Blazing Brooks

He is a short, thick-chested, cinnamon-gum-chomping cinematic subversive, dedicated to the perpetration of mindlessness over matter. His films are collages of chaos seemingly cut out by some giant pair of deranged scissors, pitiless assemblages of sight gags, smart cracks and terrible puns. A hard-riding posse of cowhands is held up by a single-file tollbooth in the middle of the Great Western Desert. A sweet, about-to-be-married young thing brushes her hair in the moonlight and bellows out The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Mel Brooks is not a subtle man.

His punch lines can be seen coming a mile away. Good and bad gags are pushed indiscriminately. He is often tasteless--certainly he has a four-year-old's overestimation of the comic possibilities in the word doodoo. But when he is good he is splendid, and he is the only commercial American film maker today (with the occasional exception of Woody Allen) working in the low-comedy, slapstick tradition of Buster Keaton and the Marx brothers.

Tops in Taps. Brooks is a 24-hour clown who never stops performing. On the set, directing one of his own gags, he crumples to the floor and lies there clutching his sides with laughter. Between takes he lurches into an imaginary swordfight with one of his actors. Minutes later he is airily winging it through Gene Kelly's Singin 'in the Rain dance sequence, crying at top volume, "Fellini and Dick Lester are great directors, but are they tops in taps?"

As a writer and performer, Brooks, 48, has a 25-year string of credits that includes television's Your Show of Shows, the creation of the Get Smart series and, with Carl Reiner, the comedy record albums of The 2000 Year Old Man. When he turned to film making, he promptly won two Oscars, one for his short film The Critic (1963), the second for the story and screenplay of The Producers (1968). But Producers and his second feature, The Twelve Chairs, were box office flops, beloved by only a small but fanatic band. Last year, however, he broke out of the cult category with Blazing Saddles, a western that slings outrageous shots at--among other things--patriotism, religion and Marlene Dietrich.

Saddles is expected to gross around $25 million and the just released Young Frankenstein (TIME, Dec. 30), says the unblinkingly immodest Brooks, "will nail my reputation." Especially among the young, he adds, noting the enthusiastic reception that the seven-to-twelve set gave Frankenstein at sneak previews. "I'll be the new Disney. We're going to launch a whole new generation of Mel Brooks freaks."

Brooks' comedy career began on the schoolyard circuit--a bright, bookish, undersized Brooklyn kid who learned fast that he could keep bigger boys at bay by making them laugh. In his early teens he was touring Catskills resorts as a stand-up comic and drummer. At 30 he was making $2,500 a week writing Your Show of Shows with his old Catskills pal Comedian Sid Caesar.

Tension, Tension. If his genius is joyous insanity, his approach is in painstaking earnest. He spends more than a year laboring on each script. "What you're after," he explains, "is to make a Mount Whitney of a picture. What you settle for is a wonderful snowball." The time in between, he says, is agony --"compression, remolding and restructuring--tension, tension, tension."

Like many other successful comics, he does not like to be taken lightly. When critics panned his first movie, The Producers, Brooks claimed "bleeding wounds for two years." Today he insists that he, more than Woody Allen, is the funnyman's intellectual. "I don't want to make just another movie," he says. "I want to make trouble. I want to say in comic terms, 'J'accuse. 'We dealt with bigotry in Saddles and with neo-Fascism in Producers. Underneath the comedy in Frankenstein, the doctor is undertaking the quest to defeat death--to challenge God. Our monster lives, therefore he wants love too. He's really very touching in his lonely misery." Is Brooks serious about all this? Maybe, but his cure for the poor fellow's isolation is to replace those circa-Karloff lug bolts in his neck with a circa-Courreges zipper, and to have the heroine swooningly discover that his "ol' zipper neck" is not his only monstrously proportioned part.

Frankenstein is the first film of a three-picture deal with 20th Century-Fox that allows Brooks "to make a living with no artistic restraints." Married since 1964 to Actress Anne Bancroft (friends jokingly call them Beauty and the Beast), Brooks lives quietly in Beverly Hills. When he is not working on a script he works on his friends ("If he's not feeding you," says one of them, "he's telling you what kind of car or clothes to buy"). He is still a passionate reader, especially of 19th century Russian novels: "My God, I'd love to smash into the casket of Dostoyevsky, grab that bony hand and scream at the remains, 'Well done, you goddam genius.' "

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