How ‘Blazing Saddles’ turned a Texan into a star

[Elderberry]

Houston Chronicle by Craig Lindsey 8/26/2019

This year marks the 45th anniversary of “Blazing Saddles,” Mel Brooks’s Western satire that still holds up in the funny department, even though it’s been continuously brought up by people (even Brooks) that this relentlessly (and hilariously) offensive movie -- about a black railroad worker (the late Cleavon Little) who becomes the first black sheriff of a predominantly white town -- could never be made today. (The N-word is tossed around as freely as the word “and.”)

The first character who appears in the movie (and basically gets the just-plain-wrong ball rolling) is Lyle, the gleefully racist cowpoke played by Burton Gilliam. He tries to corral Bart and the other railroad workers into singing, but somehow ends up doing a rowdy rendition of “Camptown Races” with he and his boys instead. “Actually, Mel and [co-screenwriter] Richard Pryor re-wrote that opening scene for me,” says Gilliam, 81, on the phone from his home in Allen, Texas. “Richard called me and told me, ‘Listen, we really want you to do this part. So, we’ve written you the opening scene and you are gonna tell how crazy this picture is gonna be and you’re gonna tell them exactly where’s it going.’ And if that was their aim, they hit the bull’s eye.”

With only one big-screen role in his then-filmography (he played a hotel desk clerk in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 film “Paper Moon”), this Dallas-born fireman was still a babe in the woods when did his career-changing turn in “Saddles.” “It started a whole new career for me,” he says. “So, I quit the fire department, naturally.”

For the next three decades, he would do parts in such films as “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,” “Fletch,” “Back to the Future III” and “Honeymoon in Vegas.” He also did guest shots on such prime-time shows as “The Waltons,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “The A-Team.”

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/movies/article/How-Blazing-Saddles-turned-a-Texan-into-a-14374318.php


“Blazing Saddles” will be screened at The Alamo Drafthouse Friday
night with actor Burton Gilliam, who played Lyle, in attendance.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Mel's funniest.

And a movie I watch each and every time I am channel surfing.

In days gone by, it was fun to crack stereotype jokes.  Everyone knew it was a joke.  Now, this sensitivity crap has taken us to destroying fun.

We are not better off as a country.