Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  No matter how much he talked about She Stoops to Conquer—with Gene Wilder as Tony Lumpkin—producers weren’t buying it. Brooks needed another story, a more commercial one, and as always he needed the right collaborator for the script. More than two years had gone by since he had called the last take on The Twelve Chairs by the time, in early April, he flew to Mexico for another television paycheck, an appearance on the one-hour Timex-sponsored “Aquacade in Acapulco,” hosted by Tony Randall, with Ed McMahon, Jerry Stiller, and Anne Meara among the guest stars who congregated around the pool at a lavish Mexican resort. It was one among hundreds of television specials produced by Joseph Cates, who had served as coproducer of “Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man,” and directed by Walter C. Miller, who also had been behind the camera for Bancroft’s 1970 special. “Aquacade” sprinkled comedy sketches in between water sports and games: champion divers, famous swimmers, synchronized swim teams, and cliff-divers.

  Brooks had a moment in the special where he impersonated an ex-Nazi hiding out as an Argentinian archaeologist. McMahon is interviewing him at poolside. According to Variety, Brooks “looked like he was winging it” on camera. But he did have a script: Gary Belkin from Club Caesar had written the special along with an up-and-comer named Norman Steinberg. Brooks hung out after hours with Steinberg, bonding with the younger writer. Steinberg was the missing link. A promising project had dropped into his lap, Brooks told him. Would he read the script and let Brooks know what he thought?

  One month after the broadcast of “Aquacade,” on May 22, 1972, Bancroft gave birth in New York City to a boy whom the proud mother and father named Maximilian Michael Brooks. His first name paid tribute to Brooks’s own father; his middle name to Bancroft’s. The couple had nearly given up trying to have a child, and Bancroft’s pregnancy was difficult, the birth cesarean. She had suffered “strange labor pains at seven months,” she told talk-show host Charlie Rose years later, “and we all thought I was going to lose that baby. So I went to bed for three months, and I didn’t lose it.”

  The new mother was almost forty-one years of age. Brooks was nearing forty-six and now the father of four, including his three children from his first marriage. Baby Max was baptized Catholic, with Bancroft promising to bar mitzvah the boy in due time.

  At the time of The Comedians and “Aquacade in Acapulco,” Brooks’s agent was David Begelman, the vice chairman of Creative Management Associates (CMA) under its chief executive officer, Freddie Fields. CMA, by late 1972, was in talks to merge with International Famous Agency (IFA), formerly Ashley-Steiner before the agency had become Ashley-Famous. The merger would give birth to the mega-agency International Creative Management (ICM).

  Within months of the merger, the new management of Columbia Pictures appointed Begelman to head up its film production division in Hollywood. Ted Ashley, another former agent, who had represented Brooks when Ashley led Ashley-Steiner, was already installed at Warner Bros., dating from mid-1969, as its chief of film production.

  The growing power nexus between onetime New York talent agents and the Hollywood studios would profoundly shape Brooks’s career. Brooks did not care to make another East Coast independent picture and have to scrounge for his production costs and bookings. He also didn’t want to affiliate with another Joseph E. Levine–type producer. Working for a major Hollywood studio would guarantee his production budget, a higher investment in publicity and advertising for his films, and ready access to many more theaters around the world: ergo, a bigger audience with commensurate grosses and profits.

  By early 1972, he admitted in later interviews, his air castles had evaporated. He was practically skipping meals and missing auto payments. (“I’ve used up all my money, and I’m living on Anne’s money, but she’s pregnant, and soon she won’t be able to work, and so we’re going to be homeless.”) One day, while walking on a New York street, searching intently for quarters on the sidewalk, as he liked to say, he literally bumped into his agent. His stomach rumbling, he jumped at Begelman’s invitation to lunch.

  Over lunch, Begelman told Brooks about a property called “Tex X”—as in Malcolm X—a Wild West comedy about a hip, militant black sheriff who is hired to uphold the law in a prejudiced frontier town. Warner Bros. had taken an option on “Tex X,” which had originally taken the form of a ninety-three-page novella, employing its author, a former film publicist named Andrew Bergman, to develop a viable script. At one point, Alan Arkin was set to direct the Bergman screenplay that resulted, with James Earl Jones as “Tex X.” Then everyone involved, the studio included, balked. Judy Feiffer, a Warner’s story editor acquainted with Brooks—she was the wife of Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer—thought Begelman should offer “Tex X” to Brooks. “The idea is crazy but not crazy enough,” Begelman told Brooks. “You could give it the real craziness.”

