Melvin James Brooks (Kaminsky), or commonly just known as Mel Brooks, is an American film director, comedian, screenwriter, actor, composer, producer, and song writer. He was born on June 28, 1926 in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently 89 years old and has been active from 1949-today. His medium is film, television, and musical theater. Mel Brooks is a very successful man, which all began when he started his career as a comic along with a writer for the early TV variety show, Your Show of Shows (Wikipedia). Mel Brooks had a very successful life with many different accomplishments.
Mel Brooks was born to Kate and James Kaminsky, whom were both Jewish. He also had a couple siblings, which were three older brothers: Bernie, Irving, and Lenny. His father passed away from a kidney disease at age 34, when Brooks was only two years of age, so he did not even know his father. He uses a specific quote of, “There’s an outrage there. I may be angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I am sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility. Growing up in Williamsburg, I learned to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems, like a punch in the face (Brooks, Mel).”
While growing up, Brooks was very small and a sickly young boy who was very much teased and bullied in school by fellow classmates. At age 14, a guy named Buddy Rich actually taught young Brooks how to play the drums and started earning money at this age. He attended the school, Abraham Lincoln High School for only a year and ended up graduating from Eastern District High School. Brooks then decided to attend Brooklyn College, but ended up only being there for a year, because he was drafted into the army, which was called the Army Specialized Training Program conducted at the Virginia Military Institute. He ended up then serving in WWII.
After the war, he started working in multiple Borscht Belt resorts and nightclubs in the Catskill Mountains, also known as the Catskills, which a huge area located in southeastern New York, as a pianist and drummer. This was actually when he decided to change his name to his professional name that everyone knows him as, to “Mel Brooks.” The “Brooks” part came from his mother’s maiden name, which was essentially Brookman. The reason he changed it is because everyone was confusing his name for a trumpet player, which played at the same place, whose name was Max Kaminsky and no they were not related. This was the same time that his comic career began. One night, after a regular comic at one of the nightclubs was too sick to perform on stage, Brooks actually started working as a stand-up comic, which consisted of telling jokes along with doing movie star impressions (Wikipedia). After this, he started acting in the summer at Red Bank, New Jersey along with starting some radio work. He kept working and working and eventually worked his way up to the comically aggressive job of Tummler, master entertainer, at Grossinger’s, one of Borscht Belt’s famous resorts (Wakeman, John).
Mel Brooks started discovering other aspects of the entertainment industry, such as becoming a comedy writer for television. He was hired to write jokes for an NBC series, The Admiral Broadway Revue and got hired to be a writer for another television series called, Your Show of Shows. During this time he befriended a man named Carl Reiner, who was his co-writer and would both improvise comedy quite casually and give one another a character to play while attending parties. Brooks ended up then moving from his hometown of New York all the way to Hollywood in 1960. Brooks and Reiner ended up performing an act called the “2000 Year Old Man” act on the Steve Allen Show. This definitely led them to more success and the release of a comedy album, which got them more publicly noticed, because this album actually sold over a million copies.
Mel Brooks seemed to discover more television success as the co-creator along with Buck Henry of Get Smart that was debuted in 1965. He ended up working on an animated short film, The Critic, which actually won a 1964 Academy Reward, but after this he made his feature-length film debut in 1968 with the comedy film, The Producers, which led Brooks to receive the 1969 Oscar for best screenplay (Biography.com). Recently, it was announced that he would be honored with the American Film Institute’s 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award (Biography.com). What is really cool is that PBS actually made a documentary about him, which indeed aired the same year. He has also received numerous nominations, one specifically being for Guest Actor in a Comedy for the film, The Comedians.
When it comes to his personal life, he was married to Anne Bancroft from 1964 to her death, which was in 2005. They actually met at a rehearsal for the Perry Como Variety Show in 1961 (Wikipedia). What is really cool is their son, Max Brooks, became the author of The Zombie Survival Guide series and World War Z, with the latter book having been turned into a 2013 blockbuster film starring Brad Pitt (Biography.com).
Brooks continued writing, acting and directing films for years on end of all different films which included: New Faces (1954), The Producers (1968), The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), The Muppet Movie (1979), History of the World- Part 1 (1981), To Be or Not to Be (1983), Spaceballs (1987), Look Who’s Talking Too (1990), Life Stinks (1991), Mickey’s Audition (1992), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1992), The Silence of the Hams (1994), The Little Rascals (1994), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), Screw Loose (1999), Sex, Lies and Video Violence (2000), Robots (2005), The Producers (2005), Ruby’s Studio: The Feelings Show (2010), Underdogs (2013), Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014), and Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015) (Wikipedia). The list goes on and on if television and his other work were included in this film list, since he has done just about anything in the film industry.
Mel Brooks is actually one of the very few people that had received an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, and a Grammy (Biography.com). Brooks won two Grammys for the Broadway version of The Producers and another for the comedy album The 2000 Year Old Man in The Year 2000 (Biography.com). He obtained a 1967 Emmy for his variety show writing and years later, won three extra figurines over three consecutive years for his part as Uncle Phil on the NBC sitcom Mad About You (Biography.com). The 2001 Broadway musical version of The Producers earned a record-breaking 12 Tony Awards and ended up airing for six years, which is outstanding.
Mel Brooks worked very hard in his life and still very successful and continuing to work in the film industry, which includes both movies and television. Mel Brooks is mainly commonly known for Blazing Saddles, which is how I personally heard of him. He has been and done everything from acting, musician, which was just being a drummer and pianist, musicals, film directing, comedy, etc. He had a rough life starting out from being bullied at school and losing his dad, but decided to improve his life and work hard and keep working his way up in the film industry to become a success. He ended up having his own family and was married for many years in between working all of the time and meeting all the people he was meeting. He has produced numerous amounts of films and has participated in some part of them along with television shows. His biography could go on and on with everything he has done in his life, but to say the least, he found what he was passionate about and explored all aspects of the entertainment industry, which is truly inspirational.
Works Cited
Biography.com Editors. (n.d.). Mel Brooks. Retrieved May 04, 2016, from http://www.biography.com/people/mel-brooks-9227644#related-video-gallery
Brooks, Mel (January 31, 2015). Mel Brooks Live at the Geffen (Television production). Los Angeles: Brooksfilms; distributed by Home Box Office.
List of Mel Brooks films. (n.d.). Retrieved May 04, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mel_Brooks_films
Mel Brooks. (n.d.). Retrieved May 04, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Brooks#cite_note-Wakeman.2C_John_1988-11
Wakeman, John. World Film Directors, Volume 2. The H.W. Wilson Company. 1988, pp. 162–167.
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