Biografia

Discovered Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, which resulted in their movie Un colpo da dilettanti (1996).

He is among an elite group of six directors who have won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (Original/Adapted) Oscars for the same film. In 1984 he won all three for Voglia di tenerezza (1983). The other directors are Billy Wilder (for L'appartamento (1960)), Francis Ford Coppola (for Il padrino - Parte II (1974)), Peter Jackson (for Il Signore degli Anelli - Il ritorno del re (2003)), Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (the brothers co-produced, co-directed and co-wrote Non è un paese per vecchi (2007) with each other), and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (for Birdman o (L'imprevedibile virtù dell'ignoranza) (2014)). Brooks is the only one to do so with his directorial debut and the only one to do so without collaborators in any of the three categories.

Has won 21 Prime Time Emmy awards--more than any person in history. As executive producer he has won 11 for I Simpson (1989), three for Taxi (1978), three for Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) and one for The Tracey Ullman Show (1987); as writer he won two for Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) and one for The Tracey Ullman Show (1987).

He has directed one film that has been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Dentro la notizia (1987).

Owns Gracie Films, which produces I Simpson (1989).

While you're doing it, it is sort of a lonely kind of feeling, even though you are surrounded by so many people giving beyond the call. That's generally true of movies, there's a sense of urgency, people risking their tail, people working past exhaustion. That's what moviemaking is. It's lonely because you asked all of them to work that hard for this idea you had.

[on Una figlia in carriera (1994)] I wanted to do a Hollywood story. At the time it seemed to me, and it turned out to be a real miscalculation, to get the truth about Hollywood, the form had to be larger than life, a musical. I did a lot of strange things on that. Because of my background I went for actors on it and not singers. I'm in love with actors. I had great musical people, the best. I had Twyla Tharp as my choreographer. Prince as my songwriter. Sinéad O'Connor did one song, a beautiful song. And I went to work, and it was the first time I fell in love with my leading lady, who was this six-year-old magical child. And her mother was great--part of the movie was based on my experience with my own two daughters, and I sort of became a surrogate dad. I had all these other people around me that I loved and it was great. And then we went to our first preview. And it was a disaster. We had walkouts, it was awful. Then the worst thing of all happened--someone who saw it told somebody who told somebody who told the Los Angeles Times about what had happened, and then they came after the story. So now here I was trying to fix the film and I actually have the major home-town newspaper publish what had happened, and kill us dead in the water. And they made a story out of my odyssey, came to my next preview and it was just horrendous. So eventually I pared down the music, took almost all of it out. And you can speculate on a lot of things about why the picture didn't work. I'm a guy who started out in one form and changed it to another, but the movie played and people laughed, because I saw it with an audience. But it utterly failed commercially and I felt like I had let down a lot of people. It's my job to take it personally. When I ask people to join me and work with me, who else is responsible? But I haven't seen the movie in a long time and I still think it's a good movie.

[on being employed by a studio] Sometimes they give you so much rope you forget it's around your neck. But it always is. You feel it when they yank it.

[in 2014] The great thing in television, usually the writer's in charge. It's the one place. In movies it's certainly not true. But in television it's true and there's something--the inmates running the asylum and all that. And there's something to that. Right now, there are so many great shows that are truly authored. It's a place where writers are in charge. Right now, a lot of the great things we see each year will be on television.

I saw Io e Annie (1977) with a group of people working in comedy and television. We were all stunned. Stunned. It was like watching a spaceship land. That something that funny could also be that beautiful.