At the Movies with Governor Tom: Blazing Saddles and History of the World: Part I

When Mel Brooks was a wee tot growing up in Brooklyn, he had an uncle named Joe who drove a cab. The thing about Joe, right? He was a tiny man. Mel said that if you saw a cab coming your way, and no one was at the wheel? That was Joe. Anyway, Uncle Joe was pals with this doorman in Manhattan named Al. One time, when Mel was nine or so, Al told Uncle Joe that he had two tickets to Anything Goes that he couldn't use. Anything Goes had premiered at the Alvin Theatre on Broadway the year earlier and was still going strong. It starred Ethel Merman in the lead as Reno Sweeney. Uncle Joe gladly unburdened Al of his tickets and invited his little nephew Melvin to go with him. The seats were in the last row of the second balcony, but still, according to Mel, Ethel Merman was a bit too loud. Seeing this musical pretty much determined Mel's career path. From that moment on, he knew he wanted to be in show biz.

Now how do I know that, you might ask? Well how else? Mel told me. Okay fine. He didn't tell me personally. He told all of us sitting in the audience during his Q&A. That's right, kids. I saw Mel Brooks in person! THE Mel Brooks. Comedy legend Mel Brooks. In person. You don't understand, I grew up watching a good share of this guy's resume: Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, History of the World: Part I, Spaceballs. When Spaceballs was on cable regularly in the late eighties, I probably saw it about half a million times or so. The first Mel film I saw, however, was History of the World: Part I. My brothers and I rented it sometime in the mid eighties and watched it like it was going out of style. Plus, again, HBO had it on a lot. That was my introduction to Mel. When I heard that Mel himself, just north of eighty years old God bless 'im, was appearing in person last night, I couldn't resist. What was gravy was that it was in honor of this double feature of what are, in my humble opinion, his finest gems: Blazing Saddles and History of the World: Part I. Actually, it was one of three appearances he's making during this five-day Mel festival at the Aero, with two films per day. Sure, I'd love to go see all ten films, but there's this little thing that gets in the way. It's called life. When I saw this event scheduled a few weeks ago, I decided I had to go on one of the nights when he was going to be there. And of those three nights, there simply was no better choice than this one. Come on now. Blazing Saddles AND History of the World: Part I? In the same night? With Mel in person? As Grant, the guy who always introduces screenings at the Aero and conducts the Q&As most of the time, said last night, if the sign outside said "Aero Hotel and Casino," our tickets would've cost $500. As it was, it only cost $10. Again, quoting Grant: "Highway robbery!"

First, they showed Blazing Saddles, right? Then Mel came up, and Grant interviewed him and all that. And then you know what Mel did? He stayed and watched History of the World: Part I with us. Can you imagine? This film had been my Mel initiation. And now I've seen it. With Mel! I don't mean to go all googly-eyed on you, but how ridiculous and wonderful can you get? It'd be like you were a U2 fan or something. And Bono and all the guys came over and listened to one of their albums with you and then talked about it afterward. Are you getting what I'm saying?

Before I get to the Q&A, let me talk a little about the films. Blazing Saddles takes place in New Mexico or some such southwestern place in the 1870s. The brilliant Harvey Korman, a regular on The Carol Burnett Show at this time, plays the shamelessly corrupt state attorney general named Hedley Lamarr. No one gets his name right, though. They call him Hedy Lamarr. Get it? No? Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian actress whose heyday was a bit before your time then. Anyway, whether you got it or not, his being called Hedy frustrates him to no end. Poor Hedy--I mean, Hedley--wants land. He's trying to grab enough land to allow a railroad to run through his state. Only problem is, the railroad would have to run straight through this one town called Rock Ridge (where everyone's last name is Johnson). Hedy--sorry, Hedley--needs to find a way to scare everyone out of town so he can get the railroad through there. How does he plan to do it? He takes one of the railroad workers, a black guy named Bart (Black Bart, get it? Oh come on, you must get that one!), and makes him the new sheriff. Never in the history of those United States had there ever been a black sheriff. This is back when they use the evil N word as casually as you and I use the word Starbucks. So Black Bart becomes the new sheriff. Hedy Lamarr of course hopes the people of Rock Ridge would rather run away than live under a black sheriff. If it were a perfect world, they'd kill Bart first, then abandon the town.

