"Humor is just another defense against the universe," Mel Brooks once observed. Screenwriter, director, actor, producer, comedian and occasional Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man: no one title is encompassing enough to capture--let alone tame--Brooks. He is like...

Mel Brooks (born 1926) transformed traditional burlesque and Jewish humor into a hit-and-miss career writing and directing film parodies of traditional Hollywood genres. His biggest success came late in his career when he adapted his first film, The Prod...

Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, to Max and Kate Brookman Kaminsky. His comedy career began at an early age with humorous routines he performed for his classmates at school, routines that he later incorporated into his films. As...

Journal Record Staff Reporter A Tulsa firm has started production on Oklahoma's first feature-length animated motion picture, according to the Oklahoma Film Office. The film, tentatively titled "Boz _ the Junkyard Dog," has a $12 million budget and will generate more than...

A year after Hurricane Katrina brought most of the production work in Louisiana's booming film Industry to a halt, movie and television projects have returned in force and the state has won an accolade that bodes well for the business sector's continued growth. ...

Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom are bringing down the curtain."The Producers," Mel Brooks' hit Broadway musical, will close April 22 after 2,502 performances at the St. James Theatre."The last six years working on this show have been pure joy for me," Brooks said Thursday. "There...

Tony Danza will reprise his lead role as Max Bialystock in the Las Vegas version of Mel Brooks' hit Broadway show "The Producers.""I love the part," said Danza, a former star of TV's "Taxi" and "Who's the Boss," who signed to take over Aug. 13...

[Mel Brooks' "The Producers"] did not make me laugh as much as I had anticipated, and perhaps anticipation is part of the problem. Let us suppose that an acquaintance stops us in the street with the announcement that he is going to tell us the funniest joke ever told. But first, he tells us, he is going to synopsize the joke, describe its high and low points, analyze the style of its telling, compare it with other jokes in the same genre from other eras, and psychoanalyze those listener...

["The Producers"] is a violently mixed bag. Some of it is shoddy and gross and cruel; the rest is funny in an entirely unexpected way. It has the episodic, revue quality of so much contemporary comedy—not building, laughter, but stringing it together skit after skit, some vile, some boffo…. Strangely enough, the first act of "Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgaden" is the funniest part of this fantastically uneven movie. The Gestapo ch...