Here’s an example, where the Waco Kid is consoling the Black sheriff who has just been crushed by a racial insult:
Waco Kid: What did you expect? “Welcome, sonny”？ “Make yourself at home.” “Marry my daughter”？ You’ve got to remember these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know…Morons.
It turns a bitter heartache into a great laugh.
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I’ve also always been hard on language. Language has rhythm that I respect. When I was a kid all I ever wanted to be was a drummer, and a lot of that filtered down into my use of language. I mean there’s a phenomenon called a rim shot. The sound is produced by simultaneously hitting the rim and head of a drum with a drumstick. As far as I’m concerned, a joke has to end with a rim shot. For example, character names. Lili Von Shtupp—that’s a rim shot. Even if the audience doesn’t understand the subtext, they get the rhythm. I also decided to name every citizen in Rock Ridge “Johnson.” I figured why waste time coming up with last names? Johnson covers it. There will never be a better Western name than Johnson. Our Johnsons included Van Johnson, named after the actor; Olsen Johnson after the famous vaudeville team; Samuel Johnson, the famed English writer; and finally Howard Johnson after the twenty-eight-flavor ice cream and hotel chain.
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Six months after our first writing session, we had a rough draft called Black Bart. We thought that was appropriate because the sheriff was Black, and Black Bart was a well-known Western name because there was actually an American outlaw with that nickname in the Old West who left poetic messages behind after his robberies. Black Bart was a good title, but it wasn’t crazy enough. It didn’t tell you anything about the nature of the picture. Then one day I was taking a shower, my hair was full of soap and maybe I cleaned my brain because it hit me: Blazing Saddles. Two Western clichés, “blazing” and “saddles.” No one had ever put them together, and for good reason: They simply don’t go together. However, they cry “Crazy Western!” and that’s what we were making, a crazy Western. That title tells you everything.
So Blazing Saddles it was.
Making a satiric comedy serves two audiences equally and simultaneously: the audience that gets every film reference and all of the subtext, and the other audience that has never seen or heard of any related film. I wanted Blazing Saddles to work on its own. What I mean by that is even if you’d never seen a Western before you’d still get it. I try to lace my movies with cultural references, but I’ve always been careful that they’re not weighed down by anything too arcane or inaccessible. I never came with any prerequisites. The only requirement for a Mel Brooks film is that you come in ready to laugh.
So with the rough draft done, I took Andrew Bergman and Norman Steinberg with me to Hollywood, and we continued polishing the script there.
Then we started casting. It was daunting.
Of course, we wanted Richard Pryor to play the Black sheriff, but Warner Bros. said no. They were afraid of his erratic behavior. No matter how much I begged and pleaded, Warner Bros. always gave me a firm no.
So who could we get to play the Black sheriff? A search that ended by me taking another great bounce. Instead of my first choice for Black Bart, I found somebody who was made for the role, born to play it. A Broadway actor who was handsome, sophisticated, and winning. The truly talented Cleavon Little. After he read one page of dialogue I grabbed him, embraced him, and I said, “Cleavon, don’t ask for too much money and you’ve got the part!”
We both knew that a good thing had happened. Even Richard Pryor agreed wholeheartedly that Cleavon was the perfect choice for the role.
On the set of Blazing Saddles, not making the mistake of giving Cleavon direction that he didn’t need.
For the part of the Marlene Dietrich–type character there was only one person in the world who could do it. Remember when I said if I didn’t get Zero Mostel I wouldn’t have done The Producers? The same thing almost held true here. If I couldn’t get Madeline Kahn to play Lili Von Shtupp, I simply didn’t know what I’d do.
I first saw Madeline Kahn in her stunning Broadway debut in Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1968 and had followed her career ever since. I saw her in Peter Bogdanovich’s wonderful films What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. She was one of the most gifted people—her timing, her voice, her attitude. The camera was in love with her, and if she’d wanted to, she could have been a legitimate Metropolitan Opera singer. She had the pipes! The richest, deepest vibrato. She could sing anything. The only thing that held Madeline back was a psychological defect called modesty.