All About Me

All About Me
Author: Mel Brooks
Publsiher: Random House
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781473587311

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AVAILABLE NOW - THE PERFECT GIFT FOR FATHER'S DAY 'Delightful. A great, fun read.' DAVID JASON 'Mel Brooks is the king of comedy.' DAVID BADDIEL 'Riotous' DAILY MAIL 'A jaunty romp across Brooks's career' THE TIMES __________________________ At 95, the legendary Mel Brooks continues to set the standard for comedy across television, film, and the stage. Now, for the first time, this EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) winner shares his story in his own words. Here are the never-before-told, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and remembrances from a master storyteller, filmmaker, and creator of all things funny. From The Producers to Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein to Anxiety and more, All About Me! offers fans fascinating and hilarious insight into Mel Brooks's outstanding collection of boundary-breaking work. Filled with tales of struggle, achievement and camaraderie, Brooks shares riveting details about his upbringing, his career and his many close friendships and collaborations including those with Gene Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and the great love of his love, Anne Bancroft. 'Not since the Bible have I read anything so powerful and poignant. And to boot - it's a lot funnier!' M. Brooks

Funny Man

Funny Man
Author: Patrick McGilligan
Publsiher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 772
Release: 2019-03-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780062560964

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A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award–winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in front the camera too) of some of the most influential comedy hits of our time, including The 2,000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. But before this actor, writer, director, comedian, and composer entertained the world, his first audience was his family. The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was born on his family’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and was not quite three-years-old when his father died of tuberculosis. Growing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was short and homely, a mischievous child whose birth role was to make the family laugh. Beyond boyhood, after transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily inside the Kaminsky family proved more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself into a brand name of popular humor is at the center of master biographer Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man. In this exhaustively researched and wonderfully novelistic look at Brooks’ personal and professional life, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and drawbacks that shaped Brooks’ psychology, his willpower, his persona, and his comedy. McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic ride that has been the famous funnyman’s life story, from Brooks’s childhood in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television—working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner—to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His book offers a meditation on the Jewish immigrant culture that influenced Brooks, snapshots of the golden age of comedy, behind the scenes revelations about the celebrated shows and films, and a telling look at the four-decade romantic partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks’ troubled first marriage. Engrossing, nuanced and ultimately poignant, Funny Man delivers a great man’s unforgettable life story and an anatomy of the American dream of success. Funny Man includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert.

It s Good to Be the King

It s Good to Be the King
Author: James Robert Parish
Publsiher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2008-02-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780470225264

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Discusses the personal life and professional career of comedy writer/actor/filmmaker Mel Brooks.

Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks
Author: Jeremy Dauber
Publsiher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2023-03-07
Genre: Electronic Book
ISBN: 9780300244274

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A spirited dive into the life and career of a performer, writer, and director who dominated twentieth-century American comedy Mel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, is one of the great comic voices of the twentieth century. Having won almost every entertainment award there is, Brooks has straddled the line between outsider and insider, obedient and rebellious, throughout his career, making out-of-bounds comedy the American mainstream. Jeremy Dauber argues that throughout Brooks's extensive body of work--from Your Show of Shows to Blazing Saddles to Young Frankenstein to Spaceballs--the comedian has seen the most success when he found a balance between his unflagging, subversive, manic energy and the constraints imposed by comedic partners, the Hollywood system, and American cultural mores. Dauber also explores how Brooks's American Jewish humor went from being solely for niche audiences to an essential part of the American mainstream, paving the way for generations of Jewish (and other) comedians to come.

The Big Screen Comedies of Mel Brooks

The Big Screen Comedies of Mel Brooks
Author: Robert Alan Crick
Publsiher: McFarland
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2015-06-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781476612287

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Mel Brooks is often regarded as one of Hollywood’s funniest men, thanks to such highly successful films as The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. His films do have a tendency to turn out much like the jokes that comprise them—hit-or-miss, one minute shoot-the-moon brilliant and the next minute well short of laughs. This work provides a thorough synopsis and thematic analysis for each of his twelve films along with complete cast and production credits: The Producers (1968), The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World—Part 1 (1981), To Be or Not to Be (1983), Spaceballs (1987), Life Stinks (1991), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).

The Political Mel Brooks

The Political Mel Brooks
Author: Samuel Boerboom,Beth E. Bonnstetter
Publsiher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2019-06-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781498586719

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The Political Mel Brooks analyzes the work of Mel Brooks as political and social commentary. It demonstrates that Brooks is a serious, political filmmaker whose comedies go beyond goofy parody, attending to serious socio-political issues through a humorous lens.

Mel Brooks in the Cultural Industries

Mel Brooks in the Cultural Industries
Author: Alex Symons
Publsiher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2012-08-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780748664481

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Which strategies has Mel Brooks used to survive, adapt and thrive in the cultural industries? How has he gained his reputation as a multimedia survivor? Alex Symons takes a unique, artist-focused approach in order to systematically identify the range of Brooks's adaptation strategies across the Hollywood film, Broadway theatre and American television industries.By combining a cultural industries approach together with that of adaptation studies, this book also identifies an important new industrial practice employed by Brooks - defined here as 'prolonged adaptation'. More significantly, Symons also employs this method to explain the so far neglected way that Brooks's adaptations have contributed towards changing production trends, changes in critical attitudes, and towards the ongoing integration of the cultural industries today. An essential read for film students and scholars researching adaptation, this refreshing new approach will also be valued by everyone studying the cultural industries.

The Lost Expert

The Lost Expert
Author: Hal Niedzviecki
Publsiher: Cormorant Books
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2021-11-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781770866355

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When Chris, an unambitious young waiter, walks through the park on his way home from work, he stumbles onto the set of a Hollywood film — and is promptly mistaken for the missing lead actor. Corralled into filming a scene for The Lost Expert — director Bryant Reed’s last-ditch effort to restore his reputation — Chris assumes the identity of international action star Thomson Holmes, and disconnects from his real life. He falls deeply into his newfound identity as Holmes and as his character in the film, a struggling young man who has the ability to find lost people and things. Tensions mount as Chris gradually learns of the real Thomson Holmes’ scandals and accusations of sexual misconduct. Meanwhile, the real Thomson Holmes has disappeared and Chris has reason to fear he’ll be next. As he tries to figure out what happened to the actor, he grapples with his role as imposter and whether he can — or even should — extricate himself from reinvention.