Mel Brooks keeps business open as a Pizzaman

Continuing a 30-year penchant for the serious, Mel Brooks announced yesterday he will not be closing his film company Brooksfilms Ltd. as a May 30 gossip column had recently claimed. "Brooksfilms is still here and will be going on for a while," the octogenarian told The Hollywood Reporter. "I'm not at all slowing down, and nobody has told me to stop."

Brooksfilms was created in 1978 for the production of The Elephant Man, a drama that Brooks believed audiences would think a comedy if publicized with the "A Mel Brooks Film" tag, four words already associated with satires such as The Producers, High Anxiety and Silent Movie. Instead, the Brooksfilms moniker was used for production on serious flicks like The Fly and 84 Charing Cross Road along with new comedies like My Favorite Year and History of the World Part 1.

At 82, Brooks isn't getting any younger, but it seems that, like Governor Hedley Lamarr from 1974's Blazing Saddles, his mind—why, it's "a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives!" To wit: Brooksfilms isn't just staying open as tax-fodder. A serious horror movie entitled Pizzaman is in the works, on which Brooks is working with longtime co-conspirators Rudy De Luca and Steve Haberman. While no plot details have been revealed (the project is still in the writing stage and won't be out for a few years), recent speculation hopes that it will involve Spaceballs' Pizza The Hut. Unlikely for a "serious" movie—even for one of Brooks'—but, as always, Brooks' fans will harbor nostalgia for ridiculosity of yore.

Related links:
Mel Brooks on IMDb
Brooksfilms on IMDb
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