—
My anarchy vis-à-vis Blazing Saddles didn’t stop with filming; it carried on to the first screening of Blazing Saddles at the Avco Embassy theater on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. I had the lobby filled with live cattle, mooing and doing what live cattle do. It was terrible and wonderful. The theater was packed. There wasn’t a seat to be had. The audience loved it—they went bananas! It was one of the greatest nights of my life. To work so hard on a film for so long and to be rewarded with nonstop riotous laughter is the greatest payment in the world. It was an incredible screening right from the first Frankie Laine rendition of the title song to the limo driving our heroes off into the sunset. It was, as they say in Variety, “A LAFF RIOT.”
* * *
—
My worries about whether or not audiences would get and embrace Blazing Saddles went out the window that night. Everything worked…except for one slight hitch.
The head of Warner Bros., who hadn’t seen any of the footage before, grabbed me on the way out of the screening. He pulled me into the manager’s office at the Avco Embassy theater and I grabbed John Calley to come with me for moral support. He handed me a yellow legal pad and a pencil and said, “Take notes! Farting scene, out.”
I said, “Farting scene, out.”
He said, “No punching a horse. Cannot punch a horse.”
I said, “How stupid of me. How silly! Can’t hit a horse. Mongo punching horse, out.”
It went on and on.
He said, “N-word. Cannot say that word.”
I said, “N-word, out.”
He continued: “No scenes with the secretary. No boobs.”
The greatest thing in Blazing Saddles was Madeline Kahn singing “I’m Tired.” He said: “Too dirty. Take the song out.”
I said, “?‘I’m Tired,’ out.”
I’m taking all of these notes. He’s running a film studio, he should realize that if I had listened to every single thing that he wanted me to cut we’d have the shortest movie in the history of film. I sat down after he left, tore the page of notes off the yellow legal pad, crumpled it up, and tossed it in the wastepaper basket.
John Calley said, “Well filed.”
* * *
—
I never changed a thing. Like I’ve said before, as far as movie executives are concerned, always agree with them, but never do a thing they say. When the good reviews, and more important for the front office, the money started rolling in, I never heard a bad word from the head of the studio again.
* * *
—
Blazing Saddles opened in stages. It opened in a limited run in February of 1974, and it must have played in only about a hundred theaters nationwide, but to very successful numbers, pretty good reviews, and, most important, very good word of mouth.
Instead of their normal summer fare, Warner Bros. expanded Blazing Saddles into a wide release. Apparently, the exhibitors had been clamoring for it. They made a lot more prints and that summer it really exploded. Whatever I had done before—Blazing Saddles was forty times bigger. It was supposed to run through June and July, but instead it went all the way through Labor Day. A lot of the theaters wouldn’t take it out. (In those days that was a long time for a movie to run!) There was concern among some critics that the outrageousness of Blazing Saddles would destroy the Western as a film genre. Not only were they wrong, at the time it became the second-highest-grossing Western, after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Finally, after two good pictures I had managed to make not only another good picture but, to boot, my first big hit.
Chapter 13
Young Frankenstein
One day on the Western town set of Blazing Saddles, when we broke for lunch I noticed Gene Wilder leaning against the sheriff’s office and scribbling something on a pad propped up on his knees.
I said, “Gene, how ’bout lunch?”
He said, “In a minute, I have to finish a thought I have.”
I said, “What are you writing there?”
He handed me the pad and at the top it had the words “?‘Young Frankenstein.’?”
I repeated, “?‘Young Frankenstein,’ what is that?”
He said, “I have this idea for a movie about Baron Frankenstein’s grandson. He’s an uptight scientist who doesn’t believe any of that nonsense about bringing the dead back to life. Even though he is clinically a scientist, he is as crazy as any Frankenstein. It’s in his heart. It’s in his blood. It’s in the marrow of his bones…only he doesn’t know it yet.”
“Sounds interesting,” I said. “What is your dream for this movie?”
He said, “My dream is for you to write it with me and direct the movie.”
I said, “You got any money on you?”
“I have fifty-seven dollars,” Gene said.
(This is true.)
“It’s a beginning,” I said. “I’ll take it. I’ll take it as a down payment on writing Young Frankenstein with you. And if I like what we’ve done, I’ll direct it.”
That was the beginning.
* * *
—
That night, I went over to Gene’s bungalow, at the Hotel Bel-Air, to discuss the concept. We stayed up until the early hours of the morning talking about the story line over Earl Grey tea and English digestive biscuits. We talked about being very faithful to the tempo and the look of James Whale’s marvelous black-and-white films, Frankenstein from 1931 and Bride of Frankenstein from 1935.
James Whale’s talent was in how he told the Frankenstein story visually. Gene and I watched Whale’s movies together multiple times. We saw how he took his time. Whale wanted everything to be deep, dark, and somber. He had worked in the theater before he started in film, which is where he met Colin Clive, the actor who plays the insane Dr. Frankenstein. When Whale’s Frankenstein came out, it was a smash hit, and catapulted Boris Karloff, who played the monster, to stardom. Whale got pigeonholed as a horror director and would go on to direct The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein, which we later referenced liberally. Whale knew exactly how to scare the hell out of you, but he was also a great artist who was not appreciated for those talents as much as he should have been. We decided to base the look and spirit of Young Frankenstein on the James Whale classics.
* * *
—
Gene and I quickly got into a rhythm of working together. Each night after I finished in the editing room on Blazing Saddles and had dinner, I’d go to Gene’s hotel. At the beginning we concentrated on satirizing and saluting the James Whale films, but later we expanded it into our own story line. We knew exactly where we were going. Gene wrote everything in pencil on his yellow legal pads, which my secretary typed up the next day.