Max Brooks

Maximillian Michael Brooks is an American horror author and screenwriter, as well as a television and voice-over actor. He is the son of comedy filmmaker Mel Brooks and actress Anne Bancroft. Much of Brooks's writing focuses on zombie stories. From 2001 to 2003, Brooks was a member of the writing team at Saturday Night Live. His first book, The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), published by Three Rivers Press, describes in depth the origin and lives of zombies. The book was followed up by The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks (2009), a graphic novel depicting several of the events detailed in the first book's latter section. In 2006, Brooks followed with World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which deals with the war between the human race and zombies. Paramount Pictures acquired the movie rights, and Brad Pitt's production company, Plan B Entertainment, produced the film. In the October 2006 issue of Fangoria Magazine, Brooks stated that he would not be writing the screenplay for the motion picture, as he felt he was not an accomplished enough screenwriter to "do it right" (J. Michael Straczynski wrote the first version of the screenplay).