Mel Brooks competition for his latest comedy

Press, 28 October 1982, Page 14

Mel Brooks competition for his latest comedy

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hans petrovic

Mel Brooks’s long-awaited "History of the World — Part 1,” is expected to start at the Savoy next week, and “The Press” in conjunction with Amalgamated Theatres is holding a competition with prizes of four books about the film and 12 double passes to see it.,

All you have to do is list as many as possible other works by Mel Brooks, and send your answer to “At the Cinema,” c/- Hans Petrovic, “The Press,” P.O. Box 1005, Christchurch. Brooks has made many films about the Wild West, monster movies and the silent pictures before tackling the history of the world. All of these films were crazy. Brooks, however, has a few serious words to say about his latest effort:

“I have always wanted to make a grand movie, a spectacle.

“I thought that the history of the world would be the perfect vehicle and the most colourful backdrop for the particular endeavour. “History is eternal and

durable. It points out how groups of people survived all kinds of calamaties, oppressions and depressions. “It should teach us, and does teach us (if we pay attention), how to survive. It also teaches us respect for man’s mind, for man’s artistic bent, for the artisan in man, for the thinker and the philospher. “History is, in a sense, like an island; it lets us stand above the waves of ignorance.

“That is why the history of the world is so critical and invaluable to us, and that is why we owe such a debt to those who went before us, and those who took the time to annotate what they thought, what they did, and how they did it.

“Cecil B. De Mille and D. W. Griffith have always been like gods to me, and so ‘History of the World — Part I’ is a tribute to their majesty. “With this film, however, I do not want to do a satire. I do not want to do a film takeoff, and I do not want to do a genre movie.

“What I want to do is bigger: I want to make a statement about eternal human behaviour.

“So, instead of going to De Mille and Griffiths and satirising their work, I used them only in terms of aura, in terms of capturing the grand scale of human behaviour stylistically on film. “To tell my story, I went where they went: To the wellspring of human endeavour — history itself.”

The names of the winners of this competition, and where they can collect their books and theatre tickets, will be published on this page next Thursday.