Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - 182. David Zucker

Episode Date: November 20, 2017

Writer-director-producer David Zucker ("Airplane!," "The Naked Gun," "Kentucky Fried Movie") sits down with Gilbert and Frank for a fascinating, hour-plus conversation about the rules of comedy, the challenges of parody, the uniqueness of "Who's on First?" and the greatest hits (and misses) of the Marx Brothers. Also, Peter Graves takes offense, Vincent Price takes a pass, Woody Allen boxes a kangaroo and "ZAZ" lifts a plot from Charles Bronson. PLUS: "Top Secret!" "A Fistful of Yen"! In praise of Chevy Chase! John Byner sends up Robert Stack! And David remembers his old friend Leslie Nielsen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. hi this is gilbert godfrey and this is g is Gilbert Gottfried's amazing, colossal podcast with my co-host, Frank Santopadre. And once again, we're recording at Nutmeg with our engineer, Frank Furtarosa. Our guest this week is a writer, producer, and director, and a member of the legendary comedy dream team known as Zazz. Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker. You know his films, of course, like Top Secret, Scary Movie 3, 4, and 5,

and 5, Basketball, The Onion Movie, Ruthless People, The Naked Gun, Naked Gun 2, The Smell of Fear, Naked Gun 3, The Final Insult, and his debut film, Kentucky Fried Movie, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, and last but not least, one of the most quotable and beloved comedies in cinema history, 1980's Airplane, voted one of AFI's top 10 comedies of all time and preserved in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. He's also co-created the short-lived but much-admired series Police Squad, starring his friend and frequent collaborator Leslie Nielsen, a show that consistently tops the list of TV series canceled before their time. You want more from the guy? He's also produced non-commitic films like A Walk in the Clouds and Phone Booth, as well as short films and TV series. as Peter Cushing, Ernest Bognine, George Carlin, Bette Midler, William Shatner, Kevin Hart,

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Steve Carell, and Donald Sutherland as the clumsy waiter. We're thrilled to welcome to the podcast a bona fide comedy legend and a man who has never once seen Airplane 2, David Zucker. And I also never saw Avatar. I think that's on my Twitter. Really? Yeah. How did you manage to avoid that? I don't go to movies that much because I just don't like them.

So I don't like many. You know, my son and four of his friends dragged me to this comedy. This was about three or four years ago and i was going to bring a book in a flashlight but but but it turned out to be so and the comedy was called bad grandpa and i sat there and i loved it i laughed harder than with de niro is it that bad grandpa no no bad he did another grandpa oh he does another grandpa this is Johnny Knoxville dirty grandpa this was bad grandpa with Johnny Knoxville yes really funny really funny and then the other one I saw and I just you know I I have to say that I do like some things yeah and bridesmaids I liked so these are the comedies I liked otherwise I don't think there's there's anything that really interests me about movies.

But on TV, it's the Impractical Jokers, who we're all fans of. Yes, that's where we met. We were both on the cruise, invited by the Impractical Jokers. That's right, and it was an all-gay cruise. So it was, you and I were there and it was wonderful. Did you have a better experience than Gilbert did, David? Because he was miserable. Evidently, because he's alone now.

So anyways. And you're a birthday boy. It was my birthday on Monday. Happy birthday. Along with Tim Robbins and Angela Lansbury. Oh, she turned 92. October 16th. Yeah, thank God I'm not 92. Now, we'll have to jump right ahead to the movie, yes, that everybody knows, and that's Airplane. How did that come to be? Well, that was the first movie we ever wrote.

We wrote it actually before we wrote Kentucky Fried Movie. And, you know, we used to do the, you know, we used to re-dub, overdub serious 50s black and white movies. And so, you know, like the kind where the guy would say, what time is it? And the guy would, you know, pull out his hand and say, it's 12 midnight. Very dramatic. And we'd go, we'd have the guy saying, where's your hand? It's right here at the end of my wrist. You know, just stuff like that.

And so we thought instead of overdubbing a movie, why don't we actually cast these roles with these stiff, you know, old time, you know, stylized acting? Yes. And so that's what that's what Airplane was. So we discovered this movie called Zero Hour, which was done in 1957 with Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, Sterling Hayden. And and so we just we bought the rights to that movie and we just filled in the jokes. Because it's funny. I remember I didn't remember seeing Zero Hour and then it came on TV. And it's the same plot.

People get food poisoning. And in fact, on YouTube, people have you can Google or not Google on YouTube, just put in Zero Hour zero hour airplane and people have done scene for scene. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I found it. It's great. Yeah. It's so, I mean, it's the entire airplane. Yeah, right.

We never made any secret of it. We just copied this movie because we didn't know how to do a plot or characters or scenes or story arc. And we proved it in Top Secret. And I heard when you first started pitching that movie, the studio wanted comedians in it. Well, yeah, there was a number of mountains to climb there, barriers. And one was that, you know, we were three first-time directors directing together. We wanted to make a comedy without comedians.

And it was really to Paramount's credit that they ever did this. And I think in the end, you know, the budget was low enough. I think it was like $3.2 million. And so they just took a flyer on it. And so we were able to do it. And they did want to cast like Chevy Chase or Bill Murray.

Those were the comedians at the time. But we just wanted to cast all these guys. And, in fact, only Robert Stack was our first choice. Everybody else was a second or third choice. And I think Leslie Nielsen was fourth on the list. Was Charlton Heston somebody, too, that you considered? Yeah, Charlton Heston was there. And, you know, he turned it down.

Vincent Price turned it down. It's a blast. From Zimbalist turned it down. A lot of people passed on it. And so but and finally, you know, when we finally cast Leslie Nielsen, the casting director at Paramount at the time just blew up. He, he had just had it with us and with the casting these stiffs. And he said, Leslie Nielsen, Leslie Nielsen's the guy you cast the night before. And we were already six weeks out from, from principal photography.

I saw Graves, Peter Graves in a reunion about Airplane about 10 years ago, and he was saying that the script offended him when he first read it. He threw it across the room. They all had various reactions. You know, Peter read the script and said, he threw it in the garbage. He said, this is the worst piece of trash I've ever read in my life. Because, you know, he didn't really warm to the whole playing a pedophile concept so uh so howard koch was our our you know executive producer godfather uh put put on our our team

by paramount by the studio to kind of because we're three directors and they had no idea what was going to happen so and he turned up out to be our guy at Paramount and he called, he called Peter and as he did Robert Stack and everybody and said, just come and meet the boys as we were, became known as. And so he met us and we, you know, we did our aw shucks. We're just three guys from Wisconsin and, and actually we, we were. So, so, you know, and he agreed to do it. And what's interesting, you know, you created Airplane and you also created then the Naked Guns series, which was a takeoff on all the police shows and movies. And then it seems like every filmmaker watched the success of those and thought, oh, OK, I think I know how to make those.

Yeah. It's not it's not as easy as that. Yeah. You know, we evolved this style over really 10 years from from when we started in around around 1970. in around 1970. And it really, if I can be serious for two seconds, you know, it does take discipline. And we even evolved a set of 15 rules. And, you know, the things that we couldn't do. And we really thought about why things were funny. And in addition to, we had our show,

our live show on Pico called Kentucky Fried Theater, which we ran for five years. And we really, you know, we thought about how to do this. we had our show, our live show on Pico called Kentucky Fried Theater, which we ran for five years. And we really, you know, we thought about how to do this, and it does take a lot of discipline. And, you know, you can't just put in jokes willy-nilly and do anything. There's a certain motivation for it. And what the other movies seem to do, like, I mean, Airplane, 99% of the people who saw it were not familiar with Zero Hour, but it was still funny. Yeah, they didn't need to.

They didn't need to be because it was a, you know, your generic airliner in trouble disaster movie. And there had been 100 of them all through the 70s. And so the 80s, you know, the 1980 was the perfect timing to do this. And what I've noticed with the other movies, it would be like, let's dress someone up like the character in some current movie. And if we all recognize it, that's that's comedy. Yeah, well, that's you know, we had this. One of our rules was knocking down the posts. So it's not enough to just do the reference.

And we had to learn this because there was a scene in an airplane from a movie called Since You Went Away. this because there was a scene in an airplane from a movie called Since You Went Away and one of these 1940s black and white movies where the girl is saying goodbye to her soldier boyfriend and he's going away on the train and she's running along the train, running along the platform. Oh, yeah. So we do that in airplane and she's running along the runway. And so we thought it would get big laughs just to see her running along the play and people would think, oh, that's funny because it's a spoof on these old 40s movies. But nobody laughed until she started knocking down the posts of the,

you know, the platform. So that got the laugh. So you can't, just doing a reference wasn't enough. So we tried to learn from all these things. And you and Jerry and Jim sat down and you had these 15 rules. Well, Jerry and Jim did very little. It was mainly me doing the entire, all the movies. You're supposed to laugh.

