Learn about the life of a comedy legend with the new docuseries Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!
The two-part documentary, which was directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, arrives to HBO on Thursday. Apatow told ABC Audio that Brooks needed a bit of convincing before he agreed to become the subject of another retrospective.
“There had been other pieces made about him in the past, and I wanted to do something more personal. And he wasn’t sure how he felt about that,” Apatow said. “My main pitch was, ‘But Mel, you get to hang out with me,’ you know, like, ‘We get to talk and when else are we going to have a reason to talk for 10 hours?’ And he’s like, ‘OK, I’ll do it.'”
Bonfiglio said that Brooks’ style of comedy in movies like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein became a brand unto itself.
“The Mel Brooks brand is big, laugh-out-loud funny, going for the huge, huge laughs, no-holds-barred, kind of busted all open kind of humor. Not a lot of subtlety, but always so funny,” Bonfiglio said.
Apatow said that the daring nature of Brooks’ comedy is not something that could be replicated today.
“He certainly was as daring as you can be,” Apatow said. “What’s most impressive is that at a time when people weren’t making much work like that, he decided to plant his flag and make a movie that mocked racism in a way that was such a strong point of view that even today people are like, ‘Whoa, did you see that?’ I mean, it certainly doesn’t seem tamer as the years pass. And I think the lesson of it is still very, very important, unfortunately.”
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