Mel Brooks was beside his best friend Carl Reiner when Reiner collapsed and died from a heart attack in 2020 at age 98, the new HBO documentary Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! shows.
The two-part film, premiering Jan. 22, captures Brooks and Rob Reiner recounting the evening Carl passed away. “Mel was there when my dad died,” Rob says. “He just collapsed in the bathroom, and Mel came back and realized, ‘Uh oh, something’s wrong.’ ” Carl died moments later.
Brooks, who had spent nearly every evening at Carl’s house for years after both men lost their wives, begged first responders to keep trying. “I kept yelling at them, ‘Keep it up, keep it up,’ and they thought I was crazy after an hour of yelling,” he recalls.
The comedians’ bond began in the 1950s and produced the iconic “2000 Year Old Man” sketch. “I just didn’t want him to go,” Brooks says. “I loved him so much.”
Following Carl’s death, Brooks continued visiting the Reiner home. “He would come to the house, sit there, watch television and have dinner, and he did that for months,” Rob remembers. Brooks even asked the family, “Let me know when you’re gonna sell the house.” Rob joked that staging the house with Brooks inside would raise its value.
Rob believes his father served as a father figure to Brooks despite a mere four-year age gap. Carl, interviewed before his own death on Dec. 14 at 78, praised Brooks without reservation: “There was no question that he’s gonna – whatever he decides to do, when he decides to do it, it was going to work.”
Carl dismissed Brooks’s aversion to the word genius, insisting, “Genius has to not only produce something really good, but a volume of it. And Mel, look at the volume he has produced. And if somebody wants to argue, they can, but they won’t win.”
Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! launches Jan. 22 on HBO.
