“Airplane!”: Don’t Call Them Shirley

When I was a young married,there arose (just a stone’s throw from 20th Century Fox Studios)something called Kentucky Fried Theatre. The invention of three antic young menfrom the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the theatre housed a popular sketchcomedy show called My Nose. This oddball title allowed the trio to placeads in the Los Angeles Times announcing, “My Nose Runs Continually.” Anambitious fellow named Lorne Michaels once showed up in the audience with anNBC honcho, Dick Ebersol, whom he was trying to interest in the prospect of anetwork comedy series. Ebersol was convinced, and the result was (ta da!) SaturdayNight Live.

 Meanwhile the three KentuckyFried Theatre cut-ups moved from the live stage into movies. They soon struckcomic gold with their 1980 release, Airplane! By this point, JimAbrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker were no longer starring in theirown material (playing onstage such goofy roles as a strip-teasing Mister Rogers,who removes his jacket and shoes but doesn’t stop there). Instead the artisticménage à trois was responsible for both writing and directing a $3.5 million moviethat took in a reported $171 million worldwide, and was inducted into theNational Film Registry in 2010 for its cultural and aesthetic significance.

 These three madcapwriter/directors have just come out with a behind-the-scenes memoir, “SurelyYou Can’t Be Serious”: The True Story of Airplane. It was mypleasure to hear David Zucker speak in person about how the film came to be.This was the era of all-star disaster movies like Airport (a crisis inthe air!),  The Poseidon Adventure (acrisis at sea!), and The Towering Inferno (a crisis in a bigbuilding!)  Arthur Hailey, whose novel begatthe film Airport had earlier contributed to the screenplay of a 1957thriller called Zero Hour! Its hero is a disgraced World War II flyerwho—while a passenger on a long-distance flight—must unexpectedly take over thecockpit of a large jetliner when passengers and crew are felled by foodpoisoning. Sound familiar? Yes, this basic plot shows up in extremis in Airplane!,with the addition of some outrageous sight gags, some deliberately corny jokes,and a blow-up autopilot named Otto.

 When Zucker and company wentto cast their movie, they took the matter seriously in all senses. They had nodesire to follow in the footsteps of funnyman Mel Brooks, who stocked his castswith outsized performers like Dom DeLuise. Instead they looked for the sorts ofstraight-arrow actors who would have starred in serious B-movie action dramaslike Zero Hour! That film had featured Dana Andrews and Sterling Hayden.In Airplane! Zucker Abrahams Zucker (informally known as ZAZ) showcasedthe work of Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves, and Robert Stack, none of whom had areputation for zany comedy. For their leading lady, the stewardess whose heartRobert Hays is trying to win back, they found Julie Hagerty. It was her veryfirst movie role, and her wide-eyed innocence fit in nicely with the insanitygoing on all around her. (Zucker discloses that another candidate for the rolewas Sigourney Weaver, who came to her audition in full 1940s stewardess garb,and then started making demands for script changes.)  

 Why was basketball starKareem Abdul-Jabbar cast as First Officer Roger Murdock? Because this was anera when sports stars were being shoe-horned into cameo roles in major movies. ZeroHour! in fact used as one of its pilots a famous retired footballer, Elroy“Crazylegs” Hirsch. Surely Kareem wore his wings well. But don’t call himShirley.