photo: HBO
Today is the birthday of American actor, filmmaker, comedian, songwriter, and playwright Melvin James Brooks (né Kaminsky) better known as just plain Mel Brooks. But there is nothing plain about this guy! He has a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 28 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and an Honorary Academy Award in 2024.
Brooks was born on a tenement kitchen table on June 28, 1926, in Brownsville, Brooklyn to Katie (née Brookman) and Max Kaminsky. He grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His father's family were German Jews from Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). His mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant from Kiev, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). His father died of tuberculosis of the kidney at 34 when Brooks was two years old. He has said of his father's death, "There's an outrage there. I may be
angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I'm sure a lot of my comedy
is based on anger and hostility. Growing up in Williamsburg, I learned
to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems—like a punch in the
face."
He was a small, sickly boy, who often was bullied and teased by his classmates because of his size. At age nine, he saw Anything Goes with William Gaxton, Ethel Merman, and Victor Moore at the Alvin Theater. After the show, he told his uncle that he was not going to work in the garment district like everyone else, but instead wanted to go into show business.
Brooks studied drums under jazz musician Buddy Rich, who had also grown up in Williamsburg and earned money as a musician from age 14. During his teens, he changed his name to Melvin Brooks, used his mother's maiden name Brookman, after being confused with trumpeter Max Kaminsky.
In early 1944 in his senior year in high school, Brooks was recruited to take the Army General Classification Test, a Stanford–Binet-type IQ test. He received high scores and was sent to the Army Specialized Training Program at the Virginia Military Institute to be taught electrical engineering, horse riding, and saber fighting. In 1944, Brooks was drafted into the US Army. Twelve weeks later, when he turned 18, he officially joined the Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, induction center, and was sent to the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for basic and radio operator training. In December 1944, Brooks was transferred to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion as a combat engineer, participating in the Battle of the Bulge. Of his experience there, Brooks noted:
"Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier."
Stationed in Saarbrücken and Baumholder, the battalion was responsible for clearing booby-trapped buildings and defusing land mines as the Allies advanced into Nazi Germany. Brooks was tasked with land-mine location; defusing was done by a specialist. Brooks has stated that when he heard Germans singing over loudspeakers, he responded by singing the American-Jewish singer Al Jolson hit "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye!)" into a bullhorn.
After the war, Brooks's mother secured him a job as a clerk at the
Brooklyn Navy Yard, but Brooks "got into a taxi and ordered the driver
to take him to the Catskills", where he started working in various Borscht Belt resorts and nightclubs in the Catskill Mountains as a drummer and pianist.
In 1959, Brooks and Carl Reiner improvised and eventually developed the idea of the 2000-year-old man who had witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. They began performing the 2000 Year Old Man act on The Steve Allen Show. Their performances led to the release of the comedy album 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks that sold over a million copies in 1961.[ It eventually became a comedy record album which ended up in my collection (link below).
Brooks was involved in the creation of the Broadway musical All American, which debuted on Broadway in 1962. He wrote the play with lyrics by Lee Adams and music by Charles Strouse. It starred Ray Bolger as a southern science professor at a large university. During a press conference for All American, a reporter asked, "What are you going to do next?" and Brooks replied, "Springtime for Hitler," perhaps riffing on Springtime for Henry. For several years, Brooks toyed with a bizarre and unconventional idea about a musical comedy of Adolf Hitler. He explored the idea as a novel and a play before finally writing a script. He eventually found two producers to fund it, Joseph E. Levine and Sidney Glazier, and made his first feature film, The Producers (1968). The Producers was so brazen in its satire that major studios
would not touch it, nor would many exhibitors. Brooks finally found an
independent distributor who released it as an art film, a specialized
attraction. At the 41st Academy Awards, Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film over fellow writers Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes. The Producers became a smash underground hit, first on the nationwide college circuit,
then in revivals and on home video. It premiered to a limited audience
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 22, 1967, before achieving a
wide release in 1968.
Brooks, along with his collaborator Thomas Meehan, later adapted it into a musical, which was hugely successful on Broadway and received an unprecedented 12 Tony awards. In 2000, Roger Ebert included The Producers in his canon of Great Movies, and remembered being in an elevator with Brooks and Anne Bancroft
shortly after the movie was released: "A woman got on the elevator,
recognized him and said, 'I have to tell you, Mr. Brooks, that your
movie is vulgar.' Brooks smiled benevolently. 'Lady', he said, 'it rose
below vulgarity.'"
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