When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences stages its tribute to Mel Brooks on Friday, it will be honoring one of only 12 people to have won all four major show business awards -- Oscar, Emmy, Tony and Grammy. Brooks has repeatedly reinvented his career, going from TV sketch writer to half of the classic “2000 Year Old Man” standup routine (with Carl Reiner) to multi-hyphenated filmmaker to Broadway impresario. Along the way, he created three of the AFI’s Top 20 movie comedies, “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein.”
He spoke with Eric Estrin about breaking his first audience into hysterics -- in a drama -- circumventing Sid Caesar’s manager and his unquenchable adolescent desire to enter show business.
I got into the business, I wasn’t even 15 yet. I grew up in a part of Brooklyn called Williamsburg. In the last 60 years, it’s become a chic address, but back then we paid $18 a month in rent. So in Williamsburg at that time there lived a famous actor named Don Appell – he’d come back at 11 or 12 at night and regale us little kids, if our mothers let us stay up, with stories of what was happening on Broadway. And I always said, I can do it, I can sing and I can dance; let me get into the business.
He finally said OK. They’re auditioning for people who can be busboys and waiters and be a part of the social staff at a place called the Butler Lodge in the Catskills. The resident director at that time was a guy by the name of Joseph Dolphin. So I auditioned for this guy. Of course, you had to do your normal work, which was waiter, busboy, rowboat attendant, you know, but then on Saturday night you could be in a play.
They were doing a play called “Uncle Harry” about some crazy serial killer. The only part that was open was for a district attorney. Now, I was 14, and the district attorney must have been 50 or 60. They gave me a beard and they gave me a wig -- gray wig, gray beard, period clothes -- and I was supposed to grill this Uncle Harry character in my office. So what I had to do was casually pour him a glass of water and try to get information out of him, and then I’d nail him when he said the wrong thing.
So I pour him a glass of water, and the glass slips out of my hand and breaks; the water goes all over the desk and the stage, and I’m mortified. I don’t know what to do. So I walk down to the floodlights, and I say to the audience, “Hey, this is my first job as an actor, I’m really only 14,” and I take off my wig and my beard, and the audience gets hysterical.
Joe Dophin, the director, leaped on the stage in a rage.
