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.

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.

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.

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.

Eric Boehlert discusses the way the Bush administration has rammed through funding for both the Iraq war and its Medicare program by floating incorrect figures and only later revealing the true costs. This is a Salon.Com story, which means that if you're not a member, you'll have to watch some advertising.

A reader of my websites, Ray Barrington, calls the following to my attention. In this post on my other weblog, written back in December of '02, I was talking about how some companies like to change what their initials stand for. I predicted that the KFC company would begin denying that their initials stood for "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and would come up with some other name. Well, as Ray points out, their commercials are now claiming it stands for "Kitchen Fresh Chicken." Yeah, right.

Over on one of the theater chatboards, there was recently a discussion of cell phones going off in the middle of a performance. There is no disagreement that this is a bad thing. I am still embarrassed over one time when mine did. It was in New York while my friend Carolyn and I were taking in the recent Broadway revival of Follies. I had diligently remembered to turn my little Motorola off before the show started but during the second act, there was a moment when a lady sitting next to Carolyn was so touched that she began sobbing. I usually carry a little pocket-pak of Kleenex with me and being a grand gent, I extracted a tissue and offered it to her. Apparently as I was doing this, I accidentally nudged the "on" button on my phone and at a key dramatic point about ten minutes later — the worst possible moment — I was suddenly ringing.

Fortunately, we were far enough from the stage that it did not distract the players. Humiliated, I grabbed out my phone, ripped off the back and yanked out the battery. Even though my new phone (a Sony-Ericcson) has a "lock" option on it, I don't trust the thing. When I go into a play or movie now, I always remove the battery. Just to be absolutely certain.

Some on the boards are talking about laws that would make it a crime to bring a cellphone into a theater, even one turned off or set on "vibrate." Cities may experiment with such legislation but I doubt it's a real solution. Some people really do need to be reachable during a show — doctors, people with baby sitters, pimps, etc. Others need to be able to check for messages during intermission. Generally speaking, I think most folks who rely on their phones that way know how to use them. The problem is that a lot of folks learn no more about their phones than how to dial and how to answer.

This is not, obviously, a world-shattering problem nor is it ever 100% solvable. But I have an idea I'd like to throw out there in the slim hope that it will reach someone who can make it happen. Cellular companies like Cingular and T-Mobile spend staggering sums of cash to promote their services. I think one of them could drum up some cost-effective good will by setting up an "800" number, free to all, where anyone could call up and speak to someone who would talk them through (a) how to turn the ringer off on their cell phone, (b) how to turn on "vibrate" and (c) how to "lock" the phone off so it doesn't do what mine did and accidentally turn on. (Actually, my Motorola didn't lock. When I picked out its successor, I made sure to get one that did.)

I can imagine a series of commercials in which someone is in a theater during a tense, dramatic scene and their cell phone goes off. The surrounding audience members then beat the guy up while a voiceover says, "Don't let this happen to you…call (800) Whatever and a kind, understanding person will teach you the proper way to turn your cell phone off." If there's time, the voiceover might add, "And if you don't call, remember — you can definitely silence your phone during a show just by removing its battery." It's amazing how many people don't think of that.

When a hapless cell phone owner calls the "800" number, they reach someone with a little database of the pertinent instructions for every current model, and they can look up that phone and explain to the caller what to do, and maybe even call them back to test that they've done it correctly. It wouldn't take a lot to set up such a database or to train a crew to field calls. If I were thinking of which cellular service to sign up with, it would certainly make me think well of the one that set up such a service.

I don't expect this to happen but I thought I'd toss it out there. Just an idea.

Sir Sean Connery has a website…and a very handsome one, I might add.

Here's a long but important article in the New York Times magazine section about the Bush administration's attempts and occasional successes to roll back environmental protection laws. Pretty scary stuff.

Bill Carter, who reports on TV for the New York Times and especially on late night, files this long piece on Conan O'Brien. The quick summary of it is that Conan wants to move up to a show at 11:30 and since Jay Leno ain't going anywhere, O'Brien may be going elsewhere.

Like several of Carter's past articles on late night teevee, this reads like someone's agents are about to open negotiations on their client's future and to put pressure on the network, someone said, "Let's plant a story with Bill Carter." The next probable step in Conan's situation is an auction with Fox, syndicators and maybe ABC or some of the cable networks offering huge sums to wrest Conan away from NBC…though NBC may hurriedly make some kind of mega-deal involving prime-time commitments to keep the guy right where he is. The odds are that's what will happen…but things could get interesting. (While we're at it, here's a link to Carter's recent article on Leno's new contract.)

While working this afternoon, I have some DVDs on the player, including the movie version of A Chorus Line. The best thing about this DVD is that it has a special feature, an interview with Marvin Hamlisch in which he discusses how the Broadway show came to be and says not one single word about the movie. It's hard to not assume this was because he didn't have much good to say about it…and neither did anyone else, as I recall. Given that about 80% of it follows the show precisely, it's amazing how the other 20% or so jerks things so far from what we saw on stage. I already wrote about this adaptation (here) but I felt like mentioning that repeated viewings — and this is may be my last — have not improved my view of it.

Oh, yeah…and here's an Amazon link in case you want to purchase it but trust me. You don't.

HBO and Showtime have this strange way of rotating shows where, for example, Real Time With Bill Maher does a batch of shows and then it goes off for a while and On the Record With Bob Costas returns for a spell. Showtime has just brought back the Penn & Teller program which I liked but with reservations. (I don't think a guy who claims that second-hand smoke can harm you is as deserving of contempt and exposure as a guy making millions claiming to talk with the dead.)

Anyway, I highly recommend the Costas program, which keeps moving farther and farther from its original concept as a sports show. The first new outing, which reruns several times before a new episode next Friday, features Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Billy Bob Thornton, Josh Groban, and Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Whether the topic is sports or show biz, Costas is one of the best interviewers ever on television.

William Saletan nails what I suspect is a key element in the debate over George W. Bush's leadership capabilities or the lack, thereof. An awful lot of folks, both Democrats and Republicans, have sided with Bush and come to regret it. Unfortunately for sane discourse, when they change their minds, the immediate accusation is that since they said one thing then and now say another, they can't be trusted.

While we're at it, The Center for American Progress, a liberal site, has posted this list of Bush "flip-flops." I have never bought the notion that if a politician changes his position, it is a sign of weakness or insincerity. In many cases, I see it as a sign of being open to new evidence and willing to change with the times. But those who cite it as a negative about John Kerry ought to be willing to admit that Bush has often taken both sides of an issue.

Things seem to be stablilizing in the Writers Guild. We haven't changed Presidents for two whole weeks.

My pal Carl Gottlieb has stepped in as Vice-President. Carl is a very intelligent man who knows more about negotiations and the Guild than any man alive. But I'm still skeptical that the current drive to increase writers' revenues from DVDs is going to get anywhere.