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Summary
Summary
A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.
Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award-winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in front the camera too) of some of the most influential comedy hits of our time, including The 2,000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. But before this actor, writer, director, comedian, and composer entertained the world, his first audience was his family.
The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was born on his family's kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and was not quite three-years-old when his father died of tuberculosis. Growing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was short and homely, a mischievous child whose birth role was to make the family laugh.
Beyond boyhood, after transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily inside the Kaminsky family proved more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself into a brand name of popular humor is at the center of master biographer Patrick McGilligan's Funny Man. In this exhaustively researched and wonderfully novelistic look at Brooks' personal and professional life, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and drawbacks that shaped Brooks' psychology, his willpower, his persona, and his comedy.
McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic ride that has been the famous funnyman's life story, from Brooks's childhood in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television--working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner--to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His book offers a meditation on the Jewish immigrant culture that influenced Brooks, snapshots of the golden age of comedy, behind the scenes revelations about the celebrated shows and films, and a telling look at the four-decade romantic partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks' troubled first marriage. Engrossing, nuanced and ultimately poignant, Funny Man delivers a great man's unforgettable life story and an anatomy of the American dream of success.
Funny Man includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This superb account by film biographer McGilligan (Young Orson) of Mel Brooks's life and career persuasively sketches two sides of the comedian-filmmaker's personality: "Nice Mel," a zany performer who is always on, cares deeply for others, and craves affection, and "Rude Crude Mel," a tenacious negotiator and a genius at self-promotion who is riven by insecurity. McGilligan covers the major achievements of Brooks's career, including the TV show Get Smart (on which he had a long-standing feud with Buck Henry over the creator credit), his film directing debut, The Producers (described by collaborators as a chaotic and fractious production), his breakthrough hit Blazing Saddles, and the follow-up success Young Frankenstein (to which Brooks shrewdly secured the stage rights from co-writer Gene Wilder, allowing him years later to mount a musical version). While the book sometimes bogs down in the minutiae of Brooks's legal deals, it is best at showing Hollywood as a place full of remarkable talents intricately interconnected through friendship and career, especially, in Brooks's case, through his lifelong relationships with Carl Reiner, Mel Tolkin, and other fellow writers on a formative early experience, Sid Caesar's live 1950-1954 TV program Your Show of Shows. McGilligan's exhaustive biography will be essential reading for anyone interested in Brooks or, more broadly, how Hollywood functioned during the second half of the 20th century. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A biography of America's "self-proclaimed emperor of bad taste."McGilligan's (Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane, 2015, etc.) hefty tome about Mel Brooks (b. 1928), the director of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, isn't exactly a hagiography. The author ably chronicles Brooks' career arc from the Brooklyn kid born Melvin Kaminsky to the loudest member of Sid Caesar's writing staff on NBC's Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour in the 1950s to the driving force behind some of the most successful film comedies of his timeand the crassest, with their many fart, rape, and "fag" jokes. McGilligan also shows the ugly side of Brooks: the hard-driving businessman who berated actors when he didn't like a performance, the disputes over writing credits that led to multiple litigations. Much of this material has been documented elsewheresuch as the story of Caesar dangling a young Brooks out a hotel window when Brooks wanted to go out for the evening ("Is that far enough?" Caesar shouted)which makes the book overlong. In the second half, the author gets bogged down in the minutiae of Brooks' business deals, and