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I collected Andrew Bergman and Richard Pryor, and then I collected Norman Steinberg. Norman used to annoy me every day. He’d come to the Chock full o’ Nuts where I’d be having a chicken salad sandwich, he’d put on my coat for me and say: “Mr. Brooks, Mr. Brooks! Help me! I’m a lawyer. I don’t want to be a lawyer; I want to be a comedy writer!”
He gave me a few sketches that were surprisingly funny and the fact that he was a lawyer who wanted to give up his career to be a comedy writer struck home. He also told me that he had been writing with a dentist named Alan Uger. And I just loved the idea of having a comedy writing team that included a lawyer and a dentist. They were just so wrong, that they were absolutely right.
So of course, I hired them!
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The five of us met every day to write, and my only rule was on the wall in big print:
FIRST, WE LAUGH.
None of us had ever lived in the West. None of us knew anything about Western films, except that as kids we loved them. Every morning we had bagels and Nova Scotia lox from Zabar’s for breakfast and started writing. We washed down breakfast with many cups of coffee. Most of us put sugar in our coffee, except for Richard, who occasionally laced his coffee with a shot of Rémy Martin, a very fine French brandy. Once in a while when writing late into the night Richard or Alan Uger would peel off, leaving Norman, Andy, and me to grab a cab and go to Chinatown for a midnight meal. Those were great nights, sometimes rewarding us with fresh ideas.
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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.”
When it came to working on the script, there was never a subject I thought was off-limits or untouchable. If we thought of something, if it even entered our minds, no matter how bizarre or how crazy or dirty or wild or savage or not socially acceptable…we would still do it. Because if it came into our minds, it was worth exploring. The tone I set for the writing team was the freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. In the writing of Blazing Saddles, we had absolutely no restrictions on any and all subjects.
The plot was familiar to Western fans: In the 1874 Old West, a crooked politician, Hedley Lamarr, “attorney general, assistant to the governor, and state procurer,” is working for the governor, William J. Lepetomane, “a silver-haired, silver-tongued moron.” They are trying to run the citizens out of the town of Rock Ridge to get the land on the cheap so they can profit off the incoming transcontinental railroad.
Hedley Lamarr muses to himself, “Unfortunately, there is one thing that stands between me and that property—the rightful owners.”
To placate the Rock Ridge citizens’ demand for a sheriff, Lamarr has a stroke of brilliance: He will send them as their new lawman a Black sheriff, assuming that once the townspeople get a look at their new sheriff they will pack up and leave town. But somehow “Black Bart” wins them over and with the help of an ex-alcoholic gunslinger, the Waco Kid, turns the tables on Lamarr and saves the day.
That was a good simple standard plot. We decided to twist it, turn it, and stand it on its ear. We threw crazy comedy bits into the mix. In one scene Bart becomes Bugs Bunny. We just stole it, but it was a Warner Bros. cartoon, and since we were also a Warner Bros. picture, we knew we could get away with it. I also included the “we don’t need no stinkin’ badges” reference from the Humphrey Bogart and John Huston film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—also a Warner Bros. film.
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Sheriff Bart’s entrance was spectacular. Instead of background music we used foreground music. We started the scene with the great Count Basie and his orchestra playing his famous hit song “April in Paris” in the middle of the prairie. I was sure the audience would wonder, “How did Count Basie and his orchestra end up in the middle of the Mojave Desert?” Into the shot rides Sheriff Bart dressed in his cool, with-it Gucci outfit and saddlebags. On the page it was daring, but on the screen it was spectacular. I don’t think anyone had ever done anything like that before.
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Here in the middle of the prairie, the great Count Basie plays his famous rendition of “April in Paris” to bring on new sheriff Cleavon Little, seen in the distance riding into Rock Ridge.
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One of the reasons that I was attracted to Blazing Saddles was that even though it was a wild comedy, it had a great engine beneath the comedy that was driving it. If I ever taught comedy or comedy movies to film students, I would tell them crazy comedy alone doesn’t work. If you want a comedy to last, there’s a secret you must follow: You have to have an engine driving it. In Blazing Saddles, there’s a very serious backstory. Racial prejudice is the engine that really drives the film and helps to make it work.