Mel Brooks On The Very Rude Joke They Had To Cut From Blazing Saddles
Blazing Saddles is already pretty rude.
But according to Mel Brooks, there was a gag that even they had to drawn the line at while making the classic comedy.
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The 90-year-old movie legend appeared in front of an audience at the Radio City Music Hall in New York last night, following a special screening of the movie.
According to reports, fans clapped as each new character came on screen, the biggest applause being for Gene Wilder, who died last weekend at the age of 83.
After the credits, Brooks took questions from the audience, and spoke about the cut gag.
It was during the scene in which Madeleine Kahn’s Lili Von Shtupp seduces Cleavon Little’s Sheriff Bart.
After enquiring as to the Sheriff’s manhood, and while noises came from, ahem, below Bart’s waistline, he tells a seemingly confused Von Shtupp ‘You’re sucking my arm’.
“It was just too much,” Brooks said of the line.
He recently said that he believed the movie, which superbly lampooned race, could never be made today.
He also added that Warner Bros, who funded the movie, hated it while it was being made.
“They wanted to bury me and the film,” he told the Daily Beast.
“I actually got notes from the studio head in vivid detail who said, ‘Lose the fart scene, cut out any racial and ethnic jokes, edit scenes where a horse and an old lady get punched,’ and my favourite note: ‘Can you reshoot Black Bart with a white actor?’
“If I had made their changes the film would have been just 14 minutes long! I stupidly threw all their notes in the trash. Imagine the book I could have written on them today.”
The comedy turned out to be a massive hit for Warners on its release in 1974. Costing just over $2.5 million to make, it grossed over $100 million.
Image credits: Rex Features/Warner Bros