Even so, Blazing Saddles became the first Brooks film to receive an R rating.
Warner Bros. president Ted Ashley is said to have freaked out at one of the early screenings for executives. Ashley steered Brooks and production head John Calley into an office and, in “a litany of anger,” in Brooks’s words, ticked off all the stuff that had to go: the N-word, the farting, the horse getting punched, yada yada yada. Brooks solicitously jotted down notes; then, after Ashley stormed out, he balled them up and shot the paper into a wastebasket. Calley, “the only one who laughed” during the screening, muttered, “Good filing.” Brooks convened a separate screening for studio employees, got roars of laughter and instant buzz around the lot, and Blazing Saddles was set for release.
Blazing Saddles shot out of the gate like Secretariat, running “hot” (Variety’s phrase) at showcases on both coasts, the Sutton on 57th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan and the AVCO Center Cinema in the Westwood/UCLA neighborhood of Los Angeles. With robust ticket sales, the release was quickly expanded to ninety theaters across the United States—which in those days, when theaters were cavernous, constituted a wide release—and by mid-April, Brooks’s film had risen to the top of the box-office chart: number one.
Blazing Saddles was the comedy of the year for audiences and the debate of the year for many critics who didn’t think so, although many wrote guiltily of their enjoyment.
“There are grand bits and pieces,” wrote Judith Crist in New York magazine in one such review, “but there are ungrand bits and pieces.” Brooks’s new comedy, Charles Champlin wrote in the Los Angeles Times, was “often as blithely tasteless as a stage night at the Friar’s Club and almost continuously funny.” Even Variety carped. “If comedies are measured solely by the number of yocks they generate from audiences, then Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles must be counted a success,” wrote the trade paper’s critic, “Beau,” who added “Brooks is such a funny man, however, that it seems a shame he still doesn’t know how to harness his stable of gags into something more than an updated Abbott & Costello farce.”
One reason the critics hedged was that Woody Allen’s futuristic Sleeper had opened in December 1973 and the pundits had begun to compare Brooks with Allen, both Jewish New Yorkers, both graduates of the Sid Caesar college of comedy. Sleeper belonged with Jacques Tati’s Playtime as pictures that “stay with you after you’ve seen them,” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, while Blazing Saddles was more like Chinese takeout, “every Western you’ve ever seen turned upside down and inside out, braced with a lot of low burlesque, which is fine. In retrospect, however, one remembers along with the good gags the film’s desperate, bone-crushing efforts to be funny.” Judith Crist agreed with Canby. “Odious” comparisons between Saddles and the better Sleeper only served to underscore that “with each one of his feature films, Woody Allen has become more and more his own man, perfecting his skills as a triple-threat writer, director, and star.”
Some critics sided with Brooks. America’s dean of auteurist criticism, Andrew Sarris, in the Village Voice, said he had experienced a “mini-auteurist epiphany of sorts vis-à-vis the movies of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen” and preferred Blazing Saddles to Sleeper. Confessing that “I had written off Brooks as a film director after The Producers and I hadn’t even bothered to see The Twelve Chairs when it came out,” Sarris said he had come around to viewing Brooks’s pursuit of mass audiences as a canny survival strategy. “What Allen lacks is the reckless abandon and careless rapture of Brooks,” Sarris wrote. “Indeed, Brooks reminds me in his most serious moments of artists like Renoir and Sternberg. But, alas, in his most comical moments he reminds me of the Ritz Brothers.”
As the reviews and receipts rolled in, Brooks was preoccupied with the first scenes of Young Frankenstein at 20th Century–Fox. Most of the photography took place on studio soundstages, with excursions to the University of Southern California, where Brooks shot the medical school sequence, and to the back lot of MGM for that studio’s standing sets.
At the end of the first week, Brooks and Wilder asked cameraman Gerald Hirschfeld to stay and chat after dailies. They were not happy with the look of the film.
“What are you talking about?” Hirschfeld demanded. “You showed me Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, and that’s the look I’m giving you.”
“Oh, that’s not what we want,” Brooks responded. “We want to satirize that look.”