Neither happens. Hedy Lamarr apparently forgot that the notorious gunslinger known as the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder, awesome as always), who's killed more people than Cecil B. DeMille, is still being held prisoner in the Rock Ridge jail cell inside the sheriff's office. Black Bart, a "sophisticated urbanite," strikes up a fast friendship with the Waco Kid. Together, the two of them find a way to escape Hedy Lamarr's machinations. Not only that, but the townsfolk soon come to like their new sheriff. That's right, kids. Poor Hedy Lamarr, while simply trying to evacuate Rock Ridge so he can profit from the expanding railroad, ends up opening a can of nightcrawlers. The whole thing blows up in his face. But how does it blow up? Ah, that's where I'll leave it to you to watch this priceless picture.

History of the World: Part I, about 90 minutes like Blazing Saddles, isn't one feature-length story but a series of sketches taking place during certain time periods, some sketches much longer than others. Like Blazing Saddles, though, a lot of the humor comes from blatant anachronisms. For instance, upon being asked for a last request, the prisoner says, "Novacaine." The executioner's like, "There's no such thing known to medical science," and then the prisoner's like, "I'll wait."

First you've got the dawn of man, featuring a hilarious series of mini-sketches that show how man discovered singing and what have you (hint: it involves slamming people's feet with rocks). The main caveman in that is played by Sid Caesar. Does the name at least sound familiar to you? He was huge back in the fifties and sixties. In the fifties he had this comedy sketch show called Your Show of Shows. Guess who one of the writers on the show was? Mel to the Brooks. Mel wasn't even 30 yet. Landing that gig provided a huge boost to his career. In addition to Sid, Imogene Coca and Carl Reiner were two of the show's regulars. Anyway, so Sid went on to star in two of Mel's films, this one as well as Silent Movie five years earlier (Mel's follow-up to Blazing Saddles).

So anyway, after the dawn of man, you've got Mel playing Moses carrying fifteen commandments on three tablets. One of them breaks, and that's why we have ten commandments to this day. And then there's the Roman Empire, the Last Supper, the Inquisition, and finally the French Revolution. The Inquisition segment is really just this one musical number. After hearing his Anything Goes story, it's perfectly obvious watching the Inquisition bit how much the man loves musicals. He wrote the lyrics, as he'd eventually do for the stage musical adaptations of The Producers and Young Frankenstein.

If you're seeing History of the World right after Blazing Saddles, you'll recognize some of the actors. There's Dom DeLuise playing Emperor Nero. And Madeline Kahn plays his wife, Empress Nympho. And once again you've got Harvey Korman playing a guy whose name no one can get straight. This time he's Count de Monet, but everyone calls him Count de Money. One special guest star you've got in this flick is Englishman John Hurt. The year before this was made, Mel Brooks produced The Elephant Man under his production company at Fox, Brooksfilm. It was directed by David Lynch and starred John Hurt as John Merrick, a.k.a. the Elephant Man. Anthony Hopkins played his doctor. They must've liked working together because Mel got John to cameo in History of the World as Jesus during the Last Supper bit. Mel's character from the Roman Empire segment, Comicus, is their waiter. A few years later John Hurt showed up briefly in Mel's Spaceballs playing the same guy he played in Alien, the one with the alien bursting from his chest. "Oh no," he says in Spaceballs. "Not again!"

Since the Q&A immediately followed Blazing Saddles, Mel mostly talked about that. One day in the early seventies, when he was strolling the streets of New York, he heard a voice behind him say, "Need some change?" Mel turned and saw one of his writer friends who happened to be out for a stroll himself. This guy told Mel about this other writer Mel had never met before named Andrew Bergman. Turned out Andrew had an outline for a movie idea called Tex Ex, a comedy Western. Perhaps Mel would take a look at it and maybe help the guy bring it to the big screen. At first Mel was less than thrilled. Last night he said his response was: "I'm a New York Jew. What the hell am I going to do with a Western?" Just to humor his friend, though, Mel went to Andrew and took a look at the outline. He loved it and thought it had a lot of potential. So he and Andrew started writing the script together.

