I was thinking of those same films. It was good solid work - and he did get an Oscar nod for Witness and Golden Globes nods for Witness and Mosquito Coast. But I think Regarding Henry hurt his ego - no awards nods. I wonder how different his career would have been had he continued on that path - but I think he is a guy who needs to have his ego fed - it isn’t about art for him. And when he steps outside his “type” his fans are disappointed.
(African Queen. I think Ford is functionally a later day Bogie - right down to the awkward Sabrina role. I think Ford and Susan Sarandon would do one hell of an African Queen remake. But the original was so perfect, why bother.)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Indiana Jones and Something or Other ( hated Kate Capshaw and Moo goo gai pan or whatever his name was.)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Six movies, two BIG FAT ROLES that are now a part of our language. He’s created freakin’ icons.
The man has earned a right, IMHO, to coast for the rest of his life.
Some of the incidents in My Favorite Year are closer to the life of Woody Allen than to that of Mel Brooks. The main character in the film is described as being someone not long out of high school, already a college dropout, who’s suddently been hired as a writer for a big TV show. That describes Allen. It doesn’t describe Brooks, who’s somewhat older than Allen. Brooks was in World War II after graduating from high school. He then went on to work as a stand-up comedian for a few years before becoming a TV writer. Incidentally, that quote is clearly wrong about how old Brooks was when he worked for Your Show of Shows. The show didn’t even start until several years after he was 20. Brooks was already married and in his late twenties (and I think already had children) when he started working on the show. The subplot about the main character dating a woman who also works for the show also didn’t happen to Brooks. It didn’t happen to Allen either, who married a college student while working on the show.
The only incident in the movie that was clearly derived from Brooks’s life was his having to take care of Errol Flynn for a weekend. Much of the rest of the film is simply fiction, of course. Flynn didn’t have occasion to defend the star of the show from a gangster. It’s apparently true that the movie gets the atmosphere of the TV show right. Describing the film as a quasi-autobiography strikes me as stretching it slightly.