Known for his prolific sense of humor and razor-sharp mind for parody, Mel Brooks had his finger on the pulse of comedy for decades. From genre spoofs (High Anxiety to Hitchcock pictures) to specific targets (Spaceballs to Star Wars), Brooks found himself a niche that few other filmmakers were able to capitalize on like he did.
The new Hulu series History of the World: Part II, based on Brooks’s film of similar name, which features a star-studded cast which includes Nick Kroll (Big Mouth), Taika Waititi (Thor: Love and Thunder) and Khumail Nanjiani (Marvel’s Eternals), is set to premiere later this year and marks Brooks’s first foray in nearly a decade back into his original material (the last being the short-lived Spaceballs animated series.)
With this in mind, we thought it was time to take a look back at some of Brooks’ lesser known projects. We all know the comedies: Blazing Saddles, The Producers, Young Frankenstein. But what about the forgotten dramas? The comic misfires? Oscar plays? And even his hand in launching the careers of several industry icons? At 96 years old, Brooks has managed to keep himself quite busy.
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10 84 Charing Cross Road (1987)
Columbia
84 Charing Cross Road is a drama mostly lost to time. It centers on Helene Hanff (Anne Bancroft), an American writer in search of several difficult to acquire British literature titles. She contacts Frank Doel (Anthony Hopkins), the proprietor of the antique bookselling shop at 84 Charing Cross Road, in hopes to attain the books and this sparks an over 20-year friendship.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
Any Brooks fan will note the obvious connection here - the film starred Brooks’s wife Anne Bancroft. In fact, she went on to win the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her portrayal of Hanff in this real life story.
9 The Doctor and the Devils (1985)
MGM
Under the Brooksfilms banner, Brooks produced this 1985 horror film based on the infamous graverobbings perpetrated by William Burke and William Hare in Edinburgh, Scotland throughout the 1820s. The film stars Timothy Dalton (James Bond) as an anatomy lecturer with a problem – he has no dead bodies to use to teach his courses. Enter our Burke and Hare surrogates: Fallon (Game of Thrones’s Jonathan Pryce) and Broom (V for Vendetta’s Stephen Rea).
While this may seem like a massive departure from Brooks’s comedy roots, this is in line with several of Brooks’s other, and more famous, forays into horror. He even went as far as hiring former Hammer Horror cinematographer Freddie Francis as the director of the film.
8 The Elephant Man (1980)
Paramount Pictures / Warner Bros.
That’s right. Mel Brooks served as the main backer and producer for David Lynch’s breakout film The Elephant Man in 1980. Lynch, who by this time had already directed cult hit Eraserhead, came on board the project after Brooks had already attached himself to producer. Here is Brooks recalling his first meeting with Lynch:
“His shirt was buttoned — always buttoned — at the top. His look was “kind of weird.” The man didn’t wear a tie. He said “a lot of ‘R’s, like a Midwestern kid.” He looked just like a young Charles Lindbergh. “I said to him, ‘You’re hired.’ I hired him right there.”
The film was a massive success, going on to be nominated for eight Academy Awards, but there was one notable name missing: Brooks. He felt that ending a film like The Elephant Man and cutting to a card that read “Produced by Mel Brooks” would be distracting to audiences who were predisposed to his comic styling, so he left himself uncredited on the production.
7 The Fly (1986)
20th Century Fox
As if The Elephant Man wasn’t enough, Brooks put his stamp on another totemic film in the Horror cannon – David Cronenberg’s The Fly, a fable about the dangers of teleportation technology. It was Brooks’s former assistant Stuart Cornfeld that brought him the project based on the 1958 film of the same name. He sought independent financing after studio backing had fallen through. Knowing Brooks to be a horror fan, Cornfeld made the right call. Only later did Cronenberg sign on and his vision of a science experiment gone wrong came to (bloody disgusting) fruition.
