INTRODUCTION
Never assume that just because it’s someone’s job, they know how to do it. If you have a better idea, put down your laundry and do something about it.
MRS. ZUBATSKY’S LAW
From Jerry Zucker’s Commencement speech at The University of Wisconsin Madison, Wisconsin, 2003
One day, when I was a kid, our house caught fire. A large section of the wood-shingle roof was burning as the fire trucks pulled up. The firemen ran into the backyard with a large hose and began assembling their metal ladders and positioning them against the house.
Mrs. Zubatsky was our next-door neighbor, and at the time she was standing on her upstairs porch taking in the laundry. She watched anxiously as the firemen struggled with their ladders. Suddenly she leaned over the balcony and shouted down to the professional firefighters, “Forget the ladders! Just point the hose at the fire!” The firemen, to their credit, responded immediately. They dropped their ladders, pointed the hose at the fire, and extinguished the blaze in about forty seconds.
There are two morals in this story: One, never assume that just because it’s someone’s job, they know how to do it. And two, don’t let yourself be intimidated by professionals and their uniforms.
Growing up in Wisconsin, my brother, David, and I and our friend Jim Abrahams never knew anyone in the movie business. We never even knew anyone who knew anyone in the movie business. That world had previously held a mystique that made it seem unattainable to us. But, like Mrs. Zubatsky, when we found ourselves sitting on our porch watching someone else do it, we all turned to each other and said, “Hey, we can do this!” And like Mrs. Zubatsky, we seized the moment.
If you have a better idea, if your plan makes more sense, if you have a vision, then put down your laundry and scream a little bit. Throw your hat into the ring, and never let professionals or their uniforms prevent you from telling anyone where to point their hose.
CHAPTER 1“GET ME REX KRAMER!”
They created an entirely new thing that no one had seen! And now, to have gone from a fan to someone who works in comedy, it’s more that I kind of watch it in awe, that it can sustain that many jokes, where everything is a bit, and it works.
BILL HADER
Jerry: The seeds for our kind of humor were planted when we were kids. Growing up in the 1960s in Milwaukee, we consumed a steady diet of hard-hitting dramas like, The Untouchables, Sea Hunt, Dragnet, and Mission Impossible. Shows where the characters just took themselves so seriously, and we’d blurt out ridiculous lines for them to say. Later, we’d dub old movies, and then in Airplane! we actually got those same tough-guy actors to say the lines we always wished they would have said. There was a part of us that couldn’t believe that they would really do that.
BILL HADER
Robert Stack, the way he delivers his lines … I mean, the hardest I laugh now when I watch the movie is his kind of spinout at the end of the movie, where he’s talking about, “Municipal bonds, Ted!” “Do you know what it’s like to fall in the mud and get kicked in the head with an iron boot? Of course you don’t, no one does. That never happens.”
“Christmas, Ted. What does it mean to you?”
Jim: And the most serious and humorless was Robert Stack. He was the one guy who we knew we wanted in Airplane! from the get-go, from when we first started writing the script. He was sort of our key to it all.
David: I remember us saying, “We will camp out on his lawn until he signs!” We were not going to accept “no.” In fact, with the first 1975 incarnation of the Airplane! script—amateurs that we were—we called Stack’s agent and said, “We’ve got this script, Airplane!, and we want Robert Stack for the lead, and could he read the script?” And the agent says, “Is this a ‘go’ picture?” And we said, “What’s a ‘go’ picture?” There’s a pause, and the guy says, “Come back when you have the money.”
ROBERT STACK (Rex Kramer)
They came after me for about two and a half years, and I kept saying, “Fellas, you sound like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, ‘Let’s put on a show in a garage.’” I said to my wife, “No one’s got any money, all three are gonna direct it.” And my wife said, “I think it’s funny.” I said, “I think it’s funny, too, but c’mon already, it’s their first picture, and well…” I finally said I would do it, under great trepidation, of course. They offered me a piece, and I didn’t take it. Well, it turned out to make a hundred million dollars, and that just goes to show how terribly clever I am.
