Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Mel Brooks. All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (New York: Ballantine Books, 2022). 460pp.
21st Edition.
Recently, while visiting my son in Hackensack for a weekend, I realized I was going to finish the book I’d brought along well before we left. Despite having a full complement of books waiting at home to be reviewed, I knew I’d have to visit the nearby Barnes & Noble, even if I had to pay full price instead of getting something at a discount on Amazon.com.
The Hackensack B&N isn’t particularly well-stocked with books about theater or “entertainment”; of the half-dozen possibilities that interested me, Mel Brooks’s memoir, All About Me!, seemed a good fit. It was a paperback (I’m not into e-books), relatively inexpensive, and, despite a hefty page count, sure to be a breezy read in my son’s backyard. And who doesn’t like Mel Brooks?
The choice was perfect, although All About Me! is no literary masterpiece. (For one thing, as per the grammarian brouhaha over the old “Winstons taste good, like a cigarette should” commercial, Brooks never uses “as” when he can use “like.”) It is, though, a snappy tour through the life and achievements of a deservedly honored and beloved actor-comedian, film director, scriptwriter, and film producer—not to mention songwriter and librettist. This is a guy who, at 75, not only wrote his first Broadway musical, The Producers (2001), creating the music and lyrics himself and co-writing (with Thomas Meehan) the book, but watched it win the most Tony awards (12!) in Broadway history (one more than Hamilton earned a decade and a half later).
Brooks, now 98, sat down to pen All About Me! four years ago, when the pandemic put the brakes on everything, and his son by Anne Bancroft, Max (himself a gifted writer), urged him to use the time to do so. Although it has its share of LOL moments, and Brooks almost always keeps things chipper, the book’s major interest lies in the many chapters that tell the story behind the inception and making of his classic films (and single Broadway show), most of which broke many rules as to what a popular audience would find not only funny but appropriate. Brooks, not shy at clapping himself on the back, often suggests his surprise at his own creative fecundity and success.
Brooks is the comic genius, of course, who gave us The Producers (before it became a musical), which features a show within a show celebrating Adolf Hitler. Blazing Saddles, which introduced racial issues into a satire on movie Westerns, has a memorably hilarious scene of cowboys eating beans and farting. Young Frankenstein pokes fun at James Whale’s classic 1931 black and white gothic horror movie about Mary Shelley’s monster, including a vaudeville routine with Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) and his creature (Peter Boyle), dressed in top hats and tails, doing “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
Silent Movie has not a word of dialogue. High Anxiety spoofs the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock. History of the World, Part I shows Moses (Brooks) appearing with three tablets containing the original 15 Commandments— when one tablet drops and smashes, he makes do with the remaining 10. To Be or Not to Be remakes the 1942 Ernst Lubitsch comedy mocking the Nazis (Brooks admits that the Nazis served him well). And in Spaceballs, which skewers Star Wars, he imprinted “May the Schwartz Be with You” on our brains. The above, of course, is just a selection of his almost entirely successful cannon.
Cinephiles will hungrily devour his commentary on his movies, and comedians will savor his personal perspectives on comedy. One of his major themes is how, regardless of how silly the humor is, it’s essential that it come from a place of humanity. He pays homage to those predecessors who influenced him, including Jewish comics like Danny Kaye and the Ritz Brothers. Curiously, he never mentions that both he and Kaye, born in another part of Brooklyn 15 years before Brooks, share the same last name of Kaminsky.
Melvin Kaminsky was the youngest of four brothers born and raised in Williamsburg (mostly), Brooklyn to a family of struggling Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He outlines his boyhood years in that colorful working-class neighborhood, where most of his family and neighbors worked across the river in Manhattan’s garment industry. He tells, in humorous detail, of his service in the army during World War II, where he began to advance his growing show business ambitions. And he explains how, back in the U.S.A. he began, following the usual struggles to make a buck, to build a career as a comic writer, principally for the great comedian Sid Caesar, a pioneer of TV sketch comedy throughout the 1950s.
We learn how he teamed up with best friend from the Caesar shows, Carl Reiner, to produce one of the best-selling comedy albums ever, “2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks,” in which he portrayed the Yiddish-accented 2000-year-old man. (Jewish-inflected humor is in Brooks’s DNA.) Then there was his successful creation of a very popular 1960s TV series, “Get Smart,” about a goofy spy named Maxwell Smart (Don Adams), who uses his shoe as a telephone, a prescient idea decades before cellphones were born.
There’s also a great deal in the book about Brooks’s highly successful venture as a film producer for Brooksfilms, the company he founded to create films both by himself and others. Among the company’s many notable films is The Elephant Man, in which he takes great pride. Oddly, he never mentions that it followed Bernard Pomerance’s hit Broadway play of the same name, although the film isn’t an adaptation of the play. His business dealings with the Hollywood executives in getting his films made provide fodder for criticism of the system, but his appreciation for supportive studio honchos, especially Alan Ladd, Jr., is considerable.
Of course, we also meet many of the powerful influences in Brooks’s life, especially his late wife, the exceptionally talented and beautiful actress Anne Bancroft, who died of cancer in 2005. Theirs was a rare show-biz marriage made in heaven. But, while Brooks mentions many of his closest friends and colleagues, he declares that “my intention in writing this book was mainly to share my adventures in show business, and not to indulge in too many stories of my private life . . .” (p. 144). A few personal stories arise here and there, but at a surprising minimum. We hear, for example, about Max Brooks’s success, but little more than the names of his children by his first wife, a marriage about which no details are offered, not even his wife’s name.
Brooks writes in everyday language, enjoying every minute of his verbal retelling of his filmic highlights, including many chunks of what he considers the biggest laugh-generating dialogue he ever wrote. Apart from “I” and “me” the word that probably tallies the highest number of uses in his depictions is “fun.” Each experience is appreciated as much for its comedic achievements as for the fun it created for Brooks and his cohorts. If we can believe his recollections, just being involved in a Brooks enterprise seems to have been a grand old time for everyone involved.
That must be why so many leading artists, regardless of their creative specialty, worked with him over and over.
The anonymous studio suits aside, Brooks rarely says anything bad about anyone (although he refused to accept a Kennedy Center Honor from President George W. Bush, whose Iraq War policies offended him). He prefers to note how talented, lovely, funny, clever, or whatever they were. Person after person is described as a dear, close friend or pal. And since so many people have been involved in this nonagenarian’s remarkable life, an index would have been of considerable value. Happily, a modest selection of black and white photos accompanies the text.
Probably because he wants to maintain an upbeat mood, Brooks only rarely mentions the passing of his closest collaborators. The deaths of Bancroft and that of Mike Ockrent, original director of Broadway’s The Producers (his wife, Susan Stroman, took over the show), are mentioned, unavoidably, but we never hear a word about the far too early loss of such close collaborators and buddies as Gene Wilder. Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, and Dom DeLuise, to cite only a few.
Brooks has received countless awards, even becoming an EGOT (winner of an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony). He has a chapter devoted to his awards, including those he received from President Barack Obama. He also provides the words—including those when he was lovingly roasted—spoken about him by awards presenters, and those he himself said on winning certain honors. When he agreed to accept the Kennedy Center Honors award from President Obama, the latter thanked him “for a lifetime of making the world laugh.” The laughter promises to continue for more lifetimes to come.
Coming up: Judi Dench (as told to John Miller). And Furthermore.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
