Wait a minute, we're starting and there's the Paramount logo.
- I remember when we thought that up. - That's Jerry speaking.
OK, we'll ID ourselves. I'm Jerry Zucker.
Jim Abrahams.
- David Zucker. - Jon Davison.
And this is Paramount Pictures presenting...
It's in colour.
You probably wanted us to say something.
We have nothing to say.
This shot was done by Rodney Blalack.
And...
It's a lot of cotton wool and a little airplane tail on a track.
- But... was this in the script... - Yes.
Or was this added?
It's on a big plywood table.
I remember when we started talking to Elmer Bernstein about the score,
trying to tell him that we wanted a B-movie score.
We did not actually want, like, a really good score,
- but he got it. - Rose to the occasion.
That's the old LAX before they did the second deck.
Anyway, should we talk about how... how the movie actually got started?
- Good. - OK, so...
This was probably 19... the first draft we probably wrote in 1974?
Yeah, while we were doing our "Kentucky Fried Theatre".
We got material for the theatre by leaving a video recorder on all night
to get the commercials so we could do spoofs,
'cause that's when they do the stupidest, cheapest commercials.
And so one morning we were looking at what we got the night before
and there weren't many good commercials,
but there was this airplane movie, a disaster film,
which was "Zero Hour" from 1957,
starring Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell and Sterling Hayden.
Written by Arthur Hailey.
Right, who did all the "Airport" movies.
So we said we could do a parody of this and see what happens,
so we wrote a movie we called "The Late Show" because the idea
was to tie all our commercial gags together with some movie in-between.
You were going to watch all these commercial spoofs
but then we'd go to the actual movie for a couple of minutes
and then back to commercials.
The first guy we brought that script to was Lloyd Schwartz...
Whose wife that is.
And that's Barbara Mallory.
He liked it but he said this "Airplane" story seems... funnier
and more interesting than your commercial spoofs.
Cut out the commercials and just do the story, so...
That's what we did, huh?
Then we wrote the first draft,
which had 20 good jokes from the final version,
and a lot of talking and a lot of shoe leather.
There's your credit, Jon.
The voices you hear...
- That's Howard... - Howard Jarvis.
They were the actual people who did the no parking at LAX.
The red zone, yeah. We got the actual couple.
And they make a living by making the machinery.
- They make the machinery. - Yeah.
Wait, here comes my wife.
- Stop for a minute. - Nancy... there she is.
I met her, she was an extra and we met that day.
And there she was, so I said, "Stop the camera."
That's Jerry Zucker right there.
There's me and there's David.
It's good to have three directors. While two are acting one can direct.
And this is the model Howard was angry about.
- That cost $40,000. - Yeah.
It's not a model, it's full-size... three-quarter size.
And they covered it in plaster and it weighed...
Good to see some guy pulling cable, here now, on the left.
- Right there! - Just on the left.
The technician pulling cable.
This picture was so cheap.
Half these people are just people going to their flights
The people right behind are extras,
but they couldn't shut down this main thoroughfare,
so I remember shooting in the airport was like shooting in an airport.
We either couldn't control the costumes of the extras or...
she just misinterpreted our instructions,
but you can see the big collars.
On the plane everyone was supposed to have '50s-era clothes,
which helps to make the movie timeless,
because we don't have any stupid '70s fashions.
Another story is that we always had envisioned this movie
as a kind of a '50s style and always thought of it as on a prop plane
because that's what "Zero Hour" was and we loved the sound of the engines
and the drama of the prop plane
and when we came to Paramount, Eisner loved the script
but he said you gotta do it on a jet plane.
It's hard to imagine, but we struggled with this.
We had no other offers to make the movie,
a bunch of other places had turned us down,
but we were gonna say no because we'd envisioned it on a prop plane.
Finally, we sold out because we really wanted to make the movie
and in fact Eisner was totally right
and it wouldn't have been as good
because you wouldn't have identified with the present day aspect,
just the old movie aspect.
- You can see the string there. - Yeah.
Eisner said you may go on to make this movie on a prop plane
but it won't be at this studio.
So we thought about it and came back.
Other studios had worse ideas, remember America International
and they said, "We'll let you make the picture but...
"it's gotta be with Dom DeLuise."
And Harvey Corman, "I'll control casting..."
- That's right. - He died, that guy.
And then United Artists,
who we took it back to after we had done "Kentucky Fried Movie" there,
said they wanted to do it as a 20-minute centrepiece
as part of a "Kentucky Fried Movie ll",
so that that would be like "Fistful Of Yen" in "Kentucky Fried Movie",
Airplane would be this centrepiece, and we said no.
We pitched it to Warner Brothers,
who loved the idea and didn't like the script.
Avco were going to do it for a while but couldn't raise the money.
- What happened with... - We wanted...
With Avco, we kind of sequestered ourselves away, remember?
Because we had to decide shall we go to Avco or Paramount?
- No, no... - What?
Was it? No, it was AIP...
- Our lawyers wanted AIP. - Then Avco.
And Bob Raimi really wanted the picture, he loved this movie.
He was head of the studio but we were for Avco.
But then we actually decided, after we'd debated and debated,
we said, "We'll go to Avco,"
but we called Paramount to say "We're gonna make the movie at Avco"
and talked to Jeffrey Katzenberg
and the express intent of the conversation
was to say, "Sorry, we're going somewhere else,"
and the conversation was three minutes
- and we made the movie at Paramount. - Katzenberg was very persuasive.
He's brilliant.
And we took a week, calling him... with a list of factors.
Yeah, 'cause there wasn't a movie afoot at the studio at that time,
they said, "You can have Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack,
"Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves," but they wanted lots of cameos,
comedy cameos, which we didn't want to do.
The one we ended up with, who was great in the movie was Jimmie Walker,
but that's...