Okay. No, of course. I'm kidding. But, yeah, we evolved these rules together. Through the Kentucky Fried Theater days. Through the Kentucky Fried Theater days. Through the Kentucky Fried Theater days. Well, it really, yeah, the first rule started when some friend of Jim's named Alan Mandel came to, and he was a comedy writer. And this was in 1972 when we did our first show.

And this was in 1972 when we did our first show. And he said, yeah, your show is great, but in the 10 minutes in, you do such and such a joke, and it's a joke on a joke. And you shouldn't do that. Yeah. And it never occurred to us to even think that there were any kind of rules. So that was our first rule is joke on a joke. Oh, yeah. While Gilbert tries to remember who our guest is...

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Live from Nutmeg Post. We now return to Gilbert and Frank's amazing, colossal podcast. Amazing Colossal Podcast. I noticed with Leslie Nielsen, in the beginning, it was funny because he was the Leslie Nielsen of the B movies. Right. Yeah. But then he started to realize, hey, I'm getting laughs. Well, what happened was other directors and filmmakers thought, hey, this guy's funny. And then they just thought, put him in the movie as if he were Jerry Lewis. Yeah.

And then just let him riff. a particular skill, you know, within a structured format and doing, you know, the particular jokes like we did in The Naked Gun, where he could be successful. But if he was put in a position where he had to be funny. Well, he's in the fugitive parody, wrongfully accused, and there's an exorcist one, but they play it broadly, whereas you guys were playing it straight like a genre picture. I guess so. Yeah, I think that he was, I think he was good in the fugitive parody. But in some of the other ones, I think it was they played it too broadly. Yeah, because what you did with him was, you know, it's like he was hijacked out of one of his early pictures. Yeah.

And what just other directors thought, hey, let's just put Leslie in a movie and we're home free. So it didn't really work that way. the airplane and Naked Gun and all the others was a 2001 space tragedy or space something like that. Missed that one. I know he was in an Exorcist parody called Repossessed. Yes. And then there was the Dracula, Mel Brooks' Dracula movie. Yeah. And they were all like things of like, hey, we both saw this film.

Yeah. So that means satire. Right. You really wanted Robert Stack. You thought Robert Stack was going to be the linchpin. Well, he was the one. We wrote it for Robert Stack. Everybody else was interchangeable.

But Robert Stack, we were prepared to camp out on his front lawn until he did it because there was just nobody else that could have that weight. I mean, possibly Charlton Heston, but Charlton Heston didn't want to do it. Right, and with him, you've got the airport background. And, in fact, Universal was not happy about our doing this parody of their airport series. So they – actually, George Kennedy was one of our choices for one of the roles. And they – I think they prevented George from doing it. But finally, we were able to cast him in The Naked Gun.

And – oh, God. Now – you're blanking on it you're not 70 also are you yes it strikes you're thinking of lloyd bridges yes yeah oh well i i mean like the funny thing with robert stack is one of the things it seems he was famous for when you watch him. He never smiled. Yeah, he was like, he was so deadpan and so humorless in all of his roles. But, you know, in person, he was a wonderful, wonderful person and full of jokes. He was always telling stories and jokes. And very proud of having just been in Spielberg's 1941. Oh, he's good in that.

Yeah, he's funny. And he thought that was going to be a big hit. General Stilwell. General Stilwell. He's funny. He seems like someone, if you met him in real life, he'd be like, you know, a stone. Yeah, but he's a great guy.

He was a great guy, yeah. Is this bullshit, or did you guys show him a tape of John Biner impersonating him? No, but this is a good question you're asking, because what we did, we wrote this one line. It's his ship now, his command. He's the boss, the big cheese. And that was from a John Biner routine from, I think, Vaughn Meter's album about JFK. Oh, First Family. First Family.

Wow. And he was doing, John Biner was doing Robert Stack. It was either from that or just John Biner on The Tonight Show or something. That's fun. So we remembered that, and so we actually wrote it for Robert Stack. And so we get it on the set, and we're doing the take, and Robert Stack goes, it's his ship now, his command. He's in charge. He's the boss.

He said, no, no, no, Bob, we want you to do it. And we didn't want to say, like, Elliot Ness. Oh, wow. We want you to do it. And we didn't want to say, like, Elliot Ness. Oh, wow. So Jerry was following Robert Stack around the set saying, giving him line readings to be Robert Stack. That's hilarious.

No joke. And Jerry's doing John Biner to Robert Stack. We had John Biner here. Oh, really? On this show, yeah. Does he even know this? I don't know. Well, really? On this show, yeah. Does he even know this? I don't know. We'll tell him. He's in Florida. If you ever see him, tell him we absolutely used that. We'll reach out. Yeah.

He's in Florida. I heard that happened with Peter Lorre where they wanted him to come on and just say, hi, I'm Peter Lorre. And he went, hi, I'm Peter Lorre. And they said, no, no, it's, hi, I'm Peter Lord. And they said, no, no, it's, I am Peter Lord. That's the exact story. Yeah, that's it. You have to get these guys. Yeah.

I heard Bridges, his kids talked him into doing it too, that he was similarly reluctant. Yeah, I'm not sure if he was reluctant, but his kids loved the script. And I think, you know, Peter Graves' daughter loved it and his wife loved it. And they were sitting behind me, Peter Graves' daughter loved it and his wife loved it. And they were sitting behind me, the Graves family, at the premiere. It was the first time they saw it. And they laughed so hard and Peter laughed along with everybody. And Stack also loved it. But it was bittersweet for him because he was offered points on the back end.

Lots of points. Oh, interesting. And he took the money up front instead. Oh, interesting. Oh. So he said, after the premiere, he said, never in my life have I been so wrong about anything, you know, any movie. And he and Leslie, they told me later that they kind of said privately to each other, you know, the shit hitting the fan. He said, that's never going to work. That's just never.

They've gone, the boys have gone too far. It's never going to work. One of the great gags of the film. And tell us about one of your favorite films, Airplane 2. Oh, yeah, Airplane 2. No, we never saw it it none of us ever saw it to this day to this take some doing but why but i don't see every movie that's interesting and you don't even have a perverse curiosity don't even have a curiosity that's fascinating and it's

probably even the opposite it would it would be painful yeah to watch it and to watch Bob and Julie and I think Peter and Lloyd were in it. And we get asked this a lot. We do a Q&A after we screen Airplane. Why didn't you see Airplane 2? And Jim Abrams said, well, if your daughter became a prostitute, would you go watch her work? Wow. So that's really the accurate thing.

Kind of sums it up. Yeah. I saw it. And really, all it is is, you know, the best of airplane. They just repeated. They repeated the jokes. They're a mad bomber thing like Van Heflin in an airport with Sonny Bono. Like 90 percent of it. I've never seen it all the way through either. Is a rerun of Airplane. Was Pete Rose originally in the Kareem? Pete Rose was originally written for that Kareem role. And I've read some of the old scripts and it just didn't go very far.

Right. And then what happened was we shot Airplane in the summer of 79, and it was baseball season and Pete Rose couldn't make it, so we had to get Kareem, which was yet another fortunate turn of events. And then we wrote so much more, the whole thing about him not trying to the playoffs. Right, right, right. Tell your old man to drag Walden and Lanier up the court. It was not trying to the playoffs. Right, right, right. Yeah. Tell your old man to drag Walden and Lanier up the court.

It was just perfect. Just great. We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's amazing, colossal podcast, but first a word from our sponsor. When you were doing Naked Gun, did O.J. Simpson say at any point that he was planning on killing two people? You know, he never came out and said that. He's been waiting to ask that question.

He was always a nice guy. And I really didn't know anything about what was going on because I guess he had beat up Nicole a few times. And I don't read the papers or know anything that's going on, but he was always nice to everyone, except for one time, you know, Jerry and Jim and I had an office together in Brentwood, and for our hold music, the phone, instead of music, we played Howard Cosell reading his book. So Howard Cosell's going, the juice was crying on the phone.

