The Book of Mormon (musical) with tyrannical, charismatic men with way too many children, our heroes... must confront a one-eyed, genocidal warlord with an unprintable name... That's enough to test the faith of even the most optimistic gospel spreaders (not to mention songwriters). Yet in setting these dark elements to sunny melodies "The Book of Mormon" achieves something like a miracle. It both makes fun of and ardently embraces the all-American art form of the inspirational book musical. No Broadway show has so successfully had it both ways since Mel Brooks adapted his film "The Producers" for the stage a decade ago." Jon Stewart, host
Mel Brooks Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca, and Barry Levinson and was the first movie produced by Brooks himself. It starred Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman, Ron Carey, Howard Morris, and Dick Van Patten. The film satirizes such Hitchcock classic films as "Vertigo", "Spellbound", "Psycho", "The Birds", "North by Northwest", "Dial M for Murder", and "Suspicion". Brooks stars as Professor Richard H. (for Harpo) Thorndyke, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who also happens to suffer from "high anxiety". By 1980 "Siskel and Ebert" called Mel Brooks and Woody Allen "the two most successful comedy directors in the world today ...