Rethinking Mel Brooks: Creative Pioneer of Media Convergence

Even in the 1950s, Mel Brooks was ahead of today's "creators" in the cultural industries. Thinking about today's artists conjures perceptions of their business-savvy work, drawing on intellectual property (IP) to produce what is derisively referred to as "franchises" or "brands." They are masters of intuitively "reselling" content in different mediums - producing what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin tells us is an intermedial landscape which merges TV, film and theater, hybridizing aesthetics and personalities (like a YouTube web series becoming a Comedy Central show, discussed before).

This all resulted in what Henry Jenkins popularized as "convergence culture" (a world of media products generating profitable synergy between them, e.g. you watched Tim Burton's Batman movie in 1980, bought the music soundtrack by Prince, and ate from the branded lunchbox).

It is rarely realized that as a writer, director, producer and actor, the now-100-year old Mel Brooks was a pioneer of these intermedial and convergence strategies. His work adapting between film, television and theatre makes him a historically important, unrecognized engine of contemporary media culture- someone who shaped today's integrated markets and how audiences interpret media.

While Brooks is rightly remembered for his contribution to Jewish comedy culture, his outrageous pushing of taste boundaries, and the Hollywood film parody genre, he was also an innovator of surviving in the cultural industries - recycling ideas and content across TV, film and theatre. Doing this, he capitalized on their layered meanings and appeal, all of which is understandable through the perspective and language of contemporary media scholarship; he was a pioneer of convergence, intermediality, and his own strategy of prolonged adaptation (endlessly rebooting content).

Blazing Saddles: Intermedial Comedy

Certainly, Blazing Saddles (1974) echoed a cycle of Western movies, drawing reference to classics as far back as Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) through its bearded, rustic old man of the town, speaking "authentic Western gibberish." Yet, as is not well recognized, it was richly layered with contemporary US TV culture from its writing to its production values.

This TV appropriation was clear in the presence of its scene-stealing, supporting actor, Harvey Korman ("Give the Governor harrumph!”), was well known for his prime time performances on the TV variety-comedy series, The Carol Burnett Show (CBS, 1967-1978). There, he exhibited all the same audience-aware "campness" that he did in Blazing Saddles as "Hedley Lamarr." As Variety tellingly described the film, it was "essentially a protracted version of a television comedy skit." Indeed, it was written by a large group of writers including Richard Pryor, more like an episode of Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975-) than a traditional screenplay.

TV was a hidden source even for Mel Brooks's acclaimed Young Frankenstein (1974), written with its star Gene Wilder (after bitterly disputing the inclusion of a joke in the script together, they sadly parted creative ways). Again, superficially the film adhered to the special effects of James Whale's 1933 Frankenstein through the work of the same technician, Kenneth Strickfaden. But the casting of the British, onscreen talent Marty Feldman that made the film intermedial - Feldman was a TV performer first, known then for skits in The 1948 Show (ITV, 1967; the origin of the cult "Four Yorkshireman" skit), in which he performed with Pythons John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and Goodies member, Tim Brooke-Taylor.

In Young Frankenstein, Feldman's bulging eyes did part of the work form him (a result of a real-life thyroid issue), but his highly surreal asides, echoing domestic experiences were more in-keeping with his TV-saturated viewership than the 1930s horror film mise-en-scene ("I remember, my old man would say to me, 'what are you doing in that bathroom all day and night? Other people have got to get in there too!")

This all may be because TV writing was the beginning of Brooks's career, where he first honed his skills writing for Your Show of Shows in the 1950s, collaboratively creating skits of Sid Caesar with other writers including Woody Allen. Caesar was an iconic star during the "golden age" of live US comedy programming. Brooks often returned to TV, including developing some short-lived TV projects, The Nutt House in the '80s (a hotel-based sitcom farce, starring Korman and Cloris Leachman of Young Frankenstein), When things Were Rotten (a Robin Hood parody) in the '70s, and never-broadcast pilot, a spinoff from Blazing Saddles titled Black Bart.

