Blazing Saddles Was Supposed to Be ‘An Esoteric Little Picture’

The writers decided to write what they really wanted to write, without worrying about the mainstream, Brooks told Playboy:

“It was designed as an esoteric little picture. We wrote it for two weirdos in the balcony. For radicals, film nuts, guys who draw on the washroom wall—my kind of people.”

Brooks also told Playboy: “What grabbed me were the possibilities of a modern black man arriving in the traditional West. … We called in Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, a Jewish comedy team, and Richard Pryor, a black person of outré imagination. Then we turned on the tape recorder and started bulls—-ing. Pryor wrote the Jewish jokes, the Jews wrote the black jokes. Nine months later, we had a finished script.”