What Are You Watching Tonight? May 20th

quote:

---

Probably start season 2 of six feet under on hbogo. Watch season one finale last night and it was meh for a finale but still good.

---

quote:

---

Thought I would give LE610N a break for a day.

---

quote:

---

Mel Brooks, saluted Monday (May 20) at 8 p.m. (Central) on WYES-TV with his own episode of “American Masters,” has succeeded in making people laugh in multiple media. “The Producers” was a smash on Broadway and originally came from film, where the musical returned to more great success in 2005.

Earlier, Brooks had a great run spoofing genre films in the 1970s and 1980s, starting with Westerns (1974’s “Blazing Saddles”), horror (1974’s “Young Frankenstein”), silent films (1976’s “Silent Movie”), Hitchcock-style suspense (1977’s “High Anxiety”) and science fiction (1987’s “Spaceballs”).

On my scorecard, “Young Frankenstein” was the pinnacle. It’s amazing, looking back, that it was issued the same year as “Blazing Saddles.”

“We were making ‘Blazing Saddles,’ and Gene Wilder was scribbling on a yellow legal pad with a stubby little pencil,” Brooks said during the Winter TV Tour in Hollywood. “And I said, ‘Well, what are you annotating? What are you writing?’ And he turned it around, and he showed me. In big print at the top of this page, it said, ‘Young Frankenstein.’ And he said, ‘I want to do not only a comedy about Frankenstein or about the horror genre, but I want to do a serious salute to the genre itself.’ And we’d often talk about the James Whale classics, you know, the ‘Son of Frankenstein,’ ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘The Cousin of Franken’ — there were a lot of Frankensteins.

“I said, ‘Could I join you in that?’ He said, ‘I was praying,’ you know. So we worked together on ‘Young Frankenstein.’ And this is a true story. The funniest section of it, I would say, is ‘Putting on the Ritz.’ And I said to Wilder when we were writing it, ‘We’ve got to take that out because that tears it. That’s making too much fun of it.’ And then he begged me. He said, ‘Well, please shoot it, and then we’ll decide later.’ I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘It’s insulting James Whale.’”

Eventually, Brooks gave in.

“And we screened it just for us,” he said. “And at the end of it, I said, ‘You are so right. It’s the best damn thing in the movie.’”

---

quote:

---

Rules of Engagement series finale tonight.

And then Bates Motel season finale.

---

quote:

---

Mel Brooks

---