It took a few days, but Mel Brooks finally emerged from his Broadway bailiwick to stamp out that Page Six report that Brooksfilms is shutting its doors. "I'm not quitting," the filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter's Leslie Simmons. "Brooksfilms is still here and will be going on for a while. I'm not at all slowing down, and nobody has told me to stop." OK, well, stop — please: Brooks also vaguely told Simmons about his forthcoming project Pizzaman, a "serious horror film" Brooksfilms is developing with longtime collaborators Rudy De Luca and Steve Haberman. Surely he must have alternatives; after all, isn't Silent Movie: The Musical an idea whose time has come? And must we really have mashed The Elephant Man up with Dracula: Dead and Loving It in vain? [THR]

As if Harvey Korman's passing wasn't enough cosmic, clipworthy grief for Mel Brooks devotees, today comes word that the filmmaker's 30-year-old production shingle Brooksfilms is closing its doors. It's not quite the loss it sounds like at first blush — the company hadn't released a film since 1995 — but as symbolic deaths in the family go, this one smarts. Brooks founded the shingle in 1978 to avoid potential genre confusion over The Elephant Man and other dramas he would produce throughout the '80s; Brooksfilms also yielded his last great comedy, History of the World, Part I, before tapering off with the likes of Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Then came Broadway, and Brooks never looked back. That doesn't mean we won't, though; join our reminiscing with the accompanying greatest hits (sorry, no Solarbabies here!), and Netflix accordingly. [NYP, video by Molly McAleer]