Jerry: When we finally did sign him and I told my sister in Hartford, Connecticut, her reaction was, “Oh my God! I can’t believe you get to tell Elliot Ness what to do!”
David: But when we actually met him, instead of the stern, humorless Ness, we get this jovial, smiling guy, constantly telling jokes and funny stories. I started calling him Bob. In addition to that, he asked us if we could write more jokes into the script for him! And we did.
ROBERT HAYS (Ted Striker)
I worked with Bob Stack on a TV series that he had done before Airplane! called Most Wanted. My folks came to the Airplane! set to visit one day, and I introduced them to Bob, and he—being the incredibly gracious guy that he was—said, “You know, Bob was a guest star on my show when I was doing Most Wanted, and now I just look at this like I’m a guest star on his show!” And I thought, God, how cool was it that he just said that?! He was exceptional. I just loved that guy.
David: Starting with Kentucky Fried Movie, we named all our characters after our high school friends. Rex Kramer was in Jerry’s class; I dated his sister, Randy, which is the name of Lorna Patterson’s stewardess character. Steve McCroskey was my best friend from grade school. In our KFM parody “Fistful of Yen,” we named the evil villain after our Shorewood High principal, Dr. Klahn. In fact, as I remember, not much more liked than the evil Mr. Han of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. Jim’s best friends, Prussing and Macias, were two of the guys in the tower. The list went on.
Dr. Klahn, Steve McCroskey, Rex Kramer, Pete Prussing, Ed Macias
David: For Lloyd Bridges’s role, we first approached Jack Webb from Dragnet. He came in for a meeting, but he turned down the role.
Jim: Probably because we let him read the script.
Jerry: Always a mistake.
BEAU BRIDGES
Airplane! really kind of reinvented my dad’s career. We were so happy to see it happen, my brother and I and our family, because we always felt he had a real funny bone in there. Rarely did he get a chance to show his comic chops. Airplane! really started it for him in that arena. It was wonderful, because he did have a great sense of humor, and it finally came to light with that wonderful movie. I just loved it.
David: There may have been a few other actors we went to who were more well-known at the time. People like Efrem Zimbalist Jr. from The FBI. And Lloyd Bridges. We all used to watch him on Sea Hunt, and we loved how serious he was on that show. We thought he’d be perfect for McCroskey.
Jim: He played Mike Nelson, a Navy diver. Big hit, but very low budget. Lots of underwater scenes. He told us they’d get letters from the audience complaining that they recognized the same fish.
ROBERT HAYS
In the beginning, Lloyd was kind of just trying to figure the whole thing out. I remember one day, Lloyd Bridges and Bob Stack were rehearsing a scene in the control room. I remember Lloyd being kind of a little frustrated and confused, and saying, “What the hell’s going on here?” Because it was so stupid! It was so crazy, and he didn’t quite get it.
Jim: I do believe that when Airplane! is really clicking, it elevates stupidity to an art form. I mean, we were writing dad jokes before they became an official category.
David: So finally Stack jumps in and says, “Look, there’s a spear going into the wall behind me and a watermelon falling on the desk in front of you. No one’s listening to us! Just keep talkin’, Lloyd!” Stack got that they were cardboard characters in the foreground, and the jokes were going on behind them. It’s the concept of what we came to call “floocher” dialogue, a word we made up to mean “filler.”
Jerry: It’s what we imagined the word for “filler” would have been in Yiddish.
“Where the hell is Kramer?”
David: It’s either delivered while something else was going on in the background or it was for the characters to keep talking to cover a laugh and therefore appearing not to acknowledge a joke.
ADAM MCKAY
When I was at Saturday Night Live, we utilized the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker formula anytime we had older, high-status White dudes on the show hosting, and especially when they weren’t really actors, like when Rudy Giuliani or Steve Forbes hosted. Basically, any older, high-status white dudes were the easiest to write comedy for, because they just could fall a lot further, and it was so fun to hear them say crazy, crazy things. The higher the status of the person you’re playing with, the more fun it is to have them say crazy things. And those guys cracked that code, there’s no question.
