Mel Brooks Kept His Oscar on Top of His Mother’s TV Set
Mel Brooks is a man of many talents — an actor, a director, a pitchman for banana-shaped pens.
He’s also an Oscar-winning screenwriter. Back in 1969, Brooks took home the Best Original Screenplay award for writing The Producers. The competition was pretty stiff, too; Brooks was up against a number of acclaimed filmmakers that night, including John Cassavetes, nominated for Faces, and Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, for the anti-colonialist classic The Battle of Algiers. Oh, and some guy named Stanley Kubrick who co-wrote a movie called 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The 98-year-old Brooks recently sat for an interview with the Academy’s newsletter, and explained that he truly didn’t think that he would take home the Oscar, owing to the impressive lineup of nominees. “I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to win,” Brooks noted. “I was up against blockbusters like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. It was my first time attending the Oscars, and I was honestly more worried about my bow tie being crooked than winning and having to give a speech.”
Accepting the award from Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles, Brooks still had some solid jokes prepared, thanking the “Academy of Arts, Sciences and Money,” before opting to just say what was in his heart: “Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.”
Brooks had already been part of an Oscar-winning production, having conceived of, and provided voiceover for the 1963 animated short film The Critic. But the award itself went to director and producer Ernest Pintoff, who thanked Brooks in his speech.
So The Producers win was the first time that Brooks took an actual trophy home. What did Brooks do with his prestigious Oscar statuette? Earlier this year, Brooks received an honorary Oscar and said of his Producers award, “ I feel so bad. I miss it so much. I never should have sold it. Hey, listen, times weren’t great.”
He made a similar joke later in the year while accepting the Peabody Awards’ Career Achievement Award, telling attendees, “I promised the George Foster Peabody people I will not sell this one.”
But, of course, Brooks didn’t really sell his Oscar. In 1970, Dick Cavett asked Brooks where he kept the award, and he replied, “My Oscar is on my mother’s credenza in Brooklyn.”
While he refuses to divulge its current location (Brooks said that he’s “afraid someone will steal it”), when speaking with the Academy, Brooks confirmed that he did indeed keep the award at his mother’s house before she passed away. “I can tell you where it used to be,” Brooks said, “on top of my mother’s TV set!”
The Oscar obviously attracted a lot of attention at the time: “Once when I went to visit her, I found out that she was giving daily tours to show her neighbors that her little Melvin was an Oscar winner.”
Thankfully, no one living in Brooklyn between in the ‘70s and ‘80s decided to steal Mel Brooks’ Oscar.