  Brooks made a show of reluctance, often claiming, in such instances, “You know me . . . I don’t write anything I don’t initiate.” Besides handing him the unique story idea he sorely lacked, Begelman arranged the deal with Ted Ashley and Warner Bros. Brooks never forgot it was Begelman who had kept the faith with him at that low point of his career and opened a magic portal to the future; later in the 1970s Brooks would submit an effusive deposition as to Begelman’s good character when the agent turned producer, still at the helm of Columbia, was disgraced by charges of forgery and embezzlement.

  After his meeting with Begelman, Brooks put in a courtesy call to Bergman, whose PhD in film studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison had led to a dissertation that was published as We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. Back in his late-sixties college days, feeding off the black militancy of the period, Bergman had imagined a Western that would begin with the image of an H. Rap Brown or Stokely Carmichael–type sheriff, black and proud, wearing “his finest Sixties threads” as he trots on his horse down the Main Street of all-white Rock Ridge, Kansas, in 1874. Working as a film publicist for United Artists as his day job, Bergman had written the “Tex X” novella.

  The first meeting between Brooks and Bergman happened “over the phone,” the “Tex X” author recalled. “I was a huge fan of his, and he was very warm and of course utterly hilarious.” Brooks asked Bergman if he’d work with him on a new version of the script, and Bergman said yes; agents and lawyers went to work on the contracts. Brooks went off to Acapulco for ten days, where he looked forward to re-connecting with Norman Steinberg.

  Brooks knew Steinberg from earlier in time. Brooklyn born, Steinberg had been beavering away as an entertainment lawyer in the late 1960s, handling copyright and music rights for a legal firm in a high-rise near the Chock Full o’Nuts that Brooks frequented for late-morning coffee and doughnuts when, one day, he spotted him. The lawyer revered the 2000 Year Old Man recordings and dreamed of writing comedy himself.

  Steinberg dared to approach Brooks, saying “I want to be a writer.” Brooks put his hands on the lawyer’s shoulders, looked deeply into his eyes, and said, “Leave me alone.” Steinberg had persisted over the next few weeks, becoming something of a pest. Brooks finally handed him Leonard Stern’s name and telephone number on a scrap of paper.

  In short order Steinberg wrote a Get Smart script on spec. Stern called him to say that if the series was picked up for another season, he’d option the script. Unfortunately for Steinberg, Get Smart was canceled in early 1970, but he had already quit lawyering forever. He picked up an agent at William Morris, quickly won a Grammy writing for comedian David Frye’s album I Am the President, and found regular work on a CBS summer show called Comedy Tonight with Robert Klein, Peter Boyle, and Madeline Kahn among the cast. Comedy Tonight led to The Flip Wilson Show and a writing staff–shared Emmy.

  Reuniting with his comedy idol in Acapulco, dining out nightly with Brooks, collaborating with him on his fugitive-Nazi sketch “was just the greatest thrill of my life,” Steinberg recalled. The writer performed a cameo in the Brooks/McMahon vignette as a bellhop int
errupting the Q and A with Brooks’s Argentinian archaeologist. A package has arrived that is addressed to the ex-Nazi. Brooks harrumphs, “Hold that package for me over there by the pool!” Bellhop Steinberg walks away, and an explosion is heard with gold buttons flying into the frame. “Oh,” Brooks says sadly, “that was such a beautiful uniform.” A beautiful human being was inside that uniform, McMahon scolds him. Brooks nods. “Yeah. That, too.”

  Steinberg was flattered when Brooks gave him “Tex X” to read and said that if Steinberg thought the script was up his alley, they might work on it together with the originating author, Andrew Bergman, back in New York. Brooks might have said something like “We are going to need other writers, too”—the more the merrier—and Steinberg said he had a New York friend named Alan Uger, a former dentist, with whom he’d crafted comedy sketches for Alan King and Robert Klein. Uger held a day job with the New York City Department of Health, but he could take a leave of absence. A former lawyer and dentist for writing partners? Brooks was amused. He said fine to Uger also.

