Exclusive: Mel Brooks Talks “Blazing Saddles” & Wanting To Satirize AI Ahead Of LA Event

Lots of different terms get thrown around for people who achieved a certain amount of success in their field: Legend, Icon, Superstar, and so forth. In terms of comedy, films, and quite frankly pop culture in general, Mel Brooks is all of these things and so much more. 

At 98 years-old, Mel Brooks is still out there doing what he does best: Making us laugh. 2024, in particular, is a notable year for the PEGOT winner. This year alone, he’s received a honorary Oscar and a Peabody Award Career Honor. 2024 also marks the 50th anniversary of two of his landmark films: Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles.

The latter - which starred Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn, and Brooks himself - was a first for many reasons. To start with, this was Brooks’ third film after The Producers and The Twelve Chairs, but his first genre parody. The genre parodies is something that would define his career, and it all started with the Wild West. It’s also the first film that he didn’t write all by himself. Instead, he enlisted a group of writers that included Andrew Bergman - who wrote the initial treatment - Norman Steinberg, Alan Uger (a dentist), and Richard Pryor. This was a format that had worked in television when Brooks was a writer on Sid Cesar’s Your Show of Shows, and it is something he would adopt for the rest of his career.

The film’s sendup of the cliches and everything we had seen in the Western films that came before it sort of broke the doors down on the industry. It was packing in jokes and visual gags at a rate that had never been done prior in films. It was a rare time that you saw people breaking the fourth wall in films, and also had the first extended fart joke on film. It’s a distinction that Brooks wears like a badge of honor decades later.

To celebrate the film’s 50th anniversary, Brooks is hosting a screening of the comedy epic this Saturday, July 27th. The screening will follow a Q and A, in which he will divulge just what went into making this masterpiece that revolutionized comedy films entirely. Tickets for the event can be found here.

Ahead of the screening, we recently got the opportunity to engage with Mr. Brooks over email to ask him about breaking the fourth wall, working in a writers room format, the chemistry between Little and Wilder, and what he still wants to satirize in his career.

The film is notable for adopting the TV writers' room setup and was the first script you didn’t write by yourself. Were there challenges that emerged from trying to write a 90-minute feature film in that setting versus something like Your Show of Shows?

I’ve always enjoyed the collaboration of working in the writers' room--especially on the hit comedy-variety series Your Show of Shows. It was my choice to bring that setting and that energy that worked so well to Blazing Saddles. And boy was I right! Let's face it, it's always better to have too many ideas than not enough.

Breaking the fourth wall is something you did so expertly in your career, starting with Blazing Saddles. What was the genesis for wanting to do that?

Blazing Saddles is a satire of the American Western. We were bringing up and exploding all the Western cliches, and letting the audience in on the truth in the process. While you may be thinking just of the end of the film, I also see it when they're sitting around a campfire eating beans and swilling down black coffee. Each cliche had a wall to be broken through. With the beans and black coffee, what we broke was a lot of wind.

And of course the other big truth we let the audience in on was that the big climactic fight scene didn't happen in the West at all, it happened on a backlot of Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.

As Gene Wilder was a last-minute replacement for Gig Young, how natural was the chemistry between him and Cleavon Little? It seems so organic on the screen, did it take time for them to find it or was it immediate?

You've answered your own question--it was immediate! They fell in like with each other, and their harmony resonated throughout the film.

Blazing Saddles was your first genre satire, which became another trademark of your career. Are there any genres you still feel haven’t yet been explored like they should be?

At this point in my film career the only thing I can think of that I have not had fun with satirizing yet is the current state of "artificial intelligence".  And I think it could use a Mel Brooks style raking over the coals!