Early in 1973, Mel Brooks called up his close friend Richard Pryor and asked about the “n” word. Brooks was working on a parody of the Cowboys and Indians genre, in which a black sheriff is assigned to a one-horse town in the Old West. By way of skewering the grotesque and historically accurate racism of the townsfolk, Brooks wanted to make conspicuous use of the worst racial slur of all.
“I said, 'Richard, read this, tell me what you think',” Brooks later recollected to Rolling Stone. “He read it and said, 'Yeah, this is good … this is real. I like this.' I asked, 'Right, but what about the N word? We can’t say this so many times …' 'Well, Mel, you can’t say it. But the bad guys can say it. They would say it!'”
Blazing Saddles would ride into cinemas the following year and was immediately acknowledged as a comedy classic – and a devastating satire of racism and of the tiny, closed-off minds from whence it bubbles up. But today even devastating satire requires a health warning, it would appear.
“This movie is an overt and audacious spoof on classic Westerns,” University of Chicago professor of cinema studies Jacqueline Stewart explains in a new "proper social context" introduction to the film added by the HBO Max streaming service in America.
“It’s as provocative today as it was when it premiered back in 1974.”
“Racist language and attitudes pervade the film. But those attitudes are espoused by characters who are portrayed here as explicitly small-minded, ignorant bigots.”
HBO Max had appended a similar preamble to Gone With The Wind. In it, Stewart unpacked the problematic handling of race in the David O. Selznick Antebellum epic from 1939.
“The film’s treatment of this world through a lens of nostalgia denies the horrors of slavery, as well as its legacies of racial inequality.”
What HBO seems to not quite appreciate is that the gulf dividing Gone With The Wind and Blazing Saddles is wider than the Grand Canyon. The former indeed looked at the American Civil War through a sepia-hued and unforgivably “white” prism. Whereas Blazing Saddles, in which a black sheriff named Bart becomes the lawman of Rock Ridge, was a hilarious yet unyielding attack on those same attitudes.
“The engine that drove Blazing Saddles was [the white population’s] hatred of the black,” Mel Brooks said in 2004.
“It was race prejudice. Without that the movie would not have had nearly the significance, the force, the dynamism and the stakes that were contained in it…. People said we can't use those words those are bad words. But you couldn't break Bart’s little heart unless that old woman said 'up yours n_____'”.
The clue to the true purpose of Blazing Saddles lies in project’s original title. It started life as Tex X: An Homage To Malcolm X, and was conceived from the outset as an unflinching attack on racism. To that end, the script’s machine-gun deployment of the n-word was intended to hold up a mirror to contemporary Seventies America.
Brooks, as already pointed out, fretted about using the slur. But he knew that, to be true to themes of the film, he would have to put it in the script. This came as a shock to the author of the original screenplay, Andy Bergman.
“I call Andy up and I say, listen, would you come do this with me if I direct it? But we need a black guy. Otherwise, we can’t use the n-word, and we’ve gotta use the n-word many, many times.
“The idea of a black sheriff — which Andy already had in his first draft — is great, but all the bad guys are going to call him that. He had a hero who spoke like a 1974 resident of Harlem in a Western town in 1874. I mean, the juxtaposition of it was just great. But you know, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to need permission. I don’t want to cross lines I’m not supposed to be crossing.”
“You couldn’t make this movie today – you couldn’t say n_____,” Bergman told the makers of a 2004 DVD documentary Back in the Saddle. “Even in a stand-up comic way [you can’t say it].”
Pryor convinced the wavering Brooks to hold true to his comedic instincts. He even agreed to play the black sheriff, though Warner Brothers, wary of Pryor’s reputation for unreliability, would veto his appearance.
“I almost quit the movie because the studio was scared of casting him,” Brooks said to Rolling Stone. “He was the original Black Bart. But Richard said, 'Mel, don’t quit — I still have two more payments coming to me from the Screenwriters’ Guild, let’s make the movie. I have to get paid. We’ll find a good Black Bart, let’s just do this.'”
And so Brooks, the director, and Pryor the screenwriter, set about finding an alternative Black Bart. They saw more than 20 actors. When Cleavon Little, then best known for playing an “irreverent” doctor in ABC sitcom Temperatures Rising, walked in, they knew they had their man.
“The minute he read for us, Richard and I just said, 'This is the guy'. He was so laid-back and took his time with the jokes.”
Warner Brothers at that time time was overstaffed with executives and middle-managers. Brooks understood that if the suits discovered he was making an Old West satire stuffed with racial slurs they would intervene. So he did his best to keep them in the dark. He made sure that John Calley, Vice President in Charge of Production, was in the loop – and nobody else.
“I just cared about Calley, so I went to him and said, 'John, can I really punch the s___ out of an old lady?' 'Look, Mel, if you’re going to go up to the bell, then ring it!' He was on our side.”
