Directing his wife Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning in their ill-advised 1983 remake of the classic comedy “To Be or Not to Be,” Mel Brooks began “berating their performances,” angering Bancroft. The nominal director of the film was Alan Johnson, but Brooks was actually in charge. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “Mel Brooks is telling Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning how to act?” She laughed and huffed off the set, leaving her tiny husband trailing after her, begging pardon.

Sweet, endearing, goofy Mel Brooks, a comedy hero across two generations for the transcendentally immature, gag-a-minute style of “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” both released in 1974, didn’t want Patrick McGilligan’s exhaustive, 500-page Funny Man: Mel Brooks to get written. In a note, the veteran Hollywood biographer says, “I have never been faced with as many people who either did not reply to inquiries, expressly declined to cooperate with an interview, or spoke on the condition of anonymity. … People feared Brooks’s temper or litigiousness.”