Jerry kept calling him "JJ".
- And he said I'm Jimmie. - I'm not JJ.
And I think Paramount wanted Barry Manilow to fly down the plane.
We had a lot of suggestions.
He lived next door to Michael Eisner.
That's David's and my sister in the middle
and our cousin Mallory on the left.
And Howard Koch gave some great advice when they said Barry Manilow,
Howard Koch said, "Don't worry about things that'll go away."
Bruce Jenner came in to read a couple of times.
We screen-tested David... David Letterman.
- Oh, yeah. - That's right.
And later showed it on the David Letterman Show.
Oh, there's a pun.
Smoking.
Here's high production value right here.
That shirt has no production value.
Just... I want to point out where you can see
the Scotch tape holding the set together.
- Real stock footage. - Yeah.
I don't think we'd have got through the studio system without Howard.
He was so uppity.
And every time the studio had an actor they wanted us to consider
that we thought was wrong, Howard would say, "lt'll work itself out.
"Don't do anything."
They'll probably do the screen test and probably, you know...
The other great piece of advice from Howard Koch was buy a tuxedo,
'cause you're gonna rent one so frequently, so buy one now.
Here's one of our rules of comedy.
- What? - Knocking down the posts.
We thought this was funny because we were doing satire on a scene
from "Since You Went Away".
And she was chasing along a train.
We thought people would laugh just because they would connect the train.
Nobody ever laughs at this line, I thought it was funny.
I... I... always... That made me laugh.
"It's all right, it doesn't work."
It doesn't get a laugh until she knocks down the posts.
So we had a rule that you knock down the posts.
So to speak.
But we never made another movie with a post in it.
We're waiting to apply that rule.
That's Kareem Abdul, he did this movie for a rug.
- He didn't wanna. - Six months later he needed it.
It was the greatest line ever by an agent.
"He's got to have $30,000 because he wants to buy this rug."
It was more than we had in the budget but we said OK.
We thought it was agenting but we saw an article in the newspaper.
When Steve Stucker, who plays the airplane controller,
first saw that miniature at a screening, he said,
"Oh, it's just hanging there!"
Followed by his cackle.
- "It's just hanging there!" - It's pretty cheap.
This scene's from "Zero Hour".
We used to run old movies all the time
and just take serious lines and scenes and moments,
and tonnes of lines can be traced back to...
all kinds of different B-movies, a lot of flying movies that we saw.
- See the Scotch tape? Oh... - The set's being held together.
- Let's move in. - Can we freeze-frame that tape?
It's a really low budge.
The picture cost $3.5 million... in 1980.
Look at all the open luggage racks.
That's right, the old days.
There aren't airplanes that have three seats on one side
and two on the other,
we just made that up.
- There probably weren't then. - Yeah.
- I think we're out of stories... - We're done.
Go back to the regular soundtrack now and enjoy the movie.
We front-loaded all them stories.
Who's this woman?
And what's she doing in our movie?
She wound up being in a...
She's in a lot of... yeah.
Boy, we're scraping the barrel!
I'll tell a story about another Kareem thing,
originally the Kareem part was written for Pete Rose,
and we went to Pete Rose to try to get him
but we filmed during the summer and he was playing baseball,
and so our fallback was Kareem
and we re-wrote the part to make it specific to him.
Who played the part in "Zero Hour"?
- Crazylegs Hirsch... - That's really true.
The co-pilot was a guy who really couldn't act.
So Pete Rose turned down the movie,
but bet us $1,000 that the team would win.
And I still have that cheque.
This was the only part filmed on the Paramount lot.
Everything else was filmed at Culver Studios.
You can see the pads in their back.
Wait till the guy gets stabbed...
He had a sign saying "stick the knife here."
Didn't we shoot this in two days? It's amazing.
- The old days. - Stage seven at Paramount.
The whole picture shot in 34 days.
- Is that all? - Yeah, 34 days.
- Couldn't do it again. - We were tired after that.
I gained 15 pounds.
And a wife.
I lost 15 pounds.
- You look great. - Thank you.
If you can't really see Jim, he looks great.
- Muscled, oiled and tanned. - Like the guy on the right.
It's Bill West from our theatre in Madison.
Now, this guy who's dancing, look at his back.
Do you think maybe he's gonna get a knife?
What's gonna happen?!
We didn't even take it off for the shots before he got stabbed.
Early homophobia.
There's a hole where he got it the first take.
That was good.
He conveniently had balsa wood in his back that day.
As fate would have it, the man stabbed was wearing balsa wood.
He was made of balsa wood.
- Just one of those things. - Animatronic... mannequin.
That's...
That's not worth waiting for.
You guys came up with this. Dave and Jerry came up with this.
I remember getting to work when they said spinning around.
- In that contraption? - Yeah, the contraption.
Wait for your laugh.
There was a screening process.
- They rehearsed this for weeks. - Yeah.
For an hour!
- The song is speeded up, too. - Yeah, 10%.
We had to get permission.
And now you have to watch here when Bob gets flipped.
That's the "Texas Switch".
You can see him waiting because it's a double that lands in the audience.
- This was the contraption. - Right.
Now, that's a double... There's Bob in the background on the right.
And then comes out.
Seamless filmmaking.
How do they do that?
One take, no waiting.
This is before special effects could get rid of that.
There was no painting out of wires then.
This was also on the day we said... Bob said, "Do you juggle?"
We looked on his résumé - any special skills?
Horseback riding and juggling.
So we couldn't get a horse, so we threw in these balls.
This is not something we sat down and thought of.
Bob at the same time was filming a TV series, so he'd go back and forth.
That's right, he was doing "Angie".
Good guy.
Do you think there's enough time here to get back down?
The audience likes to see this kind of slow camera movement.
- It's very artsy. - Nobody ever appreciated that.
