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This is a list of films produced by Brooksfilms, the studio founded by Oscar-winning filmmaker Mel Brooks.
Awards. Full list. Melvin James Brooks ( né Kaminsky; [1] born June 28, 1926) is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, songwriter, and playwright. With a career spanning over seven decades, Brooks is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. [2]
- 1949–present
- Full list
- Virginia Military Institute
- 4, including Max
28 giu 2021 · Cinema fotogallery. 28 giu 2021 - 18:45 11 foto. ©Getty. Compie 95 anni uno dei geni del genere comico-demenziale americano: regista, sceneggiatore, comico e produttore cinematografico e teatrale. Uno dei mostri sacri di Hollywood, la cui bacheca vanta 4 Emmy, 3 Grammy, un Oscar e 3 Tony Award. 1/11 ©Getty.
8 dic 2021 · Lorenzo Barbieri. 8 Dicembre 2021 07:58. Tutte le foto per gentile concessione de La Nave di Teseo. In uno dei momenti più cupi della sua esistenza, Mel Brooks, all’anagrafe Melvin Kaminsky, si...
- Overview
- Early life and work
- First films
- Films of the 1970s
- Films of the 1980s and 1990s
- Work as producer and actor
Mel Brooks (born June 28, 1926, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) American film and television director, producer, writer, and actor whose motion pictures elevated outrageousness and vulgarity to high comic art.
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Brooks was an accomplished mimic, pianist, and drummer by the time he graduated from high school and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1944. As part of his assignment to the Army Specialized Training Program, he received instruction at the Virginia Military Institute. After serving as a combat engineer in Europe during World War II, he became a professional entertainer, working as a stand-up comic, an emcee, and a social director at resorts in the Catskill Mountains (the so-called Borscht Belt). In 1949 he joined the writing staff for The Admiral Broadway Revue, a weekly television series starring Sid Caesar. Brooks remained with Caesar until 1958, contributing material to the comedian’s subsequent TV efforts, most memorably to the landmark comedy series Your Show of Shows (1950–54) as part of a writing staff that included Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Larry Gelbart. In 1967 he won an Emmy Award for being a cowriter of the variety show The Sid Cesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris Special. Additionally, Brooks collaborated on the librettos for the musicals Shinbone Alley (1957) and All American (1962).
As a performer, Brooks came to prominence in 1960 when he teamed with Reiner (who acted as an interviewer) to bring to life “The 2,000 Year Old Man,” a mostly improvised bit that the duo performed in television appearances and on best-selling comedy record albums. Brooks entered the motion picture industry as the writer and narrator of the Academy Award-winning animated short The Critic (1963), a devastating lampoon of avant-garde films. He and Buck Henry then created Get Smart (1965–70), a television situation comedy spoofing the espionage genre popularized by the James Bond films.
All this was but a prelude to his auspicious feature-film directorial debut, The Producers (1968), which was not a major success at the box office, even though Brooks’s screenplay won an Academy Award. In The Producers, Zero Mostel starred as a financially troubled stage producer who teams with his accountant (played by Gene Wilder) to purposefully oversell shares in their upcoming production to investors. With the pro-Nazi musical Springtime for Hitler, they hope to create a production so obviously bad and offensive that it will quickly bomb and close, allowing them to abscond with the investors’ money. To their horror, they end up with a hit. Despite its initial poor showing at the box office and a mixed response from critics, the film had some ardent champions, including actor Peter Sellers, and Brooks won an Academy Award for his screenplay.
Moreover, with the passage of time, The Producers became a cult favourite and was eventually widely lauded as one of the greatest comedies ever made. Its celebrated centrepiece, an absurdly upbeat Busby Berkeley-like musical number (“Springtime for Hitler”), and Dick Shawn’s bohemian portrayal of the play-within-the-movie’s protagonist, Adolf Hitler, both typified Brooks’s comedic approach as they shockingly defied audience expectations. Brooks, whose artistic sensibility had largely been shaped by his sense of being an outsider as a Jew in mainstream American society, boldly put the ultimate villain of Jewish history, Hitler, at the heart of his comedy and transformed him into a clown. In so doing, he embodied the approach to comedy (and, more specifically, to parody) that film historian Gerald Mast called the “anomalous surprise”—the interjection of a character, a situation, or an event that makes no sense given the context. Brooks would return to this approach again and again throughout his career as a filmmaker.
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It was with his third directorial effort, Blazing Saddles (1974), that Brooks cemented his reputation as Hollywood’s foremost purveyor of hilarious tastelessness. He collaborated with writer-director Andrew Bergman and stand-up comedian-actor Richard Pryor, among others, on the script for this uninhibited burlesque of the western genre, the comic targets of which ranged from racial prejudice to flatulence. Its stellar cast included Wilder, Cleavon Little, Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens, and Madeline Kahn, who earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress for her parody of Marlene Dietrich’s saloon singer in the classic western Destry Rides Again (1939). The film reaped a fortune at the box office and earned Brooks another Academy Award nomination, this one for best original song (“I’m Tired”).
Equally popular was his next film, a broad but affectionate parody of the Universal horror films of the 1930s titled Young Frankenstein (1974), which earned Brooks and the film’s star and cowriter, Wilder, an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Young Frankenstein was more carefully structured than Blazing Saddles, and its elegant black-and-white cinematography replicated the look of the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. Brooks reined in his more anarchic impulses (though his trademark lewd jokes are abundant), and many critics found the result more sophisticated than Blazing Saddles, which had been released less than a year previously.
Despite the presence of Korman, Leachman, and several other fine actors who were members of the loose ensemble that appeared in Brooks’s films, including Kahn and Caesar, History of the World—Part I (1981) was poorly received by most critics and at the box office. Similarly disappointing were Spaceballs (1987), a takeoff on the Star Wars series, an...
As founder of Brooksfilms, an independent moviemaking concern, Brooks engaged in a parallel career as an executive producer of serious “quality” films, including The Elephant Man (1980), Frances (1982, uncredited), and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), the last of which starred his second wife, Anne Bancroft, whom he married in 1964. Brooks costarred with Bancroft in To Be or Not to Be (1983), a remake of the Ernst Lubitsch-directed film of the same name. His work as an actor included regular appearances on the popular TV sitcom Mad About You in the late 1990s, for which he won three Emmys, and a guest stint on the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm. He won a Grammy Award for the spoken comedy album The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 (1998). In addition, he lent his voice to various TV shows and films. The latter included the animated Hotel Transylvania series (2015, 2018). In 2019 he voiced the character of Melephant Brooks in the animated feature Toy Story 4.
Brooks made a spectacular comeback in 2001 as producer, composer, and librettist of the hugely popular Broadway stage musical based on The Producers. Brooks received several Tony Awards for the production, and with these wins he became one of the few entertainers to have earned an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony). He followed this in 2007 with a Broadway musical based on Young Frankenstein. Brooks was named a Kennedy Center honoree in 2009 for his contributions to American comedy. His memoir, All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business, was published in 2021. Michael Barson
The film was directed by David Lynch, produced by Mel Brooks (who was uncredited, to avoid audiences anticipating the film being in the vein of his comedic works, although his company Brooksfilms is in the opening credits) and Jonathan Sanger, and starred John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Michael ...
2 apr 2014 · Mel Brooks is an iconic filmmaker known for comedies like 'The Producers,' 'Blazing Saddles' and 'Young Frankenstein,' among other works.
