Mel Brooks Made His Two Biggest Hits Back to Back After a Very Rough Time

When it was released in 1974, Blazing Saddles became a huge hit that opened the door to other rapid-fire, irreverent comedies like Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein — also released in 1974 — and later Airplane, Top Secret and The Naked Gun.

But when Brooks and his co-writers first assembled, none were in demand. They included Norman Steinberg, Alan Uger, Richard Pryor, and Andrew Bergman, who came up with the original idea for Blazing Saddles.

In the 2014 biography Becoming Richard Pryor, by Scott Saul, Saul writes: “Steinberg was a fledging film writer with no film credits; Bergman, a history PhD who had just failed to land an academic job. Brooks felt himself washed up after the disappointments of The Producers and The Twelve Chairs.”

Brooks wrote in his 2020 memoir All About Me!: “The Producers and The Twelve Chairs together didn’t make me enough money to buy a new car.”