Amazon Funny Man Mel Brooks Patrick Mcgilligan
Publisher Description
A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.
Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award–winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in front the camera too) of some of the most influential comedy hits of our time, including The 2,000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. But before this actor, writer, director, comedian, and composer entertained the world, his first audience was his family.
The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was born on his family's kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and was not quite three-years-old when his father died of tuberculosis. Growing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was short and homely, a mischievous child whose birth role was to make the family laugh.
Beyond boyhood, after transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily inside the Kaminsky family proved more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself into a brand name of popular humor is at the center of master biographer Patrick McGilligan's Funny Man. In this exhaustively researched and wonderfully novelistic look at Brooks' personal and professional life, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and drawbacks that shaped Brooks' psychology, his willpower, his persona, and his comedy.
McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic ride that has been the famous funnyman's life story, from Brooks's childhood in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television—working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner—to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His book offers a meditation on the Jewish immigrant culture that influenced Brooks, snapshots of the golden age of comedy, behind the scenes revelations about the celebrated shows and films, and a telling look at the four-decade romantic partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks' troubled first marriage. Engrossing, nuanced and ultimately poignant, Funny Man delivers a great man's unforgettable life story and an anatomy of the American dream of success.
Funny Man includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This superb account by film biographer McGilligan (Young Orson) of Mel Brooks's life and career persuasively sketches two sides of the comedian-filmmaker's personality: "Nice Mel," a zany performer who is always on, cares deeply for others, and craves affection, and "Rude Crude Mel," a tenacious negotiator and a genius at self-promotion who is riven by insecurity. McGilligan covers the major achievements of Brooks's career, including the TV show Get Smart (on which he had a long-standing feud with Buck Henry over the creator credit), his film directing debut, The Producers (described by collaborators as a chaotic and fractious production), his breakthrough hit Blazing Saddles, and the follow-up success Young Frankenstein (to which Brooks shrewdly secured the stage rights from co-writer Gene Wilder, allowing him years later to mount a musical version). While the book sometimes bogs down in the minutiae of Brooks's legal deals, it is best at showing Hollywood as a place full of remarkable talents intricately interconnected through friendship and career, especially, in Brooks's case, through his lifelong relationships with Carl Reiner, Mel Tolkin, and other fellow writers on a formative early experience, Sid Caesar's live 1950 1954 TV program Your Show of Shows. McGilligan's exhaustive biography will be essential reading for anyone interested in Brooks or, more broadly, how Hollywood functioned during the second half of the 20th century.
GENRE
Biographies & Memoirs
RELEASED
2019
19 March
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
656
Pages
PUBLISHER
Harper
SELLER
HarperCollins Publisher Australia Pty Limited
SIZE
25.6
MB
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Source: https://books.apple.com/nz/book/funny-man/id1329409836
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