98-Year-Old Mel Brooks ‘Very Involved’ in Production for ‘Spaceballs 2’

Despite Mel Brooks gaining on his iconic 2000 Year Old Man character, age hasn’t stopped him from getting very hands-on with Spaceballs 2, according to star and screenwriter Josh Gad. 

“Mel is 98 years young, and I can’t go into detail just how involved he is, but let’s say very,” Gad said this week on the Let's Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa podcast. “It’s been such a thrill to get to see him literally still on form in every single way. He is so effortlessly funny and so unbelievably brilliant.”

Gad will star in the sequel and co-wrote the screenplay as well. But before the movie got the green light, he had to sell the concept to the comedy legend. “When we were pitching him the original conceit for what we wanted to do with the film, at the beginning, he goes, ‘I’m just telling you now, I want you to really go into detail. Because I don’t know a lot about the new Star Wars films.’”

Gad was game, pitching the story to Brooks for 40 minutes. “It was like I am a combat vet just going to war in front of one person,” he told Ripa, a weird metaphor but let’s just say Gad was a Star Wars combat vet and go with it. 

He does make the pitch session sound like an ordeal. “I’m sweating,” Gad confessed. “I am getting into every line and every beat and every comedic set piece, every reveal. I’m painting all of it, and I’m speaking to how this speaks to a certain Star Wars moment.” 

And at the end of the pitch? “There’s silence.”

But fear not, young Jedi. At 98, it likely takes Brooks a moment to get his thoughts together. “At the end of it, he goes, ‘Wow, Josh, it really sounds like you’ve got your finger on the pulse.’”

“That is the greatest compliment I could have ever gotten, even though there’s no context for it for Mel,” Gad explained. “He really just trusted everything I had to say.”

If it sounds like Brooks is simply rubber-stamping everything his younger writers put on paper, that’s not the case. “He’s very honest,” Gad told Ripa, explaining how the comic legend crosses out dialogue in the screenplay punctuated with “I don’t get this joke” and “I don’t like this.” 

But Gad getting to work with Brooks on Spaceballs 2 does sound like the ultimate comedy fanboy experience. “I have a recording of (Brooks) saying to us, ‘This is incredible writing!’” Gad claimed. “I want to make it my ringtone.”