Mel brooks

Born on June 28, 1926, Melvin Kaminsky comes from a Jewish family. As a child he was very small in stature, so he was mistreated by his classmates. “I’m a little genius, although I’d rather not be a genius and be big and normal,” he once remarked.

After finishing high school, the United States became involved in World War II, and he enlisted in the army, where he was part of a team specializing in removing antipersonnel mines. Curiously, it was then that he verified his comic potential by parodying the Nazi propaganda messages broadcast on German radios on the army station.

He discovered that his true vocation was to make people laugh, and at the end of the contest he became a comedian in various venues, where he was especially successful when he made jokes about movie stars. From there he moved into television, writing gags for hit shows like the “Steve Allen Show.” With Buck Henry he createdAgent 86 , a parody of the James Bond movies that became one of the great classics of sitcoms.

In the cinema he made his debut with The Critic , an animated short conceived by him and directed by Ernest Pintoff, which was awarded an Oscar, where he parodied art and essay cinema. Shortly after he would deliver his first film as a director,The Producers (1968) , in which a bankrupt businessman teams up with an accountant to get rich by starting the worst musical of all time. The idea is to make sure that the first day the curtain closes, so that they can flee with the investors’ money, so they conceive of an absolute horror, a musical about the Nazi genocide called “Spring for Hitler”, which will be staged by a director gay. The film, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder , horrified the critics, who raved about it, but it was a tremendous success with the public –which would become a constant in the director’s career–, and in addition, Brooks won the Oscar for best original screenplay.

His next jobThe mystery of the twelve chairs , acid satire of the regime of the Soviet Union, adapts the novel “Ilya Ilf, Yevgeni Petrov”, by Brooks himself. In 1974 the filmmaker released two surrealist parodies, that of western cinema,Hot saddles , and that of the horror movie,Young Frankenstein , his greatest success, with memorable gags such as the blind man ( Gene Hackman ) about to burn and finish off the monster in his attempt to shower him with attention as he is his only visitor in a long time, or the appearances of the hunchback Igor :

“Whose brain was that?”

–From A. I don’t know what.

-A. I do not know what?

-A. Normal.

Divorced in 1961 from Florence Baum, with whom he had 3 children, Brooks joined actress Anne Bancroft , the legendary Mrs. Robinson ofThe graduate , until her death in 2005. With her he dared to star inI am or I am not , infamous and unnecessary revision of one of the quintessential comedy classics,To be or not to be , by the teacher Ernest Lubitsch. Paraphrasing the delicious original tape, it can be said that Brooks did with Lubitsch “what Hitler did with Poland.”

Despite this big slip, and the fact that Brooks resorts to a much easier humor than that of the great classics of the comic genre, it is necessary to admit that he is usually funny. Above all, his 70s movies make people laugh, such asMaximum Anxiety , a funny parody of Alfred Hitchcock ‘s films or Mel Brooks ‘ Last Madness , a silent comedy in which curiously the only one who gets to speak is the mime Marcel Marceau , and which has the presence of great figures of the time , such as Paul Newman , James Caan , Liza Minnelli and Burt Reynolds .

The problem is the disastrous influence that his films had on American comedy, currently more along the lines of the easy gag than in recovering the iron scripts of the greats, such as Lubitsch or Billy Wilder .

In the 80s, Brooks’ cinema was deflating, with titles likeThe crazy history of the world andThe crazy history of the galaxies , each time with more simple gags and pulling towards the tacky. But curiously, at this time he began to be interested in serious cinema, and produced two significant films based on real cases,The Elephant Man , one of David Lynch ‘s best films , andFrances , with Jessica Lange . Unfortunately, Brooks has to forgo being included in the credits to avoid being laughed at by the public.

In the 90s he directed What a disgusting life , The crazy adventures of Robin Hood and Dracula. A very content and happy death , which was less and less funny and was not very well received by the public.

He assures that Anne Bancroft became his ‘Obi Wan Kenobi’ when he gave him a great idea, to make his first feature film,The Producers (1968) , in a Broadway musical. Not only was it a huge success, but it won a whopping 12 Tony Awards, three of which went to Brooks himself: Best Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Book. It was covered in other countries (in Spain José Mota and Santiago Segura starred in a successful adaptation) and gave rise to a completely unsuccessful film version. In any case, this turn of the screw is still anecdotal, since a film gives rise to a musical that in turn inspires a new film, as happened with Little Shop of Horrors .