09/11/2026
Richard Pryor's lost role and Cleavon Little's great performance can both be true at once. Pryor helped write Blazing Saddles, the studio rejected him for Sheriff Bart, and Little turned the part into something unmistakably his.
That matters, because Cleavon Little deserves better than being remembered as the man who got Richard Pryor's part.
When Blazing Saddles opened in 1974, it dropped a Black sheriff into the middle of one of Hollywood's whitest myths: the Old West. The town of Rock Ridge expects a lawman it can respect, then recoils when Sheriff Bart rides in and they see that he is Black.
The joke is not that Bart is out of place.
The joke is that nearly everyone around him is too blinded by racism to recognize that he may be the smartest man in town.
Richard Pryor helped build that world.
The official screenplay credits name five writers: Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor, and Alan Uger. Bergman had written the original story, first known as Tex X, before Brooks assembled the writing team that turned it into Blazing Saddles.
Brooks later said he expected Pryor to play Bart.
Warner Bros. said no.
Years later, Pryor told the story himself on Larry King Live. When a caller said he had heard Pryor wrote Blazing Saddles, Pryor immediately corrected him.
“Co-wrote.”
Then the caller asked the obvious question: Why wasn't he in the movie?
Pryor said the studio did not want him. According to him, executives distrusted him because of his record and feared he could become unreliable and cost the production money.
Brooks gave a similar account over the years, saying Warner Bros. was concerned about Pryor's drug problems, history and insurability.
But Pryor added a small qualification that deserves to remain in the history.
He said Brooks wanted him, “so he says.”
Those three words keep the story honest.
Brooks's account tells us what Brooks said happened inside Warner Bros. Pryor confirmed that the studio rejected him, but his wording also shows that he did not simply endorse every part of Brooks's version.
What is not in dispute is what happened next.
Cleavon Little became Sheriff Bart.
And Little was no consolation prize.
Four years before Blazing Saddles, he had won the 1970 Tony Award for Actor in a Musical for his performance in Purlie. By the time Hollywood put a sheriff's badge on him, he was already an accomplished stage performer with serious command of timing, language and presence.
That background becomes visible almost immediately in Blazing Saddles.
Little does not play Bart as a man desperate to prove himself to Rock Ridge. He plays him as a man who can see the absurdity surrounding him before the people creating it can.
That difference is everything.
The townspeople panic.
Bart watches.
They underestimate him.
Bart calculates.
They become louder and more ridiculous.
Bart gets cooler.
Little rarely needs to fight the madness for attention. He lets the madness expose itself.
One of the film's most famous moments captures the entire performance in miniature.
Bart has arrived as the new sheriff, but the townspeople cannot get past the fact that he is Black. At one point, he reaches down and announces, “Excuse me while I whip this out.”
The crowd panics.
What Bart produces is the document confirming his appointment as sheriff.
A piece of paper should be ordinary.
Here, it becomes the joke.
Bart possesses the lawful authority to hold the office. The people who consider themselves respectable citizens are the ones losing control because they cannot reconcile that authority with the color of the man holding it.
Little understands exactly where the comedy lives.
Bart knows what room he has entered.
He knows what these people think of him.
And he refuses to become smaller, more frightened, or less intelligent simply because their prejudice demands it.
That is one reason the story becomes weaker when Cleavon Little is treated merely as Richard Pryor's replacement.
Pryor's exclusion matters.
A Black comedian could be valuable enough to help write a racial satire built around a Black sheriff, yet Warner Bros. could still decide he represented too great a risk to carry the film as its lead.
We do not need to invent a cleaner explanation than the evidence gives us. Pryor himself acknowledged that his reputation for being troublesome was not created from nothing, while Brooks repeatedly attributed the studio's refusal to concerns about Pryor's personal problems and reliability.
But the decision still reveals something about power.
Writing the character did not mean Pryor controlled who would embody him.
Then Little walked into that opening and created something nobody should reduce to somebody else's missed opportunity.
He gave Bart intelligence without stiffness, confidence without swagger for swagger's sake, and humor without making the Black sheriff himself the fool.
That last distinction matters.
American entertainment had spent generations finding ways to make Black people into caricatures and punch lines. Blazing Saddles uses racist language and stereotypes deliberately in its satire, and some of its material remains abrasive more than half a century later.
But the central joke surrounding Bart repeatedly runs in the other direction.
The racists believe they are judging him.
Little's performance lets us watch them reveal themselves.
That is a difficult balance for an actor to hold, especially inside a movie determined to become more chaotic with every reel.
Little holds it.
And the more outrageous the film becomes, the clearer his control looks.
There is another reason to resist the easy version of this story.
When people hear that Richard Pryor was originally wanted for Sheriff Bart, the imagination naturally starts working. What would Pryor have done with the role? How different would the movie have been? What did audiences lose when Warner Bros. refused him?
Those are fair questions.
But they can accidentally turn Cleavon Little into an alternate ending to Richard Pryor's story.
He was more than that.
Little brought his own history, training, timing and intelligence to Bart. He did not give audiences an imitation of the performance Pryor might have delivered.
He gave them Cleavon Little.
That is why both men belong in the story without one being used to diminish the other.
Pryor's contribution is literally in the credits.
Little's contribution is there every time Bart rides into Rock Ridge, surveys the foolishness around him and refuses to surrender his dignity to it.
Blazing Saddles was selected for the National Film Registry in 2006 as part of America's preserved film heritage.
By then, the question of who almost played Bart had become one of Hollywood's enduring pieces of trivia.
But trivia is too small a container for what happened.
Richard Pryor helped put words into a Black sheriff's world, then watched another actor inhabit that world after the studio refused to put Pryor in the saddle.
Cleavon Little took that complicated opportunity and made Bart neither victim nor caricature. He made him observant, funny, composed and fully capable of understanding exactly how ridiculous racism could make the people practicing it.
There is no reason to choose which man's story deserves remembering.
Pryor's name is on the screenplay.
Little is the man we see wearing the badge.
The fuller history has room for both.
I invest a lot of time researching and sharing these important stories. If you’d like to support the work behind them, here’s the link:
https://buymeacoffee.com/blackhistoryrevival
Every coffee truly helps.
