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In his memoir, "All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business," the legendary director, producer, writer and actor Mel Brooks reflected on his 1974 movie, "Blazing Saddles."
"When you parody something, you move the truth sideways. With 'Blazing Saddles,' we moved the truth out onto the street. I told the writers: 'Write anything you want. We will never be heard from again. We will all be in jail for making this movie.'"
"Blazing Saddles" was a success. And some of that success traces back to screenwriter Andrew Bergman, explained Milwaukee film historian Patrick McGilligan, author of the comprehensive biography, "Funny Man: Mel Brooks."
Bergman was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. While there, he conceived the idea of a Black western called "Tex X," a play on "Malcolm X," McGilligan told Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA."
"He had this idea of this Black sheriff on a stallion coming down Main Street in a frontier town. And it's a white racist frontier town. And it was going to be a comedy," McGilligan said.
Bergman returned to New York after graduate school and while working as a publicist, he wrote the novel, "Tex X," McGilligan explained.
The novel was so good that it was optioned. Bergman wrote a draft of a script and at one point it was scheduled to be filmed, only to be dropped by Warner Brothers.
And this is where Mel Brooks enters the story.
"He's kind of down on his luck from his own point of view, because neither 'The Producers' nor 'The Twelve Chairs' have made him rich. And he runs into his agent and his agent takes him out to lunch and then into his office and says, you know, the script came across and it's really good, but it really needs your crazy touch."
Brooks told him that he only does his own material.
"But of course, he's doing other people's stuff over and over again throughout his career," McGilligan said. "And that's one of the ways in which he's been very fortunate and also very shrewd, by picking up on other people's ideas."
Brooks read the script, and he loved it so much that he called Bergman to ask if he would work on the screenplay with him. Bergman was a big Brooks fan, so he agreed.
Casting chaos
Brooks flew off to Acapulco to do a TV special. While there, he ran into an attorney named Norman Steinberg. Sternberg hated practicing law and wanted to be a comedy writer. Brooks invited him to work on the screenplay.
Sternberg told Brooks that he had written some comedy with a dentist friend named Alan Uger. Brooks welcomed the idea of a comedy writing team featuring a lawyer and a dentist.
"So he gets these three guys together in a room," McGilligan said, referring to Sternberg, Uger and Bergman. "And he says, 'I see four Jews here, and I think we need a Black person because of all the scenes with this Black sheriff.'"
So, casting Richard Pryor as the sheriff became the next step. Both Steinberg and Brooks claim casting him was their idea.
"They bring Richard Pryor in, and he doesn't last too long because he's drinking and doing coke," McGilligan said. "But he lasts long enough to really, really put his imprint on the film."
Why didn't Pryor end up playing the part of the sheriff?
"I think there was a sincere wish that he would," McGilligan said. "And Mel always said that Warner Brothers vetoed him because they were afraid that he wouldn't show up and that they wanted a bigger box office name. Pryor wasn't really established as a film personality at this point in time."
Cleavon Little ended up being cast as the sheriff. That was at the suggestion of Brooks' wife, Anne Bancroft, who was very important to the early casting of Mel's first films.
"I think Cleavon Little is just spectacular in the film," McGilligan said.
Brooks also hired veteran actor Gig Young to play the part of the Waco Kid. Young was a recovering alcoholic who, it turned out, was not actually recovering. On the first day of the shoot, he started vomiting while trying to say his line. An ambulance rushed Young to the local hospital.
Brooks ran to a phone booth outside the sound stage and called Gene Wilder. Wilder was preparing to go to London to film "The Little Prince." Brooks begged him to come out west to save the film. And he did.
One of the most famous, funniest and flatulent scenes in "Blazing Saddles" is the campfire scene.
McGilligan is unable to figure out who came up with that idea. As Brooks writes in his memoir: "There was a scene that I was kind of afraid of putting in the movie ... What I'm referring to is the campfire scene, in which, like they do in every Western, the cowhands sit around a campfire drinking black coffee from tin mugs while they scrape a pile of beans off a tin plate. But you never hear a sound. You never hear the utter reality of breaking wind across the prairie."
McGilligan explained that the scene's shooting was elaborate, where Brooks would tell the actors to "lift one side of your body, lift the other side of your buttocks."
"(Brooks) loved putting noises in post-production, including noises out of his own mouth. And so he and all the sound people had great fun, flapping their arms with making fart noises. And yet the way it's staged and how it happens is still very, very funny. It's not dated at all," he said.
For all its comedy gold, it's impossible to ignore the frequent use of racial slurs.
McGilligan said some words were used frequently in Pryor's act, as well as in many other films at the time. And, he added, slurs were sprinkled throughout Bergman's original script.
"That was part of the joke of the story, as it is an important part of the joke of the film," McGilligan said.
McGilligan said Brooks points to the use of slurs in the movie as an "anti-racist point" because the words are only used by the "bad guys."
"Mel gives interviews nowadays where he says: 'We couldn't make that kind of film nowadays because it's politically incorrect,'" he said.
In 2020, HBO Max added a disclaimer to "Blazing Saddles."