The great comedian is being celebrated with a new HBO documentary this week. But his legacy extends all the way to Australia for this former Age journalist.
is 100 in June, and he is this week being honoured with a two-part documentary, co-directed by Judd Apatow, on HBO Max. Talking heads include Ben Stiller, Jerry Seinfeld and Nathan Lane – all offering insight on what this titan of comedy has meant to them over the years.
, also brought back an amazing memory for me from 44 years ago, an encapsulation of the truism that out of naivety and positivity, young people haven’t yet learnt what they can’t do.First, some context. In the olden days reporters could, and often did, phone famous people out of the blue. No requests to see interview questions in advance, no off-limit topics, no minder sitting in a corner of the room, poised to veto any questions deemed a no-go. Back in the early ’80s the PR walls weren’t up yet and, if they were, there were some holes you could still sneak through.The Age . At our weekly news conference we were discussing Channel Ten’s decision to broadcast the “sanitised” version of Mel Brook’s filmYou know the one: a bunch of cowboys sitting around a campfire, enjoying a meal of baked beans and beginning a round of uninhibited farting.There were a number of different versions of the film released for screening on television, each designed to cater for the tastes of audiences in different markets. Channel Ten broadcast the American TV version, which omitted that scene, presumably to protect the public’s delicate sensibilities when exposed to the shock of a bodily function.The editors and I thought it would be worth trying to phone Brooks himself and find out his take on it. He probably thought it was a huge joke. And huge jokes were what Brooks loved. He’d been a comedy giant since his role writing forin the early 1950s. The show was regarded as one of the most influential comedies in TV history., the story of a desperate Broadway producer who discovers that more money could be made from a theatrical flop than from a hit and thus schemes to produce the worst possible show, to be called Mel Brooks with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, stars of the stage adaptation of The Producers, which became a Broadway classic.A plan to phone him sounded audacious and probably impossible. But hey, let’s see how the kid goes. Sure, ring up Mel Brooks. I found a number for a studio I understood he was working at, in Burbank, California. I said I was a reporter in Melbourne, Australia.”He’s not here at the moment,” came the friendly reply. “Can I take a message and ask him to return your call?”: “Please contact . Thanks for your call, have a nice day.” No, there was none of that. I went to lunch and on return I found a note on my desk: “Mel Brooks returned your call. Call him on …”I phoned and told Brooks about the scene they’d cut. I’d touched a nerve. He was furious.”It makes me very unhappy that television hasn’t grown up with the rest of the art forms,” he said. “Television has a way of blanding everything into the same melting pot … Everything comes out of that boob tube and it’s all grey and round and there are no hard edges. “The have a way of enforcing their own puritan views of a joke. You can do something that is a little double entendre that doesn’t mean anything but they will always look at the worst side of it, the filthiest side of it, and use that excuse to cut it. We are still in the hands of bureaucrats.””One of the reasons why I got into showbusiness was so I could break some of these small minds. It’s awful to be trapped again by them.”Our interview wasn’t all about scene-cutting and breaking wind. We all knew Brooks as the comic wild man whose mouth, he once said, threw a party for his tongue. He also told me a psychologist friend once called him the sanest man he had ever met; he later changed his mind. For those growing up in the 1960s, Brooks will forever be revered as the co-creator of what we all thought was one of the greatest TV shows ever made. Watching Max, 99, the chief and all the gang inOver the half century since it first screened, quotes from that show remain lodged in everyday language, not least “cone of silence” and “missed it by that much”. It’s hard to think of a character from any TV series more beloved and enduring than Maxwell Smart.In our interview Brooks talked about how he had always wanted to shake things up. “Back in the ’50s I would often run across the room and slide into the wall. Carl Reiner often got it, but the producer would run over and throw a lit cigar at me.”- headline “Blazing Mad”, my first story with the tag “Exclusive” – there were very few random calls to celebrities. Reporters were to request interviews in an orderly fashion. I had got in just before the door slammed shut on doing things like that. And I’m so glad I had. Brooks had left us with some clues about what drove him, why he wanted to act crazy, what was inside that brilliant comic mind. He said it frustrated him that people live without really living. “By doing crazy things I want to lead the way, I want to lead people into Crazyland. Too many people get neurotic and obsessive and sometimes go crazy because they’re repressed. I think if I can help liberate them I’ve done a great service.”Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man premieres January 23 on HBO Max.
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