  Shortly after Anne Bancroft gave birth to their son, Brooks, Bergman, Steinberg, and Uger began their daily rendezvous in the sixth-floor conference room of the Warner Bros. building at 666 Fifth Avenue. Huge table, no windows, blank walls. From the outset Brooks urged the writers to go for no-holds-barred comedy. He had loved Westerns since boyhood; now he wanted to skewer the genre as never before. He had hit a wall with critics and audiences on The Producers and The Twelve Chairs. He felt he had nothing to lose. “Write from the gut,” he urged them. “Write from the heart. Write the craziest shit.”

  But they did not get very far—it was still early days—before Brooks looked around the room and made an observation that would raise the stakes on the project immeasurably. “I see four white guys here,” Brooks said. “Four Jews. We need a person of color.”

  Who might that be? Brooks reached out to the political activist–comedian Dick Gregory, but Gregory said no. Then Brooks thought of Richard Pryor, a comedian even more incendiary and controversial. Or else Norman Steinberg thought of Pryor. Even though in multiple interviews Brooks insisted that Pryor’s name had rolled off his tongue (“one of my best friends . . . since I was, like, twenty-two years old, and we really loved each other”), Steinberg was just as adamant that he knew Pryor from Flip Wilson’s TV series. “When Mel tells the story, he says he called him, but in point of fact, I called him,” Steinberg said.

  At the time Pryor had acted in only a few films, and Lady Sings the Blues, with his breakthrough appearance, had not yet been released. Nor was Pryor well known as a writer, though he had done scripts for television, including for Norman Lear and Sanford and Son. Pryor was known principally for his dangerous stand-up comedy; as a writer he’d be an equally dangerous proposition and a gamble. “Richie was not in demand and had a bit of a checkered reputation,” recalled Bergman, “but we knew there had to be a black voice in the room or the project was doomed to some level of toothlessness.”

  In his autobiography Pryor said he read “Tex X” and asked Brooks, “So this is a comedy?” Yes, affirmed Brooks. “Then why don’t we make it one?” challenged Pryor.

  Brooks asked him about the word “nigger,” which was sprinkled throughout “Tex X.”

  “Well, Mel, you can’t say it,” Pryor said. “But the bad guys can say it. They would say it!”

  Hiring Pryor was a risk. Everyone knew Brooks had made the right decision when, on the legendary first day he joined the story conferences, Pryor “sort of ambled in about noon,” in Steinberg’s words, Courvoisier in hand. As Brooks brought Pryor up to date on their progress, Pryor whipped out a little container, took a snort, and then offered the white powder around. There were no takers among the four white Jewish guys, nondruggies all.

  “Brother Mel?” Pryor offered Brooks a toot.

  “Never before lunch,” declared Brooks without missing a beat.

  When, two years later, a journalist from Film Comment asked Brooks “How was Blazing Saddles written?” Brooks began his reply curiously with “I didn’t have time to write it myself . . .” That was why, he explained, he needed the team of Andrew Bergman, Norman Steinberg, Alan Uger, and Richard Pryor. Perhaps Brooks meant he didn’t have all the time he would have preferred, the years it had taken for The Producers to develop, for example; he couldn’t write it alone, and having five writers would multiply the speed. Even so, the task took about a year.

  Through the first half of 1972, first in the Warner’s building and then at CMA offices, the writers met to hash out the scenes. In later interviews Brooks consciously invoked a comparison with Club Caesar, saying he had tried to recapture that group dynamic with the Blazing Saddles team of writers. He was loud and combative and often obstreperous during the script arguments, but he also fostered “a great free-swinging atmosphere,” Steinberg explained. “It was sort of a game of telephone, in which someone would say something and then it would be a sort of creative free-for-all of additions and subtractions and endless transmogrifications, if that’s a word.”

  By July 26, they had a date-stamped first draft with the new title of “Black Bart,” which renamed the black-and-proud sheriff formerly known as “Tex X.” Most of the other characters’ names flowed from Brooks’s mouth, including Governor Le Pétomane (the role Brooks had designated for himself), which was derived from the stage name of a celebrated French flatulist, whose Moulin Rouge act consisted of farting out cannon fire, musical notes, and animal noises (pétomane translates roughly as “fartomaniac”).

