We were talking here the other day about seeing Blazing Saddles when it first came out. That brought this message from Ben Herndon…
I am 50 years old now, but back in 1974 I was attending U.C.L.A. Warner Brothers scheduled a free midnight sneak preview of Blazing Saddles on a weekend night and the Avco Cinema was packed with rowdy U.C.L.A. students.
Westwood Village had been plastered with those great old posters of Mel as an Indian Head nickel type chief — but we still didn't know what to expect. As you may recall, Mel wasn't really "hot" in 1974. The Producers had been released six years earlier, but was still considered by many to be something of a cult favorite.
Anyway, when Cleavon Little launched into that Cole Porter song, the audience went totally crazy. I have never seen an
audience react to this new type of raunchy humor like this audience did. Mel had a unanimous, unqualified, smashing success at the preview. It was the talk of Westwood for weeks.Twenty years later, I went with Leonard Maltin to interview Mel. He told us that even as the cheering at the end of the film was still going on, the Warner Bros. suits were clustered around Mel at the rear of the theater telling him…"Okay, they loved it, but you'll still cut out the campfire fart jokes, and the Lili Von Schtupp sex scenes, and the n-words…?"
Mel was blithely answering them, "Yes, yes, sure, of course…" but he never changed a frame of film or dialog. The release print was the same as we all saw that historical night in Westwood.
The rest, as they say, is history…
I had a friend who was also in that audience and his report on the audience response was about the same as yours. I saw it a short time later…also at the Avco. As I mentioned, no one really knew what to expect so it was a grand experience. I really enjoy movies more when I haven't already seen half the film in trailers and the other half in talk show clips. (Another such experience I recall was a Writers Guild advance screening of Paddy Chayefsky's Network. The film was not quite as impressive in later viewings but that night, when no one in the house knew anything about it, it was amazing. I happened to be sitting next to Ray Bradbury and at the end, he looked around the packed theater and said, "There isn't one person in this room who wouldn't give his left arm to have written that movie…including me.")
Back to Blazing Saddles. The gag I remember everyone talking about on the way out of the theater was when Cleavon Little's character is riding across the desert to rather jazzy music…and it turns out that it's coming from Count Basie's band, which is playing out there. The joke no longer seems that clever since some variation on it turned up in about half the comedy movies made during the rest of the seventies. Mel even did it again in High Anxiety with a symphony orchestra in a bus. I'm guessing the bit from Blazing Saddles that is most often quoted these days is when Little puts the gun to his head and takes himself hostage. How often have we heard someone compare some real world action to that moment?
Thanks for the message, Ben. When I get a moment this week, I'll post a fun excerpt from the script to Blazing Saddles that never got filmed. If it had, I'd still be back in that seat at the Avco, laughing my butt off.