the prose is occasionally peculiar or old-fashioned. For example, McGilligan repeatedly refers to Brooks' first wife, Florence Baum, only as "Mrs. Brooks"; he does the same thing a couple of times with his second wife, Anne Bancroft, a far more famous figure than Baum. These choices are emblematic of the troubling tendency to represent women in biographies only in relation to the men in their lives. Nonetheless, McGilligan does a nice job dramatizing the insecurities that drove Brooks and offers entertaining anecdotes about Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, and Brooks' other collaborators, who didn't always speak favorably of him.In response to a negative review, Brooks wanted to tell the critic, "I meant no harm. I only wanted to entertain you." Readers can decide for themselves whether the Brooks who emerges in these well-researched yet sometimes-tiresome pages caused more joy than harm. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THERE'S A REVEALING MOMENT early in "Funny Man," Patrick McGilligan's comprehensive biography of Mel Brooks, the relentless, redoubtable comedian and filmmaker. It's not so much an anecdote as a recitation of a musical number from Brooks's formative days as an entertainer - an Al Jolson-esque ditty that he performed in the Army and later on the borscht belt circuit before it became an enduring part of his repertoire. Its lyrics run as follows: Here I am, I'm Melvin Brooks! I've come to stop the show. Just a ham who's minus looks But in your heart I'll grow! I'll tell you gags, I'll sing you songs (Just happy little snappy songs that roll along) Out of my mind. Won't you be kind? And please love Melvin Brooks! This isn't enough to fill a book and yet it tells you almost everything you need to know about Brooks, whose singular career encompasses genuine classics like "The Producers," "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein," as well as irresistible schlock like "Spaceballs" and "History of the World, Part I." To get where he has gotten - to have secured a place in the comedy pantheon and to have won the show-business quadruple crown known as the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) - Brooks, of course, had to be funny and inventive. He had to have a fierce conviction in his own abilities, an unwavering determination to be in front of a crowd and a caustic wit to wield against enemies, or turn on himself when necessary. But he had an obvious neediness, too, as most comedians do - a part of himself that craves approval and bristles at the mildest rejection. The end result is a dynamic that compelled Brooks, even in success, to keep throwing everything he had at his audiences, sometimes to his own detriment. As one of his frequent collaborators, Thomas Meehan, is quoted as saying late in the book, "Mel's a fountain of genius. Remarkable things no one would think of pop out of his head, 100 ideas a day. Many are wonderful. Many aren't. And he wants you to tell him which ones." A similar case could be made about "Funny Man," which is teeming with fascinating details about Brooks's life and career, but doesn't always seem to know which way to point its fire hose or when to turn it off. McGilligan, who has written books about Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, among others, says in his endnotes that he has "never been faced with as many people who either did not reply to inquiries, expressly declined to cooperate with an interview or spoke on the condition of anonymity" (he speculates that this may be because "people feared Brooks's temper or litigiousness"). This doesn't seem to have hindered McGilligan. There's plenty of information in "Funny Man," and it's often illuminating. Like Brooks's tablet-tumbling Moses in "History of the World, Part I" the author probably could've dropped a portion of this material to no one's harm. Despite its overstuffed nature, the book nonetheless paints a portrait of Brooks as a wildly talented - emphasis, occasionally, on wild - artist whose intensity both advanced and impeded him. Born Melvin Kaminsky on his mother's kitchen table in Brooklyn in 1926, the future Mel Brooks was the youngest of four brothers. His father died at age 36, when Mel was just 2 years old. As early as his teens, Brooks was performing in his own comedy sketches, and after serving in World War II he had the good sense and the tenacity to attach himself to Sid Caesar, who was already rocketing to stardom in the clubs and on television. On the earliest episodes of "Your Show of Shows," the influential NBC variety show, Brooks received no official writing credit and was paid out of Caesar's own pocket, kept around as a joke-writing "topper" and personal jester. (The volatile Caesar is also said to have dangled Brooks by his feet from a high hotel window after tiring of his insistent pleas to go out and enjoy the nightlife.) Brooks's major hits were spread out