Directorial... It's pretty good.
This is what Katzenberg talked about, the hills and valleys.
- This was the valley? - Yeah.
Always good to see two people hugging.
There, before the dummy comes in.
Recap a joke.
She insisted on doing this.
We could've had a stunt double...
She insisted on actually hanging from her neck.
Was that guy a mannequin back there? I think he is.
Yeah, that's a mannequin.
Yeah, he doesn't even blink.
We couldn't afford a mannequin that good.
It's good though. He hasn't blinked yet.
It's an extra, what do you want?
You know, "Shaft" is out again.
- It's been remade. - With Al White?
No!
These guys came to audition for this and they made up that stuff.
In the script we just wrote "mo fo shi' mo'fuh".
Three white guys from Milwaukee writing black jive.
We apologised to these guys when they came in,
but Al and Norm just made it work.
This is straight from "Zero Hour".
- Actually, it's "Crash Landing". - Was it?
Another movie where two adults did the same dialogue.
- Without the punchline? - Without the punchline.
They had a tape of "Zero Hour". When they were shooting scenes,
they'd check it in "Zero Hour" so they knew where to put the camera.
We knew this was the only movie we could direct.
It's a great first movie, it's got training reels for directors.
Basically, you had people sitting in fixed rows of seats facing forward.
Wasn't a lot of movement.
And it had been shot before so you just needed the videotape.
An amazing thing about this scene is people saw this and said,
"You did a great send-up of 'From Here To Eternity',"
and none of us had seen it.
Sometimes you get credit for things you didn't intend.
We probably saw still pictures.
Send-ups of "From Here To Eternity".
- That was cold. - We waited for a wave.
Julie took the brunt.
You can see her face - oh, not there.
But the one before you can see she's freezing.
He's on a stand for his shots.
We had to shoot this and then get back
to shoot all the hospital scenes in the same day.
- Is that true? - That's right.
It was badly scheduled.
Who's in charge of that?
- She's very pretty. And very nice. - Yeah.
She was one of those people that had read, you know,
hundreds of people for that role,
and she came in and she made us laugh.
- She made it work. - She is that character.
It was one of the first days of auditions
and I met her on the elevator, she was wearing a full-length fur coat.
It was in New York, and she had once dated a friend of mine.
How'd that work out?
Evidently not very well because she was single by the time of this scene.
Peter Graves did this movie because his wife loved the script.
And she laughed at the... she was howling at the premiere.
She was hysterical.
We met Peter Graves and he couldn't understand why we wanted him.
"The script is funny, but why me?"
"Get some comedians."
And we said, "We think you're funny."
Yeah, you're funnier than those guys.
When we were writing this, because we were basically doing "Zero Hour",
we transcribed "Zero Hour" and I was the only one who know how to type.
And so I did the typing when we were writing,
and so when we transcribed "have you ever been in a cockpit before?"
The kid says "no" and I put in the line,
"Have you ever sucked a grown man's cock?"
And David and Jerry said, "You can't say that."
That was funny in the room but you can't say that in a movie.
That would have been a deal-breaker.
You put that in to amuse us but then we thought perhaps we can use this.
Jim, maybe you should explain what a typewriter is.
- This is 20 years ago. - That's right.
There's a huge pause at the end of this scene,
because this got a big laugh in the theatre,
I don't imagine people at home laughed that long,
but you'll see we're just on this kid forever.
When he lets go.
OK.
There's a '70s costume that slipped through.
Boy, always irritates me to see that.
- It's just hanging there. - You can see the wires.
It's so cheesy.
Also the prop plane sound instead of the jet noise.
That's what we did. We compromised with Eisner.
We put it on a jet but we made the sound a prop plane.
We showed him, didn't we?
The first time we showed the rough cut we went to Eisner's house
because that was the tradition at Paramount in those days.
That was the tradition with movies under $4 million.
We can't actually afford a theatre but...
But you could hear his sons, or son, laughing from the kitchen.
So that's when we knew.
I remember he said afterwards how much he liked it.
He was always our biggest supporter
and he saw the potential of the script.
He and Jeffrey.
- Remember how I got the script? - No.
We sent it to United Artists, who passed on it,
but a lady at United Artists, Suzanne Barewall,
was having dinner with Eisner and said,
"We passed on this picture at UA and you oughta look at it."
So he immediately called Don Simpson
and said have those guys in Katzenberg's office.
- John Soley did that painting. - Did he?
Does that exist somewhere now?
Is that in your living room, Jon?
- No. - Who knows.
It's amazing this exists still.
That off-camera spit take.
I'm chuckling because I'm thinking of Marcy Goldman coming up.
Not quite the big laugh we thought.
It must have got a laugh if it was left in.
The screening process was such that we would go to universities
and run the picture and every time people didn't laugh we took it out.
So the picture got cut down to 78 minutes before we added the credits.
- But the television version is... - There's Jon's voice, listen.
We don't have to listen!
It was actually not Ethel Merman.
Remember Ethel Merman's one request, that she bring her own hairdresser?
They were surprised.
This was like, God...
She was... We were so delighted to have her, she was such a delight.
She was wonderful.
Here's more of those bad dissolves.
We paid a good 50 bucks for that!
Each one had to be done nine times.
We should've just stamped "Dream" on it.
- This is a big commercial. - That's right.
We still left it in!
We could cut this down to 38 minutes.
The television version is about 10 minutes longer.
They said there's a lot of good stuff.
They should put that back.
We didn't cut anything funny.
This is Maureen McGovern. We couldn't get Helen Reddy.
Originally, we were gonna have her.
- And sing. - Satire on the Universal movies.
She played the part in Airport.
Universal threatened to sue.
Remember, we tried to get George Kennedy?
And he didn't want to rock the Universal boat.
Universal was the enemy then.