I told Emmy to talk to him. I couldn't take it any longer. And so I would do that. It was just a goof. And they all said, you got to do it for OJ. You got to do it for OJ. I said, no, no, I don't want to do it come on come on you got it so i did and oh my god he turned it just he just suddenly got dark and not the nice oj we all knew he just said this bullshit man never happened

bullshit never happened yeah interesting yeah kind of a glimpse he a little glimpse it was like i had never seen that side of him before so he he's someone who had the angry side. He did have an angry side, evidently. But, I mean, I never saw him socially. I mean, the last time I ever saw him was the wrap party for Naked Gun 33 and a Third. You know, I shook hands, said goodbye, sold him my knife collection, and that was the last time I ever saw him. I never saw him again. He's been waiting to ask

that since you were booked, David. Let me ask you about another piece of casting because I saw you guys just doing some research I'm sorry, that's the end of the casting questions. Let's move on. I'm sorry, just go ahead. I saw the three of you guys on an old Letterman episode, and you tortured him, the three of you,

by pulling out his audition tape for Airplane. So, yeah, we auditioned a lot of, a number of people for Airplane, and, you know, Letterman came in and read, and he was really funny. He even came in to read for a Kentucky Fried movie, and he was great in that. Anyway, so he – and we actually screen tested him. But he didn't really want to be an actor. And his – and I think Jerry talked to his agent.

And Jerry said, you know, he was really good. He really made us laugh. He'd be great if he did it. And the agent said, fat know, he was really good. He really made us laugh. He'd be great if he did it. And the agent said, fat chance, something like that. You know, he just, David did not want to be an actor. Right. And if you think of it, you know, he is that kind of comic that. He did some variety.

Acting is lying, really. Oh, yes. And he, you know, I think he's just so real about stuff. I saw him in one acting part i think it was mork and mindy yeah he did a morgan and he's forever embarrassed about it yeah so well he would turn up he was in mary tyler moore's variety show repertory company with michael keaton he's very embarrassed about it yeah and and just cringes when people bring it up. And wasn't he in with the Starlight Vocal Band? He was in their variety series, the Starland Vocal Band.

Yeah. Yeah. Before he was a talk show host. I mean, he was a comic in L.A. casting about. He had to do something. Oh, you should see some of the stuff Woody Allen did. Oh, yes. He dressed up as a kangaroo.

Yeah, he bought a kangaroo. He bought a kangaroo. It's ridiculously humiliating stuff. He's dancing with a top hat and cane. Yeah, I know. When you see interiors, you can't imagine that he was boxing a kangaroo. Oh, yes. Yeah, but everybody had something embarrassing.

Tell us about Barbara Billingsley and the jive scene, which I guess is a scene in a movie that you can't do nowadays, probably. Yeah, I don't know. We get that question sometimes. Who knows? I mean, it's just, you know, 1980 was, you know, one particular space and time. And at the time, you know, we wanted to, you know, we just, we wanted to, that was pushing the envelope. And we wanted to do something on this black jive.

And so who's the whitest person on the planet? Probably Barbara Billingsley or Harriet Nelson, as it turns out. And actually, we met with Harriet Nelson first. You did? Yeah. That's wild. No, she turned it down. It was a little bit too edgy for her.

Oh, yeah. But Barbara Billingsley was totally game for it. Can I get you something? It's your mofo butter laying into the barn, jacking me up. Tight me. I'm sorry, I don't understand. Cutty say can't hang. Oh, it's Tordis.

I speak Jive. Cutty say can't hang. Oh, Sturdis, I speak Jive. Oh, good. He said that he's in great pain and he wants to know if you can help him. All right, would you tell him to just relax and I'll be back as soon as I can with some medicine. Just hang loose, blood. She's going to catch up on the rebound on the med side. What it is, big mama, my mama don't raise no dummies. I duck her rap.

Cut me some slack, Jack. Say, cut me some slack. I say, cut me some slack. Chomp the one and a half. Chomp the one and a half. Say, can't hang. Say, seven up. Job ass dude don't got no brains anyhow.

I love this trivia, too. Is it the actors, when you were having trouble casting the people that do the voices over the announcements at LAX? Yeah. Well, it wasn't trouble. We wanted to cast voices that sounded like those recorded announcements. It turned out that it was the husband and wife team that sold the equipment to the airport that does these announcements. And the dialogue was from a bad B-level novel. It was from one of these romance novels. So they're talking about

Vernon, tell the truth. You want me to have an abortion? We just copied it right from there. And your mom's in the film. My mom's in that and 17 other movies. My mom's the lady who's trying to apply lipstick and it

smears on her cheek. And now Naked Gun. And in Naked Gun, she was Ricardo Montalban's assistant, the one that says, I must kill Pap Schmier. That's my mom. That's great. That's great. Of course, she's dead now. You guys had to bring that up.

It kind of brings me down a little bit. I was having fun until now. You guys had to bring that up. It kind of brings me down a little bit. I was having fun until now. You guys used a lot of family members. We did. My sisters in every movie. Uh-huh. Yeah. I remember.

Yeah. And there was a Beaver thing, because Tony Dow, because of the connection between Barbara Billingsley. It was our favorite show, Beaver to Beaver. And Jerry and I were in many ways, you know, Beaver and Wally. Right. I remember Jerry,

is it Jerry playing Beaver? Jerry played Beaver in the Kentucky Fried movie with Tony Dow. Right, right, right. Yeah. Right. Let's talk about Kentucky Fried, Kentucky Fried Theater,

which started in Madison, Wisconsin, and that's how far the three of you guys go back. To high school, actually. To high school. We all knew each other in high school. Of course, I don't think Jerry was even in the high school, not even in seventh grade when Jim was a senior. I was probably in eighth grade. Jim was a senior. But our families were friends. Our fathers were actually business partners. It was a it was a real estate firm called Abrahams and Zucker. And our mothers were close friends and our sisters were college roommates. So the families were really close and the families would get together.

And more often than not, Jim and Jerry and I would end up in our basement rec room playing ping pong and just talking and, you know, sharing. We really did have a shared sense of humor. And it did come from Milwaukee. You know, Milwaukee was a place where things didn't come from. They came to. And so, you know, and I think the Kentucky Fried Theater was our way of throwing everything back. It was all it was satires on on media, not politics at all.

We just, we were doing, we thought what was funny was the media. What we were seeing in TV and the movies, pop culture. There was a student newspaper review that kind of turned you guys in a positive direction? Well, our first show was a disaster. Tech problems? Tech problems. And because we, Jerry and Dick Chudnow, one of our original partners, lived in Madison,

and they were in school there, and then Jim and I lived in Milwaukee. And so we put this show together in two different cities, and we had never rehearsed it all the way through. So after 25 minutes, we were out of material, and it was an hour and a half show. Right. So we called a hasty conference, and we decided, well, we'll call an intermission. Oh, smart.

Oh, smart. And our other partner, Dick Chudnow, was brilliant at improv, and he kept the audience entertained for like an hour with improv and games. And, well, Jerry and Jim and I were debating how much money to refund. We just totally panicked. We just totally lost it. But anyway, so we thought it was a disaster. And so there was a review in the school newspaper that said, this is an amazing show. It's great.

And it kind of saved us, this one review. And so we had the confidence to go on. So we got a permanent theater, which was, you know, we remodeled from the back of a bookstore, uh, just off campus and we called it the, the Kentucky fried theater. How long did you guys stay in Madison before you made the move to one year in Madison? And I remember we could only charge $1 ticket and there were 70 seats and we were able to buy videotape equipment. We weren't able to pay our salaries or anything.

Right. We paid the rent. So we loaded up a U-Haul truck and moved to L.A. Topeka. Topeka Boulevard, where we found an old warehouse that we remodeled into a theater. This time it was 150 seats. And that was very good. We could charge $2 a ticket. Did you have movie aspirations at this point? I mean, the airplane script was already...

We didn't know really what we were going to be. We thought we were going to be a performing group. There used to be this group that appeared on The Tonight Show every couple of weeks called Ace Trucking. Oh, sure, sure. With Patty Deutsch. I guess. And there was a fat guy. Was Billy Saluga in The Ace Trucking Company?

I think so. I think he was. And we thought, you know, they were funny, but we thought we could do that. You know, there's something we could do. So that's one of the reasons why we moved out to L.A. So sure enough, tonight show came, they, they saw the show. We had an audition with, along with the pitchel players and the committee and Kentucky fire theater. Wow. And, uh, and we got the gig. So we were on the, we were on the

tonight show, but you know, it, it just, it didn't set the world on fire because our stuff really didn't come off on TV. I saw you guys on the Midnight Special. Yeah, we were on a Midnight Special. In 1974. That's the first time I saw you guys. Oh, really? Yeah. Bert Sugarman's Midnight Special.

