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.
