Mel Brooks: Make a Noise is the first career-spanning American Masters documentary about the life and career of multi-hyphenate funny man Mel Brooks. The documentary would earn an Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming.

I first watched this documentary when it aired in May 2013. Naturally, I rewatched it on Peacock as part of my May programming for Jewish American Heritage Month. Why not? It’s Mel Brooks for crying out loud! He is an American treasure! Anyway, it marked the first time that the multi-hyphenate opened up in an authorized documentary on his life and career. Well, mostly career because there’s not all that much new information when it comes to his private life, either with second wife Anne Bancroft or first wife Florence.

Mel Brooks was famously part of the writing room for the Sid Caesar-starring Your Show of Shows in the 1950s. It’s one of the best writing rooms in the history of comedy. Interestingly, Brooks comments that he felt his work was held back by Caesar. In an archival clip, Brooks admits that the show’s producer, Max Liebman, wasn’t a fan of having Brooks around. Brooks would also join the writing staff of the subsequent Caesar’s Hour. Anyway, he’s now been in the business for over 70 years and has an EGOT to show for it.

Robert Trachtenberg, who directs this documentary for American Masters, was allowed access to the entire Brooks film and photo archives. Is there anything new that we learn about the funny man? Well, it depends on how much you know about Brooks going into the viewing. At 1: 24 in length, some topics get their due diligence; others, not so much. That Brooks is an EGOT winner with a number of successful films speaks for itself. How many minutes does one spend discussing those films? How many minutes should they allow friends and colleagues to be on camera? A handful of interviews don’t even make it into the final documentary!

The 2,000 Year Old Man was a very hysterical concept that has its roots in the Your Show of Shows writing room. Mel Brooks brought the same brand of comedy to movies like History of the World Part I. It’s a brand that America has benefited from.

Mel Brooks was never religious but admits that societally, he was “always very Jewish.” President Barack Obama says it nicely when Mel Brooks was one of the Kennedy Center Honors recipients in 2009:

“Or, as Mel Brooks explains it: Look at Jewish history — unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So every 10 Jews, G-d designed one to be crazy and amuse the others.’ According to Mel, ‘By the time I was five I knew I was that one.'”

Okay, so clips and highlights get placed out of order in terms of their chronology, but that’s okay. It’s good to be the king, right?

Unless you paid close attention, you might not know that Brooks co-created Get Smart with Buck Henry. Brooks discusses the process of creating the show and writing the show with Henry. There’s a lot more discussed about the creation of the series and Brooks’s filmography in Patrick McGilligan’s unauthorized 2019 biography, Funny Man: Mel Brooks.

One of the highlights of Brooks’s comedies is the hysterical Blazing Saddles. Brooks had wanted Richard Pryor but was unable to get him due to insurance reasons. They ended up getting Cleavon Little, who crushed the performance. The trouble came with the casting of Jim the Waco Kid. Gene Wilder was quickly flown in to replace Gig Young following his first day of filming. Brooks describes some of the notes that were given after a screening of Blazing Saddles. Many of these notes, as we all know, were completely ignored.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Levinson was a co-writer of Silent Movie. The filmmaker discusses some of the challenges that came with making the film. Brooks was also able to direct Caesar in the film. Caesar plays the Studio Chief. Levinson’s work on Brooks’s films is something that goes unnoticed unless one plays close attention to the screenwriting credits.

As for Brooks’s private life, the filmmakers make an attempt to get Brooks to discuss his private life. This enables him to open up about being born in Brooklyn, while wishing he was born in Paris. Anyway, his mom raised four boys after Brooks’ father died when he was two years old. He opens up on his first marriage to Florence Baum–they had three children and divorced in 1962. Brooks had a fourth child, Max, with his marriage to Anne Bancroft. Bancroft passed away in June 2005 at the age of 73. At the time of its 2013 broadcast premiere, most of these reflection and confessions were never-before-heard.

Brooks parodied the Hitchcock genre of films in 1977’s High Anxiety. Hitchcock was invited to a screening of the film. Hitchcock told Brooks it was “absolutely brilliant” but said they got one thing wrong in the parody of the Psycho shower scene: the number of shower rings. Otherwise, it was high praise and a seal of approval from the Master of Suspense.

Brooks started up Brooksfilms as a way of producing talented filmmakers. One of those filmmakers was the late David Lynch–Brooks produced 1980’s The Elephant Man.

“It seems to be a running theme of Brooksfilms that all our characters are outside the normal mainstream of civilized activity,” Brooks says. “They’re all oddballs, but incredibly human, incredibly gifted, all of them. They all really count.”

Brooks first became aware of Hitler when he was 14-15 years old. He didn’t know anything about the concentration camps until afterwards. It took him “a long time to make any kind of human sense out of that.” It wasn’t until after the war ended that Brooks was able to get his own revenge.

“I love the fact that Mel Brooks dared to do to Hitler what Hitler did to the Jews,” said Carl Reiner. “He decimated him by making fun of him.”

“Well, there are always going to be people that when you do a Hitler joke, you make a Jewish joke, that you’re gonna say, you shouldn’t do this,” said Joan Rivers. “He has my philosophy so I think he’s right, obviously. You bring it around with humor. You remind everybody with humor what’s happened, what’s been done, and that makes it how–if you laugh at something, you’ve won already.”

For more, watch The Last Laugh as the documentary explores the Holocaust and taboo humor.

One of the many genres that Brooks tackled was sci-fi through 1987’s Spaceballs. Lucas only had one caveat about Brooks making the film: no action figures. It wasn’t a success at first –at least, not by Hollywood terms–but it later grew a following. Bill Pullman recalled a time that they had a kid over for dinner and that’s all he wanted to talk about. A sequel is currently in development, set to be directed by Josh Greenbaum. Josh Gad is attached to star and produce alongside Mel Brooks and provided an updated during a March 2025 appearance on The Rich Eisen Show.

As of now, 1995’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It is the final film that Mel Brooks directed. It was critically panned and only earned one-third of its production budget back at the box office.

“Dracula: Dead and Loving It, I think, felt more like a Mad Magazine parody, said Steven Weber. “Not bad in itself, but not necessarily a–but it wasn’t a Mel brooks–it wasn’t enough of Mel in a way.”

The career behind the camera may have come to an end but Brooks soon turned his eyes to Broadway. The Producers came to Broadway in 2001, followed by Young Frankenstein in 2007. By bringing The Producers to Broadway, it created a trend of outrageous and funny Broadway musicals.

A career-spanning documentary, Mel Brooks: Make A Noise allows audiences an opportunity to get inside Mel Brooks’s mind.

DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER: Robert Trachtenberg
FEATURING: Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Cloris Leachman, Joan Rivers, Tracey Ullman, Neil Simon, Rob Reiner, Barry Levinson, David Steinberg, Steven Weber, Richard Lewis, Buck Henry, Michael Gruskoff, Andrew Bergman, Norman Steinberg, David Lynch, Richard Benjamin, Susan Stroman, Bill Pullman

Mel Brooks: Make a Noise premiered May 20, 2013 on PBS. Grade: 4/5

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