And they are once again.
- Mon dieu. - Mon dieu?
- Lorna had her own series. - This song was written by...
- Peter Yarrow. - Of Peter, Paul and Mary.
We were on a show, "Razzle Dazzle Rock'n'Roll".
Yeah, and we had to pay for the rights and everything.
And he sold the rights and then he saw the movie,
and saw how we had used this wonderful song.
And he thought it was sacrilege.
He was really mad at us.
Not necessarily at us,
he was just angry that he had given up the rights,
that he'd sold his song, because he'd written this for a friend's wedding
and it was a touching, personal, heartfelt, emotional song for him.
And it ended up in this piece of crap.
We used it in this sordid way.
I always took that personally.
I always wondered what would happen if we ran into Peter Yarrow today.
I don't know.
He's probably gotten over it by now.
What would he say? "You guys, it's like..."
"You're those Airplane guys."
- Jill Whelan? - Yeah.
She later appeared on Love Boat as one of the main characters.
Jerry showed her how to do that.
Jerry did that a lot on set.
Following around Robert Stack
telling him how to do John Byner doing Robert Stack.
- Shall we tell that story? - Yeah!
We had always listened to some record we had
where John Byner imitated Robert Stack.
And he was..."He's the big chief, the top dog, the main man..."
I can't remember what Byner's dialogue was,
but something about Elliott Ness and droning on, yeah.
And I don't imitate it well but it was that kind of cadence,
so we wrote the lines in the control tower.
At some point, probably shouldn't tell this till we get to it,
you'll remember it, we'll make it so much more exciting,
waiting for when we actually get there.
Anyway, so we wrote these lines when Bridges says to him it's...
He's got to do what we say, or whatever,
and then Stack says, "No, no, it's his command now" and drones on
and so we were hysterical,
thinking about Robert Stack doing John Byner's imitation...
So we wrote that part for Robert Stack.
That was the one part we really wrote for him,
But we always had him in mind,
and so we got to the first rehearsal, and it was on the set, I think.
On the set that day.
And we get to that part in the rehearsal and Stack reads it,
"It's his ship, now! His command! He's in charge!"
And it was a whole different person doing Robert Stack
I'm not doing him justice, my apologies, Bob,
but it just wasn't that imitation,
so first I tried to explain to do it faster
and finally I had to do a reading of my imitation of Byner doing Stack.
'Cause Jerry and I had been doing Byner at college for years.
He was really nice, Bob Stack.
- He was. - I remember on the first day
I had to ask him to dye his hair,
and he said, "Kid, don't worry, you bought the body."
He had such a great sense of humour
about himself and everything he's ever done.
He was the one who got the joke.
He really understood it, too,
because one of the first read-throughs,
Lloyd Bridges had a lot of questions,
Lloyd was a great guy too but had a lot of questions.
"Why would my character say this and why would..."
He was trying to make sense out of it.
And Stack just laughed and said,
"Lloyd, there's a watermelon hitting the desk behind us
"and a spear flying into the wall,
"nobody's watching us!"
Yeah, that was Stack.
I remember him telling Lloyd, "We are the joke - just keep going!"
- Did he say that? - Oh, yeah.
- Stack was right on. - He got it.
Lloyd half got it.
In 1974, when we finished the first draft of the movie,
we called up Stack's agent to see if he'd be in it,
and what did the agent say?
"Is this a go picture?"
And we said, "What's a go picture?"
He said, "Call back when you get the money."
I remember that Stack was offered a piece of the picture,
a piece of the picture or another 20 grand.
And he took the other 20 grand.
Picked the wrong door!
He thought people wouldn't be that excited about laughing at him.
- That's me vomiting. - That's right, that's you.
- Doing the voiceover. - All the vomiting is Jim.
I later parlayed that into...
This is my mother with brown hair coming up.
I remember Leslie Nielsen at the first rehearsal
was not quite... did not quite get exactly what we were doing
and we sent him home with a tape.
And there was a doctor in "Zero Hour",
and just tried to explain to him what we were doing, the style,
and he saw that, he took that home, watched it
and got exactly what we were doing.
From then on he was a fish in water with all this kind of comedy.
This was a George Kennedy part.
- Most of these guys weren't our... - Lloyd Bridges was.
Most of these guys were not the first choice.
We tried Efrem Zimbalist for some things, Jack Webb...
We always go to Charlton Heston.
We were thinking of one of those TV doctors...
- Ben Casey! - Ben Casey, whoever that was.
- Vince Edwards. - Vince Edwards.
- We met with him. - He turned it...
- He did a TV movie instead. - That's right.
In retrospect probably not wise.
- But, you know... - Who knew?
We lucked out because we got all the right people.
Despite our stupidity.
Didn't somebody... Some guys turned it down,
saying "I don't like their movies", they hated "Kentucky Fried Movie".
Didn't the guy Jack Lord, maybe?
You could hardly blame him.
- To their credit. - Exactly.
The guy who was on "Rat Patrol".
So he was like, "I would never appear in one of their movies."
The interesting thing here is there's no take two.
Literally.
- We called this the mirror shot. - Two white-haired guys.
Do you remember, there was no take two?
We were so short on time
There was nowhere else to put it.
The casting director could not understand
why we wanted Leslie Nielsen.
He said, "Leslie Nielsen's the guy you cast the night before!"
This is the short-pants era of flying.
That was pretty elaborate, gimballing the plane, wasn't it?
We didn't, I think we just shook the camera.
- But you know, it works, it's... - Very effective.
It's not exactly The Perfect Storm but...
- It's time for another great story. - Yeah.
About the premier?
The premier, yeah, that was a disaster.
Michael Eisner insisted on having the premier at Paramount Studios.
He didn't want to leave the studio for it,
and that's where we had it.
And hiring those cars, you know?