Hirschfeld pointed out that nobody had said as much, and Wilder piped up, “Mel, he’s right. We never told him that.” Hirschfeld said he would make some adjustments.
At the next viewing of dailies, they told the cameraman, “Oh, this is more like it!” and then, as time went on, “Oh, this is even better!” Halfway through the picture, Brooks drew Hirschfeld aside at lunch and said, “Gerry, I’m glad I didn’t fire you four weeks ago.” And Hirschfeld thought to himself, “Mel, you’re lucky I didn’t quit.”
Apart from that little misunderstanding, the filming of Young Frankenstein was, by all accounts, “the happiest I’d ever been on a film,” as Wilder wrote in his memoir. “It was like taking a small breath of heaven each day.” There had been little rehearsal time for Blazing Saddles, but Young Frankenstein was more of an actor’s showcase, and Brooks set aside three weeks before shooting for read-throughs and staging. More than usual on a Mel Brooks film, the script was protected by the lead actor. Although Wilder often insisted, “we never improvised dialogue on the set,” Brooks said, “Gene did what I call ‘aftermath’ ad-libbing,” supplying what he called “prop-wash” to follow through on jokes: lines such as “You son of a bitch, you ruined me!” or “Momma, I want my momma!”
One joy of the film is Wilder’s intensely focused performance, as harebrained as it is charismatic, in the lead role he’d crafted for himself. The actor “could be Krakatoa,” Brooks explained. “He could be the greatest volcano ever . . . or he could be sweet and mellow and very moving.” The director developed a code for calibrating Wilder’s performance during the filming. Brooks would say, “Too orange!” if Wilder went too big, too volcanic in a scene, or “More purple!” if he wanted the sweetness and mellowness.
The camera kept rolling after the director called “Cut!” to catch interpolations by the cast. And Brooks was likely to print several takes of the same shot, giving him options later in the editing room. “The one [take] that’s perfect, that I love,” the filmmaker explained, “and then I do one slightly over the top, just in case it’s needed in the picture puzzle of the film—later, when you think, I need a little more energy here. Gene played everything vibrantly. The only direction I’d ever have for him is, I’d say, ‘Softer.’”
The others in the ensemble matched Wilder in their high spirits and comic inventiveness. As Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, Inga, Teri Garr “played her sexuality fully and naively, innocently,” Brooks recalled, and added “little things that were wonderful.” Her line in the script was “You mustn’t. No, you mustn’t!” But Garr would say, “No, you mozzn’t!” with “a wonderful German feeling,” in Brooks’s words. Garr’s chemistry with Wilder was boosted by the fact that the costars were amorously involved off the set.
Madeline Kahn added her usual daffy nuances, asking for musical changes the night before the crucial scene was shot in which the Monster (Peter Boyle) rapes Elizabeth, her character. The script called for Kahn to burst into Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek”—a bookend to “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” She thought that “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life!” from Victor Herbert’s operetta Naughty Marietta, with its “Oh . . . oh! . . .” (as the Monster lowers himself upon her) seguing into the song’s ecstatic opening phrase, would be funnier.
A naturally reserved person, Kahn flinched at the oft-crude vernacular in Brooks’s scripts (and in the similar language frequently echoed on his sets). But the actress never came off as sensually in other people’s movies, perhaps because on the screen Brooks saw her as “a dirty uncle” might, in Kahn’s words
. “Off-screen,” wrote Kahn’s biographer William V. Madison, “Brooks made her feel appreciated and protected. Yet his movies threw her into Transylvanian rapes and Roman orgies.”
The outtakes (later shared on the DVD and in documentaries) show the troupe breaking up repeatedly over each other’s asides and mistakes. Brooks proffered his own “aftermath” suggestions—toppers by any other name—with Marty Feldman particularly susceptible to the whispering provocateur. In one instance that led to Igor/Feldman growling and chewing on a fox-fur stole slung around Elizabeth/Kahn’s neck, after their characters first meet, with bits of the fur getting stuck in his mouth. Feldman’s other notable add-on came from either Brooks (according to him) or Feldman himself (per his biographer Robert Ross). In rehearsals for the Transylvania Station scene, where Igor greets Dr. Frankenstein/Wilder, leading him off the train platform toward a hay wagon, Feldman threw in a “silly ad-lib,” as the actor recalled, telling Wilder to “Walk this way!” as Feldman hobbled along. It was an “old Yiddish joke,” in Feldman’s words, but the crew laughed their heads off and so did Brooks. He told Feldman to keep the phrase in for the filming.
