'Blazing Saddles' is no 'Gone With the Wind' — it's always been an anti-racism, anti-white-paranoia film, as Mel Brooks explained
I can’t remember who first brought the idea up, but I can tell you it works. I’ve done Nashville, Newark, Santa Barbara, Tampa … all sort of crazy places. I just finished doing this in Chicago a little while ago, and I’d been to theater before withSo I knew it was big, but I didn’t think I’d sell it out. Next thing I know, there were 300 or so people circling the theater waiting to see if there were no-shows, trying to get last-minute tickets.
So I call Andy up and I say, listen, would you come do this with me if I direct it? But we need a black guy. Otherwise, we can’t use the N word, and we’ve gotta use the N word many, many times. So I called up a friend of mine, this guy who was a brilliant writer and the best stand-up comic of all time: Richard Pryor. I said, “Richard, read this, tell me what you think.” He read it and said, “Yeah, this is good … this isI like this.” I asked, “Right, but what about the N word? We can’t say this so many times …” “Well, Mel,say it!” Then I asked him to come write it with us, and he said sure. That was how it started.Right.
So when his boss, and boss’s bosses, came to that first screening … I mean, it was anarchy. They could not believe what they were watching: A person cold-cocking a horse? Farts? One of the guys got up and asked me. “What did we spend on this?” “I don’t know, $2.5 million?” So he turns to everyone in the room and says, “Well, I suggest we eat the picture. Let’s bury this. The campfire scene, and the language, and that goddamned Jew Indian [] — it’s disgusting.
One of my favorite lines in the whole movie is when Cleavon asks him, “What do you do for fun?” Gene goes, “Screw, and play chess.” And Cleavon says, “Let’s play chess.” [You listen to Gene say another line now — “These are just people of the land, the common clay of the West. You know … morons.” — and it’s hard not to think of certain aspects of our political landscape.History of the World, Part 1Good point.I don’t remember, but I do know that the idea to have the chief be Jewish came later.
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