Absolutely!
Wow, I didn’t realize they were both released the same year. IMHO, they were absolute masterpieces and probably the two best films he ever made. What a creative time that must have been for him!
The McGilligan biography reveals that the years between The Producers and Blazing Saddles were bleak for Brooks. Critics were at best mixed - Brooks could never stand a negative review - and nobody outside NYC saw his work. By Hollywood standards he was almost broke as well.
He decided that Producers and The Twelve Chairs were too personal as projects. His two breakthrough movies both came from others: Blazing Saddles from Richard Pryor and Young Frankenstein from Gene Wilder. (In fact, Get Smart wasn’t his concept either. The studio had developed it and called Brooks in to flesh it out.)
For all his acclaim, every movie after that was a commercial bomb. At a quick glance, all his later movies combined barely made more than the two 1975 movies combined. He went back to be a cult artist. As I said, one of the oddest careers.
History of the World: Part I, Spaceballs & Robin Hood: Men in Tights were all successful, they just weren’t big money makers like the 1974 pair. Even Producers made money, mainly as the budget was so low.
However, in 1974 his 2 films made over $200 million on a combined budget of $5.38 million. Amazing super-successes.
Silent Movies probably made a nice profit also, some reports are it cost $4 million to make and returned $36.1 million. High anxiety had similar numbers.
Bonus, I think he put up much of the money for My Favorite Year and it cost $7.9 and made $20.1 Million. He also helped develop it and worked on the writing. It was after all mostly about his time on the Show of Shows.
Part of the “issue,” I suppose, is that, in the years immediately after Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, Hollywood suddenly was taken over by the blockbuster movie, starting with Jaws (1975), then Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Success in the movie industry became defined differently.
Gene Wilder was also a busy man that year.
Funny, funny man. I’ve seen him live several times, and he kept the audience in solid laughter the whole time.
I find his movie output to be erratic. I hated Spaceballs, Robin Hood:MIT, and just about everything after those films. Mainly because Brooks has totally lost his eye for casting and he telegraphs his jokes like it’s still vaudeville.
But for The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein he should be revered.
Today I learned that he has refused the Mark Twain Prize (at least) three times.
Interesting, did he say why?
Despite being credited as co-creator, Brooks’s involvement with Get Smart was fairly limited. While he did help shape the concept and co-wrote the pilot episode with Buck Henry, he left the show soon after that. After the pilot, he has writing credits on only two more first season episodes. The series is much more Buck Henry’s than Mel’s.
That writers’ room from Your Show of Shows was the basis of The Dick Van Dyke Show; it’s generally understood that the Buddy Sorrell character was based on Brooks.
As a horror movie fan, I loved Young Frankenstein. It’s one of the great horror parodies. High Anxiety, his Hitchcock parody, doesn’t get as much attention, but I enjoy it as well. I’m less fond of Dracula: Dead and Loving It, although Peter MacNicol is a surprisingly good Renfield, and Harvey Korman gets to trot out his Nigel Bruce impression one last time.
Maybe because he feels he’s not done yet.
One Mel Brooks film that I don’t think was mentioned here is 84 Charing Cross Road. He didn’t write, direct or star in it. Instead he just produced it for his wife Anne Bancroft to star in. I heard somewhere that she was a big fan of the book on which it was based, so he bought the movie rights and produced the film, which is great.
By all accounts, he and Anne were happily married until she passed in 2005.
Similarly for the 1980 film The Elephant Man. A nice large role for Anne Bancroft. According to wikipedia Mel didn’t put his name on the actual credits for fear of audiences expecting comedy, but he was the executive producer nonetheless.
Yes, their marriage was reportedly happy and close.
I’m curious about that, too. Wikipedia is silent on the issue (though it notes he did accept a Kennedy Center Honor, during Obama’s first term).
He also produced The Fly and My Favorite Year. See this list of Brooksfilms productions. It’s a record to be proud of.
Here’s a gift link to the Times’ article on 100 reasons to love Mel Brooks.
Great article, thank you.
Mel Brooks has been alive for 40% of the history of the United States of America.
Mel is still active at 100. He contributed the Foreward to a brand-new book, Funny Stuff: How Comedy Shaped American History, jointly created by staff from the National Comedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution and published by Rutgers University Press. Don’t turn pale; it’s not in any way academic. Dozens of short pieces on comedy history, various comedians including Mel, and illustrated by dozens of pictures. Oversized, gorgeous, and not much more expensive than an ordinary novel.
I’ve only had a chance to flip through it since it arrived today, but I like what I see, Smithsonian books have always been great, and the National Comedy Center is the best little museum in America.
I was told there would be no math.