Wilder, finding it a “cheesy joke,” later asked Brooks where “Walk this way!” had come from. “Man walks into a drugstore,” he replied, “and says to the pharmacist, ‘I got terrible hemorrhoids—have you got some talcum powder?’ Pharmacist says, ‘Yes, sir—walk this way.’ Man says, ‘If I could walk that way, I wouldn’t need the talcum powder.’”*
If Brooks laughed, it was funny. The director was never as relaxed, staging Young Frankenstein and not having to worry about his own performance on camera. Gone, at least for now, were the shouter and insulter from The Producers. “Mel never loses his temper,” Garr told the columnist Earl Wilson. Most days Brooks collegially ate lunch with the cast and crew, rather than disappearing into his trailer to stare at the script, as had previously been his wont. Numerous times, in interviews, Brooks said that Young Frankenstein was the best-directed picture of his career. Wilder thought the reason was simple.
“Mel could see what’s wonderful” when he directed Young Frankenstein, Wilder explained in an interview. “The difference between Mel when he’s not acting in it, and just directing, as opposed to when he is acting and directing, is the difference between a great director and a good director. Because if he doesn’t have to worry about ‘how’s my make-up, how’s my hair, how’s my nose, how’s my lighting,’ just ‘what do I see in front of me? How can I make these actors better?’—that’s when all these things happen.”
John C. Howard from Blazing Saddles was in position for the editing of this and the next three Mel Brooks comedies, patiently awaiting final decisions from Brooks. By now Brooks had a clear editing philosophy: he didn’t like to be preempted by an editor’s assembly, as had happened on The Producers and The Twelve Chairs. First he wanted to look at all the takes and outtakes, “every frame” that had been shot, laboriously piecing together the scenes, snipping frames out here and there, fine-tuning the laughs.
If Brooks did not appear in the picture, well, he could create cameos for himself at the postproduction stage. For Young Frankenstein, he voiced werewolf sounds for one particular scene and the deceased Baron Frankenstein for another. Kenneth Mars had a wacky moment in which he plays a darts game with Gene Wilder, cheating to intimidate him. When his turn comes, Wilder sprays darts outside the frame. That permitted one of Brooks’s favorite impressions. “One goes through the window,” Brooks explained, “and you hear, ‘Yeow!’ a cat sound, like he hit a cat? That’s me! That’s my guest appearance.”
“After Young Frankenstein was in the can,” a Playboy writer later reported admiringly, Brooks “edited the picture frame by frame at least twelve times, and in the last week of production spent several hours in a recording room, gleefully snorting, grunting, snarling, groaning, sighing and guffawing to fill tiny gaps in the talk track.”
Taking a break from editing Young Frankenstein, Brooks made a rarer guest appearance acting alongside his wife. Since the birth of their son Anne Bancroft had made only one film, the screen version of Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue, which had been shot around the same time as Blazing Saddles. Now Martin Charnin coaxed the actress into another television special, again written by a small army of writers led by Gary Belkin and Thomas Meehan, with Charnin also in on the writing and directing the show.
Airing on November 27, 1974, “Annie and the Hoods” encompassed all the “hoods” in a woman’s life: bachelorhood, motherhood, unlikelihood, and so on. Bancroft sang, danced, and portrayed a dozen characters in sketches with costars Jack Benny, Alan Alda, Tony Curtis, Lily Tomlin, Polly Bergen, Gene Wilder, and Carl Reiner. “Other Womanhood” was a mirror-of-reality sketch that found Anne married to a philandering spouse played by none other than her real-life hubby. In the sketch Bancroft sarcastically serenaded Brooks with “Guess Who I Saw Today?,” first made popular in New Faces of 1952.
