Background[edit]

Brest was born to Eastern European immigrant parents in a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx in 1951.^[4][5][6] He was influenced by watching The Honeymooners as a child, saying in a 2023 interview, "I was a kid watching it in a household that was economically not that different than in the show. I felt like it was a show made for my neighborhood. And that character of Ralph Kramden really touched me, that angry soul whose spirit blossoms".^[7] Brest graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1969 and from New York University's School of the Arts in 1973.^[5] His NYU student film Hot Dogs for Gauguin (1972), starring a then unknown Danny DeVito and with a small part by then unknown Rhea Perlman, was one of 25 films chosen in 2009 by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress to "be preserved as cultural, artistic and/or historical treasures".^[8] Brest attended the AFI Conservatory, where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1977.^[5]