[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
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Film Courage: We know you love the Wayans brothers. You spoke very highly of them last time we interviewed you. We understand there’s some controversy now?
David Zucker, Director/Writer/Producer: Well, yeah, [laughter] there’s a little bit of controversy with the Wayans and I’m not sure, it may be only from Marlon.
But quizzically somebody showed me a interview with him where he was very angry about, and he didn’t mention me by name, but he did say the Zucker brothers at one point, he said they were robbed of the franchise after Scary Movie 2 and Scary Movie 3 was no good and Scary Movie 4 was no good.
I rarely disparage other filmmakers here.
What happened was that I talked to Bob Weinstein, who was the head of Dimension at the time.
He said that they were just unable to make a deal with the Wayans.
It’s math. It’s just they asked for too much in Bob’s opinion and Bob didn’t want to pay it.
Michael Eisner once said his rules of negotiation is you can get what you can get.
So the Wayans evidently asked for too much according to Bob and Bob turned it down and they left.
They went over to Revolution Studios with Joe Roth and did another movie and you can do that.
I mean, it’s a free country.
Then after this all happened, Bob called me.
I had done one picture with him before that didn’t do well at all.
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He said to me at the time, Zucker, you’re a better director than your material.
And I didn’t write this movie. He said, I need a director for Scary Movie 3.
I said, Okay, give me the script.
He said, Basically, there is no script. You’ve got to write it.
So, I recruited Craig Mazin, brilliant writer, Pat Proft, another amazing writer who I’ve been with since the early 70s, and they wrote a great script.
Scary Movie 3 was one of my three best movies. Still holds up. It was just a great movie. It just worked.
Everything about it worked.
But I guess Marlon, despite all their success, is angry about it.
I would love to have a conversation with him because I once had lunch with Keenen.
Keenen…he couldn’t have been nicer. said, “We owe you guys a lot. You inspired us to do I’m Going To Get You, Sucker.” But it comes down to…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
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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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