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For more than seven decades,Mel Brookshas made the world laugh. But early in his career, it came at a private cost.
The legendary funnyman is the subject of a new two-party documentary calledMel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, which premieres Jan. 22 on HBO. The deep dive into theBlazing SaddlesandYoung Frankensteindirector, who will turn 100 in June, features interviews with collaborators and acolytes like Rob Reiner and Judd Apatow, who recount his spectacular rise to fame and enormous influence.
But candid testimony from Brooks and his children paints a different picture of the writer-director before he made his big break.
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"My dad was very hungry for stardom; he really wanted desperately to be a somebody," says Nicky Brooks, Mel's second child with first wife Florence Baum. "Not just to be a kind of industry success in some abstract way, but to be recognized and noticed and appreciated."
Brooks got a taste of modest success in his early 20s as a writer for Sid Caesar'sYour Show of Shows, but always felt he was destined for bigger things. When the show ended in 1954 after four seasons, Brooks went from making $5,000 an episode to next to nothing.
"That was real money, and then I wasn't working," he tells Apatow, who serves as an executive producer on the doc.
Without that income, Brooks could no longer afford to see his therapist, who had been helping him manage his anxiety. "I cried for two years," he says in archival interview footage played in the film. "For two years, I did nothing but sob. I mean, I was broke."
Looking back on that time, Nicky remembers, "My dad tended to express anxiety, stress through anger, and he became a very angry person, very volatile mood-wise. It was difficult for my mom trying to raise these babies, and I think it just reached a point where my dad was just frankly so difficult to live with. It was just intolerable."
Baum was a dancer in stage productions likeGentlemen Prefer Blondes. The couple married in 1953, had Stefanie, Nicky, and Eddie, and divorced in 1962. Two years later, Brooks married the Oscar-winning actress Anne Bancroft, with whom he had a son, Max.
Stefanie notes in the doc that "my father made my mother stop working, because she was his wife. It was a dynamic that was very common at the time." Still, she maintains, "He was much more fun than my mother was. They both really wanted to be nurtured, and neither of them was very nurturing."
Brooks acknowledges that the marriage stifled Baum's work as a dancer, saying, "I kept getting her pregnant, and that meant she could not pursue her career, but I could pursue mine." His own view of why the relationship failed is simple: "I was very difficult to live with because I was just disgusted with reaching a dead end to my creativity. And I don't blame her for divorcing me. It was just hell living with me. Very unhappy."
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Brooks' career got back on track when he and hisYour Show of Showscostar and best friend Carl Reiner released their popular 2000 Year Old Man comedy album in 1960. He later wrote and directed such classics asSpaceballs,History of the World, Part I, andThe Producers, for which he won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The Broadway adaptation of the film ultimately netted him three Tony Awards.
Elsewhere inThe 99 Year Old Man!, Brooks reflects on his career-long friendship and collaboration with Reiner, who died in 2020.Brooks was with Reinerat his home the evening of his death, he reveals in the documentary.
"I was still hoping that they would put the stuff on him and boom, get him up," Brooks explains, recalling the chaos of EMTs arriving on the scene after Reiner collapsed in his bathroom. "I just didn't want him to go. I just couldn't — I wouldn't accept it. I loved him so much."
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