Interviewer: You know, I’m going to start a little off of. Chronology for second. I was talking to somebody the other day who must have been a teenager. When Blazing Saddles came out and he said, the movie or Mel, however, you want to tell me if you agree with this? He said he made it cool to be Jewish.
Andrew Bergman: He made it cool to be Jewish. That’s interest. I never heard that before. That’s a that’s a new one. I thought being Jewish was either always cool or never cool. Interesting that that’s when I actually have never heard. You know, I guess I mean, there was certainly enough hip Jewish comics before. I mean, as opposed to Lenny Bruce making it hip to be Jewish. I never heard it in that context that the movie itself made it hip to be Jewish.
Interviewer: You know, this guy even he definitely referenced the movie. But he even referenced the poster with the Hebrew writing on Mels.
Andrew Bergman: Well, that’s true. I was one of the great posters of all time. Anthony Goldsmith had created. But I never thought of it as as as Jewish as Mel is. And as most of us were, except for Richie Pryor I never thought of as a Jewish movie. To me, the movie was a bunch of guys sitting in a movie theater watching a Western and talking back to the screen. That’s really what it was, in essence.
Interviewer: How did you give us the here’s the backstory on all of I’m Blazing Saddles for you.
Andrew Bergman: The backstory was I had an idea going back to graduate school in the 60s already when I was in university, Wisconsin. It was a vision I had of a town waiting for a sheriff to show up and in rides, someone who looks like a trap. Brown, who was a pig. Milton at the time, a guy with this fabulous American Basketball Association Afro on and shades. And this is your new sheriff and the town has to deal with it. And in the original version, he has an actual romance with the daughter of a land baron, et cetera, et cetera. I wrote a script. Warner Brothers bought it and hired me to write a first draft, which I did. It’s like 160 pages. I’ve never written anything before. Not fictional anything. Never written a script. A book. I just written this this vision I had of this guy. And they decided to go ahead with the movie. And originally they’d hired James Earl Jones to play the sheriff and Alan Arkin was gonna direct it. And that fell apart. And then they started looking for director and they came back and said, How about Mel Brooks? I said, I worship Mel Brooks. Be fantastic. So he calls me one day when I’m sitting in my apartment. I’m 26 years old and I said Mel Brooks calls and says. I want to make this movie. You want to be part of it. I said to me, you know. Yes, I do want to be part of it. So I never done anything before. Plus, Mel was like my my hero. I mean, where I went to school, if you didn’t know the 2000 year old man, you couldn’t understand half the conversations. Half of them referenced the two thousand year old man. So it was it was that was that was my introduction to it. And then we began this insane writing process.
Interviewer: Tell us who is in the in. By the way, just as an aside, ran a second Mulvany, he said, and he’s right. He said that the natural thing would have been to immediately Gabbert.
Andrew Bergman: Go ahead.
Interviewer: No, you should mention, you know.
Andrew Bergman: No. Then the natural thing was the guy who wrote the original your firearm, that that’s time honored Hollywood practice. It was his idea. What does he know? And, you know, he was the new guy. And in fact, if I was in his position. I might have fired me. You know. I want to take ownership of the project. But he didn’t. I mean, he loved. He really loved the notion of it. So I was hired and originally was a Melloni. And and Norman Steinberg, who at that point had a writing partner, and Alan Yuga and Melissa, you can’t do this. We can’t afford you sitting in a room writing a movie about a black sheriff. I said, you’re absolutely right. He calls. I never got the conversation. He calls up Richard Pryor’s agencies for Jews in our room. We need someone to come in and do the windows. So they said. And that was an offer that Richard Pryor couldn’t refuse. So Richard Pryor shows up. And now we’re in this room with these five people. And you have to say, I had never written a movie before. I’d never been in this kind of situation before. Comedy writing situation. And it really was like walking on a tennis court and there’s, you know, Federer and Djokovic and Nadal and say, you want to be a fourth and play tennis. I was in sanely competitive and hilarious room, but I was 26. I had nothing to lose. And I said, hell, I’m as funny as anybody. So we just started this amazing, hysterical process. And as funny as that movie was, that Rome might have been even funnier.
Interviewer: So Allen left after all.
Andrew Bergman: Allen, you were left shortly after. It just didn’t work out. I mean, he was sort of Mel’s whipping boy for while NATO summit, someone who was the junior member. I was a junior member, but I’ve written the original. So I sort of Mel gave me a lot of room. So then the four of us wrote. And then about six weeks later, Richie left and Norman and Mel and I wrote the next, you know, 45 drafts. However many they were. We got the script originally. The first draft was like one hundred seventy five pages. And we got it down about a hundred and thirty pages.
