Funny Man: Mel Brooks

This superb account by film biographer McGilligan (Young Orson) of Mel Brooks’s life and career persuasively sketches two sides of the comedian-filmmaker’s personality: “Nice Mel,” a zany performer who is always on, cares deeply for others, and craves affection, and “Rude Crude Mel,” a tenacious negotiator and a genius at self-promotion who is riven by insecurity. McGilligan covers the major achievements of Brooks’s career, including the TV show Get Smart (on which he had a long-standing feud with Buck Henry over the creator credit), his film directing debut, The Producers (described by collaborators as a chaotic and fractious production), his breakthrough hit Blazing Saddles, and the follow-up success Young Frankenstein (to which Brooks shrewdly secured the stage rights from co-writer Gene Wilder, allowing him years later to mount a musical version). While the book sometimes bogs down in the minutiae of Brooks’s legal deals, it is best at showing Hollywood as a place full of remarkable talents intricately interconnected through friendship and career, especially, in Brooks’s case, through his lifelong relationships with Carl Reiner, Mel Tolkin, and other fellow writers on a formative early experience, Sid Caesar’s live 1950–1954 TV program Your Show of Shows. McGilligan’s exhaustive biography will be essential reading for anyone interested in Brooks or, more broadly, how Hollywood functioned during the second half of the 20th century. (Mar.)