A few years ago Brooks, who turns 100 on 28 June this year, was on the BBC’s early-evening magazine programme The One Show. The hosts initially treated him with that slightly patronising deference that the elderly often have to abide. Within minutes they had lost all control of the show and Brooks reigned the studio, while Russell Crowe looked on with utter joy.
When Mel Brooks produced The Elephant Man, he didn’t have his name on the credits as he knew that might change the audience’s expectations. When they screened a cut of it for the film executives, Brooks made it clear that they would not need to hear any executive opinions afterwards as they were screening it to them as a courtesy. John Hurt would go on to play Jesus in Brooks’s History of the World Part 1 and a brilliant Alien spoof cameo in Spaceballs.
Not only could Brooks see the genius of David Lynch, he also produced David Cronenberg’s The Fly, a supremely underrated film, and both Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum should have been nominated for Oscars at the very least.
Brooks never forgets the importance of love in comedy, something that was also true of two of his frequent collaborators, Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman.
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Wilder talked of the one time he and Brooks had a row. He had written the scene in Young Frankenstein where the monster and Frankenstein do a white tie and tails routine of Puttin’ on the Ritz. Brooks stormed in and asked Wilder what the hell he was thinking. Was this really funny? After a heated debate, all fury from Brooks vanished and he said, “OK then.”
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Wilder couldn’t understand how that rage had so quickly disappeared. Brooks explained that he was unsure of the scene, but he knew if Wilder really believed in it then it would be great.
Anyone who still bores you with the opinion that women aren’t funny is centuries behind Brooks. Watch Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman and Teri Garr in his movies; utter magnificence. Then there is the romantic intensity of his marriage to Anne Bancroft.
The first time Brooks saw her she was singing. He recalled, “When the song was over, I leapt to my feet, applauded madly, and shouted, ‘Anne Bancroft! I love you!’ She laughed and shouted back, ‘Who the hell are you?’”
Bancroft said of him, “I was in love with him instantly. He looked like my father and he acted like my mother.”
I sometimes hear people say of Blazing Saddles that “you couldn’t make that nowadays” and then burble on about “the woke” or whatever, and I just think you don’t understand that movie one iota and you don’t understand that love that Brooks puts into everything, whether a film or the world.
At age 100, he is still a rebel, a fighter, a clown and an imp.
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