Mel Brooks Working on Blazing Saddles Musical

Mel Brooks, the comic filmmaker who has gone Broadway the last few years, says he is currently at work penning new songs for a Blazing Saddles musical. The 1974 parody of film Westerns starred Cleavon Little and Madeline Kahn, and it is generally considered to be one of Brooks' best movies. Mel Brooks went from a big screen funnyman to a Tony-winning Broadway sensation when the musical version of his film The Producers became a Broadway hit. But the follow-up, Young Frankenstein, was not as a big of a Broadway success and led some to speculate that Brooks would give up turning more of his movies into stage musicals. So far Blazing Saddles is very much in the early stages, with Brooks having only written two or three new songs, but time will tell if it eventually gallops its way onto Broadway.