Sheriff Bart, aside, the most important part was that of outlaw the Waco Kid. Brooks’s instinct was to cast a dramatic actor rather than a comedian. He wanted the lines delivered with as straight a face as possible. To that end he hired Gig Young, a Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in 1969.
However, Young’s thespian credentials were by 1974 overshadowed by his spiralling alcoholism (Young was found dead in 1978, having apparently killed his young wife and then turned the gun on himself). The Waco Kid was supposed to have a drinking problem. But this was taking method acting too far.
“I said, 'This guy’s giving me a lot. He is giving plenty',” recalled Brooks of his first scene with Young. “'He’s giving me the old alky shake. Great.' And then it got serious, because the shaking never stopped, and green stuff started spewing out of his mouth and nose, and he started screaming. And, I said, “That’s the last time I’ll ever cast anybody who really is that person.” If you want an alcoholic, don’t cast an alcoholic…”
In a jam, he reached out to another old comedy friend, Gene Wilder, with whom he had worked on his first hit, The Producers. Brooks was desperate, even verging on tears, as he put in the call.
“I heard him sigh over the phone: 'I know, Mel, I’m the Waco Kid, you need me, I’ll be there.' This was a Saturday; he flew out on Sunday, tried on the costume, tried on the gunbelt, tried on the horse … [laughs] it all fit. By Monday, he was shooting the scene where he’s hanging upside down next to Cleavon. It all worked.”
The casting of Madeline Kahn didn’t go quite as smoothly. She walked into the audition for “Teutonic Titwillow” Lili von Shtupp and Brooks told her he was already a fan. Nonetheless, he needed to see her legs before he could give her the part.
“Oh, so it’s that kind of audition,” she said, and got up. “No, no, I’m happily married, it’s not that at all,” replied Brooks. “We’re doing a take-off on Westerns, and if you’ve ever seen Destry Rides Again, there’s the scene where Marlene Dietrich sings in the saloon. We’re trying to match that, and I know you can do it, it’s just that…”
Kahn was game for it. “[She] grabs a chair, hikes up her skirt and straddles the chair just like Dietrich does in the original,” said Brooks. “I mean, like an exact match of the shot. I nearly fainted.”
The casting is generally perfect. As the villainous Hedley Lamarr, Harvey Korman twinkles and leers (Hedley was a pun on the actress Hedy Lamarr, who successfully sued the studio for using her name without permission). Slim Pickens brings old school grit as archetypal cowboy Taggart – he was so committed to the part, he slept outside every night of the shoot, cradling his Winchester rifle. And Brooks plays both the Governor and a Yiddish-speaking Native American chief (he felt an affinity as both Jews and Indians were, he said, people whose lands had been stolen).
Blazing Saddles is, it is true, juvenile in many aspects and its Benny Hill-esque qualities have not aged well. The character of Miss Stein (Playboy model Robyn Hilton) is on screen simply so that Brooks’s Governor Le Petomane can ogle her (she wears skimpy lingerie for no clear purpose). Meanwhile, the only joke the studio successfully expunged from the final cut involved the Sheriff and Lili cavorting in the dark, Bart saying “I hate to disappoint you but that’s my hand you’re sucking”.
Very much making the final cut was the famous scene of cowboys farting by a camp fire. The symphony of wind-breaking created cinema history as the first sequence to incorporate “audible flatulence” in a film.
“I always say I’m in the house that farts built,” quipped a producer who did well out of Blazing Saddles.
“Blazing Saddles, for me, was a film that truly broke ground,” Brooks would say. “It also broke wind… and maybe that’s why it broke ground.”
The movie’s conclusion, meanwhile, is a celebration of the art of filmmaking itself. As the stand-off between Sheriff Bart and his ally the Waco Kid and the racist locals erupts into chaos, Blazing Saddles literally breaks the fourth wall.
The feuding gunslingers smash their way into an adjoining studio where a Busby Berkeley-style musical is being shot and beat up the director. With the ruckus spreading through what is revealed to be a warren of sound-stages and sets,the camera pulls back – so that we are no longer in the Old West but in modern (early 1970s) America.
All that genius was lost on Warner executives when Brooks showed them the finished picture. The consensus was this crass and offensive “comedy” should be buried and never spoken of again. But John Calley galloped to Brooks’s defence and argued for a weekend of sneak previews in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.
“I don’t have to tell you — those three sneak previews we did were absolute riot,” said Brooks. “Suddenly, the same executives who wanted to kill the film saw gold coins floating in front of their eyes.”
“It’s a pretty dumb movie,” Brooks later said. “When you think of the plot, we used it as a basis to make fun of people and life.”
Wilder, however, saw Blazing Saddles in more grandiose terms. For him, it was one of the great reflections on race of its time – a factor in its longevity.
“It's still a modern film,which makes it a classic,” he told the makers of Back in the Saddle in 2004. “I think it will live forever.”
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