Albert Brooks
Career
Brooks attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh (where his classmates included Michael McKean and David L. Lander), but dropped out after one year to focus on his comedy career. By the age of 19, he had changed his professional name to Albert Brooks, joking that "the real Albert Einstein changed his name to sound more intelligent". He quickly became a regular on variety and talk shows during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was on the writing staff for the ill-fated ABC show Turn-On, which was cancelled after one episode. In 1970–71, he also worked with college friends McKean and Lander (alongside Harry Shearer) as a writer/guest performer on some early material by radio and LP record comedy group The Credibility Gap. Brooks led a new generation of self-reflective baby-boomer comics appearing on NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. His on-stage persona, that of an egotistical, narcissistic, nervous comic, an ironic showbiz insider who punctured himself before an audience by disassembling his mastery of comedic stagecraft, influenced other post-modern comedians of the 1970s, including Steve Martin, Martin Mull, and Andy Kaufman.
Career
After two successful comedy albums, Comedy Minus One (1973) and the Grammy Award-nominated A Star Is Bought (1975), Brooks left the stand-up circuit to try his hand as a filmmaker. He had already made his first short film, The Famous Comedians School, a satiric short and an early example of the mockumentary subgenre that was aired in 1972 on the PBS show The Great American Dream Machine.
Career
In 1975, Brooks directed six short films for the first season of NBC's Saturday Night Live. In 1976, he appeared in his first mainstream film role, in Martin Scorsese's landmark Taxi Driver; Scorsese allowed Brooks to improvise much of his dialogue.
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