Yeah. We were in a bunch of other shows. And I used to say, you know, we made a joint decision with the networks not to do any more television. So, you know, we decided to, so we recast the show, and we did a show called, and we recast it with four of the actors from the show and called the show My Nose so that our listing in the L.A. Times calendar section would read My Nose Runs Contin runs continuously. And that's what, that's what, you know, that's our way of, yeah. So, and so that, and that year, then we rewrote

Airplane. We wrote the script to Airplane. And so, and then we couldn't sell it. Nobody would finance it. So we decided to, we just, you know, did the, we did a combination of the first show that we did, which was called Vegetables and Beating a Dead Horse and called it, no, no, My Nose and Vegetables. We combined to be a new show called Beating a Dead Horse. That was, and so that's what we did in 1976. And Naked Gun actually started as a TV series. Yeah, it was a TV series because we, after Airplane, we didn't have any, we didn't have an idea of what to do. So we loved this.

There was an old TV series called M-Squad. With Lee Marvin. With Lee Marvin. Yeah. And he was the template, you know, he was the Robert Stack character. And so that's what we cast Leslie Nielsen in that, called it Police Squad. And then, you know, made it. In color.

In color. A spoof on all those Quinn Martins shows. All right. Police Squad in color. Right. Great gag. And tonight's guest star, and the guest star would be killed in the first two minutes. Yep, yep.

And so it was a budgetary matter. Was it a little M squad, a little felony squad? I don't know that we did felony squad. But you got the guy that did the Quinn Martin announcements. Yeah, we did the actual Quinn Martin announcement. Siv, wasn't his name? I don't know. Yeah, yeah.

But I'm sure he's dead now. He may be dead. Yeah. How many episodes did you actually do? We shot six episodes, and it was canceled after four. And they couldn't cancel it fast enough. They showed the last two episodes during the summer. And, you know, there was an outcry, I think, from the critics because they

liked it. And there was a press conference in which the head of ABC, Tony Thermopoulos, had to answer for this. And he said, police squad didn't work because you had to watch it. Yeah, I love that. A show you had to actually sit and watch. Now, so when you announced you were going to make Police Squad into a movie, you must have had people going, what from that? Well, it wasn't, you know, we went into, this was after we did Top Secret and Ruthless People. And then we were kind of, at that point,

Jerry and Jim and I were going off in our separate directions. And so Jerry wanted to do Ghost, and he started working on that. Jim did a movie called Big Business. Oh, yeah, with Bette Midler. With Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin. And I wanted to do, I really wanted to do Police Squad as a movie. And what we needed was to do a real plot character and story arc. And so we learned from doing Ruthless People with Dale Launer.

Because you guys didn't write Ruthless People. We didn't write Ruthless People. Dale Launer did. And we didn't write the plot to Airplane. We thought we knew what we were doing. We really didn't. So we went back and and so we did we did the plot and we did we did the Naked Gun. And Jerry and Jim and I and Pat Proft each wrote a quarter of the next you know 10 or 20 drafts and then and kept writing every day on the set and so uh and that became the Naked Gun and then and that became a franchise it was it was very successful it's it may be one of the few successful film franchises spun off from a from a failed tv show I don't know i don't know there's another

one there was another one yeah yeah it's kind of a unique situation we pitched it to paramount with frank mancuso and it was the easiest pitch we ever had he just said yes let's do it you you think they go you think there's what are you crazy but yeah i don't know yeah well the series is funny i mean there's so much there's so much going for it. The series is very funny. Ira Newborn's music is great. Yeah, it just wasn't right for TV. Yeah, it just wasn't. You know, we were making, you know, little half-hour movies, and people don't watch TV the way they watch movies.

And so I guess in a TV show you need, you know, you watch in your house, you know, without an audience there, and it probably needs a laugh track and you want to see another family on TV. And we were, you know, kind of not doing all those rules. It's possible that today with there's so many different things on TV, maybe it would be, it would be more successful. Well, you have a different landscape now. You had three networks. Yeah, three networks. You could conceive of it now as a Showtime show or an HBO show.

You'd think that it would have succeeded with only three networks. But no. So I can't make any other excuses for it except that it really didn't work. It's so hip, David. You watch it even now. I love its time. Well, all my flops, I just say they're ahead of... Well, that one was. Even with no competition...

No competition. It was like it was gone after four episodes. Yikes. Do you feel up to any questions? I'll try. Where were you when all this happened? I was right here at my desk working. And when was the first time you noticed something was wrong?

Well, when I first heard the shot, and as I turned, Jim fell. He's a teller, Frank. But Jim Fell's a teller? No, Jim Johnson. Who's Jim Fell? He's the auditor, Frank. He had the flu, so Jim filled in. Phil who?

Phil Din. He's the night watchman, Frank. Holy, Phil had been here. Now, wait a minute. Let me get this straight. Twice came in and shot the teller and Jim fell? No, he only shot the teller, Jim Johnson. Fell is ill. Okay, then after he shot the teller, you shot twice? No, I only shot once. Twice is the hold-up, man.

Then I guess I did shoot twice. Well, so now you're changing your story. No, I shot twice after Jim fell. You shot twice and Jim fell? No, Jim fell first, and then I shot twice once. Who fired twice? Once. He's the owner of the tire company, Frank.

Okay. Once is the owner of the tire company, and he fired twice. Then twice shot the teller once twice and jim fell and then you fired twice once okay all right that'll be all for now miss decker now we'll need you to make a formal statement down at the station oh of course you've been very helpful we think we know how he did it oh how he couldn't have done it he hasn't been in for weeks well thank you again. Why didn't George Kennedy do this one either?

Was he approached again? Because Alan North plays the part that George Kennedy winds up playing. I don't know. I don't know why. In the franchise. I think we wanted to save money, I think. You know, there also wasn't a lot of absurdism in primetime television at that time. No, there was nothing like it.

This was absurdism, which was barely started in the movies. I mean, we were doing it in the movies, and it was... With Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln. I think television audiences watch and say, what is this? Right. Lincoln gets a shot at every opening sequence. Lincoln returns fire. Lincoln returns fire. He returns fire.

There's just so much going for it. And they really hold up quite well. The DVD set is great. Even though there's only six. Yeah. You want to watch them over and over again. And the best jokes we've used in The Naked Guns. Like, you know, when they walk from one room to the other and leslie goes outside the set and passes and and when he and al with the al the guys whose head

is out of frame and he says you got something on the side of your mouth al no the other side and then a whole chunk of banana falls down there had been spoofs i mean there had been things like at smart but there what but the way what you guys were doing. It was different. You were breaking the fourth wall in every conceivable way. You were doing, like I said, surrealism in prime time. Yeah. Because what, you know, was things that have been cold spoofs that really weren't. It's kind of like, well, like. Well, I think, well, you mean since Airplane or before Airplane?

Before. Well, you know, Mel Brooks did Blazing Saddles. Sure. Which was really a spoof on Westerns, but he did it with comedians. And Young Frankenstein was a spoof on those horror movies, but it was also with comedians. And they were funny, but a completely different style. Yeah, yours was a different animal and and what also used to be called like when they call abedin costello meet frankenstein right it's

just that's combining yeah that was a yeah i suppose that was a spoof but not not in the airplane way because they weren't really, they were respectful of the monsters. Yeah, so these two guys, well, it was like Chevy Chase and Aykroyd did a movie called Spies Like Us. Sure. And there were some very funny things in that. John Landis. Yeah. And they, it was ostensibly they were spies in a serious thing, but they were doing these routines much like Hope and Crosby.

It's sort of a Hope and Crosby movie. Yeah, which Ishtar was intending to be also a Hope and Crosby movie. Yeah, but you still need comedians. You need Chevy Chase. You know, if you watch Chevy Chase in those movies, he's amazing. He's so funny. He's so amazing. He looks like he's another of like that professionals of

uh he looks like he's doing nothing yeah effortless it's like you know in in acting you know steve mcqueen could act and you know as though he wasn't trying at all you know the the best actors are just effortless and And Chevy was actually intrinsically funny and didn't have to try. I don't think Ackroyd, Ackroyd was very successful at it, but didn't have those kind of chops. Interesting. And I remember sitting at a table and I heard two people talking and one said, was Jack Benny ever funny? And the other one said, no,ny ever funny and the other one said no there were funny people on the show and he just kind of stood there and i thought yeah missing missing the whole thing it's like missing the talent of mary tyler moore who yes she played mary tyler moore but you know

and she was surrounded by crazies, but she was a master. Well, she had to be the straight man, but she also had to be funny. And she was funny. Yeah. She was very funny. It's just like they tend to ignore the straight men in comedy teams. Like, oh, it's the funny guys. Yeah, Dean Martin was so good.

Yeah, Sam's a good example. Bud Abbott, too. Bud Abbott, yeah. Underrated. Bud Abbott, I thought, was when you really watch those Abbott and Costello movies, Bud Abbott is hysterical. Yeah. Well, even when you're watching Burns and Allen. Oh, yeah. And she's getting laughs, but he's goddamn good at what he does.

You know, who's on first is an interesting routine because Costello is the funny guy. He's the crazy funny guy, but he's the straight man in it. Yes. And Bud Abbott is the serious one, and he's doing the funny line. Never thought of that. That's interesting. It's a complete reversal, and it's the only instance that I can ever remember where anyone did that. That's true.

And it's also like— See, you guys had never thought of this before. No. I'm brilliant. That's pretty heady And it's also like. So you guys had never thought of this before. No, this is I'm really heavy stuff. Yes. Right. And what what's also funny about it is the premise itself is completely ridiculous that they'd have these names. But Abbott sells it. He sells it. And I don't remember that ever being done before. I mean, we've, you know, copied that, you know, and other people have. I mean, we did, you know, we've done a who's on first in almost every movie that we did, you know, with Airplane. Well, we did in Kentucky Fried Movie, we did Who Are These? These are just lost drunken men who don't know who they are and no longer care.

And who are these men? These are lost men who know where they are and care but don't drink. You know, it's just like, so it's kind of that. These are men who know where they are in car, but it kept going. You know, we just played with words. And then in airplane, I think we did, how soon can we land? I can't tell. You can tell me.

I'm a doctor. So it's that word play. You've also got Roger Over and Hold the Mayo. And Roger Over. Yes. And all of that stuff. Over Roger, that stuff. So we've always been fascinated with those words. And even a lot of that stuff, the way things sound, Don't Call Me Shirley, those kind of –

One of the fun things about Airplane is every imaginable kind of comedy is in there. There's a lot of, yeah. There's sight gags. It's not just physical. It's sight gags. Yeah, it's, and then we did some weirdness like this Robert Stack mirror scene where he steps through a mirror. Because we always wanted to do stuff like that. And then we did a lot of that in Top Secret.

Yeah. Well, you play with perspective in Top Secret. There's the giant phone. That's right, the giant phone. The magnifying glass with Peter Cushing. All that stuff. It's so, the visual puns. Yeah.

And we just had so much fun doing that. There's one takeoff on that line you've heard in a million movies. And it's like he's being held captive. And they say, you know, the foreign guy says, you have become, how do you say, irreplaceable. Indispensable. Indispensable. And Val Kilmer says, indispensable. And the guy says, that's what I thought.

How would those actors do? Because they always say, how do you say? Yes. Yeah, the accent guys. How are those actors doing comedy? I mean, Omar Sharif and Peter Cushing. Yeah, they all love. First of all, they never get to do comedy, so they all love it.

And so that's why Stack wanted to do it. I think Graves, despite his misgivings about the script. And they all wanted to do comedy. Everybody wants to have fun. Oh, and one joke that I think you used in two of your movies, and it's certainly in Top Secret, is they go in a room and there's boxes there. is they go in a room and there's boxes there and one says like explosive dynamite and the next box says a must-see.

So it was like blurbs. Is that in Top Secret? I don't think – that may have been from Airplane 2. Yeah. I think I'm done here now. That may have been from Airplane 2. Yeah. I think I'm done here now.

You've confused your Zucker picture with your Zucker ripoff. But I think there were two. I don't remember that gag, but some people come up to me and say, I saw your airplane movie. The funniest gag is, and then they'll say something that I never heard of. It's from Airplane 2. The underwater fight scene is just, I mean, how you guys even thought of that and then managed to execute it. Yeah, that was done, of course, you know, like a minute and a half at a time.

And, you know, we undercranked the film so that it would go slightly faster. And Kilmer, talking about committing, you're talking about his commitment. Was he a Kentucky Fright Theater fan? He was, yeah. He was a big ZAZ fan. He loved Airplane and Kentucky Fright movie. And we were casting. We were trying to find somebody to play Nick Rivers. And Jerry and Jim and I went to New York.

and Jerry and Jim and I went to New York and we saw a play, an off-Broadway play called Slab Boys with Val and Sean Penn and somebody else who later became very well-known. He's great in the picture. He really commits. Yeah, he's great. And you had no trouble with Val Kilmer.

I wouldn't say no trouble. You know, he was kind of quiet and he would have his moods you know you never know which val we'd get but you know we all liked him and we had we we had a lot of fun doing it and then later we thought back on it we thought well maybe it was because we really didn't write him a character. He had no character. You know, actors really need to play a character. And, you know, we took the wrong lessons from Airplane. We just thought, well, you just fill, you know, 85 minutes with jokes and that's what we have to do.

So, but there was no, he didn't really have a character. So that may have been part of the problem. But I, you know, he was a little moody. And I remember one time, you know, we were at a party together and we were just sitting on the side together and I didn't have much of a relationship with him. And, you know, and I was just, and I just, I was just in some kind of a mood that night. And I said, And I was just in some kind of a mood that night. And I said, I hate everyone. And he turned to me and said, hey.

And it was like he connected with me. I hate everybody. And it's like he was, for one night, he just, we had a great time. We talked. We bonded, yeah. Are you aware there's a movie, a documentary called Jews and Baseball that opens with the scene from Airplane? I did not know that. That opens with the scene, the great Jewish sports legends.

You have this pamphlet? Yeah. Which Gilbert appreciates. I want some, like, light reading or, like. Yeah. Yeah, it's a tiny book. I didn't know that. yeah going back to kentucky fried movie and i'm sure you guys get asked this a lot you just did a was it in april or june you

did a you did a 40th anniversary one of those anniversaries yeah i think we did it at somewhere in la yeah how much from kentucky fried theater survived and found its way into the movie was fistful of yen in the in the stage show that no fistful of yen found its way into the movie. Was Fistful of Yen in the stage show? No, Fistful of Yen was completely new for the movie. But, you know, we did the sex record. That's a good one. Yeah, that was from the stage show. Yeah, Big Jim Slade we did on stage.

And there was a bunch of things from... Cleopatra Schwartz? No, that was for the movie. No, that was for the movie. But there was Danger Seekers. That's a bold one. There's an out on the edge there. There's a ballsy piece of comedy. Yeah, and that was from the show.

And yeah, there's I think about half the material. And then Jacques Cousteau, that thing where, that thing where the, the mic goes, we did that on stage and the, um, the, the couple making out watching the newscaster, we did that on stage with it. We had a monitor, a TV monitor mounted on stage. So you kind of had an idea. We, we know, we know what works. We have enough that we know half the stuff was going to work. And then we just, the other stuff, we just, you know, we were confident. And I think, and John Landis added jokes, you know, that where the lady is, the TV host has the little gerbil,

and she says, that's very cute and everything. He says, now what are we bringing out here next? And she just throws it over her shoulder, just throws it away. That was completely Landis. And so he had it a lot of great. You guys had never been on a film set at that point. We had never been. And there's Bill Bixby and George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland. Yeah, and we didn't know what a director did.

And so Landis took us through every phase of the whole thing, from pre-production, casting, you know, the actual directing. And, you know, to his credit, he took a lot of our suggestions. You know, we were all back on the watching the monitor and making suggestions. And, you know, he didn't take all of them. But, you know, for a director, he was pretty good about it. I have to say, even by 2017 standards, and I'll say this to our listeners if they haven't seen it, it's still pretty ballsy. It's still pretty edgy.

I think half of it still works if you can watch the right half of it. Yeah. Well, and the commercial parodies are good. You guys knew how to do those. Yeah. And a lot of them we had done like household orders. We did on stage. we did video on stage. We had a video monitor.

Now, Donald Sutherland, I heard is another one of those guys who could be in any mood. Well, I don't know because that was completely through Landis. Yeah. John knew him, had worked with him, and then he was just there for one day. Oh, the closey-to-closey waiter. He said hello, yeah. Yeah. John knew him, had worked with him and then he was just there for one day and I barely said hello. Yeah. But he was such a big star. It was amazing. We got Donald Sutherland.

I didn't even get my picture with him. Yeah, you got... For some reason we spent... Jerry and I spent an hour with Bob Hope here in New York. And this was in 1982, I think. And he told dirty jokes. What was the context? He had seen Airplane. He liked Airplane. And we knew Rick Ludwin, who knew Bob Hope,

produced a lot of his specials. And so we said, yeah, we'd love to meet Bob Hope. So he arranged it, and we spent an hour with Bob Hope. But the reason I'm mentioning it is because this was before cell phones, where routinely you'd take a picture. Right, of course. And so we don't have a picture with Bob Hope. Well, I always think whenever they mention the Zabruta film, I think there's one biggest moment, one of the biggest moments in history. And there's that grainy little. Yeah, just one guy filming now. If that happened today.

From every single angle. Yeah, from every single angle. There would be a million. Yeah. There'd be too many. Yeah, there'd be too many. Yeah. I found this.

This was fun in my research. David, you were skeptical'd be too many. Yeah, there'd be too many, yeah. I found this was fun in my research, David. You were skeptical about Jerry doing ghosts? Yeah. You know, I have to preface this with saying I wanted to do Naked Gun. And he said, do you really want to go back to that stuff? And then he gives me ghosts. I read the script and said, I don't know. I don't get it.

You know, no matter how you slice it, you end up with a dead guy at the end. Pretty much. How smart was that? So, you know, so we have not been each other's best cheerleader and, you know, guide to what to do. You have different ideas. We have different ideas. Yeah, totally. But I think I just it's hard for me.

I hate reading scripts. It's just so hard for me to concentrate on a script. And also, you know, what Jerry did with that in the casting and the direction and, you know, he added so much to it. And it was it was so entertaining. And Bruce Rubin, who's a great guy. And it was so entertaining. And Bruce Rubin, who's a great guy, and I got to know, the story is when his baby, he wrote this script. When he heard that Jerry Zucker was going to direct it, he cried.

Really? Yeah, because here's this goofball airplane, you know, hitting the fan, crazy guy. Wow. And so then, and Jerry knew that Bruce had misgivings. So Jerry said, Bruce, let's just go out to dinner. Or maybe Bruce said, let's just go out to dinner, not talk about the movie or anything, just go out to dinner. So they did. And they, yeah, they just.

I like Jacob's Ladder too, which he wrote. Bruce Joel Rubin So they did, and they, yeah. I like Jacob's Ladder, too, which he wrote. Bruce Joel Rubin, right? I guess so, yes. Pretty good movie. Another person from the Naked Gun movies, much like O.J. to go on to Scandal, you had Anna Nicole Smith. Yeah, she was, yeah.

Well, she was in Naked Gun 3 and, you know, the first time she read for the part, you know, we put her on tape and everybody thought, oh, it's too bad, you know, she can't do it. And so I said, wait a minute, let me work with her for, you know, 20 minutes. So we went into the room, you know, I a minute, let me work with her for, you know, 20 minutes. So we went into the room. You know, I told her how I wanted her to do the part. And she went back and everybody said, yeah, she can do it.

Yeah, it's okay. She's fine. And then, you know, later, you know, I premiered the movie at the White House. I was invited by Bill and Hillary because Bill was a fan of the Naked Guns. And so this was in 1993 before any of the scandals broke. I guess some people somebody had told me this guy's got a zipper problem. Evidently, that means, you know, he's going to screw around a lot. But I didn't know anything about that. So he corners me before the screening, and he says,

so, David, you know, the girl in the movie, what's the name of the girl in the movie? And I said, Priscilla Presley? He's like, I'm such a Boy Scout. And so he said, no, no, the other girl. I said, oh, you mean Anna Nicole Smith? And he said, yes, yeah, that's the one. And then I'm going, I just don't have anything to say. I have nothing to add.

So he says, she's the guest jeans girl, right? And I go, right. Yes. Again, what am I going to say? She's like, I said, I said probably seven words to her the whole time that we were on the set. I didn't, you know, I didn't know her really. But, uh, and so he said, you know, one time on air force one, you know, I went into my stateroom and I closed the door and they had put her fold out on the inside of the door. And so I go, I've got that smile, that Woody Allen smile during Annie Allwood. He's got the glued on smile. And I said, great. And I still don't say it.

I didn't. It was years later when I realized that he wanted me to set set him up and so I'm such a dope I could have double dated with the president he would have gotten me some girl you know I I just and I just totally passed it up and I didn't know I was just I was pretty much straight out of Milwaukee, I think. I had no idea that the president would be interested in some woman other than his wife. Fascinating. Yeah.

Yeah, he's better remembered for that stuff than anything he did in office. Yeah. Let me ask you a question from one of our listeners, David. This is a thing we do on Patreon. Yeah. This is from Frank Salerno. I wanted to know, is David still interested in his Davy Crockett project?

And has he ever discussed the Alamo with Phil Collins? I guess Phil Collins is an Alamo enthusiast. No and no. You know, for a long time I was like obsessed with Davy Crockett and you know, it's something I became a collector. I have four Davy Crockett letters. I, you know,'s something I, I became a collector. I have four Davy Crockett

letters. I, you know, I've gotten to know some amazing people, you know, this professor of history at University of New Mexico called, named Paul Hutton, who's one of my best friends now. And so we wrote a movie when we were at Sony and, but it just never, it's just hard to do that, and but it just never it's just hard to do that to make a a biopic out of a guy's life who doesn't really fit into three acts so uh so the movie never got made and uh so i i just kind of gave up on it right you would do it straight as a drama well i was going to do it straight as a drama. Well, I was going to do it straight as a drama, but there would be funny parts to it. I see. Because Davy Crockett himself was, he was a very funny humorous, he was like the Will Rogers of his day or Mark Twain. And he would entertain audiences by making them laugh. And he wrote an autobiography that was funny and, you know, one of the first biographies to really use that vernacular frontier dialect.

And he had an amazing life. I think it still would make a good picture, but probably not a movie. I don't think you could fit it into even three hours to tell the story. So it could be a miniseries. But, you know, right now I think I have to, you know, I have to work on other things and then come back to that maybe. Interesting. Yeah. There was another actress.

Oh, she was in that same Naked Gun with Anna Nicole. And that was who I always liked her, Kathleen Freeman. Yeah, that sounds familiar. She was in three. She was paid Ma Barker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She worked with Jerry Lewis a lot. Yeah, she sounds familiar. She was in three. She was paid Ma Barker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She worked with Jerry Lewis a lot. Yeah, she was great.

I mean, I don't remember too much, but, yeah, she was perfect. I remember there's a scene Anna Nicole Smith is in some sexy bathing suit, and she's very buxom and everything, and Kathleen Freeman says, Why are you wearing my bathing suit oh that's right yeah a lot of those lines are are Pat Proft uh and then Phil Collins I'd love to meet Phil Collins but I don't he's apparently also obsessed he also is a letter he collects letters he's got four also yeah but I've got the i've got the last letter

that he ever wrote so it says tomorrow i leave for texas so wow so take that phil what let me ask you a question about somebody we had on this show and that's bob costas oh yeah who's a great sport how did you get him to say that stuff in baseball he does it so he does it so effortlessly yeah like helessly yeah like he was great and then was instantly completely mortified at the movie and embarrassed he was like he had the same reaction to doing this podcast oh really yeah so what did he say about baseball he was he was he you know he was very tough on me after basketball he was like like, did nothing but, you know, rag on the movie. But then I think a funny thing happened.

First of all, the movie, you know, kind of rose in popularity as a cult favorite. And I think his kids grew up and thought it was great. And so then their dad was a hero for being in it. And so he totally saw it in a different light. But I think when he saw it, well, we had a joke. We had a gag when we said, and Al Michaels is saying, or Kosta is saying, and everybody is on their feet and we're panning the crowd. And then we get to the wheelchair section and then he says, well, almost everyone.

And we cut it out of the movie because Costas said, you know, I made the mistake of inviting him to one of the previews and he said, can you cut that out because my mother is sick and in a wheelchair. So, you know, I cut it out.

But then, and then he hated the movie. And then Al. He seems like he's having a good time. He does. And he's great. Feel these nipples. You watch that. He's great.

And I remember he said, he did the wrong inflection. He said, you're excited. Feel these nipples. And I said, no, you have to say, feel these nipples. Right. That there's a difference. Right. And he debated me.

Me. Me, who invented comedy. And so I said, Bob, trust me. This is going to be funny. And then when he saw it in the preview, he said, when he saw it, he was so embarrassed to have done that. And he said, I said, Bob, if it doesn't get a laugh, it won't be in nothing. I will promise you, you will not bomb in this movie. If it gets a laugh, it's going to be in.

If it doesn't get a laugh, it's out. And so he interpreted that to to mean i promised him don't worry we'll cut it out of the movie so and that got into al michael's book who said you know the director said yeah we'll cut it out and then of course lied like all directors and and harvey weinstein so yeah but anyway so so then so then he years later uh he had he asked me to be on his show because he was having kareem on this show and i said sure i'll be on it i mean he didn't call me personally his people called and i said sure i'll do it and then i had a conflict so i couldn't i had to back out of it but it was for no reason except that i really did have a conflict, so I couldn't. I had to back out of it. But it was for no reason except that I really did have a conflict.

And so Jim Abrams did it. And so Jim went on and he said that Bob said, is David mad at me? He was like worried that I was mad at him because he thought I backed out. But anyway, someday I will have dinner with Al Michaels and Bob Costas. We'll have a little reunion. I've already had a few dinners with – I've become friends with Al Michaels since the whole thing. Gilbert did a play-by-play – a dirty joke, and Bob did – reinterpreted it in play-by-play style. We have video of this.

And Bob became so mortified that he got on all fours and crawled away. We were in the Friars Club. I started telling him. Oh, he was at the Friars Club? This was at the Friars Club? We recorded the show at the Friars Club. Oh, yeah. Was it a roast of Costas?

No, it was just this show. Oh, it was this podcast. Oh, okay. And I started telling him some really long, dirty, disgusting joke, and he just started slowly sinking under the table and crawling. He's Catholic or something. I think he's also concerned about his brand. He's very concerned about the image.

And so, first of all, in baseball, he neglected to read the script. The script, it was always rated R. It was always rated R. He thought he'd breeze in there it was a be another like a naked guns but this was going to be our it was with matt and trey and so they wanted to make it edgy so anyways and so he thought i had you know i don't know what he thought another another friend of ours who's been on this show is craig bierko oh yeah i love we've done some great stuff with in the scary movie.

Funny, funny guy. I'd love to cast him in something. Yeah. He's got a lot of talent. He's actually funny, but can also play the straight man. Did you see Cinderella Man? Where he was the heavy with Russell Crowe that Ron Howard made?

That was before the scary movie, I think. Yeah, I think so. Check it out. He's very good. He's very menacing. Yeah. He's great.

He can do anything. And he's funny. You know, if you watch Bjerko on a talk show, he's funny. He is. He can go on. Whereas, you know, Leslie was funny on a talk show, but only because he brought his fart machine. Right. He was obsessed with that fart machine.

Yeah, that's what he did. That was his shtick. I didn't know it went back to airplane, that he was on the airplane set with that machine. Oh, before airplane, yeah. It went back to police squad at least. But he would do this thing. And then, you know, I would be on press tours with Leslie. We'd be in like Charlotte, North Carolina, and we'd be on an elevator.

People would recognize him in a crowded elevator. And then he would be very pleasant and say hello and then fart in the elevator. And people would get off on the first floor. You wrote a nice tribute to him too in The Hollywood Reporter. Well, I found out when The Hollywood Reporter called and said, can you write something for us about your recollections of Leslie? And I said, sure. Wait a minute. Why? That was when I heard that he was dead.

So that's how I heard. I remember meeting Leslie Nielsen. And he, of course, had his fart thing with him. And I said, oh, I got one of those. And it never really worked when I did it. And he goes, is this the one you have? Is it the black rubber and the top of it's red? And I said, yeah.

He goes, oh, that's useless. He was an expert. He was a complete expert. Yeah. Yeah. He knew. He knew. Yeah.

Yeah. I miss him. I miss him. He was a great guy. Yeah. Can we throw a couple of other actors' names out at you for fun? What was working with Ricardo Montalban like? Yeah, it was very nice.

He was great. Just a very nice man. Professional and totally got it. Was no trouble at all. He did object to one line uh there was one line another another prof line where it's like he's in a hospital at the our lady of the never had the pickle that was the that was the line he said can you please not put that in and we said yes you know look we're...

Is the plot of Naked Gun, the first one, lifted a little bit from that Charles Bronson movie? Yeah. Of Telefon? Of Telefon, yeah. We just lifted it from Telefon, but we didn't have to buy the rights because it wasn't the entire plot.

I love that. Yeah. What about one of our favorites? And then the other part of it was from Day of the Jackal. The Day of the Jackal. That's a good movie. Yeah, good movies. How about one of our favorites who comes up a lot on this show, Ernest Borgnine?

Oh, yeah. She did Basekipal. Yeah, he was excellent. You know, by the time they get to be, you know, he was probably in his 80s when he did, I think it was Basekipal. Basekipal, yeah. And they can't remember lines anymore. Leslie couldn't either.

So we used to do a walk and talk, which was, you know, you track with the actors and they talk. And so with Leslie, it became a walk or talk. So either way, anyway. So with Ernie Borgnine, we had him just stationary, but he couldn't remember a line. I mean they just can't. You can imagine when you get into your – well, your 70s, I guess. But he – so we had a teleprompter for him.

And so he was very comfortable with that. How about Robert Vaughn who's also in – Robert Vaughn, he was great. Yeah, Robert Vaughn, who's also in? Robert Vaughn, he was great. Yeah, Robert Vaughn was great. They're just, they're all wonderful. And so, you know, Robert Vaughn often, you know, he had a great instinct and he had it, he would have it on the first take. And I was always trying to chase, trying to get something better. So, and Matt and Trey would write down all my quotes. And so that, and I guess I said to Robert Vaughn that your best take is always the one before I started directing you.

So yeah. Did it give you an extra sense of satisfaction to see these guys who you've been watching your whole life in straight roles and they've never really gotten a chance to be funny? I can't think of Robert Vaughn in a comedy. I think of him in the, in, in bullet. But anybody who's straight like that will be wonderful in a comedy. Right. Is it particularly satisfying? It's, it's, it's so great because, well, you know, you know, it's kind of what I've called the Uberization of comedy, which, you know, Uber and Lyft is like, you don't have any, you don't need any skill anymore as a taxi driver. That occupation used to connote skill. Like the taxi driver had to know where to go.

But now with Waze and GPS, anybody can do that. So you get in a car and anybody can be a taxi driver now. So with an airplane, anyone could be funny. So Robert Stack, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Vaughn, Peter Graves, all these guys could be just as funny as highly skilled comics like Chevy Chase or Jim Carrey or Robin Williams. Interesting. And did you ever have to remind them, I mean, if they ever did make this mistake, did you ever have to remind them, no, no, don't be funny? Yes, yeah. You know, when we did the first table read for Naked Gun, Priscilla Presley was very nervous.

And she said, you know, I don't know how to be funny. And I said, you don't have to be funny. You just let the lines do the work. And that became the direction that I gave to actors most, is just let the lines do the work. And most of the people got it and just did it straight. And Priscilla was wonderful. I never had to direct her i really i just had to work with leslie to you know on just a lot of nuances but leslie also got it to be absolutely straight if you watch airplane you watch lloyd bridges performance there's a little there's a five percent he knew he was in a comedy oh yeah yeah and so he was much better in hot shots comedy oh yeah yeah and so he was much better in hot shots interesting so he learned he learned from that and then also uh in pre-production lloyd was trying to make sense out of his dialogue he

was trying to actually change his dialogue and you know we don't care the dialogue doesn't mean anything and finally stack told him lloyd you know no one's listening to us. You know, there's watermelons dropping, there's spears flying over the wall. Nobody cares. Just keep talking. And so Stack totally got it. Watching Zero Hour, the thing you were referring to, where somebody actually assembled the two of them and put them next to each other,

and you watch Sterling Hayden say, you know, looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking. Obviously, no one will ever take that movie seriously again. No, you can't. But we would take, like, one line, like the guy says, quit smoking. Obviously, no one will ever take that movie seriously again. No, you can't. But we would take like one line, like the guy says, it looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking. And then we did that. And then, but we kept going. We kept, you know, sniffing glue, sniffing glue. You know, the next one was, you know, drinking. And then I think the last one

was sniffing glue. Right. Yeah. Amphetamines, yeah. And it worked. It just worked. That was what we call ad absurdum. What did you mean, David, when you said, I hope I have this right, you said Airplane was your night at the opera and Top Secret was duck soup? Do you remember saying this? Right, so the Marx Brothers did, but we did it in reverse order. So the Marx Brothers did their funniest movie, which was Duck Soup.

But it was a flop at the box office because there was, if you go back and watch it, it was just like Top Secret. Very funny all the way through, but no character, no arc, no act structure. It's just anarchy. It's just anarchy. And because of that, there's no ending. And audiences subconsciously attach a lot of importance to the ending and the ending is literally 50 of a movie and so what happened was that uh that was their last the marks brothers last paramount movie and they were they were finished they were kicked

out of paramount because duck soup flopped. Of course, now we have no idea. This is just one of the funniest classic movies ever. And then Chico was playing cards with Irving Thalberg, who was the head of MGM. And he was saying, well, you know, they can't get arrested. They can't get a deal. And Thalberg said, you know, you guys can make, you know, twice the money with half the jokes.

And Chico said, what? You know, they didn't know anything. And so Thalberg got them, you know, good writers like Maury Riskin and George S. Kaufman. And they did a three-act structure and they did Night at the Opera. And so we did just the opposite. We did Airplane because we copied the structure of an Arthur Haley movie, Zero Hour, which is a very fine story and plot and characters. And so it worked fine. And then we did Top Secret, which was just a joke book.