over several years, but when he scored, he scored big: the comedy record "2000 Years With Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks," released in 1960; "The Producers," his 1968 directorial debut about two Broadway shysters, which won him an Academy Award for its screenplay; and his endlessly quotable genre parodies "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein," both released in 1974. During these years, Brooks's first marriage, to the actress Florence Baum, ended acrimoniously, he fell in love with and married Anne Bancroft and he fretted perpetually about the accomplishments of peers like Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart. Brooks also arrived at a crucial formulation that he would steer away from throughout his work, for better and for worse. As he put it in his own words: "Low key plus inoffensiveness equals mass acceptance." if you're looking for a behind-thescenes blow-by-blow on the making of the campfire bean-eating scene from "Blazing Saddles," McGilligan is happy to supply that in all its abundant, flatulent detail. And he is diligent in documenting what comes across as Brooks's rapacious need to receive the lion's share of recognition on works he produced with collaborators, sometimes undercutting creative partners like Buck Henry (to whom Brooks would later apologize for not more fully crediting his contributions in the making of the television series "Get Smart"). But as "Funny Man" marches on, the book makes the mistake of giving equal emphasis to every phase of its subject's career, lavishing excessive attention on events that don't merit them and leaving other, more significant plotlines underdeveloped. I, for one, would have liked to hear more about episodes like Brooks's difficult (and ultimately unfruitful) team-up with his idol Jerry Lewis, on what would become Lewis's 1961 comedy "The Ladies Man," and far less about, say, the competing distribution deals that Universal and Paramount offered for "The Elephant Man," which was produced by Brooks's film company. By the time McGilligan gets to important late-stage developments like Brooks's triumph with the 2001 Broadway musical adaptation of "The Producers," or Bancroft's death from uterine cancer in 2005, you can feel him racing to the finish line, rushing past moments that would have benefited from closer examination. Still, it is worth seeing "Funny Man" through to its conclusion, where Brooks attains the status of a reluctant elder statesman and starts to reckon with his legacy. In an interview, his friend and colleague Carl Reiner said that Brooks wasn't always comfortable seeing dirty jokes on television, and that he was bothered by a "Saturday Night Live" sketch that he felt relied too much on fart gags. As Reiner told the interviewer, "I said, 'Mel, you started it!"' DAVE ITZKOFF is a culture reporter for The Times. His latest book is "Robin," a biography of Robin Williams.
Library Journal Review
In the first full biography of American filmmaker Mel Brooks (b. 1926) in a decade, McGilligan (Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius; Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light) has found a good critical balance as he extols his subject's comedic and artistic virtues while being forthright about Brooks's occasional stubborn attitude toward creative and financial control (a source note mentions that many interviews for the book were done anonymously to escape the potential litigious wrath of Brooks). And while many know Brooks only from the comedic movies he directed or in which he starred, his company Brooksfilms produced widely respected and dramatic films such as The Elephant Man, Frances, and 84, Charing Cross Road. McGilligan is one of the few film biographers not to indulge in extensive criticism of the projects themselves, instead offering commentary through the contemporary reviews or financial results of a given work. VERDICT Well researched, engaging, and of interest to all of Brooks fans. [See Prepub Alert, 7/2/18.]-Peter Thornell, -Hingham P.L., MA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 1926: Little World | p. 1 |
Chapter 2 1944: Big World | p. 34 |
Chapter 3 1949: Funny Is Money | p. 61 |
Chapter 4 1952: Dreams and Nightmares | p. 93 |
Chapter 5 1955: Club Caesar | p. 124 |
Chapter 6 1957: The Genius Awakes | p. 155 |
Chapter 7 1962: The Warm and Fuzzy Mel | p. 193 |
Chapter 8 1965: Springtime for Mel | p. 229 |
Chapter 9 1967: Auteur, Auteur! | p. 264 |
Chapter 10 1971: Blazing Mel | p. 301 |
Chapter 11 1974: Tops in Taps | p. 334 |
Chapter 12 1975: Club Brooks | p. 359 |
Chapter 13 1980: Uneasy Lies the Head | p. 394 |
Chapter 14 1983: Why So Angry? | p. 435 |
Chapter 15 1986: Frolics and Detours | p. 472 |
Chapter 16 1995: He Who Laughs Last | p. 504 |
Chapter 17 2001: Unstoppable | p. 528 |
Sources and Acknowledgments | p. 555 |
Chapter Notes | p. 563 |
Filmography | p. 593 |
Index | p. 595 |