The Producers: Prolonged Adaptation

The story of Brooks's ongoing project, The Producers, is the premiere example of his "prolonged adaptation" strategy - reusing ideas, transmitting them through differing mediums. The Producers (1968) was his first original screenplay - a masterpiece which won him an Oscar (a startling beginning to his film career). Yet at the time, it was panned by critics from the Village Voice and New York Times for the "hammy" performance by Zero Mostel, its seemingly cheap staging and uncinematic direction (alike a filmed theatrical set, which was fundamentally the point).

Brooks's original film, The Producers, was a fascinating reinvention of theatre onscreen, a film about Broadway while echoing its production and acting style - especially in its Busby Berkley-esque Springtime for Hitler number, and Mostel's full Brechtian to-camera mugging with rolling eyes. Unfortunately for Brooks at the time, this very theatricality further turned off critics, who were then predisposed to favoring New Hollywood's cinematic "modernity." with films like The Graduate, looking for perceived-artful cinematography and arresting composition.

When Brooks adapted his film for Broadway, it was a record-breaking, worldwide success from London's West End to Tel Aviv, becoming the first show to take in over one billion dollars in ticket sales. During it's run The Producers on Broadway was itself reinvented through numerous increasingly curious casting choices - ultimately including the lovable, Italian-American star Tony Danza, known for sitcom Who's the Boss? unexpectedly playing the resolutely Jewish producer Max Bialystock.

It was on the back of this adaptation that Brooks then became the first single author to re-adapt his Broadway show back into a new film in 2005 (with its original cast Nathan Lane and Mathew Broderick, but complemented by Hollywood comedy A-lister Will Ferrell as the deranged Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind, and Uma Thurman in the now=ironic role of Ula the Swedish secretary). Directed by Susan Stroman, the choreographer of the previous Broadway version, it was a slick production with high fidelity to its theatrical source.

Reading Historic Intertextuality

Even age and the comforts success did not slow Brooks down. In more recent years, Brooks has persisted with his adaptation strategy applied to a new generation of projects. This began with the critically and commercially successful Broadway adaptation of his film Young Frankenstein (2007-2009), this time starring Roger Bart, as well as the reboot of his sleeper, home-formats hit Spaceballs in 2008 as an animated series for niche TV network G4. Only this year, Brooks has been revealed to be involved in the cinematic sequel to his film Spaceballs, subtitled (a la Friends) as "The New One."

Yes, Brooks's remaking of content "works" in the cultural industries, efficiently reviving presold content. As scholars of adaptation, from Linda Hutcheon to Thomas Leitch have shown, these works become richer the more they are revived - even becoming what Leitch identifies as "entry level adaptations," leading audiences back to their sources (what executives call synergy).

Yet at the same time, this all makes Brooks fans sophisticated folks - they are cinema and television literate (you have to be, to "get" all the jokes), always viewing his films in a sophisticated, intertextual way. It's only by this well-read interpretation that Brooks fans can tease out the newness, and enjoy what Hutcheon has called "the piquancy of surprise."

It is typically not recognized that Brooks's adaptations have often been layered, combining homages spanning generations of iconic film and television. To be a true Brooks fan, it's important to see the way Spaceballs hybridized his Star Wars settings with staging from the Wizard of Oz, 1933 (as Yoghurt the Great, he was himself the wizard behind the curtain), and combined the Alien "birth" scene featuring original actor John Hurt, with an all-dancing creature modelled on the Warner Bros. classic cartoon One Froggy Morning (1955).

Unlike his contemporaries, including directors Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker who produced the seminal spoof Airplane! (1980), Brooks's films delved deep into historic, sometimes 1930s film culture (a love of his as a result of his own filmgoing as a child in the era). This was striking in his riches-to-rags comedy Life Stinks (1991), when in the character of Goddard Bolt, Brooks's own farcical squabbling with his co-writer Rudy De Luca turns into a Preston Sturges-meets-the-Three Stooges farce (picture their same wild hair, snapping suspenders, and performative slaps in the face). With this kind of richness, Brooks's films are fundamentally intertextual experiences for those with long cinematic memories.

Along these lines, I authored the first scholarly book on Mel Brooks, titled Mel Brooks in the Cultural Industries: Survival and Prolonged Adaptation (Edinburgh University Press). You can see the Google preview of it here: