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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.”
Suddenly, one of the walls on the stage collapses and cowboys and horses from the Western set come crashing through. A big crazy fight ensues between chorus boys and cowboys.
Dom DeLuise as Buddy Bizarre and Slim Pickens as Taggart face off in the fight. When Dom shouts, “This is a closed set!” Slim responds, “Piss on you. I’m working for Mel Brooks!”
It’s a fierce fight, but once in a while, instead of fighting, some of the cowboys and the chorus boys make up and leave together. If that wasn’t enough, the camera is then suddenly outside the front gate of Warner Bros. Studios, as Harvey Korman, still in costume as Hedley Lamarr, with his face covered with whipped cream pie from a great salute to pie fights, hails a cab and says to the driver, “Drive me off this picture!”
As the cab speeds away, we see Cleavon on his palomino horse come riding through the gate and gallop after him. The finale of the picture takes place at the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Hedley Lamarr and the Black sheriff face off in a gunfight, and of course…the good guy wins. As Hedley Lamarr hits the ground, he notices one of the most famous hands-and-footprints squares in the concrete sidewalk, it reads: DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS. Harvey leaves us with this last line:
Hedley Lamarr: “How did he do such fantastic stunts with such little feet?”
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By the way, many years later when I was asked to put my own hands and feet in that famous sidewalk cement, I decided that I had been well behaved for such a long time…that I needed to be mischievous again! I arranged to have the prop masters from The Walking Dead TV series build me a sixth finger on my left hand. I wanted one of the hundreds of tourists that would visit the Chinese Theatre sidewalk that day to shout, “Hey! Did you know that Mel Brooks had SIX fingers on his left hand!”
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Count ’em: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
We pulled it off, and the prosthetic looked so real that I decided to wear my sixth finger on Conan O’Brien’s show that same night. Nobody from his production team told Conan about it, so that when I revealed it in the middle of our interview, he went absolutely bananas!
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But back to the ending of Blazing Saddles, Cleavon and Gene as Bart and the Waco Kid watch the end of our movie inside the Chinese Theatre with popcorn in hand. From the sheriff and the Waco Kid sitting in the theater we cut back to the Western town. The sheriff is back on his palomino, slowly riding out of town. He stops when he sees the Waco Kid, strangely enough still munching on the popcorn from the movie theater.
Waco Kid: Where you headed, cowboy?
Bart: Nowhere special.
Waco Kid: Nowhere special…I’ve always wanted to go there.
Bart: Come on.
The two ride off, and then a little later they exchange their horses for a fancy black limousine, which takes them off into a big beautiful Western sunset.
Other directors may have broken the fourth wall, but I think in Blazing Saddles I shattered it.
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Once again, the great John Morris came on board to score the film. We had a shorthand at this point. I wrote “I’m Tired” for Lili Von Shtüpp and he orchestrated it in single instruments like they did in Berlin in 1920. I thought I’d hear it in a normal orchestration, but he got the incredible Berliner Ensemble feeling like Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. It was just amazing.
John Morris and I collaborated on the title song for the film, “Blazing Saddles.” It was a musical parody of every Western title song ever written. The lyrics went like this:
He rode a blazing saddle
He wore a shining star
His job to offer battle
To bad men near and far
He conquered fear and he conquered hate
He turned our night into day
He made his blazing saddle
A torch to light the way
We needed a Frankie Laine–type to sing the song. Frankie was the go-to guy for Western themes from the late 1940s through the 1960s, including Mule Train, Rawhide, 3:10 to Yuma, and Gunfight at the OK Corral. Nobody could sing a whip-cracking Western song like the great Frankie Laine. So I said, “Why not just ask Frankie Laine himself?”
And so, we did! To my amazement after he finished a beautiful heartrending rendition of “Blazing Saddles” he told me, “I really love that song.”
God bless him! I told him how great he was and thanked him from the bottom of my heart. Frankie’s performance not only made the song and the opening work, but believe it or not, it resulted in one of three Oscar nominations for the film, the first was for Best Song, the second for Best Film Editing, and the third was for Madeline Kahn’s great interpretation of Lili Von Shtupp. I was really very pleased, because I wasn’t sure the Academy was hip enough to recognize the layers and the depth of her brilliant work in that role.
Madeline became part of a great stock company that I was unknowingly putting together for future films. Like writer/director Preston Sturges did in the 1940s, I was starting to gather brilliant performers who I could call on to do almost anything. There was Madeline, Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Dom DeLuise, and soon I would add the great Marty Feldman and Cloris Leachman—but more on that later.
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