Mel Brooks will turn 100 in June, and he has been interviewed for almost 80 of those years. Still, when his pal Judd Apatow approached him about doing a documentary, “I encountered plenty of resistance,” Apatow said, recalling his subject’s stance: “Why is there any need to do this? Is this what I want to be doing with my time?”
Apatow eventually won him over. “My main argument to him was, ‘But Mel, this allows me and you to hang out a lot!’” The result is a two-part, nearly four-hour, very loving film, “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!”
The documentary, Part 1 of which premiered Thursday on HBO (both parts are streaming on HBO Max), charts Brooks’s life and career, from his hardscrabble origins in Brooklyn to becoming the filmmaker behind comedy classics like “The Producers,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Blazing Saddles” and the “Star Wars” spoof “Spaceballs.” (A sequel to “Spaceballs” is coming next year, with Brooks as a producer and star.)
He speaks movingly of his long marriage to the actress Anne Bancroft, who died in 2005, and his friendship with the writer-director Carl Reiner. Their “2000 Year Old Man” routines, released as albums beginning in 1960, drove Brooks’s ascent into performance. Reiner died in 2020, at 98, still Brooks’s best friend, but the film includes footage from archival interviews. Reiner’s son, the filmmaker Rob Reiner, also appears, in one of the final conversations recorded before his death last month.
Apatow and his co-director, Michael Bonfiglio, filmed 10 hours of interviews with Brooks in 2024 and 2025. The aim, Apatow said last week by phone, was “to ask questions that he might not have had to answer before.”
There are jokes too; Brooks remains astoundingly sharp. “When you talk to him, it makes you feel bad about yourself,” Apatow said, “because he’s not reaching for an obscure name from the 40s — and I’m getting my kids’ names mixed up. He couldn’t be funnier.”
Brooks’s success, he says in the film, offers a message to “little short trepidatious Jews that are trying to enter show business. If I can do it, you can do it.”
Here are some highlights from the documentary.
A Veteran, and a Club Impresario
Brooks grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a widowed mother and three older brothers. All four boys enlisted in the military during World War II, and miraculously, all returned. At 18, Brooks was an Army engineer; he said he first encountered antisemitism during his training in Virginia — because “every single human being in Brooklyn was a Jew.”
His battalion saw combat. “War changed me,” he told Apatow. He had some post-traumatic stress; a backfiring car made him jumpy. But Brooks, wryly, also found a silver lining: “If you don’t get killed in the Army, you can learn a lot.”
He was a drummer, and as a boy he took lessons from the jazz great Buddy Rich, a Brooklyn neighbor. And he was gigging even as a teen. So when an officer’s nightclub opened in Germany, he was put in charge of entertainment. “He became almost a nightclub impresario,” Apatow said — all before his military discharge at age 20.
Impostor Syndrome, Then Hits
Brooks’s rise was so quick — by 25, he was a writer on “Your Show of Shows,” the influential TV variety series starring Sid Caesar — that it’s hard to imagine he ever faltered.
But he did. He always feared being told he didn’t deserve the writing job — impostor syndrome. “I always find that shocking,” Apatow said, “because he seems like the most confident man on the planet.” That terror was also, Apatow said, the engine that drove him to work harder.
Still, he had fallow years, especially after “Your Show of Shows” ended. When he met Bancroft, he was essentially broke, trying to become a director.
“The Producers,” his first feature, was a risky satire about two unscrupulous theater-makers who devise a flop musical — about Adolf Hitler — to swindle their investors. It struggled for distribution. But it earned Brooks an Oscar for best original screenplay in 1969. “I want to thank the Academy of Arts, Sciences, and money, for this wonderful award,” he began his speech.
Thirty-plus years later, the film became a blockbuster musical, winning 12 Tonys, still a record.
The (Secret) Producer
Comedy heavyweights like Conan O’Brien, Dave Chappelle and Tracey Ullman extol Brooks in the doc. So does the filmmaker David Lynch. “He was sick but loved Mel so much,” Apatow recalled of what was possibly Lynch’s last interview before his death, last January. “I said to him, ‘What are your favorite Mel movies?’ And he said: ‘I don’t think I’ve seen any of them. I don’t care about any of his movies. I just love the man.’”
As a producer, Brooks chose Lynch to direct a script for “The Elephant Man” (1980), Lynch’s Oscar-nominated breakout. Lynch’s only previous feature was the cult movie “Eraserhead,” which Brooks loved. Brooks “used all of his gravitas to support David’s vision,” Apatow said. “It completely helped him begin his incredible career.”
Lynch is gushing onscreen. “Mel’s a smart fellow,” he says. “He knows about human nature — so much.”
Producing other artists’ films “was a way for Mel to show another side of himself,” Apatow said, though Brooks often went uncredited, lest his name bias audiences. In the ’80s, he produced Oscar-nominated films like “Frances,” starring Jessica Lange; “My Favorite Year,” with Peter O’Toole; and David Cronenberg’s “The Fly.”
The Reiners
Rob Reiner recounts being a preschooler when he met Brooks, who was sleeping on his parents’ couch. For decades, the families were extremely close; in their 90s, after Carl Reiner and Brooks became widowers, they spent their evenings together, having dinner on TV trays and watching “Jeopardy.” And when Reiner collapsed at home shortly before his death, Brooks was there, shouting at the paramedics to revive him. “I wouldn’t accept it,” he says in the film. “I loved him so much.”
In the film, Rob Reiner explains their deep friendship. As Apatow summarized, “Mel’s father died when he was 2, and he looked to Carl as a father figure.”
At 99, loss is inevitable. Onscreen, Brooks describes his path through grief: “Find something in you that gives you the grit and the courage to get through.” The universe, he says, doesn’t want you to suffer.
The murder of Rob and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, in December casts a shadow on his appearance in the film, and Apatow sounded emotional as he discussed it.
“The movie was completely finished, and I did not go back and watch it,” he said. “Rob just couldn’t have been warmer or more open about everything, and funny. It was a really special day, getting to speak to him.”
The Weight of the Joke
Brooks’s oeuvre is slapstick-y, sure, but the documentary also underscores it as deft satire. His commentary on class, religion and race — the 1974 Western parody “Blazing Saddles,” with Richard Pryor as a screenwriter, brashly mocked racial prejudice — was ahead of its time, the documentary argues.
“He has a real sense of justice and standing up for the little guy,” Apatow said. “His willingness to speak up has been an inspiration to so many new comedy figures.”
Brooks insists the laughs are paramount. But he knows their weight. “Sometimes my comedy is just to celebrate the joy of being alive,” he says in the film. “And sometimes it is philosophical, and ideological, and I use it as skillfully as I know how.”
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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