in despair. It turned out that Wilder
had already memorized the character’s
lines and was ready to begin filming.
He turned out to be perfect in the part,
and Blazing Saddles went on to become
one of 1974’s most successful movies.
During the shoot, the two men kept
working on the script for what Brooks
began calling Young Frank. “Little by
little, every night, Gene and I met at
his bungalow at the Bel Air Hotel,”
Brooks has said. “And step-by-step, ever
so cautiously, we proceeded on a dark
narrow twisting path to the eventualWhile the director plugged away
on Blazing Saddles, Wilder kept writ-
ing—although he was unexpectedly
interrupted when Gig Young, whom
Brooks had cast in Blazing Saddles as
the Waco Kid, proved unable to work.
The Waco Kid was an over-the-hill
alcoholic—and Young himself strug-
gled with alcoholism. “On the first day
of shooting... we hung him upside
down in the jail cell, and green stuff
started spewing out of his mouth,”
Brooks said. After rushing the actor
to the hospital, Brooks called Wilderand depth, while transitions between
scenes were often handled using 1930s-
era devices such as “wipes” and “irises.”
Verisimilitude was also enhanced by
the equipment in the laboratory scene,
which came from the 1931 film (the man
who created the original props still
had them in his garage). Even John
Morris’s score—by turns melodramatic
and melancholy—avoided the wacka-
wacka soundtrack of many comedies.
“You have to really know a genre to
make fun of it,” Brooks wrote, “and to
really know it, you have to love it.”87CB
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