Interviewer: What? Obviously, Mel had had a lot of experience in a room with other writers you had. I mean, how did you hold your own.
Andrew Bergman: Just sort of hutzpah. You know, it’s like everybody. Is it Richard Pryor was sort of on his on his ass at that point. Melody, two movies. Neither of which had done that well. You know, the producers in the trial judge. You mean the producers was this revered movie hadn’t been that successful.
Interviewer: Sorry. Sorry. Can you move back there? Can you move chicken? Because you’re in his camera. Just straight down the middle. Just go. Let go that way. You’re yes.
Andrew Bergman: Are we taking this entire thing from the top?
Interviewer: It’s not gonna work.
Andrew Bergman: Well, God wouldn’t as well.
Interviewer: Good time for a water or come, right? Yeah. OK. So actually, just if you just pick it up from. You’re saying Richard was on his ass. Yeah.
Andrew Bergman: I mean, Ritchie was it was sort of on his assets as a stand up. Norman was was a lawyer. He’d do he’d done a comedy show that Mel had worked on. So they got to know each other. And Mel was was had done two movies that hadn’t done that well. So he was. This was a big shot for him. This is his first real big studio movie was Warner Brothers. So. Although Mel was clearly the God in the room, we were really equals and we were and and dealt with each other as equals. It was sort of a game of telephone. You know, a joke would start and then by, you know, 20, 20 minutes later, it was some other thing and everybody had input and you didn’t know whose fingerprints were where. And then we had this this this woman named Leslie Brooks, who had a legal pad and friend who was trying to keep straight this this morass that we were throwing at. Now, as it was, I’ve never worked like that since. But Mel, as you it from shower shows where just screaming at each other and at the end of the day, you have a sketch. And this was although the threat of it was very the themes were very strong. It wasn’t a waste. A series of sketches with the central theme of racism in a parody of Westerns.
Interviewer: And you should you should mention this because it’s important for people to realize that, in fact, it’s probably due to you. I’m sure that the Story Foundation is, in fact, very solid, that it was more than, you know, the core of it. The trunk of it was a real solid story.
Andrew Bergman: the basis of this movie. And I think what made it the hit, it became. Was it you really believed? That Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder loved each other, at the end of the day, you really felt a tremendous kinship between them. And I think that’s that’s what made it truly work with all the insanity and the campfire scene and Lily bunched up and all the madness that we threw into it. That core, you know, of of this white guy and this black guy getting along with and falling for each other in a way was the thing that made it that made it the hit that it was.
Interviewer: Is that something that developed through the drafts or it was that that camaraderie, that love story was always there?
Andrew Bergman: I think it was always there. And, you know, it’s sort of been true in other things that I’ve done, which is sort of buddy movies and the things that that melded. I mean, you know, in the producers, you believe. That Zero and Gene love each other. You know? And a movie I did subsequently, the as you sort of believe that that. Peter Falk and Alan Arkin, myths, all the insanity have to have a bond. It’s the crucial thing that makes it a comedy work, is that you? There’s a certain amount of love in it and it can’t be just jokes, jokes, jokes can’t take you all the way through a movie. Jokes can’t lead you through 90 minutes. I mean, there are exceptions. Airplane. Did you know that’s that’s that’s jokes without a big core story. But it’s really hard. So I think it was a conscious effort. But the story led you there. I mean, it was inevitable.
Interviewer: And actually in a way. And in a sense. Do you hear something? In a sense. Gene, as we all know. It was kind of an accident because of it.
Andrew Bergman: Oh, yes.
Interviewer: You know, so it’s of course, you can’t hindsight. You can’t say if Gig Young and Cleavon Little would have had the same rapport.
Andrew Bergman: Know, but there would have been some rapport. But, you know, and that’s sort of, as I say, if history. The fact is, these guys did. And it’s interesting that after this movie, you know, Gene made a series of very successful movies with Richard Pryor, comedies in which there was the same dynamic in a ways, as well as in Blazing Saddles.
Interviewer: And wasn’t wasn’t there talk of putting Richard in Blazing Saddles?
Andrew Bergman: Richard, we we offer Richard be a great sheriff, but he was at that point considered sort of a live grenade. And Warner Brothers was too terrified to put him in the lead, a movie for fear that he might, like, disappear. We could do things like that. And Cleavon was a very, very happy choice. He was a wonderful actor. In fact, when I wrote the original story, the first person I showed that draft to was Cleavon Little, who had seen, you know, after a show called Scooby Doo. And I said, That’s my guy. That guy’s perfect.