Let me tell you a little something about Andrew. At this time, he was in his late twenties, a full 20 years younger than Mel. He was an aspiring writer from Queens who hadn't published or produced a single word, but thanks to that one friend introducing him to Mel, that was about to change. He's had a fairly steady writing career since. After Blazing Saddles, he created the ill-fated TV spinoff of Blazing Saddles, called Black Bart, which had Louis Gossett Jr. playing Bart. Andrew also penned the scripts for The In-Laws, Oh, God! You Devil, Fletch, The Freshman, Soapdish, and Honeymoon in Vegas. For his first writing credit, though, he would have to share the credit not only with Mel but with three others.

During the early seventies, Mel was a lunchtime regular at Chock Full O' Nuts. Often, he said, he'd be in there to grab a bite when this attorney friend of his, Norman Steinberg, would show up and bug him about helping him get into the writing biz. According to Mel, Norman's signature line would be, "I'm a lawyer, but I want to be a writer. I'm a lawyer, but I want to be a writer." And he'd just hammer Mel with that refrain. Finally Mel relented and invited Norman to help him with what was still called Tex Ex. Norman joining the team meant another guy joining up, a dentist friend of Norman's named Alan Uger. Alan worked with them only temporarily before, as Mel said last night, he had to go "fill cavities." Still, Alan did contribute enough material to the screenplay to get equal writing credit with Mel, Andrew, Norman...and the fifth recruit.

This was none other than Richard Pryor, who of course would go on to become a comedy legend himself. At this time he was in his early thirties and had already been working steadily as both an actor and a writer for about a decade. His writing credits at this point included two episodes of Sanford & Son and some other TV stuff. Among his acting credits were guest-starring stints on shows like The Mod Squad and The Partridge Family. The most notable work by far that he'd done as an actor at that point was Piano Man in Lady Sings the Blues. This was about two years before Blazing Saddles. You ever see that? It's Diana Ross playing Billie Holiday. Check it out, it's good stuff. That really helped get his acting career on track. In fact, Mel really wanted Richard to play Bart in Blazing Saddles, but the suits at Warner Brothers, especially the head guy there, Ted Ashley, thought Richard's drug habit made him too much of a liability. Mel had already known Richard for a good while at this point from the New York comedy club circuit. They got along famously, which made Richard a natural fit for Mel's writing team. Last night Mel said the gravy of having Richard on board was that they could actually get away with things like the evil N word and black characters who were blatant stereotypes. Of course, as far as the Bart character goes, Richard drew him completely against type. But Richard contributed more than all that to the script. For example, remember Mongo? Richard wrote all his dialogue. And then after Blazing Saddles, he started focusing more on his acting. In short order he did both Car Wash and Silver Streak. His movie career was on track. Although we probably shouldn't talk about Superman III.

As for Cleavon Little, the man who ended up playing Black Bart, Mel couldn't say enough about how much he grew to admire him. When directing, Mel makes it a point not to eat lunch with his actors. 'Cause, you know, if you eat lunch with one actor, the rest of the cast might view that actor as being an ass kisser or whatever. Then that could lead to in-fighting and all that nonsense. So Mel typically avoids lunching with the cast. With Cleavon, though, it was different. He actually asked Cleavon if they could sit at the same table in the Warners cafeteria. If you've never heard of Cleavon Little, that's because movies weren't really his thing. Blazing Saddles was probably the highest profile film on his resume. His main thing was theater. He attended Julliard on a full scholarship, did Shakespeare, won a Tony, all that stuff. Cleavon also logged tons of TV guest spots. And then, sadly, he became another great talent gone before his time. He passed away of colon cancer about fifteen years ago, at age 53. Mel even choked up a little last night when remembering Cleavon.