And they actually put the reels up out of order.
And it was interesting, Jon, you tell your reaction,
but we had three distinctly different reactions.
I, because I was so nervous before, had gone out for some cocktails.
So all of a sudden reel five comes up
and I start thinking, "Gosh, this really steps along.
"We were worried about a pacing problem
"but look, it's really moving along."
David?
I thought the movie was getting such a low-level reaction
that I was glad for the excuse that the reels were mixed up.
Well, of course it didn't work!
So I was relieved there was a massive screw-up.
I ran back to the booth and screamed at the projectionist
like George C Scott in "Hard Core" - "Take it off!"
And the projectionist said, "No, it's right."
"No," I said, "It's the wrong reel!"
And he'd put up the shit hitting the fan reel too soon.
It began with the shit hitting the fan,
so he took it off and he found...
so we're waiting for five minutes for the next reel.
They stopped the movie, put on the lights and rethreaded the projector.
There's Mom.
Everybody remembers that.
And... and so he put up the right thing,
but then when they got the movie started again,
when that reel was done he put up the next reel,
which started with shit hitting the fan.
So everyone said it was too much having shit hitting the fan twice.
"That's a funny joke, but..."
That was so maddening.
Could have done with less shit hitting... cut one of them.
This picture actually opened in Toronto and Buffalo.
It first opened on a Friday,
and it just didn't do any business at all in Buffalo.
And then the following Wednesday it opened in the rest of the country
and... did quite well.
- I didn't know that. - Yeah.
In Buffalo I looked at the numbers and, like, nobody went.
I remember in St Louis the trailer was really good,
and there were two theatres, one where it opened gangbusters
and one where it didn't do any business.
And they attributed it to playing the trailer.
That's before they did all this TV advertising.
- And the free dishes. - Yeah.
Stan and Terry were the names of our lawyers.
That's Kenneth Tobey.
Yep, from "The Thing".
Remember we did this about 15 times because...
This was a tough master.
- He couldn't remember a thing. - Couldn't quite...
That was like the 19th line we tried.
We couldn't come up with a funny line, how about...
- Stephen sold it. - It's just hanging there.
I remember you were worried
about how Steve Stucker was gonna play in the style of the picture.
So many scenes were shot so he could be eliminated.
But actually, the first time we previewed it on the Paramount lot -
it was right after we had shown the picture to Eisner at his house -
and Eisner's first reaction was he loved it, and he said,
"Where did we shoot this? What was the budget?"
He didn't know the details, and then you explained,
we shot it for $3 million at Culver City Studios,
and Katzenberg tried to tell him when it was being released
and he says, "What are you gonna do now?"
We said we wanted to cut the picture and he said, "Don't touch it!"
So we said we've got to try it out in front of some test audiences.
And he said, "You can't do that until the executives have seen it."
And so they arranged that screening for 20 or 30 Paramount executives,
but we felt that would be a mistake so we had them recruit audiences,
but the recruiter just brought people who were in line to see
"Happy Days" and "Laverne And Shirley".
And a lot of them I don't think spoke English.
Yeah, and so the picture... The first half was like sparse laughs
and the second half was no laughs except for Stucker.
He saved the second half.
And so it appeared the picture just flopped.
And I remember Don Simpson and Craig Bomgarten leaving the theatre.
Two Paramount executives.
Two funny guys.
And they looked at me and said, "Well, that was... interesting."
And so we just thought the picture... the picture just flopped.
And I remember Katzenberg scraping us off the cement outside
saying get to work on it, you can continue to cut it,
it'll be great, don't worry about it, this is just one audience.
I mean, the next day I think we listened to the tape,
- and it had laughs. - Tape of the audience reaction.
So we realised we had to continue cutting.
We realised releasing the movie at three hours was probably wrong.
- But the original was funny. - The first three-hour comedy.
We re-cut it and took it to UC Davis and that was our official preview.
- How'd that go? - Great.
You should've been there.
I remember we previewed it at Harvard,
and the kids at Harvard had this tradition
where they won't give you the satisfaction of laughing,
so they would whistle.
But nobody advised us about that tradition...
Let me tell this Harvard story.
- Jim, keep talking. - Something about women at Harvard?
Wrestling women at... I don't know what.
But that was their way of laughing.
We recorded it on audio tape, the screenings,
and they would take this tape back to the cutting room
and cut the picture to the audio tape of the screening.
In case you wonder why it's so choppy.
Or you thought we were artists.
- We just cared about the laughs. - It was pace.
The famous mirror scene, I don't know if anybody got it.
It didn't get a laugh but it was bizarre.
So we decided to take that concept and expand it into "Top Secret".
And do a whole movie full of bizarre jokes!
Mondo.
You think that's a mirror...
- It looks like a mirror. - But actually... not a mirror.
- There were many meetings over that. - Makes me laugh.
Now you've explained it I get it.
This fella's Jesse Emmett who was in a theatre with us.
Actually that's not gasoline he just poured, it's actually just water.
But... didn't we paint this onscreen, the explosion?
Yeah, the explosion.
This is the one post-production effect added.
Another $25 down the drain.
He really did time that beautifully.
Right here, $25.
Well spent, I think.
I thought it was funny.
I love the... that St Christopher statue.
Leslie's just brilliant here.
There are whole scenes when he doesn't move a muscle.
This line's right out of "Zero Hour".
"The lives of everybody on this plane depends on..."
We bought the rights to "Zero Hour".
Bob's reaction gets a laugh all by himself.
No, it's on "altogether" that he does this great reaction.
That was "altogether."
It's coming up, Jerry, just wait.
You'll see it, you'll see it.
We must have missed it.
There's a rule coming up here, too.
Oh, yeah, ad absurdum.
We thought this would be funny, just endlessly panning controls,
much further than you would ever go, but it never...