Interviewer: And in fact, Richard did disappear after a couple of weeks.
Andrew Bergman: Yeah. I mean, I’m sort of his M.O.. You know, he’s admitted, you know, problem with cocaine and alcohol. I was the loveliest person in the world is hilarious and a genius, you know. To me, the greatest standup of all time. I mean, his concert albums, I mean, those concert films are in a class by themselves. But he was not at that point a reliable person. In fact, when I saw him 10 years ago, he said, you know, what kills me is I don’t remember anything about that time that we worked together. It was like a blank. You know, it just the drugs. I just burned such a hole in his brain. But it was the loveliest, smartest, funniest guy you could imagine.
Interviewer: Were you around once they started shooting?
Andrew Bergman: Unfortunate. The Writers Guild went on strike like the day we started shooting. So I wasn’t on the set. But I did get occasional reports from Mel who said this is a disaster. This movie stinks. I mean, all I dream up in smoke was with a great deal of trepidation that I finally saw it. Some months later and saw that he was he was he was incorrect.
Interviewer: This movie comes out in, I think, February of 74.
Andrew Bergman: Yeah.
Interviewer: Correct me if it’s like a it becomes like a phenomena, right?
Andrew Bergman: Yeah, it was. They opened. I mean, Warner Brothers thought it was gonna be a turkey. In those days, you know, you also you open movies in a smaller fashion than you do now. Now you open them in eight million theaters and, you know, by Friday at four o’clock, you know, whether it’s it or not, this was a different era. Thank God. And we opened in New York and L.A.. And it’s interesting. It opens the Sutton Theatre on fifty seventh and 3rd in New York. And a friend of mine worked in the building. Well, which house, the sudden theater was in office, and he called me right at two o’clock. He said there’s a line around the block. That was the first inkling I had that something something was up. And it was a movie that opened really well. And then it just stayed there. Every. Same thing happened every city in Minneapolis. It would do twenty thousand bucks the first week. And six weeks later, we still don’t. And it just it just never went away. I mean, it made it made money like like a sort of like a like snowfall, you know, overnight. You know, it just grew. And day after day it just grew. It was. It was you know, it certainly got Warner Brothers by it, by surprise.
Interviewer: What do you think? And do you think, though, in film comedy, there was. Pre Blazing Saddles and post.
Andrew Bergman: I mean, you could say that, and we certainly, for better or for worse, you know, and. You know, the campfire scene certainly opened, opened the doors to all kinds of gross out comedy, which I thought was it wasn’t as funny because the campfire scene wasn’t simply about farting. It was about this Western tradition. Every so these guys sitting around, you know, slurping beans and the camaraderie. And then here’s is an unpleasant side effect. Now it’s just fighting just for the element. But I thought it certainly made the canvas larger for what you could do in a comedy. I mean, the the campfire scene. The laughs and the campfire scene was so extraordinary because of the shock, the shock that you could actually get away with something like that screen. And because everybody knew it, you know, comedy is truth. People laugh at what they know. And I never heard laughs like that when that when that started.
Interviewer: When you were working on it with Mel. Do anything specific that you remember learning from him?
Andrew Bergman: Oh, many things. One was at basically. For something to be funny, comedy really is. It’s like writing poetry. And I don’t mean that a pretentious way, but every word counts. I mean, the rhythm of it is so specific. The words you choose consonants rather than vowels or it’s a much more precise thing than I could have imagined. And he was a dog about that. Plus what I. The great lesson was that it’s just on the page. You know, it’s never done until you’ve finished rewriting it. You know, what you write down doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean that’s that’s what it is. It’s never in stone. You have to keep revising until it’s better. I mean, the whole we had a completely different ending. And then Mallone, you know, the last draft said we have to have a bigger ending than this. We just they can’t just write off into the sunset. And that’s why we came up with this whole insanity where they go in the soundstages and the fight. The gunfight breaks out all of a Warner Brothers and the commissary. And in other stages, that was that was that was his his idea. And it was it was incredibly brave. You know, I felt what you write a screenplay. That’s the screenplay. So this isn’t this isn’t it yet? It’s just it’s not done. And that was a huge lesson that I carried for the rest of my. The rest of my my career, it’s been it’s never done till it’s done.
Interviewer: And breaking that fourth wall like that by going, I mean. You’re right. It’s really bright today still. I mean, it is like a Warner Brothers cartoon come to life.