The Fly was a smash hit with audiences and critics alike. Even garnering praise for the parallels to the culturally relevant AIDS crisis, though that wasn’t Cronenberg’s intention. Brooksfilm went on to produce several sequels to The Fly, Cronenberg was not involved. Cronenberg has stated that Brooks approached him about a sequel but the two could not meet eye to eye on a vision. Nevertheless, the comedy titan and the master of body horror still combined forces to make one of the most memorable horror films of the 1980s.
6 Life Stinks (1991)
Considered one of Brooks’s biggest flops because it was such a drastic departure from his previous works, Life Stinks follows stuffy CEO Goddard Bolt (played by Brooks) given an ultimatum: survive on the street for a month or lose his business. Naturally, the greedy Bolt opts for the latter and what transpires is a classic fish-out-of-water tale.
The film ultimately grossed $4 million or a $13 million dollar budget. Critic Roger Ebert commended Brooks for his committed portrayal beyond his usual comedy stylings, but the film ultimately left audiences confused by the content and tone of the film being incongruous with what they had come to associate with Brooks’s slapstick films.
5 My Favorite Year (1982)
Your Show of Shows, Sid Caesar’s weekly television program in the 1950s, was a legendary breeding ground for young comedic talent. Writers for the show included Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, and a 24-year-old Brooklyn native named…Mel Brooks. So naturally, a screenplay chronicling the on and off set antics of the show would pique Brooks’s interest.
Enter My Favorite Year, a fictionalized account of Brooks’s time on of Your Show of Shows, focusing on Benjy Stone, a young comedy writer who meets his hero Alan Swann (based on Erroll Flynn). The film features dozens of parallels to Brooks’s real life. Including characters with similar names (Sid Caesar became ‘King Kaiser’), though Brooks has stated that the content of the film is heavily embellished, but just as wild.
4 Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank (2022)
Paramount Pictures
At face value, this one is a head scratcher. Why is 96-year-old Mel Brooks, Executive Producing and voicing a character in a 2022, long delayed, Animation film?
The Answer - It is a tribute to one of Brooks’s most iconic films: Blazing Saddles
Originally, Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank was titled “Blazing Samurai”, and follows the antics of Hank (Michael Cera), a wayward dog, who trains to become the Samurai in a town full of cats. This plot line loosely follows that of Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little) in Brooks’s 1974 film.
3 Sam (2017)
There isn’t a whole lot written about Sam – the body swap comedy about a man who is transported into the body of a woman in order to learn a lesson starring Natalie Knepp, Sean Kleier, and Stacy Keach. The film has less than 1000 reviews on IMDB and no critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
That said, the connection is clear. Nicolas Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks, who serves as an Executive Producer on the film. Brooks is the father of four children including Nicolas and Max, who is better known for writing World War Z and TheZombie Survival Guide.
2 Solarbabies (1986)
A film set on a post-apocalypitic Earth where there is very little water left and a ragtag group of teens band together in order (and gain super powers) from an alien orb named Bodhi to restore the ocean? Doesn’t sound like the box office smash Brooks had hoped it to be.
In a 2016 interview with the hosts of the How Did This Get Made? podcast, Brooks detailed the background in the making of the sci-fi disaster Solarbabies, directed by choreographer Alan Johnson. The film, which shot entirely in Spain to avoid having to use the major studio unions, was an outright flop. The New York Times even called it an embarrassment.
That said, the film was praised for its elaborate production design, as well as launching the careers of several 80s/90s teen actors including Jason Patric, Jamie Gertz, and Lukas Haas.
1 The Vagrant (1992)
The Vagrant showed a lot of promise as a low-budget Horror film produced by Brooks. It was cheap to make, costing around $9500. It had a simple premise – a man is terrorized by his neighbor, a vagrant squatting in the house across the street. And it starred a young Bill Paxton, who had already established himself in films like Aliens, Predator 2, and Weird Science. And Brooks had a previously successful track record with the film’s director Chris Walas (the man behind the creature effects in in The Fly and the director of The Fly II).
Sadly, the film landed with a thud. The film only grossed $5900 at the box office, playing in a whopping eight theatres, before it was quickly shuffled to the home video market.
