[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: What are your first steps of writing a new comedy?
David Zucker, Director/Writer/Producer: With Airplane, the process was we saw an old movie called Zero Hour, a 1957 black and white movie that had the same plot. Guy goes up with PTSD on an airplane and the stewardess is his girlfriend. There’s food poisoning and he has to fly the plane down. That was written by Arthur Hailey.
He knew all the ins and outs and the intricacies of and the importance of putting a character in there. We followed that. We just put in the jokes and we landed at Paramount. They had us rewrite more stuff on it which improved it greatly.
For Naked Gun, we based it on Police Squad, which was based on a 1958 TV series starring Lee Marvin called M Squad.
We just did six episodes and ABC couldn’t cancel it fast enough because it got no audience even with only three networks. People didn’t get it.
I always say all my flops are just ahead of their time. That’s what happened there. We wanted to do a movie of that. We thought it was cancelled because it was on TV. And so, we’ll do a movie on it.
And because we did Ruthless People with Dale Launer, we knew the importance of character and to craft this three-act structure.
We did that in Naked Gun and used some of the jokes from…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
MASTERCRASH: A Crash Course In Spoof Comedy
BUY THE BOOK – Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!
About:
Born on October 16, 1947 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, director/writer/producer David Zucker, along with brother Jerry (Ghost, 1990) Zucker and longtime friend, Jim (Hot Shots, 1991) Abrahams, has established himself among Hollywood’s (or at least Wisconsin’s) most successful filmmakers. Starting out after college, with a borrowed video tape deck and camera, the soon to be legendary trio created the Kentucky Fried Theater, on the UW Madison campus, and moved to California in 1972, quickly becoming the most successful small theater group. in Los Angeles history.
After parlaying this success into The Kentucky Fried Movie, the three conceived the idea that would create a whole new film genre. Airplane! (1980) broke all conventions, featuring dramatic actors like Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen performing zany jokes with straight-laced sincerity. The spoof became the surprise hit of 1980, beginning a streak of hilarious movies including Top Secret! (1984) and Ruthless People (1986), after which David branched out on his own to direct The Naked Guns (1988, 1991, 1994), BASEketball (1998), Scary Movies 3 (2003), and 4 (2006), and others.
David also found time to produce the successful, but somewhat less hilarious A Walk in The Clouds (1995) and Phone Booth (2002), and recently completed a feature script, The Star of Malta, a comedy set in the Film Noir era, and an international spy thriller, “Counter Intellijence!”.
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