WHEN DAVID Zucker was a schoolkid in Milwaukee in the 1960s, one of his teachers made a prediction. "She said to me once, when I was fooling around in class, 'Zucker, I know one day I'll be paying good money to see you make me laugh, but right now, get your ass back in that chair and crack that book!'" She was right., writes JOHN PATTERSON
This badly behaved schoolkid would go on to reinvent US screen comedy with a movie called Airplane!, which he co-directed and co-wrote.
When we meet David in Manhattan, he is feeling a little rough. He was out the night before, it turns out, celebrating the film’s 30th anniversary with the movie’s co-creators, his younger brother Jerry and their lifelong friend Jim Abrahams. “I just couldn’t get out of bed this morning,” he says.
Well may they celebrate. Airplane!made $83 million (€65.5 million) on its first release in 1980 (on an outlay of a mere $3.5 million/€2.7 million), and launched an entire comedy franchise, from the Police SquadTV shows to the Naked Gunmovies they grew into – reconfiguring, in the process, one-time 1950s romantic lead Leslie Nielsen into a comic hero.
Somewhere along the way, Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (ZAZ for short) also inspired Saturday Night Live, launched another comedy titan of the 1980s, John Landis, and even gave the Farrelly brothers their big writing break.
I first saw Airplane!in Florida in August 1980, one of an audience that was convulsed for 90 non-stop minutes. Before Airplane!, jokes in comedies came along reliably though intermittently – but watching Airplane!was like being strafed with a joke-howitzer. There was no time to stop laughing before another dozen jokes came at you. It was smartass, juvenile, subversive and played absolutely straight by a cast of stone-faced matinee idols drawn from the very movies that Airplane!spoofed. (Robert Stack, who plays pilot-on-the-ground Rex Kramer, had starred in the cheesy in-flight melodrama The High and the Mightyin 1954.)
And all this from three guys who say they barely knew which end of the camera to look into when they got started.
“We spent so much time trying to persuade everyone else that it would be funny,” says Jerry Zucker, “that we started to believe it ourselves. So we were pretty gung-ho when it came out and weren’t that surprised it was a hit. But no one ever envisioned it still being around 30 years later.”
This was the early 1980s: the DVD wasn't around and video was in its infancy. "Movies didn't yet have that second life," David says. "We never thought Airplane!would become this, this . . . " He laughs at the preposterousness of the idea. "Cultural icon!"
ZAZ were three Jewish kids from the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, raised on TV shows and the high, wide and handsome Technicolor movies of 1950s Hollywood. Their favourite TV show was Leave It to Beaver, the archetypal white-suburban family comedy – which just makes it even sweeter that the white woman in Airplane!who "talks jive" is Barbara Billingsley, who played Beaver's mum.
"We just had this normal midwestern upbringing," says David, who, since the Naked Gunmovies, has also directed BASEketball, about some goofballs who invent a new sport, and (after his post-9/11 realignment from Democrat to Republican) An American Carol, about an anti-American film-maker who is visited by three ghosts. "We knew we weren't hot stuff. We weren't sophisticated, we weren't New York, we weren't LA – we weren't even Chicago! We were Milwaukee, which is a bend in the road: nothing originated there."
“None of us were great students,” says Jerry, who turned 60 this year, “so we distinguished ourselves by being class clowns.” “There were at least five guys in my class who were way funnier than I was,” says David, 62, “but they had it in them to get real jobs after graduation.”
The boys found themselves in Los Angeles in the 1970s and by 1975 were running their own sketch-revue show, the cultish Kentucky Fried Theatre. "The pace you see in Airplane!developed through the live theatre show," Jerry says. "We weren't really actors, just performers, so we were cheaper. We didn't even have the ability to make characters. All we could do was write jokes and act them out. We literally couldn't stand being on stage and not getting a laugh. A lot of people said their jaws ached after the show – and we wanted to get that on to film."
Thirty years later, they discovered that NBC producer Lorne Michaels had visited their live show in 1974 and said: "I want to do that on live network TV!" The result was Saturday Night Live, an instant hit and now the longest-running comedy in TV history.
The first ZAZ film was The Kentucky Fried Movie, which they only fell back on when they couldn't get Airplane!financed. And since they didn't know the first thing about film-making, they hired a then-unknown young director called John Landis to direct it; Landis would go on to become a colossus of the 1980s and 1990s, the maker of The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolfin London and the Thrillermusic video. Kentucky Fried, a wholesale transfer to film of their stage spoofs of TV ads and bad dramas, included, in its 20-minute chop-socky spoof A Fistful of Yen,the germ of Airplane!. Although they liked Landis, says David, they wanted their suggestions adhered to "100 per cent of the time – not just 89 per cent".