They had been married for ten years, but it was the first time the couple had performed together publicly. Bancroft had vowed in private that she would never work with Brooks, Charnin said, and her husband was equally reluctant. “I made her cave,” recalled Charnin. “I said, ‘I really want to do a sketch with you and Mel,’ and she agreed.” Brooks did very little, simply gazed at his wife as she sang, “because the sketch was created around his noninvolvement,” according to Charnin. “It was being done for Anne.”
The experiment was a pleasant surprise, however. “They didn’t criticize one another [behind the scenes] or chew one another out or kill each other,” recalled Charnin.
Yet the television special did not repeat the success of the first Bancroft/Charnin collaboration, “Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man,” four years earlier. Variety found the new special a dull “embarrassment.” No Emmy nominations came as before.
Promoting “Annie and the Hoods,” Bancroft gave numerous interviews with journalists, who frequently asked her when people were going to see her in a film directed by her husband. “Mel, as you know, does those way-out comedies like Blazing Saddles,” was her standard response, “and they don’t usually have big parts in them for women. But if he ever came up with something he wanted me to do, I’d jump at the chance.”
Brooks had Young Frankenstein all ready for a mid-December opening in ten American cities, but the bookings quickly multiplied and the film rocketed to number three at the box office by the first week of March. It hovered in the top ten throughout the first half of 1975.
Brooks campaigned vigorously for his new screen comedy, which he’d been too busy to do for Blazing Saddles, giving umpteen interviews to New York media, culminating in the February 17, 1975, cover of Newsweek and his first full-length Q and A in the February 1975 Playboy, a hallowed honor in the men’s magazine with nudie photographs, usually reserved for the likes of Fidel Castro or Norman Mailer.
Unlike the way they had reacted disparately to Blazing Saddles, the critics united on the subject of the PG-rated and more blithe comedy of Young Frankenstein. “Those who hated Blazing Saddles because it was coarse and tasteless,” Charles Champlin wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “will be able to join hands with those who loved Blazing Saddles because it was coarse etc. to walk down the aisles loving Young Frankenstein together.” Variety compiled the New York reviews: eight favorable, three unfavorable, none mixed.
Young Frankenstein stands apart from other Brooks films in many ways. The cast members were not stand-up comedians; they were actors in career ascendancy giving ebullient performances. The design elements are first-rate. Brooks’s direction is restrained.
The comedy is sprinkled with risqué moments. (Brooks proved impervious to the women’s movement with his Monster/Elizabeth rape scene, and feminists picketed one Boston theater, objecting to the “use of rape as a source of humor.”) But most reviewers celebrated the film’s relative discretion, its dialing down of crude humor. Gene Wilder’s hand in the script, his constant
presence on-screen, lent the film a singular charm.
Even the New York Times was won over, with Vincent Canby declaring Young Frankenstein to be Brooks’s “funniest, most cohesive comedy to date,” adding, equivocally, “Some of the gags don’t work, but fewer than in any previous Brooks film.” Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times was effusive, hailing the work as Brooks’s “most disciplined and visually inventive film (it also happens to be very funny) . . . it shows artistic growth.”
Still, there were a few prominent skeptics, including Gary Arnold in the Washington Post, who was left “untickled” by the horror-film spoof. Arnold trotted out more comparisons to Woody Allen, appraising Sleeper as “the work of someone who has mastered a considerable amount of technique” while Young Frankenstein “reveals a director whose visual imagination and technical resources remain pretty elementary.”
Yet Brooks, in his interviews, had fewer naysayers to grumble about. Instead he pontificated about the underlying deep themes of his comedy. “We dealt with bigotry in Saddles,” Brooks said in one interview, “and with neo-Fascism in Producers. Underneath the comedy in Frankenstein, the doctor is undertaking the quest to defeat death—to challenge God.” Young Frankenstein was treating the subject of “womb envy,” according to Brooks, and “the monster is what people who are afraid of intelligence think intelligence would look like if it were a person.” Behind the comedy of all his pictures, Brooks insisted, was serious commentary about society or human nature, racism or greed.
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