One of his funnier Blazing anectdotes concerned the test screenings at Warners. In fact, no sooner did he come up after the film than someone in the audience shouted out, "How did you get away with it?!" First of all, Mel couldn't emphasize enough how he and the other four writers never believed for a second their script would ever get made. He kept warning Andrew Bergman, who came up with the idea, that a snowball had a better chance of surviving a brush fire than their script had to get produced. Because of this view that they had nothing to lose, Mel said they just went balls to the wall with the humor. Mel's skepticism during the writing process didn't have anything to do at all with Andrew's outline, by the way. He loved the idea. But at this point in his career, Mel had only directed two films, and neither made much money. He said that his first film, The Producers, only played in a handful of cities. His second film, Twelve Chairs, made, as he put it, "Thirty-six cents." So here he was, pushing 50 and figuring no one would ever let him make a movie again, and certainly not a Western satire.

But son of a bitch, Warners did let them make it, but they greenlighted it before Mel et al had a final draft of the script. It wasn't until after the film was shot that Warners head honcho Ted Ashley realized what he'd gotten himself into. It was hilarious, what happened at the test screening. As Mel described it, the first test screening was with all the top brass at Warners, including Ted Ashley. When the movie was over, Ted took Mel into another room and gave him no less than two dozen or so changes to make. Mel wrote them all down as Ted spoke. First, you can't show a guy punching out a horse. And you can't have a scene with people farting. And for God's sake, Mel, you can't have anyone saying the evil N word. You know, stuff like that. So Mel thanked Ted for his valuable feedback. Then, right after Ted left the room, he tore up the sheet of paper and didn't change a thing. Soon after, they had a test screening for all the peons of Warner Brothers, the administrative staff and what have you. The first scene in the film, right? You've got that chain gang of blacks and Asians working on the railroad. One of the Asians passes out because of the heat, and the head guard's like, "Dock that chink a day's pay for napping." Mel said that's when everyone in the audience laughed their asses off, and he knew this test screening was going to go over much better than the suits' screening.

Still, the executives didn't know what to make of it. Mel said it may never have reached a theater near you if it hadn't been for a suit at Warners named John Calley. He was different from Ted and the others in that he had a shred of foresight. He could see that this film was going to be a smash, and might even get some awards attention. He convinced Ted to release it without any of those changes. John Calley, by the way, eventually left Warners and became the head honcho at Sony Pictures. A few years ago he left Sony and now produces films with his own production company. Recent credits include Closer, The Da Vinci Code, The Jane Austin Book Club, and the upcoming Da Vinci prequel Angels & Demons.

So thank John Calley for Blazing Saddles. I obviously don't need to tell you how extremely popular the film was, and still is, judging by last night's sellout crowd. Did you know that Blazing Saddles was the first film to show farting onscreen? Weird, huh? Comedies these days have become so raunchy that we take scatological humor for granted. In addition to turning a profit, it also racked up three Oscar nominations. One was for Best Song for the title song "Blazing Saddles." Guess who wrote the lyrics for that. You know it: Melvin Brooks. Madeline Kahn scored a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

Oh yeah. Madeline "Wrath of" Kahn. Mel talked about her a bit. Her Blazing character, Lili Von Shtupp (a.k.a. the Teutonic Titwillow), was a direct riff on Marlene Dietrich from the 1939 flick Destry Rides Again. That song "I'm Tired" that she sings when Bart and the Waco Kid see her for the first time was a riff on Marlene's singing "Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It)". Mel expressed some regret that a lot of her scenes with Cleavon Little had to be edited out because they weren't exactly germane to the story. You see, in order to get rid of Black Bart, Hedy Lamarr hires Lili Von Shtupp to seduce Bart and lure him into a trap. Instead, Bart turns out to be great in the sack, and Lili falls for him and joins his cause against Hedy. So at least a few of their scenes together survived. Madeline Kahn was just awesome, wasn't she? Of course you should see her in all the Mel stuff she did, but don't forget to check out Judy Berlin, her very last picture. With Edie Falco in the title role, it came out the same year Madeline passed away. As with Cleavon, it was cancer that got her.

