Mel Brooks: Make a Noise

Mel Brooks has been in show business for more than sixty years, with awards of every variety to put him into the elite EGOT class (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony winners). Yet the comedy giant has energetically avoided a documentary profile being made, even issuing an informal gag order on his friends … until now. In advance of its broadcast premiere, the Paley Center presents this special premiere screening and onstage conversation celebrating the iconic comedy genius.

Showcasing the Brooklyn native’s brilliant, skewed originality, American Masters Mel Brooks: Make a Noise journeys through Brooks’s early years in the creative beginnings of live television—with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows—to the film genres he so successfully satirized in Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, and Spaceballs—to the groundbreaking Broadway musical version of his first film, The Producers. The documentary also delves into his professional and personal ups and downs—his childhood, first wife, and subsequent forty-one-year marriage to Anne Bancroft—capturing a never-before-heard sense of reflection and confession.

The documentary features new interviews with Brooks, his friends and colleagues, including Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Cloris Leachman, Joan Rivers, Tracey Ullman, and his close friend, with whom he created "The 2000 Year Old Man" more than fifty years ago, Carl Reiner.

American Masters: Mel Brooks airs on PBS on Monday, May 20, 2013, at 9:00 pm (ET/PT, check local listings).