Andrew Bergman: Exactly. And I think I think one of the things about the movie is it is also a movie. Clearly a movie about movies. And I think because it was a Warner Brothers movie, I think it really was it had this, you know, Looney Tunes ending in a way, you know. That it that it just it broke out all over the place and was very exhilarating to see it. Very exhilarating.
Interviewer: Did you talk to him about working on other stuff?
Andrew Bergman: We talked over the years. But, you know, when he eil it, when he finished with Plaisance house, he went right into Frankenstein. And I was writing something else. And, you know, we we we stayed close over the years. And we might have chatted about this or that and actually. But 10 years ago, I said I want to make. I want to do a documentary about him. I went to a movie called My Lunch With Mel would have been like my dinner with Andre because he had you know, you have lunch with these guys, Mario Puzo. And these these guys would have lunch all the time. I said, you know, just it would be just great to just shoot this for two weeks and then then put it together. And he said, I have the vanity for it anymore. You know, I just. And it’s a shame because would have been great to get that out because because Mel’s sitting in a room is there’s there’s there’s nothing funnier when he gets going. Side, that that’s that’s a record. I thought this should have been preserved. It just his. He’s on the loose, you know, over a lunch table, over a bungalow, Maine, which is where you see the essence of Mel. I mean, some of the greatest hits you have just in Chinatown, just walking around, you know, we’d be Norman Steinberg and Mel. And we’d go down to China and we’d just be paralyzed. Laughing You know.
Interviewer: Do you have a favorite story?
Andrew Bergman: Favorite story. Give me a minute. I mean, there’s so many hilarious moments with him. But it’s less one of those things he said in this situation. And then he said it’s just it’s it’s it’s this existential thing of being in a in a on a street with him. And he’s he’s like the bad kid in the back rows of a class. He really is. He’ll say what he’ll say out loud. It is always shocking and and different. He just is locutions was so different than anybody else’s.
Interviewer: Well, you know, and that’s an interesting thing because. You know, when I think of his peers, a lot of them and and even when I interviewed Carl, you know, because I’ve seen Carl, I said to Carl the other day when I interview him, I said, so it’s the early 60s. Males can’t get arrested. Pretty much can’t really. He’s having a hard time getting Roderic. I said, you’re doing The Dick Van Dyke Show. I said, why the hell didn’t you give him a job? Have to, you know, write an episode? He said, you know, it never even occurred to me because he said it didn’t occur to me because because what I said and to the point what I was saying about Mel, as I said, you know, here’s one of these guys, unlike so many of his peers, his comedy, he’s not concerned about the kids, the wife, the ex-wife, the mother in law, all those sort of comedy staples. He he he doesn’t sort of play in that pool at all. You know, he goes off, he’s kind of on and on another tangent, which references, if not all movies and history and literature and all this other stuff.
Andrew Bergman: So and so much of his comedy comes out of language more than almost more than even Woody. You know, that particular Luke locutions that he used starting in the in the in the 2000. Ermanno, you know, good luck on your winning all these particularly strange things that that he did an incredible ear, you know, incredible ear. And it wasn’t like a stand up here. It was like I don’t remember when my wife. It’s very, very different. It’s very, very sophisticated. Here’s a story that to me that they’d made me love him dearly. The first day we worked together at Warner Brothers, who worked every day at six, six, six with them in a conference room, we would we would meet and write. And obviously was it I was somewhat terrified going into this situation and. It’s a it’s an interesting day. Gotten us and at night I go out and my wife’s having like a woman’s group this 1970s, women and women’s groups, consciousness raising groups. And I came my wife said, Mel Brooks call. I said, God, am I out already? So I called him and I he said the following. He said. So it wasn’t so bad working with me. Right. That was it. He just he just wanted to reassure me, which was an extraordinary thing to do to a guy who’s 26 years old. And, you know, it just walked in this situation I’ve been in and he just had snuffed it out, if not more. I said this is in this guy. There’s a lot to this guy. And we’re still pals.
Interviewer: Yeah. We’re gonna reload the camera. Have some water. All right. Ready? Ready? Be very soon. Going back to the writers room for a second on unpleasing, tell us. He says. You know, the function of everyone there was to be brave. Right, to not be afraid to.
