[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: I recently re-read a book called Steal Like an Artist [Amazon link] by Austin Kleon. He has a series of books.
It’s about borrowing other’s ideas thoughtfully and then implementing them into your own creativity.
In keeping with that theme, what does Steal like an artist actually mean? And is there an ethical line between inspiration and imitation?
David Zucker, Director/Writer/Producer: All artists borrow. In fact, there’s a saying,
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
I don’t think we outrightly steal from anyone.
You know, we involve our own style, but Airplane was based on that black and white 1957 movie called Zero Hour. And we stole the whole plot. We stole the whole story.
We’ve never hidden that fact.
We actually ended up buying the rights to it because I remember showing the script to John Landis.
This is a story that we tell in our book, Surely You Can’t Be Serious.
He said, “Guys, this isn’t parody. This is plagiarism.”
We kind of gulped and we said, you know, he’s right and so we better buy the rights. And we did.
It’s a good thing we did because we just took that entire plot which was owned by someone…(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!”.
MORE VIDEOS WITH DAVID ZUCKER
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