Agent Palmer

Mel Brooks is a legend. And he spent the pandemic doing what writers do… writing. So in addition to The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, and many others, you can now add the autobiography “All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business.”

As much as this is your standard autobiography written by someone famous who came from nothing and made their mark, this is comedy icon Mel Brooks, and while not all of his stories are funny, they all involve funny and talented people. You can’t help but smile as you read it.

I hadn’t thought about AND1 for a long time until I saw the title “Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1.” The start of the documentary establishes its primary function as we hear the AND1 announcer himself Duke Tango narrate:

“This is where it’s at. It’s New York City. Street basketball. This is our culture. This is what we do, B. This is our job. Yo, back in the day, it was like a big block party. The atmosphere, the energy. It was just special. But AND1, they just took it to another level…

We all have those movies. You know the ones I mean. They’re those films that we are aware of, that cycle in and out of are periphery once they leave theaters. They’re on streaming services we don’t have or, maybe worse, they’re on the ones we do pay for, but we don’t have time to watch them.

Any number of things can happen as time goes by and yet, we’re still adamant that one day we’ll watch that movie.

You know the movie, and perhaps you know the series. Both of those, however, were based upon the best-selling Tom Wolfe penned The Right Stuff. The book, as the movie and the series are, is based around the early beginnings of the space race, and it follows the exploits of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, test pilots, and the cultural issues surrounding the men and engineers tasked to get it done.

Wolfe paints the portraits of the Mercury program as a large landscape on which he can include a little editorial here and there as trees that dot the scope of the picture.