It was a Friday night, and I knew what I had to do to save the picture: I called Gene Wilder. Through tears I told him what had happened and begged him to save me.
He said, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I’ll be on a plane tomorrow morning.”
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It was the weekend, and the studio was closed, but they opened up a few departments for me. Someone from wardrobe helped him with a costume. We went through props and he chose a pair of six-shooters. We drove out to the WB ranch, and he picked out a horse. And then he picked out a white cowboy hat and I said, “No, you’re not the sheriff. You’re the sheriff’s buddy.”
So he picked out a dark cowboy hat, which suited him perfectly. By the end of that day Gene Wilder had become the Waco Kid.
And believe it or not on that Monday （without losing a day of shooting） he was there, hanging upside down in the jail cell and redoing the same scene that Gig Young had attempted on Friday.
Gene was absolutely perfect and I asked myself: Why hadn’t I cast him in the first place? It was because I was suffering the same prejudice everybody had about serious actors and comedy. Either they can do one or the other. Originally, I didn’t want the Waco Kid to be funny. I wanted the Black sheriff to be funny, but I wanted the Waco Kid to be serious. I wanted him to carry some of the more emotional qualities of the film. I was dead wrong, but I didn’t know it yet. I hadn’t realized if you can find a funny actor who can be serious, then you’ve got heaven. That day I learned the lesson. A really good actor can do both. Hence, Gene Wilder.
From their first scene together, Cleavon and Gene bonded immediately.
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We shot for ten weeks, half on a Western set at Warner Bros., and the other half on location in the Antelope Valley in California. At Warner Bros. I met John Calley, the head of production. He was an invaluable aide in fashioning the movie. I’d often come to him and ask something like, “John, is it too crazy to beat up an old lady in a Western bar fight?”
And he gave me this memorable piece of advice that stayed with me all through my career: “Mel, if you’re gonna step up to the bell—ring it!”
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There was a scene that I was kind of afraid of putting in the movie. That’s not like me, but this particular scene was really testing the fates. What I’m referring to is the campfire scene, in which, like they do in every Western, the cowhands sit around a campfire drinking black coffee from tin mugs while they scrape a pile of beans off a tin plate. But you never hear a sound. You never hear the utter reality of breaking wind across the prairie. I had to risk my life and tell the truth. Surely there had to be one little sound from all those beans. But I decided to let the audience hear the real McCoy, no matter what it would cost me.
I remembered John Calley’s motto: “If you’re gonna step up to the bell—ring it!”
And boy did I ring it. The air was filled with the unmistakable sounds of nonstop flatulence. It was the greatest farting scene in cinematic history.
I may have been risking my career, but what good is a career if you don’t risk it from time to time?
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The most fun was shooting the Lili Von Shtupp saloon number. I spent several nights writing “I’m Tired,” the song that Madeline Kahn sings. I took special care to write lyrics that would blend with our Dietrich-esque Lili Von Shtupp’s slightly off-key notes. “I’m Tired” is a salute to world-weary women everywhere, who give in to the inability of men to make love properly. Madeline loved it, and her performance was absolutely out of this world. We were lucky to get Alan Johnson, who had choreographed “Springtime for Hitler,” to do the crazy Teutonic dance steps for us. I was hoping the audience would agree with me after they saw pointy-helmeted Germans singing and dancing in a Western saloon—that this picture was downright crazy!
（Did I tell you that Madeline was incredible? I probably did but I’m saying it again. Madeline was incredible.）
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I think Blazing Saddles was a giant step forward for me as a director. There was a part of me that I hadn’t used before: anarchy. As a director, Blazing Saddles was the beginning of my complete disregard for reality. It was the first time I really broke the fourth wall. I pulled the camera back on a fight in a Western town, to reveal to the audience that what they were watching was on a fake Western street in a big place called Warner Bros. Studios. Then I proceeded to zoom in to one of the Warner Bros. stages to reveal Dom DeLuise as a Busby Berkeley–era dance director filming a big studio production number with a chorus of performers in top hat, white tie, and tails singing “The French Mistake.”