BLAZING SADDLES @ 50

 

Celebrating its golden anniversary today is Mel Brooks' outrageous western farce, Blazing Saddles, which was first screened on February 7th, 1974. While lampooning the absurdities of racism, it managed to bring the laughs to audiences in enough droves to make it Warner Bros highest grossing comedy of the year.

The idea for the film began with writer/director Andrew Bergman, who'd started off the project with the name "Tex X" as a play on Malcolm X's name. His intent was to write and produce the film himself, hiring Alan Arkin to direct, with James Earl Jones slotted to play the lead of Sheriff Bart. Bergman couldn't get the project off the ground on his own, however, but he'd shown it to Mel Brooks, who took an immediate shine to the concept, so he came to the rescue, buying the rights to the treatment Bergman had put together. The title of "Tex X" was then rejected by Brooks, who felt people would think it was an X-rated adult movie. The title "Black Bart" was kicked around for a bit, but the name was already associated with a white heavyweight boxer from the 19th century. Brooks ultimately came up with "Blazing Saddles" in a flash of inspiration while in the shower one morning.

For script development, Brooks kept Bergman onboard to co-write, and also brought in Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger. He had not worked with a writing team since Your Show of Shows, and posted a large sign in the writing room that encouraged: "Please do not write a polite script." Brooks described the writing process as chaotic:

"Blazing Saddles was more or less written in the middle of a drunken fistfight. There were five of us all yelling loudly for our ideas to be put into the movie. Not only was I the loudest, but luckily I also had the right as director to decide what was in or out."

Bergman remembers the room being just as chaotic, telling Creative Screenwriting,

"In the beginning, we had five people. One guy left after a couple of weeks. Then, it was basically me, Mel, Richie Pryor and Norman Steinberg. Richie left after the first draft and then Norman, Mel and I wrote the next three or four drafts. It was a riot. It was a rioter’s room!"

For casting, Brooks had originally planned to give the lead role to Richard Pryor, but his history with drug arrests made the studio claim he was uninsurable, so they refused to green light his casting. Instead, the role of Sheriff Bart went to Cleavon Little. Brooks offered the part of the Waco Kid to John Wayne, but Wayne turned it down, stating that it went against his wholesome reputation, though he promised Mel he'd be first in line to see the picture. Gig Young was ultimately cast to play the Kid, but collapsed on the set the first day of shooting from alcohol withdrawal syndrome, so the last minute scramble to replace him lead to Gene Wilder, who had been offered the role of Hedley Lamarr, but turned it down, along with Johnny Carson. Carol Burnet Show cast regular, Harvey Korman eventually landed the Lamarr role. Madeline Kahn objected when Brooks asked to see her legs during her audition. "She said, 'So it's THAT kind of an audition?'" Brooks recalled. "I explained that I was a happily married man and that I needed someone who could straddle a chair with her legs like Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again. So she lifted her skirt and said, 'No touching.'"

An interesting side note to the character of Hedly Lamarr, with the name being an obvious parody of the name of actress Heady Lamarr, the film production was sued by the actress for $100,000 for "infringing her right to privacy". Clearly she just didn't get the joke, but the studio still went and settled with her out of court for an undisclosed sum and an apology. This lawsuit would be referenced by an in-film joke where Brooks' character, the Governor, tells Lamarr that "This is 1874; you'll be able to sue HER."

During production, Brooks ended up having numerous battles with the studio over content in the film, with the studio constantly pushing back on things like the repeated use of the "N" word and the aforementioned scene with Kahn. Other scenes that stirred up battles included the flatulent campfire beans dinner and the horse punching. But Brooks had final say in his contract, so he stood firm on nearly all of his creative choices, with the exception of cutting Bart's final line during Lili's seduction: "I hate to disappoint you, ma'am, but you're sucking my arm." When questioned about the use of the N-word, Brooks defended himself by citing that he worked closely with both Richard Prior and Cleavon Little on these lines and they were both insistent on the necessity to use that language, though the film still received letters of complaint upon its release. Brooks added in a 2012 interview: "If they did a remake of Blazing Saddles today, they would leave out the N-word. And then, you've got no movie."

Once completed, the film nearly fell into oblivion as the studio considered dumping it and writing it off as a tax loss, in an ironic shade of Brooks own prior work The Producers. At a test screening for the studio executives, the audience was dour and there were few laughs to be heard. The head of distribution suggested binning it and dealing with the loss, but then Warner Bros president, John Calley, insisted on releasing it in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago as a test. The world premiere took place on February 7, 1974, at the Pickwick Drive-In Theater in Burbank for 250 invited guests, including Little and Wilder, who watched the film on horseback. Once it was given wide release, it became the studio's top moneymaker that summer.

I was just 11 years old when my parents took my brother and I to see it in the theatre. I remember it vividly, because I'd never laughed so hard or so much in a movie in my entire life. I'd never seen anything like it, and the jokes just kept coming and coming, in an unstoppable barrage. It was absolutely relentless and I completely loved every minute of it. That feeling was shared by many millions of others, though the critics, typically, were somewhat divided in their appraisal. Some found it too scattershot in its attempts to pack in too many gags too densely into the movie's run-time. But others understood the approach and appreciated the balls it took to load a movie up with that much comic ammunition. Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four, calling it a "crazed grab bag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken. Mostly, it succeeds. It's an audience picture; it doesn't have a lot of classy polish and its structure is a total mess. But of course! What does that matter while Alex Karras is knocking a horse cold with a right cross to the jaw?" Gene Siskel awarded three stars out of four and called it "bound to rank with the funniest of the year," adding, "Whenever the laughs begin to run dry, Brooks and his quartet of gag writers splash about in a pool of obscenities that score belly laughs if your ears aren't sensitive and if you're hip to western movie conventions being parodied.

The film has gone on to be recognized as a critical contribution to American cinema, being added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2006. Given the consistency of racial turmoil that continues to plague North America, it hasn't lost any of its cultural relevancy, though it's perhaps fallen behind the times in terms of certain attitudes towards sexuality. Still, it retains its edge, with many wondering if anything like it could be made in the 21st century. It seems to be able to explore racial boundaries in a way that other creative properties can't, maintaining a kind of humour that is distinctive and unrepeatable.