People Who Don't Understand How Time And Priority Work

A pop-level or low-level critic is pissed off that I noted that Blazing Saddles ripped off Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down published six years earlier and which was certainly known to some of those involved in producing Blazing Saddles.   In answer to a volunteer involuntarily proving a point that the erudite RMJ made about the crap that passes for criticism in comments here, here's what the ripped off author said about that as recently as last October.  He was hardly the only one who noticed. 

I met Stanley in the early seventies. I stopped off to see him in Los Angeles after he contacted me about my books. Ivan Dixon, the late actor, and I were on the way to see Quincy Jones about his possible co-producing my western, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, the “antecedent” of “Blazing Saddles,” as a result of Richard Pryor introducing the book to the studio that produced it. Stanley wanted to tag along. He wanted to call Jones an “Uncle Tom.” I refused his request.

At first, Stanley wrote some articles that lauded my literary output. Even stuck his neck out by writing in The Village Voice that “Blazing Saddles” was a rip off of my surrealistic western, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, a connection that is still being made. Andrew Bergman, one of the scriptwriters for the film, wrote a letter to The Voice denying such a connection. What Bergman failed to mention was that Richard Pryor was his co-writer. Pryor read my novel in Berkeley and wrote a letter to the late actor D’Urville Martin, in which he said he was considering making a film based on the book. Alison Mills, an actress and filmmaker, whose novel, Francisco, was published by Steve Cannon and me, mentioned in the book that a friend of hers, who worked at the studio that produced “Blazing Saddles,” told her that they were reading my book.

Update:  Yeah, he's always had problems with anyone who respects Black artists, and Women, really most other than straight, white men working in other places than New York and Hollywood.

Update:  You don't disprove the point made in the last update by whining that I capitalized Black and Women.