For over 75 years, Mel Brooks has been making people laugh. Hard. He’s brought to the screen Mongo, Lili Von Shtüpp, the grandson of a certain mad scientist (aka Young Frankenstein), Frau Blücher (“A little Ovaltine, perhaps?), Louis XVI (“It’s good to be the king”), Max Bialystock, Leo Bloom, Barf, Dark Helmet, President Skroob, Yogurt, and so many others.
The comedy icon, who turned 100 years old on June 28, is the focus of the two-part HBO documentary Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! (released as he approached the century mark), directed by Emmy winners Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio. It’s got six Primetime Emmy Awards nominations — tied for the most of any nonfiction project — including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program.
Apatow and Bonfiglio join the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to discuss their profile of one of the greatest comedy minds of this or any century (his career really got started in the aughts – the original aughts — two millennia ago as the 2000 Year Old Man). The filmmakers tell us how they got Brooks to drop the veil to allow a glimpse at the man behind the laughs – how Sid Caesar paid Brooks out of his own pocket to write for Your Show of Shows, how he foresaw that his future lay not in TV but in films, his remarkable lifelong friendship with Carl Reiner, and his magnificent love affair with fellow Oscar winner Anne Bancroft.
Apatow explains how he approached interviews with the legend – and why he feared Mel might yell “cut” at any moment. The writer-director, himself one of comedy’s great talents, explores how Brooks worked around Warner Bros executives who wanted him to dump so many of the best parts of Blazing Saddles before the film’s theatrical release (“Lose Mongo punching the horse,” was just one ill-considered imperative from the exec).
Apatow and Bonfiglio also get into how Brooks managed to skewer racism, Nazism and other “isms” without ever losing sight of the key objective – to make it funny. And they opine on who, along with Brooks, belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Comedy – were such a thing to exist.
That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