Speaking of Mel Brooks regulars, Rudy De Luca was at the screening last night. He didn't come up and talk, but Mel did make him stand up and take a bow at one point. He was sitting way in the back, where Mel went to sit after the Q&A to watch History of the World: Part I with us. Like Harvey Korman, Rudy cut his comedy teeth on The Carol Burnett Show, only he worked on the show as a writer. He also did writing stints for The Tim Conway Show before Mel came calling. Tim Conway, by the way, was another regular for Carol Burnett. He and Harvey Korman did some of the best skits together. Seriously. I'm sure you could find them on YouTube. They were a riot. So anyway, in the seventies Rudy hooked up with Mel and ever since has done lots of stuff with him. He co-wrote Silent Movie, High Anxiety, Life Stinks, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. He also had supporting roles in just about all of those flicks as well as Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. In History of the World he plays Captain Mucus.

Someone up front asked Mel what makes a good comedian. Mel said he had no idea, that it was much too broad a question. He said you could understand how difficult a question that is when you think about the sheer diversity of comedians over the decades. How do you get from Charlie Chaplin to Ben Stiller? Both are very successful comedians but are so different from each other. One thing that always helps, Mel said, is to be a die hard fan of comedy. You gotta love it if you're gonna do it.

This led him to reminisce for a few minutes about Johnny Carson. Mel loved Johnny, loved being on his show. In fact, here's a nice bit of trivia. Did you know that Mel Brooks was one of the guests on the very first episode of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson? The Tonight Show had been around since the fifties, but Johnny didn't take over as host until October 1, 1962. On that night the guests included Tony Bennett, Joan Crawford, Groucho Marx...and a thirty-six-year-old unknown "New York Jew" named Mel Brooks. Cool, huh? Mel was a guest on Johnny's show another four times over the next 30 or so years. He talked about one time when Johnny didn't like his tie and sort of on the spur of the moment reached over and cut it off at the stem with a pair of scissors. Mel returned the favor, and for the rest of the interview the two of them continued bantering as if wearing a severed tie were a perfectly normal thing. Mel said that Jay Leno was doing all right, but Letterman was too weird. He's never been on The Late Show because he doesn't feel comfortable watching it. Dave, in Mel's opinion, tries too hard to be funny.

The only History of the World question I remember was about Barry Levinson's cameo as the column salesman in the Roman Forum ("Columns, columns! Get your columns here! Ionic, Doric, Corinthian! Put a few columns in front, turn any hovel into a showplace! Columns...! Sir, don't touch the merchandise. All right now, columns, columns!"). If you've heard of Barry at all, it's no doubt as a director. Originally from Baltimore, his directorial debut was Diner, which he made the year after History of the World. Other Baltimore films he did include Tin Men, Avalon, and Liberty Heights. He's also directed a lot of great non-Baltimore stuff like The Natural, Good Morning, Vietnam, Rain Man (for which he won an Oscar), and lots more. He was also one of the brains behind Homicide: Life on the Street, the one-hour Baltimore-set crime drama from the nineties. What a lot of people don't know, however, is that, like Rudy de Luca, Barry Levinson came of age as a writer on The Carol Burnett Show and The Tim Conway Show. He also helped write two of Mel's earlier flicks, Silent Movie and High Anxiety. Mel had nothing but nice things to say about Barry, and he's glad he got to work with him when he did. Because as you can tell, as soon as he made Diner, Barry's career blasted off into the stratosphere.

Barry is just one more example of the level of talent Mel's been attracting throughout his career, even if it's for a cameo. That speaks volumes about his character. After seeing him last night, it's obvious that he's very much salt of the earth with his heart on his sleeve. I'm guessing it's a piece of cake to work for him because if he had a problem with you, he'd just tell you point blank instead of leave you guessing, and he'd somehow still make you laugh. More than that, though, he'd no doubt push you to succeed by pointing to himself as an example of improbable success. Yeah, Mel's definitely one of those guys who would say, "Hey, if I can do this. You can too."