Today, one of the greatest living legends in film history celebrates his 100th birthday: Mel Brooks. Over the course of his career, Brooks has had an enormous impact on film and television as a writer, director, producer, and actor.
He began his career as one of the pioneers of early television, writing for Your Show of Shows (he later produced a fictionalized version of those early days with My Favorite Year). He went on to co-create Get Smart, but movies were always his endgame. Brooks was already well into his forties when he wrote and directed his first film, The Producers, which was only a modest financial success upon release but earned him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
His follow-up, The Twelve Chairs, failed to make much of an impact, but he struck gold in 1974 with two zeitgeist-defining classics: Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, both of which starred his frequent collaborator Gene Wilder.
He enjoyed a long run of hits in the years that followed, satirizing everything from silent films (Silent Movie) to Alfred Hitchcock (High Anxiety) and Star Wars (Spaceballs). He continued directing into the 1990s with Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, his final feature as director.
While Brooks hasn’t directed a film in thirty-one years, he’s been anything but retired. He reinvented himself as a Broadway powerhouse, with The Producers musical setting a Tony Award record and becoming one of the biggest theatrical hits of all time. He’s also remained active as an actor and producer, with a long-awaited sequel to Spaceballs finally on the way.
If that were all he’d accomplished, Brooks would still rank among the greatest figures in movie history. But did you know he also played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in modern horror? In the 1980s, he produced both The Elephant Man and The Fly, helping bring two visionary filmmakers—David Lynch and David Cronenberg—to a much wider audience (he took a step back from producing when Solarbabies almost bankrupted him) Brooks clearly had an appreciation for the genre, something that seems to have rubbed off on his son, Max Brooks, the author of World War Z.
All of that is to say that Mel Brooks’s impact on the entertainment industry is immeasurable. Few filmmakers have influenced comedy, television, Broadway, and even horror to the extent that he has. It’s wonderful to see him still going strong at 100.
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