Monday, April 5, 2004

Monday Evening

Barring some breaking news, posting here will be light for the next few days while I finish a seriously-due manuscipt and my income taxes. For some reason, doing the latter makes me think it's time to post another one of these...

• Posted at 9:51 PM · LINK

Blazing E-Mails

I have a half-dozen messages this morning telling me that the most memorable line from Blazing Saddles is: "'scuse me while I whip this out." If you say so.

Someone else asks if it's true that Mel Brooks wanted Richard Pryor to play the lead but the studio refused. That's what I always heard and I wonder if Brooks wasn't lucky that he didn't get his way. Obviously, Pryor is a much funnier actor than Cleavon Little...but Little was more clean-cut and heroic and handsome. And no one can ever say for sure but I wonder if he didn't fit the role better than Pryor would have. A key point in the film as made was that Bart was wholly qualified for the sheriff job but the town wouldn't accept him because of his skin color. Pryor would probably not have seemed so competent.

Actually, Brooks got lucky with a couple of casting replacements. The role of the burned-out gunslinger was originally offered to Johnny Carson (!) who passed on it because he didn't think the script was funny. The studio then ignored Mel's wishes and signed Gig Young for the part, and Young actually showed up for a day or two of shooting but was unable to perform. He had some sort of alcohol-related anxiety attack on the set so he was out, as was Dan Dailey, who apparently was signed at some point but was also having too much trouble with his drinking to play an old drunk. As the story goes, Brooks finally called Gene Wilder in New York, and Wilder hopped on a plane and was in Burbank and before the cameras the next morning. That worked out okay.

So did Madeline Kahn, who got herself fired from the film version of Mame, which was shooting at the same time. She was playing Agnes Gooch and Lucille Ball, who was playing Mame, thought Kahn was hopelessly miscast in the movie. (The rest of Show Business felt the same way about Lucy.) Kahn was axed and she immediately signed for Blazing Saddles, prompting Lucy and others to suggest she had underperformed as Gooch just to get out. If so, it was a good call. Lucy should have tried the same trick.

• Posted at 10:54 AM · LINK

Before Bedtime...

Time to face reality: I have fallen hopelessly behind in answering e-mail. I just spent two hours, which is all I can spare tonight, responding...and I still have over 200 unanswered recent messages.

I have a major deadline this week, plus I have to get my income tax data collected and over to my Business Manager before he leaves for Brazil with the rest of my money. But I'll try to catch up soon. In the meantime, please be patient. And if you write a message and it doesn't need a reply, that would be a nice thing to mention. Thanks.

• Posted at 2:23 AM · LINK

Remembering Julie

Peter Sanderson reports on the recent memorial service in New York for Julius Schwartz. I'm sorry I couldn't get back there for it.

• Posted at 1:41 AM · LINK

Blazing Previews

We were talking here the other day about seeing Blazing Saddles when it first came out. That brought this message from Ben Herndon...

I am 50 years old now, but back in 1974 I was attending U.C.L.A. Warner Brothers scheduled a free midnight sneak preview of Blazing Saddles on a weekend night and the Avco Cinema was packed with rowdy U.C.L.A. students.

Westwood Village had been plastered with those great old posters of Mel as an Indian Head nickel type chief — but we still didn't know what to expect. As you may recall, Mel wasn't really "hot" in 1974. The Producers had been released six years earlier, but was still considered by many to be something of a cult favorite.

Anyway, when Cleavon Little launched into that Cole Porter song, the audience went totally crazy. I have never seen an audience react to this new type of raunchy humor like this audience did. Mel had a unanimous, unqualified, smashing success at the preview. It was the talk of Westwood for weeks.

Twenty years later, I went with Leonard Maltin to interview Mel. He told us that even as the cheering at the end of the film was still going on, the Warner Bros. suits were clustered around Mel at the rear of the theater telling him..."Okay, they loved it, but you'll still cut out the campfire fart jokes, and the Lili Von Schtupp sex scenes, and the n-words...?"

Mel was blithely answering them, "Yes, yes, sure, of course..." but he never changed a frame of film or dialog. The release print was the same as we all saw that historical night in Westwood.

The rest, as they say, is history...

I had a friend who was also in that audience and his report on the audience response was about the same as yours. I saw it a short time later...also at the Avco. As I mentioned, no one really knew what to expect so it was a grand experience. I really enjoy movies more when I haven't already seen half the film in trailers and the other half in talk show clips. (Another such experience I recall was a Writers Guild advance screening of Paddy Chayefsky's Network. The film was not quite as impressive in later viewings but that night, when no one in the house knew anything about it, it was amazing. I happened to be sitting next to Ray Bradbury and at the end, he looked around the packed theater and said, "There isn't one person in this room who wouldn't give his left arm to have written that movie...including me.")

Back to Blazing Saddles. The gag I remember everyone talking about on the way out of the theater was when Cleavon Little's character is riding across the desert to rather jazzy music...and it turns out that it's coming from Count Basie's band, which is playing out there. The joke no longer seems that clever since some variation on it turned up in about half the comedy movies made during the rest of the seventies. Mel even did it again in High Anxiety with a symphony orchestra in a bus. I'm guessing the bit from Blazing Saddles that is most often quoted these days is when Little puts the gun to his head and takes himself hostage. How often have we heard someone compare some real world action to that moment?

Thanks for the message, Ben. When I get a moment this week, I'll post a fun excerpt from the script to Blazing Saddles that never got filmed. If it had, I'd still be back in that seat at the Avco, laughing my butt off.

• Posted at 1:13 AM · LINK

April 6, 2004 • Current • April 4, 2004