I am not sure why I picked this up. It was perhaps a combination of wanting something funny, wanting to read more biographies, and just finding it somewhere.
I don’t think I got much from it.
Mel Brooks is the famous directory of many of the favorite movies of someone you know. Someone you know absolutely loves Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, History of the World Part 1, The Producers, or one of his other many titles. He is a enough of a big deal in Hollywood that I feel like writing about who he was is a waste of time.
I am not sure what I was actually expecting from this book, or why it did so little for me. Part of it was perhaps the expectations built from his movies. Brooks certainly has a certain style as a director, and that of course is impossible to translate into a book. There is something of a style to his book, as I constantly felt like the words written were being narrated to me. It is written pretty much as I expect Brooks to recount anecdotes. And it was fine, and engaging enough, but I never felt any real strong pull to this.
The answer might be content. I am currently reading a very different biography and enjoying it much more. Was this because Brooks’ life was boring? By no means – but it did revolve around a lot of things I don’t care much about – Hollywood, people, big names, etc. It’s hard to pinpoint, but I struggled to care at the end of the day.
Interesting tidbit from the book: “they couldn’t make blazing saddles today” is a very stupid catch phrase internet people – particularly right leaning internet people – love to toss around when they want to talk about how some kind of censorship has taken over the common discourse. I was tickled to find this book dispelling that notion. Mel Brooks and the co-writers of that movie (one of which was the legendary Richard Pryor) operated under the notion that this would be a career ending movie for all of them. They thought it was going to have them run out of the industry. They simply didn’t care. When a studio did decide to talk to them about the movie, said studio came to them with a list of demanded changes, which included the complete expulsion of the n-word from the script. Brooks and company simply decided to make the movie as they wanted it, studio be damned. ‘Blazing Saddles’ likely couldn’t be made today, but what is really revealed by that fact has much more to do with corporate power over arts, and nothing to do with speech sensitivities.
Failures in Polymathy 