  As in Club Caesar days, it was tricky after the fact to separate out any individual’s contribution to certain scenes subjected to “endless transmogrifications” by the writers. But one thing most participants agree on: despite (or because of) the cocaine and Courvoisier, the July 26 draft was suffused with Pryor’s race consciousness and audacity.

  First and foremost, the black comedian unleashed the word “nigger,” which had been pervasive in the novella, just as it was pervasive in the black culture of the 1960s and ’70s, flavoring black militant speeches, blaxploitation films, and Pryor’s own stand-up routine, among other things. Did Pryor write the craziest shit? Brooks later insisted that Pryor had actually been more drawn to writing for the Jewish or kookiest white characters, such as Mongo (“Mongo only pawn in the game of life”). True or not, Pryor cast a long shadow over the script sessions. If Brooks did not think something was funny, it didn’t go into the script, but if Pryor didn’t think something was funny, its chances were equally slim.

  At work, Pryor was “amazing, he was astounding,” recalled Steinberg. Pryor’s instinct for constantly pushing the boundaries of outrageousness was like an accelerant poured on fire. “I do think Richie saved us from the PC dilemma,” agreed Bergman.

  At least one friend of Pryor’s, actor and writer Paul Mooney, believed the comedian had dreamed up “the most memorable scene in the movie, where the cowboys sit around the fire, cutting farts.” Pryor was “king shit in that group,” said Mooney, who wrote for Pryor’s stand-up and television specials, in his book Black Is the New White.

  Brooks often claimed the campfire farting scene as his own inspiration, but no one else could say the same with certainty. “I don’t remember how the campfire scene turned into a farting scene,” recalled Bergman, “but it just did. We all free-associated, and so ‘campfire’ evolved into ‘eating’ and then ‘eating beans,’ and then the vision of a bunch of guys in chaps farting their insides out was inevitability. There were lines and concepts besides the central notion I know that I came up with originally, but everyone’s ideas were shaped by everyone else, which is why the script had so much formal unity.”

  Steinberg took on an unofficial responsibility: he was Pryor’s “designated gatekeeper,” hanging out with the comedian after hours in order to temper his debauchery. This much is incontrovertible: Pryor didn’t last long. One day the comedian simply went AWOL. He had clocked in for “about a month of steady work,
” said Steinberg. Some of Pryor’s more whimsical stuff (an extended “Candygram for Mongo!” animated sequence) was ultimately excised, but the King Shit had left his imprint.

  How long Alan Uger stuck around after the July 26 draft is another question that later disturbed the group consensus. In interviews, Bergman and Steinberg said that Brooks’s in-your-face argumentation and nit-picking of the comedy wore on Uger, and the former dentist abandoned the script before his time was up. With a few exceptions—Buck Henry was one—Brooks was careful about what he said publicly about his collaborators, but he recalled Uger fondly. “He was at the typewriter and we were all just pitching.”

  “Rashomon is having a picnic,” Uger said when asked about accounts that minimized his participation. His contract had extended only through the first draft, after which he returned to the Department of Health, he said. He contributed his share and was fully credited on-screen according to contract. In fact, he said, he had enjoyed the “amazing experience” of working with Brooks, “a comic genius and an uncommonly decent man.” Uger would go on to write for and produce the hit television series Family Ties, winning an Emmy, a Writers Guild Award, and a Humanitas Prize.

  “I assure you that my writing credit would not be there [on Blazing Saddles] if Mel thought I was unworthy,” Uger noted for this book. And “incidentally, I can’t type,” Uger added. “Never learned to. If I were at the typewriter, we’d still be there.”

  Of course, there was someone at the typewriter—Brooks himself, never. In New York, for the July 26 draft, that person was a hired secretary, one of the unsung heroines in the motion picture business who are omnipresent, getting something down on paper as the writers sometimes shouted over one another. In California, another girl Friday did the job; she wore a Western costume because she was an actress with a stenographic sideline hoping for a part. No one remembers either of those women’s names. They go uncredited.