You all had such great comments (on Facebook), perhaps the Melvin Kaminsky (yes, Mr. Brooks’ real name) post deserves a follow up:
It was Junior year and I was sitting in a journalism class when David Ansley came in and found me. I was in a workshop, so he wasn’t interrupting a lecture, but he leaned down to whisper this in my ear:
“Do you want to be part of a college newspaper group interview of Mel Brooks tomorrow?”
Instantly, a loud and resounding. “YES!!!” burst out of me. I offered apologies for the interruption (and got a smiling attaboy from our professor, the legendary Bill Rivers) and then agreed to head straight to the Daily after class to get the details.
This was well before the days of the internet (or cable or home VCRs for that fact) and our undergraduate library (UGLY) was not exactly bursting with tomes on the golden era of television (let alone on Mel or even “Your Show of Shows”). A few books had mention of his better-known film accomplishments up to then (“Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” and “The Producers” – all of which, fortunately, I had seen and knew well) and I noted anything of interest.
I did have the press packet from the studio – which had a lot of info, and so I spent half the night pouring over those pages and filling my notes in with whatever bits of TV knowledge I had amassed to that point. One more advantage I had was a pretty expansive knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock, the subject of Brooks’ parody. (In fact, I ended up writing more than a few papers on Hitchcock’s career – which may have helped get me that “ol’ sheepskin” at the end of four years).
Packed with all these details crammed into my head (and not much sleep, but buzzing with adrenaline) I started the drive up to the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco where he was conducting the group interview in his luxury suite.
I brought along one last advantage, my good friend Charlene Bailey (then Strickland). In addition to her intellect and great sense of humor (she even put up with MY jokes), she was (and still is) a very attractive blonde woman — and, as I would learn many years later, that was always a plus in Mel’s eyes.
So doing our best Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen impersonations, we ventured up to the suite and joined budding journalists from UC Berkeley (Cal), San Francisco State, San Jose State and a few other Bay-area student newspapers.
Since I was armed with my camera, Charlene and I took good seats close to where our subject would be sitting.
Mel Brooks emerged from an adjacent room dressed rather conservatively in a grey tweed sport coat (replete with elbow patches), black slacks, wing-tips and tie. I later surmised that it was in keeping with his psychologist character, Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, in the film (heck, it may even have been show wardrobe) — but , as yet, I had not seen it — nor had anyone else in the group (save for one crafty reporter who managed a pre-screening). So when Mel’s first words to us were, “How’d you like the film?” — he was met with a sea of blank faces. We weren’t commenting on the film, but in Mel’s eyes, we may as well have been. There were a few stern words exchanged between the local publicist who had forgotten to include us to be at the screening the night before (except for the one who had gotten in on her own) and thus the interview began on a sour note.
The Mel Brooks we spoke with from that point forward was mostly reserved and serious with the occasional spark of hilarity, but not the “peel him off the ceiling” comic I was expecting. Additionally, there was his nearly-professorial look and the fact that this gathering of 18 to 21 year olds were more oriented to the then brand-new cutting edge humor of SNL than that of Mel’s old-school Catskills roots, particularly the woman from Cal, whom I found generally humorless. As Stanford and Cal were rival schools, I made a tactical error in my approach by trying not to be out-intellectualized. Instead of delving into my knowledge of the antics from his past with the likes of Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner, or even the humorous side of Hitchcock (Mel REALLY wanted to talk about the new film), I framed some pretentious question in light of the pathos of Chaplin citing “City Lights” and “Monsieur Verdoux.” (Worse still, I have always had a bad habit of pronouncing the French male appellation in the latter title phonetically, even though I know better, and so just came off sounding like a poser, which, at that point, I pretty much was).
All told, though, Charlene and I were in awe to at least have been in his presence — and we managed to put together a decent enough article about both Mel and the film (which we DID see at a screening back at Stanford that night). Even though the film is not among his best, it has several great moments (Barry Levinson as the ill-fated paper-boy in a shower-scene nod to “Psycho” being among the best). On a personal note, I have always been proud of my photographs from that afternoon — and let’s face it, I went on to become a visual story-teller, not a writer — so all in all it is still a very fond memory.