Andrew Bergman: Right. I think that’s true. I mean, first one, you know, it’s the old song. When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. So nothing to lose. I don’t have a reputation to lose, Melissa. As I said, I was a was sort of on his uppers. Richie was on his uppers. Nobody particularly knew Norman yet hit me. And so we could we could certainly afford to be brave. And the great lesson in Blazing Saddles was to be brave because you just never, ever know. I mean, as a movie, because without saying which, we’d never see the light of day to day. But in those days, you could sort of get away with something also cause two and half million bucks to make a movie with, you know, hundreds of extras. And, you know, the whole of the whole megillah of a western city, there was there was more room to be brave because the people ran. The studios were braver. But I think it was true because because once once you started on this movie, there was no turning back. There was no way you could do license, as I say, after the fighting scene go in a more serious direction. It was what it was. So you just sort of rode the wave, you know, for four hundred and fifty pages and hoped enough of it would be it would be tolerable. But I mean, this movie could also have been the biggest turkey of all time. There’s no question we knew that. But in a way, unless he unless. You can have a big turkey, you can have a big head. You know, it’s the same. It’s the two sides of the same coin.
Interviewer: Does it amaze you that it can’t be made today?
Andrew Bergman: It saddens me it can be made. That’s amazing it she’s sort of the Hulk, the culture. Because, you know. These studios are now divisions of large, you know. Corporation, which they were then, it’s just a different business, it’s that if they’re units, you know, they’re units of of, you know, Kurup Ironworks or whatever, you know, and after return, but they return and you can’t take risk because that’s not what the business. You know, Coca-Cola doesn’t take risks and they’re not going to take risk if they own the movie company, which they did for a while. And they got out of that business because it’s a messy business. And most of these companies don’t want messy businesses. But, you know, you, Rasche, try to rationalize the movie business and have no more movie business. So it is sad and it is sad, but thank God we made it.
Interviewer: And Mel said also that sort of. Look how heavy put it, like Richard sort of gave you guys permission to use the N-word.
Andrew Bergman: Oh, for sure. I mean, there’s no way would have done that or should have done that without without Richie. But I mean, if you ever saw his act, he used it every every five sentences. He just liberator’s to say, you know, make fun of this guy. You know, this guy is a human, you know. You know, it’s a reverse. Racism is a you can’t make jokes about this black guy because he’s a black guy. It’s it’s it’s it’s it’s racist. It’s making jokes because he’s a black guy. So he’s certainly liberator’s. And he was such a genius. Just the way he fit with Mel was. It was so bizarre and so perfect in a way.
Interviewer: And even though the word was incendiary back then, it since become even more.
Andrew Bergman: Even more. Now, this this would be a nonstarter tonight for sure. I mean, it’s generally still used in hip hop. That’s that’s for sure.
Interviewer: But was it even that today? It would be such a big thing back then? Was it in the writers room? Was it that big a deal?
Andrew Bergman: No. I mean, once, once, once, once, once, it was once the genie was out of the bottle, it’s like the F word. You know, once it’s there, it’s there. So it’s part of the vocabulary. And you can’t you can’t put it back. You can’t say you can’t page 50. I’m going to stop using it because it makes no sense. It is what it is. It’s like you say it had to be brave, yet you had to push it to the limit. And the movie was so essentially gentle and goodhearted, as insane as it was, and its message was so was so inoffensive in a way that it was no very little talk about it in my memory.
Interviewer: Did any of the reviews sort of surprise you in terms of it so tasteless or vulgar?
Andrew Bergman: No reviews, never sympathetic. I mean, half the right is going to have to have the critics loathed and half said it was there was, you know, the most the funniest movie ever. You know, it was it wasn’t a movie that was going to get a middle ground. You know, you can’t say, well, this is sort of an interesting movie. It just it was what it was, was it? It was an assault. So I wasn’t surprised.
Interviewer: Anything else I’m missing because.
Andrew Bergman: I don’t know.
Interviewer: I think anything else that, uh. In regards to Mel, of course I think we’re good.
Andrew Bergman: Yeah.
Interviewer: Yeah. Unless I’m forgetting something you’d like. Uh.
Andrew Bergman: So I think just I would like to make the point about his his his unusual life, generosity in. In sharing credit and sharing, you know, sharing his life with us, you know, when we worked on the movie together, every. It was also an exploration of Mel’s day. You know, my day every day we’d get together. Say we’re gonna meet here tomorrow at 10 o’clock, each other at eleven and four. And he would explain his lateness by the trains were messed up his way. He shaved, required that his face be extraordinarily wet before he started. You just you just sort of get into his life and then halfway through the the writing process. Anne Bancroft got pregnant with this is his son, Max. So we shared that to the whole the gestation was really a gestation of a movie. And this kid and we just we. There was a real bond. You know, it sounds corny. Was like, you know, when your team that won the World Series, you just have this bond of that extraordinary experience which ended up in a far different way than any of us did. But that’s the way those kind of hits become. They just they’re bigger than all of you. And you just say, well, that was that was something, you know.
Interviewer: Great. Thank you so much.