So you did it in reverse. We did it in reverse, yeah. That's interesting. You know, we've talked about the Paramount films and the MGM films a lot on this show. And Gilbert and I are of the school that it's almost disappointing in a way that Night at the Opera was the more successful film because it's not really the – it's not the funnier film. Well. Certainly not. Yeah, it is very funny.

But, you know, of course know of course animal crackers and uh and uh horse monkey business horse feathers are great yeah and of course duck soup and then and then they do night at the opera which was their most successful movie and then thalberg dies and then and then they did day at the Races, which really was terrible. Yeah. It was half terrible. It's a sharp line. And then after that, it was terrible.

Rock bottom. Yeah, they're the lost. At the circus, go west. Yeah, the big score. It was in room service, the big, terrible movies. They're really unwatchable and sad. But Night at the Opera, I felt like Spielberg, Thalberg, put them on a leash. Night at the Opera? Yeah.

But I think within that Night at the Opera, in those scenes, they were fine. They're great. It was great. They're a little bit in service to the love story, which is what we object to. But the way that it should be, that's the way it should be because movies are an hour and a half. And you have to tell a story. You have to satisfy the audience. You can't leave the audience hanging.

It's just that's the nature of that art form. And it's different than TV. In TV, you don't need that. You can do half-hour bites or whatever. You don't need to do that. But in a movie, that's why the bar is higher for a movie. You have to tell a story. You have to check all these boxes.

And it's really harder than TV. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. I'm about out of cards, Gil. You got something else for this man? No. I do want to ask about. I had nothing to ask him when he came in.

I have no shortage of stories and verbiage, but as you can see. I think Gilbert did want to ask you about, you did a series called HUD or HUD? HUD, yeah. Wanted to ask you about working with Theodore Bacall? Right. Well, that's, yeah, that's after I did Basketball. Of course, you know, after Flop, you're in director jail. So my partner, Gil Netter, got us a deal at NBC to do television.

And that was in 2000. And so we did a pilot called HUD, which was a secret agent movie, which was – and HUD stood for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. So it's like – and the premise was that the CIA, NSA, FBI in this media age had become too public and they couldn't keep anything secret. So they needed some kind of obscure and useless agency like HUD to be the real secret agency. So we did that and we need to cast the lead. And so we couldn't find a lead, but finally they showed me this one guy who was great. And so we cast him and because he had been on the correspondent on the daily show and the pilot was great but they they didn't nbc didn't pick up the series because steve corinne it was steve steve corinne was the my co-writer right right

right yeah who's a friend of theirs oh yeah steve cor Steve Korn is great. And very funny. And so the NBC didn't pick up the pilot because who was this? The lead was Steve Carell. And who the hell was Steve Carell? So it never got made. Well, how was Theodore Bacall? Theodore Bacall was great. I had actually met him. I had met him years before at, of all places, the Playboy Mansion.

And Theodore Bacall. Was he in the grotto? years before at, of all places, the Playboy Mansion. And Theodore McKell. Was he in the grotto? Yeah, not in the grotto, but it was alongside Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt Chamberlain going around trying to get girls' phone numbers. They wouldn't give him his phone number. He'd say, just give me three digits. Insanity.

So we're waiting for him. I met Theodore Raquel. And so I thought of him when we did this. So I, and my parents were big fans of Theodore Raquel. Fiddler. Fiddler, yeah. So I cast him in this. And he was great. Very nice fellow.

And then, and during it, my mom and dad came out to visit and i invited theodore bichelle and his son to dinner at our house and so we had we had dinner with theodore what did we learn about theodore bichelle on this show there was something interesting that came up that he had this other he had this uh this. In secret, he's a neo-Nazi, evidently. You've probably been asked this a thousand times, David, but I'm going to ask it. Was there some gag or some bit in Airplane that you had to lose that you loved, or did everything, everything got in?

Everything that was funny got in, of course. Because you took it out to colleges, right? You tested it? Yeah, we tested it at colleges. And, you know, there were things that were cut out. I mean, that's why, you know, deleted scenes in comedies are never any good. It's stupid. They're deleted because they weren't funny.

So why would you go, oh, boy, I'm going to see these. I went to Carell's series, The Office, and they have lots of deleted scenes. You watch them and invariably you say, I see why they cut it. But even the outtakes of comedies are stupid because they forget a line and people laugh.

What's funny about that? I always hated that. Why do they do that at the end of comedies? Stupid. They did that in Being There, which is supposed to be dramatic ending. Oh, yeah. And it's then it's all cracking up on the set. Outtakes.

Yeah. So, yeah, they crack up. They forget a line and they think it's funny. I don't know. I don't get it. My favorite gag in Airplane, I have to tell you, is yes, birds too. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Birds too. Which is just

one of those things where you don't want to dissect the frog and you don't want to explain why it's funny. I don't think, I don't know if they, if even it gets a laugh. It is just great. Yes, birds too. The other one of my favorite gags is,

it says, stewardess, can you face some unpleasant facts? And she says, no. And then he keeps going. He just ignores it. He goes on. She says, no. Also very subtle sight gags. Like there's the bulletins from around the world.

Yeah. And there's the guy with the drums. Oh, and they do the cut. And he cuts to the other camera. And he cuts to the other camera and plays a different drum. Which is just... No stone unturned. Yeah, it's a perfect film. Thank you.

It's a perfect film. People do say that every time they see it, they see, you know, gags that they missed. Well, it's like Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. And even a film like The Godfather, which is, we talk about films that they missed. Well, it's like Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles and even a film like The Godfather, which is we talk about films that come on the television, you absolutely have to watch them. You get stuck. You're compelled.

Yeah, for me, it's Midway. Have you ever watched Midway? Oh, Henry Fonda? You just get stuck. Yeah, Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston. I just get stuck watching it. But I'm happy to say I know a lot of people that consider Airplane to be one of those movies. Oh, I'm very

proud of that. They get stuck, yes. Yeah. I work with Whoopi at The View and she is constantly quoting Airplane. Whoopi Goldberg. Yeah, I know she's a friend. I know she's talking with Jerry. Yeah, she's a friend of Jerry. But she loves that film. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. More than life itself

and just constantly quoting it. And there's another actress who was quoting it and was on. Maya Rudolph. Maya Rudolph, yes. She just went on Kimmel and did a. She did the whole thing. She did the whole black jive. She did the whole jive thing.

She knew the whole thing. On the Jimmy Kimmel show. Yeah. Well. Well. I think that killed the conversation. It's about 20. One mention of Kimmel and we're done.

I'm sorry, Jimmy. Okay, that was about 20 cards worth of questions. Well, thank you. This was fun. We covered a lot. Let's talk about quick plugs. What do you got in the pipeline? Anything you want to talk about?

I wrote a movie. You know, we wrote a great film noir parody called The Star of Malta. And so that's, you know, we've had that for a while. Of course, you know, it's hard to raise money for anything. But now we're writing a script to Naked Gun, 444 and a quarter, and Nordberg did it. So that's what we're writing a script to Naked Gun 444 and a quarter and Nordberg did it so that's what we're all about and we're almost done with that

we're going to bring it into Paramount Paramount has no idea this is coming but I'm just torn from the headlines and there's a part for Nordberg in it he's driving an Uber in the Broncos. We could ask you a million other things, David, but in the interest of time, this has been fascinating.

Oh, I'm glad. And an education. So I'm Gilbert Gottfried. This has been Gilbert Gottfried's amazing, colossal podcast with my co-host, Frank Santopadre. with my co-host Frank Santopadre. And we have been interviewing a guy who's brought us some of the funniest movies ever made, David Zucker. Thank you, David.

Thank you. It was my pleasure. Are you going to promo the next one right now? Bob Costas coming up. You didn't give him shit. You've been known to do, you know, very famous filmmakers who have not used you. Like that, we had Barry Levinson on the show. Oh, really?

And Gilbert abused him for not casting him. So you let David off the hook. And actually, Barry Levinson has done things where he uses comics. Yes. I only use, you know, straight guys. So Barry Levinson goes out of his way, not to you.

I haven't really gone out of my way. I just think the garden variety, I'm not using you. Oh, yeah. It was like offhand. It was like, yeah, you don't need to be insulted by that. This was a kick, David. Thanks.

Sure. So much fun. Thank you. is handled by Mike McPadden, Greg Pair, and John Bradley-Seals. Special audio contributions by John Beach. Special thanks to John Murray, John Fodiatis, and Nutmeg Creative. Especially Sam Giovonco and Daniel Farrell for their assistance.