Jim: In Lloyd’s defense—and we ran into a similar problem later with Val Kilmer in Top Secret!—if you’re a trained actor, then you look for who your character is, what he’s feeling, and how he would react. Why was he into smoking, drinking, amphetamines, and sniffing glue? But all we wanted him to do was say the lines. A lot of Lloyd’s confusion came from the fact that he was looking for his character and there was none. So it took a while for him to adjust.
Jerry: In our minds, the character he was playing was Lloyd Bridges. We would never tell actors to play it straight. We always told them to act like they had no idea they were in a comedy. I really believe that’s the magic of Airplane!, but it requires a lot of discipline.
BILL HADER
I would watch these old movies and TV shows, and my dad was really helpful, because he’d say, “Oh, Peter Graves from Mission: Impossible. And Lloyd Bridges was in Sea Hunt, and Leslie Nielsen was in Forbidden Planet.” But to do a movie like that—where I think at the time Jimmie Walker was the biggest name, and he’s in it for five seconds and doesn’t even have a line—I mean, that’s pretty insane.
BEAU BRIDGES
My dad was a real conscientious actor. He really worked everything to death. He wanted it to be as perfect as it could be. That was really true about any job he took on. He was a real taskmaster. He gave his all.
“Hello, we'd like you to have this.…”
ADAM MCKAY
People think that, with comedy, you’ve got to play it broad. But you always play it straight, and you let the broadness come out of playing it real. You never directly go to the broadness. If you do, it all breaks apart. And that’s another thing that was groundbreaking about that movie: the deadpan nature of it. And using old-school film stars and having them deliver those lines in deadpan—nobody did that.
“They're coming right at us!”
Jerry: I think it’s hard for actors to be in a comedy and not act funny in the middle of all the craziness. It doesn’t feel right, so it requires a leap of faith. But as time went on, they all gave in to it. They were like, “Okay, whatever. Bring on the dancing penguins.”
MOLLY SHANNON
When Lloyd bridges says, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.” Then the next scene … drinking. Then … amphetamines and then it progresses to the most absurd and funniest line in the movie “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” That’s one of my favorite series of scenes.
Jerry: I couldn’t believe how long he could stay upside-down—like five minutes at a time. I was getting a headache just watching him.
BEAU BRIDGES
Jeff and I really howled when they hung him upside down and he said, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue,” because our father was such a straight arrow. So when we first talked to him after seeing the movie we said, “Dad, how could you do that? How could you accept that role when you know there are so many young people who look up to you and see you as a champion of morality and good habits? And here you are sniffing glue! We can’t believe it!” He was freaked out. He said, “You’re kidding! I didn’t mean it!” “Tell it to all those poor kids!”
JEFF BRIDGES
Years later, when we were doing a movie called Blown Away, there was a big part for somebody to play my uncle, and I said to the producer, “Gee, you know, I know a wonderful actor who could play my uncle. He looks a bit like me. His name is Lloyd Bridges. Have you heard of the guy?” He laughed, and he said, “Well, your dad is … he’s a terrific actor, but he’s really thought of as more of a comedian!” And I said, “What the…? What are you talking about?” And he said, “Well, you know, Airplane! and all the different movies that kind of spun out of that film.” I said, “Are you gonna make him come in and read for this part?!” And they said, “Do you think he would?” So he came in, and he got the part. But he was such a versatile actor, and Airplane! was a wonderful film to show his comedic side.
Howard Koch, David, Lloyd Bridges, Jerry, Jim, Robert Stack
BEAU BRIDGES
He was so happy that he had that good fortune to get into those movies. It was a real blessing for him. People came up to him all the time, and they’d say that line to him: “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue!” I have people come up and say it to me!
Copyright © 2023 by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker.