It must have gotten a laugh.
No cockpit would actually have this many controls but...
- where do you laugh? - Which point?
I don't think anybody ever...
Big laugh.
You want to explain to Howard Jarvis now?
Howard Jarvis wrote a tax initiative in California called Proposition 13.
- In the middle '70s... - Something like that.
A popular figure in the '70s.
Particularly with California homeowners.
They have pictures of airplanes up on the wall.
Reveal picture.
- OK. - OK.
This is the Howard Anderson Company...
- No, Hansard. - Hansard, yeah.
Didn't like planes.
- We shot this before the movie. - That's Jim.
Yeah, actually going "asshole."
I'm not the stuntman.
This is so fast.
We just speeded it up.
Remember the big discussion about whether he should loosen his tie?
Then we got Eisner into the set...
Then we did the focus groups and...
- Tie loosened? Tie tight? - So we did it two ways.
We tried to preview it and finally at UC Davis they all whistled.
This line coming up is actually from "Zero Hour".
No, that's wrong.
And notice the lighting, the...
It got quite dramatic.
Joe Biroc loved to do those shadows.
That's what Joe Biroc did,
it was all hard light, no bounce light, no soft light,
just all direct hard light.
It never took... I always thought,
"Why does it take so long to make movies?"
Because he never spent over 15 minutes lighting a shot.
That stop-motion animation was done by Bill Hedge.
I had forgotten that one.
There's some improvisation here.
This is one of the few things we added on the set.
The basic joke was here but we added the other stuff.
Leslie nails her twice here, just for the sadistic...
One for the road.
This is a movie that has almost no improvisation,
it's funny you mention that because the script was shot religiously.
- The two misconceptions are... - Here's Jim coming up.
One... oh, we have to be quiet.
Scientology?!
Stack did that stunt himself.
There's Jim.
- He was young then. - Yeah.
Anyway, the two misconceptions are that we do a lot of improv
and just come up with stuff on the set
and that we're stoned when we write it. Neither of which is true.
He didn't quite deliver that line.
But it always worked.
The original line was from one of those old flying movies.
"He's a menace to himself and everything else."
What draft was this of the screenplay, guys?
There were hundreds of drafts... well, dozens, maybe hundreds.
And all typed.
Yeah, without computers.
And not even really Xerox machines until later.
I remember this being about 30 drafts.
- After you came in. - Yeah, after I came in.
There was quite a bit before.
When I arrived it was called "Kentucky Fried Airplane".
- Really? - We had offices at Culver Studios
and David was working... we'd sit in the office and play Rondex,
which I guess you actually made into a movie, David.
That's right. Which one, jeez.
That was when Dawn Steele was the head of merchandising.
So we had a big merchandising meeting
and so... she said "Maybe you guys have some suggestions
"for merchandising for Airplane."
So we said "We could do Rondex, it's a game that we play."
So we started playing Rondex,
which consisted of us shouting "Bogus rules!"
As we ran around the table, climbed on the table and yelled "Rondex!"
And they tried to figure out what the game was.
And be nice to the movie-makers.
Here's another joke we thought was funny, but the audience didn't laugh.
We were hysterical, we thought that was the funniest joke in the movie.
- And the watermelon, the spear... - Nobody laughed at that either.
- But we left it in. - We enjoyed making this movie.
And it was so short.
Too bad we never saved that automatic pilot.
It just finally disintegrated, didn't it?
- Did it? - It was in Jerry's garage.
That's what happens to cheap vinyl.
There's Mom again.
Humiliating your mother.
And then, yeah, our hundredth breast joke.
This movie's pretty clean considering we were in our 20s.
This picture got criticised when it came out for being too risqué.
Too raunchy.
Boy, times have changed.
We had to cut this to get a PG, didn't we?
It got an R the first time.
- Remember what we cut? - The rape scene.
We knew that would never go in the movie.
You shot it for two days.
Did that for our own...
Here's a story - I just saw the black guys again,
when we played the movie in Germany, Düsseldorf, I think,
and they showed the black guys who are subtitled...
- The African Americans. - The subtitled African Americans...
the whole movie had been dubbed in German,
and yet when that scene came on
the audience laughed as hard as they did in the US
and a lot of these jokes didn't translate, the puns don't translate,
but when the black guys came on that joke transferred,
and we asked why the audience would laugh at that,
and they said they had dubbed them in Bavarian.
So it was, like, a southern German dialect.
Right, and so that joke translated.
The moral is if you're gonna make a movie that'll be shown world-wide,
it's a good idea to help with the translations.
This picture played very well foreign.
Did you notice the vulture on the?
I never noticed.
That gag just passed by. Jim was droning on with his story.
But that was one of the, like, 19 gags...
- A moment for Barbara Billingsley. - That's right.
She was the sweetest.
That special effect with Leslie's nose growing,
we just took a broom handle and painted it and it was so cheap.
Everything was cheap in this picture.
I mean, we were such fans of "Leave It To Beaver"
that when we had our theatre on Pico the most exciting night
was when Lumpy showed up.
I remember when I met you I thought you were the Cleavers, actually.
I was more excited to meet Barbara Billingsley.
- I also got to meet... - She was very nice.
She was a real mom, sweet...
We tried to get Jerry Mathers and Eddie Haskell
for Kentucky Fried Movie.
Beaver wanted too much money, I guess, and Eddie didn't show up.
Basically we were expecting him on the day in the courtroom.
This was the most dangerous stunt.
That's the thing about commentary, you talk about other movies.
This was a tough one... to get the horse to lie down... was a chore.
There was a similar scene in "Kentucky Fried Movie".
Actually, didn't... Correct me if I'm wrong,
wasn't the original version of "Airplane"?
Didn't we want Beaver to fly the plane down or something?
