Robert DeNiro, Mel Brooks, Dave Brubeck, Grace Bumbry and Bruce Springsteen were all appreciated during last night's Kennedy Center Honors. Here's a roundup of some of the best moments —including Ben Stiller and the Obamas— courtesy of Aol.

Camelot is over! No one can pay their Rent! The West Side Story these days is that lots of Broadway shows are closing! Ahem. Yes, lots of big glittery plays and musicals are shutting their doors forever because of this creepy, kooky economy. One of the big Goliaths to fall last week was Mel Brooks' much-maligned Young Frankenstein, which will put on the Ritz one last time on January 4th. Thing is, no one's really all that sad to see it go. The show was anticipated like crazy—the Brooks pedigree! Remember The Producers? What a crazy, million Tony-winning smash that was!—and priced accordingly. Premium tickets (a rotten idea pioneered by Brooks and Co. when Producers hit big) reached excesses of $400, group sales seats (bread n' butter, folks) were drastically limited, and, perhaps worst of all, the critics seemed pretty fed up with the whole endeavor. Acidic word-of-mouth spread throughout the industry, from creative types to tour directors, and the show was marked (perhaps not entirely fairly) an arrogant, dead-on-arrival failure. Don't piss off the theatre queens and the cigar-chomping tour company people! They're vicious! The New York Times details the story today, getting show producer Robert F.X. Sillerman to sheepishly admit: “What they perceived as our arrogance was nothing more or less than my ignorance.” Oh, sad. Though, we're not sure we believe that! Sillerman goes on to add that the show will recoup its investment, though just barely. And, well, given the show's astronomical ($11 million to mount, $600,000 a week to keep up) budget, we're not sure we believe that either.

♦ Angelina Jolie is either "burning up with jealousy" over Brad Pitt's flirtatious relationship with co-star Diane Kruger, or she's completely happy and getting ready for her next adoption in the next few weeks, depending on which tabloid you pick up. [Star, OK!]
♦ Elisabeth Hasselbeck gets more death threats than any other host on the View, news that probably won't surprise you. [P6]
♦ Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer spent last weekend at a romantic spa in Arizona. [Star]
♦ Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen appeared at a book signing yesterday, but they did not permit fans to talk to them. [P6]
♦ Page Six follows up on the news from three weeks ago and reports Ivanka Trump is converting to Judaism for Jared Kushner. She's attending synagogue regularly, too. [P6]

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]

• Pledge to Hedley Lamarr [YouTube]

[Mel Brooks pictured leaving LAX, Jan. 2; image via Bauer-Griffin]

"Suze wrote a book called "Getting Over John Doe." It is stupid. But one night in Miami, Mel Brooks drunkenly hit on her so she parlayed her silence about the episode into his putting a blurb on the back cover," writes a tipster. Gee, you mean that Mel Brooks doesn't really think that the Glamour editor's book, whose cover copy promises that it will "give you some Zen with men," is "A must read ... loaded with poignant charm and surprisingly good humor"?

Beloved Brooksian muse Cloris Leachman, who, with the exception perhaps of a double Golden Girls sighting, has been clinically proven to be most effective at eliciting squeals of approval from gay men over the age of 45, has been dealt the lowest of blows by the unkind business we call show. Reports Variety's veteran entertainment reporter Army "Hollywood's Original Blogger" Archerd: