When, late in the script writing, “John Carradine” became “Hedley Lamarr,” Brooks riffled through candidate after candidate without settling. Finally, hat in hand, he approached Carl Reiner to play the scenery-chewing villain. Reiner demurred; he was busy with The New Dick Van Dyke Show. Once again Bancroft rode to the rescue, asking Brooks, “Why don’t you use that guy from The Carol Burnett Show?” That was Harvey Korman—Carol Burnett’s Carl Reiner—who was as freewheeling a second banana as Reiner and who before then had bestowed his talent almost exclusively on television.
Korman, who knew the 2000 Year Old Man routines by heart, revered Brooks, and he went nervously for an interview with the director. Brooks got up, script in hand, and pranced around the office, acting Hedley Lamarr and belting out the film’s songs. Korman felt intimidated. “I’ll never be able to keep up with this man,” he told his agent afterward. “Don’t worry,” said his agent. “He needs you as much as you need him.”
By his third film, Brooks’s casting philosophy had evolved away from trained, serious actors, famous stars, or personalities who might be either too high maintenance or too expensive. He began to speak of his preferred troupe as “self-starters,” often musical performers or stand-up comics who brought their own craziness to his scripts. “I don’t look for actors as much as I look for comics,” he liked to say. Korman and DeLuise, Kahn as well, embodied the self-starter quality. But who was going to play Black Bart?
One reason why it is hard to believe that Richard Pryor focused on the white and Jewish characters when laboring on the script is that during the writing of scenes Pryor performed Black Bart’s vignettes with relish. “It was glorious,” Brooks recalled. All along, Pryor as Black Bart had been the unspoken wish of the team of writers, including the black comedian, who believed he had been penciled in and was a lock for the role.
But the studio knew about Pryor’s drug habits and rejected him, Brooks always insisted. “I asked [Warner Bros.] on bended knee to let Richie do it,” he said. The studio officials told Brooks that Pryor might vanish (as happened during the script writing) and he wasn’t a big enough box-office name besides. Steinberg talked it over with Pryor after he got the bad news. “Don’t blame Mel,” Steinberg said. “He wanted you.” Pryor was dubious. “The truth,” Steinberg always said, “is Mel really fought for him.”
Pryor wavered about who to blame. “It’s a thorn in my heart,” he told Ebony in 1976, not long after the film’s release. Yet by the time of his 1995 memoir he had softened. “Before we even finished writing it Mel was talking about me starring as the black sheriff,” he wrote. “I think people at the studio more powerful than Mel didn’t want me.”
His successor certainly did not have much of a box-office name. In his early thirties, the Oklahoma-born Cleavon Little had been trained at Juilliard and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1970, Brooks had seen him in his Tony Award–winning role as the eponymous traveling preacher of Purlie, an all-black musical about the Jim Crow era. Little had acted on television shows and in a few interesting movies such as Cotton Comes to Harlem and Vanishing Point. Maybe Anne Bancroft—who merited an “assistant casting director” credit for Brooks’s early films—reminded Brooks of him.
Pryor was more like Brooks: his dangerous comedy could be abrasive. Little’s screen test evinced a sly, likable personality. Little was “handsome as all get-out,” and he paused like a Broadway actor when delivering his lines, giving “a measured reading” rather than rushing the words, Brooks said later. Little would make for a different sort of Black Bart, enigmatic and winning. Announced in late December, Little was one of the accidents of fate that turned out serendipitously for Brooks’s third screen comedy.
There was no suspense about the casting of two of the characters: Governor Le Pétomane had been crafted as Brooks’s showcase so the writer-director could play the film’s silliest character with a flat paddle, a rubber ball, and a busty babe as props. Brooks also gave himself a cameo as an Indian chief, aiming this bit at intellectuals and Jews, with reference to the schvartze (the Yiddish N-word) and the lost tribes of Israel. Many jokes in the script were funnier for being lost on the majority of the audience.
The photography was set to begin in March. Andrew Bergman and Norman Steinberg had been in Hollywood for weeks, reworking and polishing scenes. Michael Hertzberg was back as Brooks’s producer. The cameraman was the veteran Joseph F. Biroc, whose long career, harking back to It’s a Wonderful Life, included the screen version of Bye Bye Birdie. Still looking for a compatible editor, Brooks hired two: one for the comedy, Danford B. Greene, who had been Oscar nominated for Robert Altman’s free-form M*A*S*H, and one for the Western, John C. Howard, who had coedited Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. John Morris and Alan Johnson returned for music and choreography.
However, on the opening day of photography, Thursday, March 8, 1973, Gig Young suffered a breakdown during his first scene, the one where the Waco Kid wakes up hanging upside down in a jail cell. (The sheriff asks, “Are we awake?” and the Waco Kid, taken aback by seeing a black lawman, asks, “Are we black?”) A notoriously heavy drinker who had gone on the wagon for the filming, Young began “spewing” green vomit, according to Brooks, and was rushed away in an ambulance. His agent-manager assured Brooks that Young was a recovered alcoholic. “Well, he ain’t quite recovered,” Brooks replied.
Young was done. Casting Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid was just another lucky break.
Since his Oscar nomination for The Producers, Wilder had been active: he had given a signature performance in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; starred in Start the Revolution Without Me, directed by Norman Lear’s partner Bud Yorkin; and filmed the Eugène Ionesco play Rhinoceros with Zero Mostel. He had also appeared in the “What Is Sodomy?” segment of Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, playing a doctor in love with a sheep. As the ambulance bearing Gig Young sped away toward the hospital, Wilder was getting ready to depart for London, where he was playing the Fox in Stanley Donen’s film of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.
Oddly, just a few months earlier, after the dream of John Carradine had died, Brooks had visited the actor he had publicly thanked three times at the Oscars for his importance to The Producers and offered him the role of Hedley Lamarr in “Black Bart.” “I’m all wrong for that part,” Wilder demurred. “How about Jim, the Waco Kid?”
“No, no,” Brooks replied, “that’s Anne’s favorite part, too. No, I need an older guy—someone who could look like an over-the-hill alcoholic. I’m trying to get Dan Dailey.”
“Mel, there are so many wonderful comics who would be much funnier than I could ever be playing Hedley Lamarr,” Wilder told Brooks, refusing the role.
Now, though, Brooks was desperate. He made a phone call from a booth outside a Warner Bros. soundstage, reaching Wilder back east and pleading with the actor to take the first plane to Hollywood and take over the role of the Waco Kid. Wilder called Stanley Donen, and the director agreed to arrange all of his London scenes to be shot at the end of Little Prince’s schedule. Wilder promptly left for Los Angeles and over the weekend was fitted for a costume and gun belt and picked out the horse he’d ride in the film.
A few days after answering the call from Brooks, as Wilder wrote in Kiss Me like a Stranger, “I was looking at Cleavon Little, who appeared to be upside down, since I was hanging upside down in a jail cell.” Little asked, “Are we awake?” and Wilder spoke the Waco Kid’s first lines, “We are not sure—are we black?” with a bemused, quizzical intonation that confirmed he was a godsend, the ingratiating character the film needed. It’s hard to imagine Blazing Saddles without him. The casting switch made Waco Jim and Black Bart contemporaries in age and helped forge their conspiratorial brotherhood.
“Go bananas!” Brooks reportedly urged all the principals, encouraging them to take liberties with the script. A few years later, Brooks told Film Comment that he had filmed the Blazing Saddles s
creenplay “word for word,” but as Greg Beal noted in his in-depth examination, “dozens and dozens of lines in the movie don’t appear in the shooting script.” The enhancements to what was already an exceptional screenplay came fast and furious; Harvey Korman’s scenes especially—some shared with the bubbling Brooks—were enriched with “wonderful asides and additions,” in Norman Steinberg’s words.
The campfire farting scene had been minimally described in the February 17, 1973, shooting script:
Five of Taggart’s henchmen are seated around the campfire.
No one talks. They are busy, noisily scraping the last of their beans off tin plates. The only SOUND WE HEAR is a vulgar symphony of eating, grunting, belching and farting. Taggart steps out of his tent and approaches the campfire.
TAGGART
Got word there’s a new sheriff in town. Who wants to kill him?
Now it was maximally staged. Even traditionalists such as Slim Pickens (Taggart) and Burton Gilliam (Lyle) got into the act, adding little improvements as the scene was filmed, starting when Taggart steps from the tent and sniffs the aroma of farts.
TAGGART
(As he waves his hat)
Goddam!
LYLE
How about some more beans, Mr. Taggart?
TAGGART
I’d say you’ve had enough.
Of course Brooks staged the scene without any actual fart sounds, just the up-and-down of cowboy butts. “Lift, turn, cross your legs!” exhorted the director. “Do the normal gestures you would do to let a fart escape.” He’d add the right fart noises later.
Madeline Kahn, in a black bustier and with a peroxide rinse, blew onlookers away when she performed Lili Von Shtupp’s big number, “I’m Tired,” which again referenced Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again, in which Dietrich sings a German-accented “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have.” Brooks instructed the actress to “harmonize the way Dietrich would,” but Kahn toyed with the phrasing (the suspended “Ah” in the middle of the song that she vocalized “in a key that was just a little wrong,” in Brooks’s words) and with the staging, too, at one point reaching to grab the set to keep from toppling over.
“Her most important contribution, however,” according to Kahn’s biographer William V. Madison, “was to point out that the song had only verses and a chorus. Brooks went home and, in one night, wrote the words and music to the introduction that begins, ‘Here I stand, the goddess of desire.’ . . . [even] though it meant restaging the number.”
Some of the actors’ inflections were nonverbal—for example, the moment in “I’m Tired” that “always makes me laugh and cry,” in Brooks’s words. As the number ends, the cowboys shoot up the saloon, and the chorus of Prussian soldiers bears Kahn/Von Shtupp off the stage in their arms, Kahn “looks around as if to say, ‘Oh, the hell with it all.’”
Though it was not quite a full-fledged musical, the score for the Western comedy would boast several of Brooks’s standout compositions. Arranger and composer John Morris shared credit with Brooks on the title theme, but Brooks got ghost assistance on the lyrics of some of the other songs also. “Look, we wrote the songs, too,” said Norman Steinberg in an interview for this book, “and he’s the only one who gets credit for that . . . but still, who cares? It’s not just his, it’s ours . . . a true collaboration.”
For the title theme, Brooks had the witty notion of recruiting Frankie Laine, who had crooned on many Western soundtracks (his voice would be instantly familiar to Rawhide fans). Laine’s caterwauling, with whip cracks punctuating the stanzas, immortalized the tune.
The other musical highs included a chain gang of railroad workers, responding to the redneck foreman’s exhortation for “a good ole nigger work song,” delivering Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” in silky harmony; and Count Basie and his orchestra materializing in the desert for the Vernon Duke–Yip Harburg evergreen “April in Paris,” frosting on the cake and a personal touch from Brooks, a longtime fan of the maestro.
The third-act melee would break actual as well as invisible walls: the free-for-all spills onto a studio set where the top-hat-and-tails chorus of all-male dancers is being guided through their fancy footwork for a vintage Warner’s musical. The handsome boys are singing the Brooks ditty “The French Mistake,” which is defined by the urban dictionary as “when an otherwise straight male is persuaded to, or on a whim in the heat of the moment, engages in a homosexual act of which he later regrets and is ashamed.”
Throw out your hands/Stick out your tush
Hands on your hips/Give ’em a push
You’ll be surprised/You’re doing the French Mistake
Voilà!
Alan Johnson’s staging rivaled that of “Springtime for Hitler.” “Piss on you, I’m working for Mel Brooks!” Hedley Lamarr’s henchman Taggart snarls when Buddy Bizarre (Dom DeLuise) strenuously objects to the cowboy invasion. Pandemonium ensues with hilarious cutaways. The film within a film shifts to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where the action soars to self-reflexive heights as Black Bart and the Waco Kid share popcorn while enjoying the climax on the screen. Never again would a Mel Brooks film feel so liberated. “Blazing Saddles is Dixieland jazz,” Brooks reflected later, “where everybody gets up, has a riot or a solo, and there’s a fierce harmonic blend of joy and freedom.”
The title had remained “Black Bart” throughout the filming. Warner Bros. did not pinch pennies. The studio furnished Brooks’s largest budget to date: $2.3 million.
Chapter 11
1974
Tops in Taps
Warner Bros. also had no idea of the lightning about to strike, however, or the studio would not have fumbled the next Mel Brooks film. Just days before he answered the phone call offering him the part of the Waco Kid, Gene Wilder had completed “the first draft” of the script for that project: Young Frankenstein.
One day in mid-1972, while on vacation in Westhampton after finishing his role in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Wilder had sat down with a legal pad and written those two words—“Young Frankenstein”—at the top of a page. He contacted Brooks in New York, where the “Black Bart” writers were hard at work, saying he had dashed off the synopsis for a comedy about the great-grandson of Baron Beaufort von Frankenstein, a young scientist who scoffs at the Frankenstein legend until he inherits the Transylvania estate. “Cute,” said Brooks, “that’s cute. Keep at it.” Nothing more.
Wilder’s agent, Mike Medavoy, had encouraged the actor to try his hand at screenwriting, and now he urged Wilder to imagine parts in the embryonic project for Marty Feldman and Peter Boyle, because they were Medavoy’s clients, too.
A Jewish Londoner, Feldman was an eccentric comedian with protruding, misaligned eyes, who had been introduced to US audiences in the 1972 summer replacement TV series The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, produced in England by Larry Gelbart. Wilder conceived of Feldman as Igor, the hunchbacked assistant to Dr. Frankenstein, which was similar to a character in the classic 1931 Frankenstein film, based on Mary Shelley’s novel and starring Boris Karloff. Boyle was a New York actor who was perhaps best known as the pathological hard hat in Joe, a surprise low-budget hit in 1970. Boyle was just hulking enough for Wilder to envision him as the Monster.
Besides a brief synopsis, Wilder wrote an introductory scene, which takes place at Transylvania Station, “where Igor and Frederick [Dr. Frankenstein] meet for the first time, almost verbatim the way it was later filmed,” with “the EEgor and the AYEgor and the Frankenstein and the Fronkensteen.” He sent the synopsis and scene to Medavoy, who phoned him a couple of days later. Knowing of Wilder’s relationship with Brooks, Medavoy said he was going to pitch the comedy with Brooks directing. “You’re chasing the wrong rainbow,” Wilder said, “because he won’t direct anything that he didn’t write.”
A few days later Brooks phoned Wilder, asking “What are you getting me into?”
“Nothing you don’t want to get into.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know—I’m telling you I don’t know.”
Soon after, Medavoy phoned to say that Brooks had climbed on board. He had been seeking a long-term contract with Warner Bros. before the release of his Western comedy, but the deal Brooks wanted was “an expensive one,” as studio officials later told Variety, and Warner’s declined. Brooks then took Young Frankenstein to David Begelman at Columbia.
Medavoy explained that the Columbia deal was contingent on Wilder and Brooks working together on the screenplay. Wilder would write the first draft and “send Mel every twenty pages,” in Wilder’s words, and Brooks would give him feedback. If either The Producers or The Twelve Chairs “had been a commercial success,” wrote Wilder, “I don’t believe Mel would have said yes to Young Frankenstein. Lucky me! Lucky Mel!”
One day amid West Coast preparations for “Black Bart,” Brooks visited New York and called to order their “one working session on ‘Young Frank,’ as he [Brooks] always called it,” Wilder recalled. That was the day Brooks tried to convince Wilder to play Hedley Lamarr. “We spent forty-five minutes making coffee and discussing the merits of different brands while we ate little rugelachs,” according to Wilder. “This was a ritual with Mel before anything serious could be discussed. (He preferred Kentucky Blue Mountain coffee, and I preferred Columbian White Star.) When coffee matters were finished, we went into my study and talked for about an hour about Frankenstein.”
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