Josh Reviews Mel Brooks’ Autobiography All About Me!
Mel Brooks’ jovially titled All About Me! is a terrifically entertining autobiography, as might be expected from master raconteur Mr. Brooks. It’s a fun trip down memory lane, through Mr. Brooks’ youth as a kid in Brooklyn and his long and successful career in Hollywood. It’s not a short book, and yet I could have happily kept reading for many pages more!
Mel Brooks has had a long and varied career, and All About Me! devotes significant time to the many different phases of Mr. Brooks’ life and work in show-business. We get a lot of fascinating information about his early days in television, working with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, creating Get Smart, performing The 2,000 Year-Old Man with Carl Reiner, etc. We get a delightful tour through all of the films that Mr. Brooks directed, with each movie getting its own chapter spotlight. The book spends time discussing Mel Brooks’ production company Brooksfilms and the various interesting movies they oversaw. We read about the creation of the Broadway production of The Producers. And lots more!
The book is written in an easy-going, conversational style. It feels very much like Mr. Brooks is telling us these stories in his familiar, gregarious style. (I wonder if that’s indeed how this book was created!) It’s a fun pleasure to read and I zipped right through the book in very little time.
To my surprise, my favorite section of the book was the first 100 pages, which deals with Mel Brooks’ life before he got famous. I loved reading Mr. Brooks’ stories and recollections about his childhood in Brooklyn, his family, his time in the army, and his early days struggling to find a way into show business. Part of why I loved this section might be because it was mostly new material to me. (I know a LOT about Mr. Brooks’ movies, but all this stuff about his youth was new info for me.) But there’s also an endearingly fond tone to this section. Mr. Brooks has an impressively strong recollection of these events from so many decades ago; most likely because those years and those events made such a strong impact on him. That comes through in the book, and it’s why I found Mr. Brooks’ narrative to be particularly captivating in these early chapters in which he was remembering the first few decades of his life.
Which is not to say I wasn’t super-happy when the book arrived at the chapters for Mr. Brooks’ incredible movies. I have such a deep and abiding love for films like The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, and Spaceballs. It was a hoot getting to read Mr. Brook’s stories about the creation of those films.
The book did seem to run out of steam somewhat in the later chapters. I was a bit surprised that those later chapters, about Mr. Brooks’ projects in the more recent decades of his life, felt far more superficial than the earlier chapters about events long ago. I’d have thought it would be the opposite, that Mr. Brooks would have more to say about events more recent in his memory. I wonder if this suggests that Mr. Brooks wasn’t quite as invested in his later films as he was in his earlier ones. (I certainly felt that way as an audience member. I’ve long felt that Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving it were missing the comedic spark of Mr. Brooks’ earlier films. I’ve long theorized he wasn’t as invested in those later parodies as he was in his earlier projects. The short, superficial chapters on those movies seems to me to support that idea.)
I was bummed that the Broadway adaptation of Young Frankenstein only merited a few paragraphs in the book. Frankly, I’ve long been curious as to what went wrong with that production. I saw it on Broadway, and it was fun, but it was clearly far inferior to the incredible Broadway version of The Producers. I was curious to read Mr. Brooks’ perspective on why that adaptation didn’t quite come together, but he glosses right over it. No surprise, I guess, that Mr. Brooks isn’t eager to spend too much time on the small handful of misfires in his long career. Still, I was a little bummed not to get anything more.
Mel Brooks has long been an unparalleled comedic genius. It’s a pleasure to read this look back and his life and work. I’m delighted that he’s still creating new art even at age 95. May he continue ever onward!
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