David recalls the happy accident that led them to make Airplane!. "For material, we'd leave the VCR on all night and see what turned up. One morning we got interested not in the commercials, but in the actual movie that was on. It was called Zero Hour!.So we purchased an option on the rights." Zero Hour!(yes, they even stole the exclamation mark) was a 1957 potboiler written by Airport's Arthur Hailey, and the trio swiped its absurd food-poisoning-at-30,000ft plot – and a lot of its dialogue – then besieged it with their full comedic powers. They also targeted the whole Airportdisaster movie franchise, and snagged a powerful, sympathetic producer at Paramount, Howard W Koch, who had once headed the studio and lent heft in casting roles.
Getting all the actors on board took some persuasion: there was Peter Graves of Mission: Impossible, who plays Captain Oveur; Nielsen, the star of Forbidden Planet, who plays Dr Rumack; Lloyd Bridges of Sea Hunt, the man in the tower; and the stony, growly Robert Stack of Written on the Windand The Untouchables, playing Rex Kramer, the man who talks the aircraft down.
“Graves took one look at the script,” says David, “and just about threw it in the trash. Well, can you blame him? He’s playing a paedophile and every line he has is horrifying.” Jerry adds: “I know – and the defining line of his very varied career will be, ‘Billy, have you ever seen a grown man naked?’” He laughs. “Stack got it right away, though. Lloyd Bridges was asking once about his motivation or something and Stack says, ‘Lloyd, there’s a spear gonna fly into the right wall and a watermelon’s gonna burst on stage left. Believe me, no one’s looking at us!’”
I suggest to Jerry that Airplane!was almost made redundant by Airport '80: The Concorde, the final Airportmovie, which verges on self-parody. At one point, George Kennedy purrs to Sylvia Krystel: "Why d'you think they call this a cockpit?" In another scene, he opens a window (during supersonic Mach 4 flight) to shoot at Russian jet fighters with a handgun.
"I totally remember that," says Jerry. "The studio learned their movie was getting laughed at in all the wrong places, and they actually changed the poster to read something like, 'The thrills are great – and so are the laughs!' But we had more laughs. We even offered Lloyd's part to Kennedy, who wanted to do it. But he couldn't kill off his Airportcash-cow. We got him for The Naked Gun, though."
Nowadays, of course, Airport '80is a forgotten piece of late-night TV rerun trash, while Airplane!remains as fresh and ridiculous as the day it was released.
"And," says Jerry, who had further hits with Ghostand First Knight, "people who weren't even born when it came out – 10-year-old kids, even – know Airplane!off by heart. It's a wonderful thing for a movie to live so long."
(The Guardian Service)
Five films indebted to ‘ Airplane!’
The Naked GunOnce Jerry and David found they had touched a nerve, they kept on pressing, first with Airplane!spin-offs, then with the Naked Guntrilogy, and these days with the (increasingly iffy) Scary Moviefranchise. Leslie Nielsen remains committed to the genre spoof, cameoing in everything from Superhero Movieto Spy Hard.
There's Something About MaryPeter Farrelly, half of another slapstick sibling director partnership, has likened watching Airplane!as a young man to seeing Led Zeppelin in concert. His first job in showbiz came after he sent a script to David Zucker. The scene in which Ben Stiller battles a puppy is almost a straight lift from Airplane!
Final Destination Airplane!demolished the disaster movie genre that had been such a 1970s staple. So while the Final Destination franchise gave it a new lease of life two decades later, it was shot-through with all the post-modern spin an awareness of Airplane!demanded.
FargoSo silly were some of Airplane!'s gags ("Surely . . ." "Don't call me Shirley") that a poker face was a prerequisite. This deadpan sensibility, staying earnest in the face of extreme stupidity, has found its classiest practitioners in Joel and Ethan Coen. Even their most highbrow work, such as A Serious Man,has some Airplane!inheritance.
Black Dynamite Scott Sanders's uproarious blaxploitation spoof shows how the Zuckers' legacy keeps on giving. Those Airplane!scenes in which the superfly dialogue of two black men is treated to subtitles (and later translated by an old white woman) touched on taboos film-makers today are applauded for approaching.
