On June 28, he will be 97 years old and, despite his advanced age, the legendary Mel Brooks remains just as incombustible. So much so that he wanted to share with his beloved audience the numerous and funny adventures that have marked his personal and professional life with a memoir, ¡Todo sobre mÃ! , which Libros del Kultrum has just published in Spanish. In English they went on sale in November 2021, when the author was 95 years old.
It was during the pandemic, “trapped at home”, that he began to write this juicy inventory animated by his son Max. Through nearly 500 pages, Brooks shares “all my secrets” with readers and encourages them to expand each confidence to the four winds. It is his way of understanding a famous life in experiences and anecdotes that have made him the undisputed king of comedy as the creator of unforgettable and crazy works including Superagent 86, The Producers, La loca historia of the world or Young Frankenstein.
The director, producer, screenwriter and actor, one of the few who can boast of having the four most important awards in the world of entertainment: the Oscar, the Emmy, the Grammy and the Tony, begins his memories in the will be 5 years old. He had just gone to see Frankenstein with his brother and was afraid that the monster would climb through the window of his house in Brooklyn and grab him by the neck. Melvin was the fourth child of Max and Kate Kaminsky, from families of Polish-German and Ukrainian immigrants who survived rejection and poverty. The mother, Kate, was a seamstress and very short. “I loved him very much. She was especially sweet and affectionate with me.” The father, a dock operator, died of tuberculosis when Mel was only two years old. In Williamsburg, during the Great Depression, he discovered the magic of cinema early: “You left the real world (which had terrible things, like homework) and entered a dimension with happy endings where dreams came true “. Your favorites? Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, plus the films of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.
His uncle Joe discovered the true secret of comedy while taking him to see Broadway plays. A love, for comedy, that he developed in the corners of the neighborhood. “Comedy gave me great friends who protected me from the pricks (…). We laugh a lot at the chronicles of everyday tragedies. They had to be real and funny”, he explains. And he says that his humor is more New Yorker than Jewish: “In my case, comedy extended the joy of a happy childhood” surrounded by the affection of his mother, brothers and uncles. At 17 he could not escape the call of the army in the middle of the Second World War, a period during which he learned to fend for himself and which gave him “an education”. With Sid Caesar, “a genuinely brilliant comedian”, he started on television as a scriptwriter for the program Your show of shows. His brilliant career took off there, along with other brilliant screenwriters such as Carl Reiner, Neil Simon or Larry Gelbart. With his friend Reiner they devised the successful albums of The 2000 year old man, for which they won the Grammy.
After his separation from Florence Baum, the mother of his children Stefanie, Nicholas and Edward, his heart beat strongly again when he met the great love of his life, Anne Bancroft, the future Mrs. Robinson of El graduate
He co-created with Buck Henry the Superagent 86 series about a sleazy secret agent inspired by James Bond. And he made the leap to the big screen in 1967 with The Producers, a play that had a musical adaptation on Broadway in 2001, where he won a historic 12 Tony Awards. The film starred a Gene Wilder who later proposed to him to direct Young Frankenstein (1974), a legendary horror comedy that parodied Mary Shelley’s classic. From his admirer Alfred Hitchcock he received wise advice. “I think he was amused by my Brooklyn bar humor,” he recalls. Brooks is proud of the awards he has won for his contribution to US culture and of having produced critically acclaimed titles such as The Elephant Man, Frances, 84 La carta final or Mi año favorito. And what do we have about the secret of their longevity? The key is laughter, faithful companion. “If you can laugh, you can move forward. You can survive when things go wrong if you have a sense of humor.” And you don’t even need to mention the word retirement. take note
