelled the ketchup, and then the jig was up. You never in your life heard such an explosion of laughter. (pg 345)
That is terrifying.
I knew box office would be smaller because the title alone is going to keep people away: Life Stinks. And I didn’t want to fake out people by saying “life is beautiful” or “life is worth living.” I wanted to tell the truth, as life does stink for the disenfranchised. Laddie once again trusted me and agreed to put up the money on behalf of MGM. (pg 375)
Brooks has taken shots before at the film
Life is Beautiful and explained that while he has jokes about Nazis and Hitler in his own work, there are limits and there should be. He would never make jokes about the camps, for instance, and was horrified by the film Life is Beautiful. I'm pretty sure this particular jibe is intentional and it's well-done.
I believe Life Stinks was also the best work I have ever done as an actor.
One of my personal favorite moments of all my movies is in this one: I’m on the roof of an old warehouse in the slums. I’ve done thirty days’ living in garbage and filth. I’ve been a billionaire for the last twenty years, and now here I am penniless.
I go up to the roof and I say, “God, thirty days. A month.” And I began to cry. I’m just so happy and relieved that I did it. And I say, “Thank you. Thank you, God.” And then I take a pause and I say, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe in you when I was rich.”
And then I just leave. It’s my favorite line because it’s both funny and touching. (pg 380)
I freely admit I had not heard of this film until I read this book. It's not one of the better known Brooks films in general. But his obvious love of it particularly makes me want to see it.
I don’t use the G-word very often because it’s so overused. But as far as genius
is concerned, I know only two for sure- Orson Welles and Tracey Ullman. She can do so many characters with such perfection. She can be poignant. She can be bizarre. And she is always hysterically funny. (pg 385)
And then at the end of the ceremonies, Glenn Close took the stage and
announced that “the 2001 Tony Award for Best New Musical goes to- they’ve broken the record! The Producers.”
And indeed- we had! All in all, The Producers won more Tonys that night than any other musical in the history of Broadway. And we hold that record to this day! Other shows threatened to knock us out of the winner’s
circle, most recently Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which I loved, but secretly hoped didn’t surpass us. It ended up winning a well-deserved eleven Tonys, but with twelve Tony Awards, The Producers still held the crown. (pg 429)
I'm glad Mel Brooks loved Hamilton.
In 2009 I was chosen as one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors. Since 1978 the awards have been presented annually at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to recognize individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to American culture.
It actually wasn’t the first time I was selected to be one of the honorees. A year or so before that, when George W. Bush was president, they called me to tell me I had been chosen.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said.
I didn’t want to be honored by Bush because as a veteran I was very unhappy about Americans being sent to war in Iraq. But in 2009, when Barack Obama was in the White House, I was delighted to once again be offered the Kennedy Center Honors. I immediately accepted and asked them whether I could get two, because I had turned down the first one. They were nice about it, explaining that they only give one to a customer. (pg 437)
Brooks also mentions that then-President Obama was kind enough to inquire as to how he was doing in the wake of his wife's death, then a few years behind him. For Brooks, there was no good answer, but he appreciated the kindness of the question.
Final Grade: A
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