Yeah, the whole thing was Beaver and Wally would fly it.
That was one incarnation.
You get the idea we were a little fixated on that show.
It was kinda primal.
Getting the horse on the bed was a big deal.
That's amazing they did that.
And he raised his head at the right time.
Here's an old Dodger reference.
Now owned by Fox so you'll have to cut this.
It didn't come off, that's right! See that guy in the background?
It was supposed to come off.
We took so much time to test it so it would come off when the wind blew
and that was the joke and it didn't work.
That's Jonathan Banks, the villain in the "Beverly Hills Cop" movies.
This was another of the 25 jokes that couldn't work.
Every time we want Stack off stage he said "Got a cigarette, Niles?"
In fact there was no Niles at all.
That was a reference to "Zero Hour"...
- There's Len Mooy. - Look out, another pun.
When we had our theatre on Pico Boulevard
this fellow, Stephen Stucker, was in our group with us.
We called him up with the straight lines and he supplied the punchlines,
- that's what you see. - He could write for himself.
Now, this is...
The last picture is Howard's grandson.
Howard Koch's... Howard W Koch's grandson.
- Billy Koch... - Now a grandfather himself.
You had to correct yourself
because Howard always wanted to be Howard W Koch -
not to be confused with a communist, Howard Koch who wrote Casablanca.
- Was that why? - Yeah.
That's a big deal in that family because Howard Koch Jr now is Hawk.
They're big on their names.
- Here's an old reference. - Yeah.
In 60 Minutes there used to be a debate called... Point-Counterpoint.
Didn't we use those two in Kentucky Fried Movie?
- This is our lead drug joke. - They probably tried to cut this.
Did we have to alter the film when it was rated R?
Yeah, we had to cut something.
But that was PG, huh?
Back at the end of the '70s it wasn't the deal it is today.
Yeah.
This is the first thing we shot on the first day.
That shot of Leslie walking out.
That's when they got what this was about.
Paramount didn't understand the movie until then...
- There's Jim again. - Vomiting.
Nobody could do it as well as Jim.
The Rumacks were our next-door neighbours in Milwaukee.
You'd never know it, but at Paramount they were always known as "The Boys."
Everybody at Paramount called them "The Boys."
We're not supposed to sit here and laugh!
I always loved that joke!
Worked like a charm every time.
- It was a great joke. - It was.
- "26 and not married." - Nicely staged.
Just like how Bartlett staged it in "Zero Hour".
We did a few shots on our own.
What war did we think this was?
His memories... of the war.
That was the war.
This was Charlie Bluton's favourite scene.
And Charlie Bluton was?
He was head of Gulf and Western at the time.
Along with about 20 other companies.
- And sugar plantations. - Yeah.
They said Charlie Bluton used to make more money
just on the phone trading sugar futures than all of Paramount.
And each morning he'd call Eisner and Diller and tell them.
- Did you ever meet him? - Yeah.
- Kidding. - Was that a lead-in?
Tell a story, nothing else is going on.
We were in Deauville, I think, doing press, after the movie opened,
and I think at that time Paramount wanted us to sign...
they'd neglected to make a multi-picture deal with us,
so they wanted to sign us up for another picture.
And I think we were holding out for more money
and so we went out for lunch in Deauville
with Barry Diller, Michael Eisner,
I think Katzenberg was there and Bluton.
- They brought us to meet Blewdorn. - Henry Kissinger was onboard.
And we met Charlie.
No, I think we met him, we said...
we want... he said "Why haven't you signed up yet for another picture?"
And I think we said immediately,
"We don't wanna deal with these middlemen,"
referring to Eisner and Diller.
And he laughed, he thought that was great.
Then we sat down and had lunch and he told us about...
this whole speech about loyalty,
how we should be loyal to the studio that brought us,
and told us about... who was the guy at MGM who was convicted?
Beagleman - he told a story about David Beagleman, how he was disloyal.
And it reminded me of "Kentucky Fried Movie" because in that movie...
This was one of those scenes...
Jerry pouring gasoline on himself.
I'm just hanging myself...
Oh, God... and then I remember in third grade...
And you won't hear the punchline.
- Tell the punchline. - Yeah, right!
They'll have to read my book.
To hear the punchline write to David Zucker...
- care of... - Paramount Pictures...
I don't work there any more.
This is a scene we just added because they told us
you had to have a point at the end of the second act
that the hero chickens out and then somebody talks him into going back.
And so we said "OK, we'll do that."
- We were malleable. - We said "All right."
It's a stiff thing but I guess you gotta do it.
I think this is... this is coming up with Stack, the John Byner imitation.
He was good at doing that.
Jerry showed Robert Stack how to do that.
Most of these names are people we went to high school with.
They all sued later.
This is a personal favourite.
"Try not to worry."
Needless to say this picture only had one airplane sale in the whole world,
it's Aero Mexico, actually brought this picture to run on...
on an airplane, no other airline ever bought it.
They did, huh?
- Oh, yeah... - You know what's coming up here.
It had to happen sooner or later.
Back in 1980 that was bad.
The first joke they cut.
We opened up on the 4th of July weekend.
That's what...
In 700 theatres, which was a lot of theatres.
- July 4th weekend? - Yeah, July 2nd.
- 700 theatres? - A lot of theatres.
In those days.
And it broke house records.
In fact, the first two days covered the cost of making the picture.
The first two days of exhibition.
- So they were happy? - Yeah.
Blewdhorn was especially happy.
I remember, he told us about loyalty.
There used to be an Air Poland scene in there
with Jose Feliciano who was blind and with his guide dog.
Flying Air Poland, and when that came out there was...
We got a call from the Complaints...
Anti-Defamation League.
But subsequently I've seen Ray Charles flying an airplane in a film.
This got applause.
'Cause it was the end of disco then.
