Black and White Was a Dealbreaker for Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder strongly believed the film should imitate the look of director James Whale’s classic black-and-white 1930s films Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, which meant shooting in black and white.
When the script was done, Wilder and Brooks went to Columbia Pictures to try to sell the film. (“Blazing Saddles hadn’t been released yet, so my reputation as a hit-producing moneymaker was not yet established,” Brooks wrote in his memoir.) The studio agreed to pay $1.75 million for the film. But on his way out of the meeting, Brooks informed the studio executives, “oh, by the way, we’re going to make it in black and white.”
Columbia offered a compromise, according to Brooks: They could shoot it in color for international audiences, but remove the color and release it in black and white domestically. “I said no, because I knew they’d somehow trick us and release it in color anyway,” Brooks wrote.
So Columbia said the deal was off.
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