Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks has just welcomed a visitor into his office when the comedian gets noticeably excited. "Have you seen the Hitler rap?" he asks, referring to the satiric music video from 1983 that has him busting rhymes dressed as the Fuhrer. "Oh, we have to watch it. " Brooks jumps from his chair and calls for an assistant to fire up a DVD. "I'm a rap pioneer," he says with a gleam in his eye as he watches himself on-screen. He adds, "This would be big on YouTube," possibly unaware that the video has in the last few years in fact become a viral-video sensation.

We're on the set of a $22.7-million movie. The director has a lot on his mind. His script supervisor is at one arm, wondering how many takes of the previous scene to print. His camera operator is at the other arm, proposing a new angle for the next shot. A screenwriter hovers nearby, lobbying for a new line of dialogue. An assistant director wants to know when to release the extras for lunch.

SPRINGTIME is coming early for Mel Brooks at the American Cinematheque. On Wednesday, the director will be at Santa Monica's Aero Theatre to launch a retrospective of his movies, beginning with perhaps his best-loved film, 1968's "The Producers," and the rarely seen 1970 comedy "The Twelve Chairs." "So you heard about this Mel Brooks retrospective," quips the man himself, one of the few people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. "Not bad.

The King of Parodies and Prince of Thieves apparently won't be stealing from the rich to pay the poor together in the upcoming send-up "Robin Hood: Men in Tights." Mel Brooks, the producer-director-writer-actor of such genre lampoons as "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein," considered offering Kevin Costner a cameo in his upcoming summer comedy from Fox, believing audiences would find it a hoot to see the star parodying his own role as a dashing, arrow-slinging hero.

It's a Tony Award-winning Mel Brooks lyric: "The toast of society's burning tonight!" On Sunday night, no one in Broadway society glowed more brightly than Brooks, the main man behind the phenomenon, the colossus, the Mothra known as "The Producers." We've officially hit it. Hype-othetically speaking, we've hit the point where people on other planets have heard plenty about this show.

Ron Carey, the short and puckish comedic actor who played Officer Carl Levitt on the hit situation comedy "Barney Miller" and was a member of Mel Brooks' comedy troupe in films such as "High Anxiety" and "Silent Movie," has died. He was 71. Carey died of a stroke Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said Michael Ciccolini, a relative.

Clear out all those books on tape. Mel Brooks' and Carl Reiner's "The 2000 Year Old Man: The Complete History" was released Tuesday, just in time to use holiday travel, or any other ambient free time, as an opportunity not only to laugh, a lot, but to explore the inner workings of what is one of the most famous comedy routines of all time. The three-CD, single- DVD set chronicles the iconic title character from his earliest beginnings, as part of a comedy routine Brooks and Reiner performed for their friends, to the 1975 animated special that may have been, among other things, a paean to Saran Wrap.

"The Producers," Mel Brooks' raucous glance at old-time Broadway, produced big-time in Broadway's Tony Award nominations, grabbing 15 nods, more than any other show in Tony history. The nominations were announced Monday at a ceremony at Sardi's restaurant in Manhattan. Brooks was honored for both his score and, with Thomas Meehan, his book.

It cuts right to the heart of Mel Brooks' "taste" problem that he named his latest movie "Life Stinks"--upgraded from "Life Sucks"--and insisted on a newspaper ad whose only image is of him looking dazed and disheveled above the title. Is this a movie or a promotion for euthanasia?

Mel Brooks brimmed with brio recently, chatting up next weekend's three-day mounting of "The Producers" at the Hollywood Bowl. Firing quips and shtick in lethal arcs at most questions, Brooks pivoted to incisiveness when talking about casting Jesse Tyler Ferguson in the musical's co-lead role of nervous/nerdy accountant Leo Bloom. "Now Jesse, he has a lot of Leo in him, I think," said Brooks. "Jesse is fragile. He is a good trembler. You get from him that life is a big struggle. " Ferguson is an established TV presence, a comic mainstay and two-time Emmy nominee playing a gay parent on"Modern Family.