Heard any good jokes lately?
Not recently.
Not for the last half hour.
OK, guy walks into a...
If this picture was any longer there'd be complete silence.
We're gonna leave a space here for you to supply your own commentary.
Did you go out with her?
Jerry, who are you talking to?
It was just to the room.
This was... this was on the set we made this up.
Guys, I have a massage scheduled so I gotta...
You can go away and come back, nobody'll know.
The first time my kids saw this movie they just sat and watched it,
and they were just into the drama, they didn't know it was a comedy.
Just "what's gonna happen? Will it get down? Will they be OK?"
That's Jim doing the dog's voice.
They actually let us shoot at LAX, we got to go out on the runway.
They don't do that any more.
Not after this picture.
Were they unhappy with us?
Not you personally, just... the film.
- They were? - I don't think so.
They were very nice.
I think it's probably very difficult to do that today.
We were shooting out on Aviation Boulevard.
Yeah.
A lot of these shots.
We were actually on the runway at LAX.
That's right.
There was no such thing as second unit.
Yeah, on this one, yeah...
We did everything.
I looked through the cost report
and there's a thing for special shooting units, they spent $15,000...
So there must have been something.
It might have been the backgrounds.
Tell them how you did that.
Oh, yeah, we hung Lloyd upside down and turned the camera upside down.
And Lloyd was great, he could hang upside down for a really long time.
In those days he could.
That was some stock footage. The runway lights went out.
The stock footage was all purchased from Universal
for practically nothing.
And when they discovered that it was now in this hit movie
they were really furious.
And in fact, I think, never did that again.
This we shot in a helicopter.
It was also, like,
they used the plane going through the glass in some other movie,
and when Howard discovered it...
he discovered some Paramount lawyer had given it away for nothing.
It's time to say we had nothing to do with "Airplane 2".
That's actually a story too.
They wanted you to do that,
they were just relentless in their pursuit of you to do that.
I think we felt we had done every airplane joke we could think of.
We had scoured every old flying movie
and just had for years been thinking up all these airplane jokes
and just felt we can't think of any more,
and also it sort of bored us to do the same thing twice,
we didn't really feel like it,
and we didn't realise how much money we'd make.
So they did it without us and none of us have ever seen it.
We never could bring ourselves to.
Even the miniatures were shot at Culver Studios.
On a stage there, stage seven.
Mike Finnell.
Yeah. Generally in charge of a lot of things.
This is straight out of "Zero Hour".
Giving the audience a little satisfaction there.
There's a sense of droning on.
That shot was right out of "Zero Hour".
Panning down, yeah.
I think she improvised that.
This always made us laugh hard. It got the biggest laugh in the theatre.
That never happens...
That's all we had of the plane, that was the entire...
There's no more of it.
Without getting any wider.
That was done on a stage, why didn't we do that on the runway?
I think we had the runway for three hours or something.
Yeah.
Or half a night.
- That's an interesting movie kiss. - Yeah.
Giving it his all there.
Listen to this chorus now screech.
That makes me laugh.
It was hard for the singers to do because they have perfect pitch.
Trans American is a real airline but it's a cargo airline, so...
So we could do it.
- They gave us the rights. - Thank you, Trans American.
That was suggested by a grip, that last joke... that last gag.
And we filmed that during regular production?
Yeah.
Well, our apologies for the second half of this.
We started too late, if we'd done it in the morning...
- We kind of petered out. - Have Paramount let us re-do it.
Why don't we just get Jay Leno in here or someone like that?
- See, you do need comedians. - Yeah.
When we did press interviews together
we'd walk into the room and you could see the look in these guys eyes,
like, "Wow, I'm gonna spend some time with these wonderful, funny guys,"
and then you could see the disappointment.
"God, they're actually boring.
"They have nothing to say."
We never failed to bore people.
The worst was doing interviews with the press
because it was the same questions over and over again
and it was like Russian roulette,
they'd ask a question and nobody would answer
and whoever couldn't stand the silence finally had to speak up.
One wrote about one of us being a master of the hangdog expression.
We finally had a contest to see who could get the biggest lie in print,
so we made up skeet-surfing.
There's Hunt Lowry, he works all the time.
Unlike the rest of us!
- Hunt's still funny. - Yeah.
One career that wasn't a strike.
He has the most expensive tastes.
He's got to keep working.
- He still buys that expensive wine? - Yeah.
Shoulda had some when we started this thing.
Where's Hunt when you need him?
Do we have funny end credits at the end of "Kentucky Fried Movie"?
Well, the army, we included every name.
Thanks for... Kim Jorgensen sent me the scripts
so I'll be eternally grateful.
- Is that how we met? - Yeah.
Susan Arnold's a big producer now.
That's right.
Gretchen Rennell moved to OI.
Wasn't this the start of doing intentionally silly credits?
Maurice Vaccarino. He's still alive, remember him?
He was 75 and he did "Attack Of The Crab Monsters".
And he'd sit there with the crossword puzzle all day.
Out of the way.
And he'd say, "Don't worry, it's going to take as long as it takes
"and cost whatever it costs."
We did do some jokes in the credits here.
We had Mike Fennell's quote.
Right, and Jon's joke was "This Space For Rent" isn't it?
Or "Your Name Could Go Here"?
"A Tale Of Two Cities", there you go.
We had to make the credits really long because the picture is short.
It's an unusually slow crawl.
There's Ron Smith, he's with us today.
There's Nancy Cocuzzo.
They were really upset about this copyright notice.
Yes, "So There."
The FBI got in touch with us.
- They called me. Very pissed. - You?
Yeah. Jack Lennie, you know, complained.
They were gonna recall the movie?
They'd made the prints so they couldn't.
Yeah.
They felt we were mocking them.
And we were.
Wow, I'm glad that's over.
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