[While I did teach a couple online courses during my Spring semester sabbatical, I didn’t have my usual slate of classes by any means. So in lieu of my usual Semester Reflections series, this week I’ll share a handful of texts I read over the last few months, leading up to a weekend post on what’s next!]
On three ways to read a comprehensive Hollywood biography like Patrick McGilligan’s 2019 tome.
- Creative inspirations: I picked up Funny Man on a whim, but for a specific reason: Vaughn and I were at the Needham Public Library just days after she had written her Review Roulette post on The Producers (the first in what has become a series on Mel Brooks’ films), and I felt that the serendipity of spotting the book was speaking to me. And definitely my favorite thing about reading this very thorough biography of Brooks was learning about the moments, figures, experiences, and interests that inspired aspects of Brooks’ films: the New York agent Brooks knew when he was a kid who courted older woman much like Max Bialystock in The Producers; the traumatic childhood experience of seeing James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) at the cinema when he was just five years old that lingered with Brooks all the way to parodying that film and its whole genre in Young Frankenstein (1974) more than four decades later; and so on. I love learning and thinking about the influences on artists, and this book offered a plethora of examples for one of our most talented comic writers and filmmakers.
- Human flaws: At the end of his Acknowledgments section, McGilligan singles out one Hollywood biographer as a kind of mentor for his own work in that genre: Joseph McBride. I know McBride well through Vaughn’s work with his first biography of Frank Capra for her Selling Out Santa, and she has thoroughly convinced me that McBride has axes to grind with Capra that reveal themselves throughout that biography. I don’t want to suggest that McGilligan has such grievances with Brooks, but there is a consistent emphasis throughout Funny Man on Brooks’ hidden (to most film audiences at least) flaws: his serial philandering on his first wife Florence Baum; the accusations of plagiarism (or at least a lack of crediting other writers) that have hounded his career and led to multiple lawsuits; the volcanic temper that contrasts with the Nice Mel persona. I know that such details have to be part of a biography, but I also don’t know that they’re as interesting as this book suggests, so much as just a reminder that every one of us, even the most talented or famous, is a human first and foremost.
- Moving moments: Or, to put that last point another way, such flaws and failings aren’t the human side of famous figures that most interests me. Back in September I shared a post on David Blight’s magisterial biography of Frederick Douglass, but I didn’t write in that brief post about my favorite moments in that book: the incredibly moving human ones, like when Douglass’s young granddaughters are braiding his hair and have to spring up and run away when a distinguished visitor arrives at their door. Of course recognizing the humanity in historic figures means grappling with their worst sides, but it also and especially means being inspired by the glimpses of the humanity that we share with them at their and our best, and I believe such moving moments provide the best opportunity through which to do so. There are plenty of those in McGilligan’s biography of Mel Brooks, many connected to his childhood as the youngest of four sons of a widowed single mother working to support that family during the Depression in Brooklyn’s Jewish American community. I loved every moment of those sections, and they have a lot to tell us about not just Brooks, but the best of America as well.
Last sabbatical read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What have you read recently?
Leave a Reply