Surely You Can't Be Serious Quotes

“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.”
― David Zucker, Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!

“O. J. Simpson was wonderfully stiff in both Capricorn One and The Towering Inferno. David: I directed him in the Naked Gun movies. Although he actually improved with each film, his acting remained a lot like his murdering—he got away with it, but no one really believed him.”
― David Zucker, Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!

“Then in March 1993, everything changed. My one-year-old son, Charlie, had his first seizure. There’s absolutely nothing funny about being the parent of a child with uncontrolled epilepsy. Nothing. After a year of daily seizures, drugs, and a brain surgery, I learned that the cure for Charlie’s epilepsy, the ketogenic diet—a high fat, no sugar, limited protein diet—had been hiding in plain sight for, by then, over seventy years. And despite the diet’s being well documented in medical texts, none of the half-dozen pediatric neurologists we had taken Charlie to see had mentioned a word about it. I found out on my own at a medical library. It was life altering—not just for Charlie and my family, but for tens of thousands like us. Turns out there are powerful forces at work within our health care system that don’t necessarily prioritize good health. For decades, physicians have barely been taught diet therapy or even nutrition in medical school. The pharmaceutical, medical device, and sugar industries make hundreds of billions every year on anti-epileptic drugs and processed foods—but not a nickel if we change what we eat. The cardiology community and American Heart Association demonize fat based on flawed science. Hospitals profit from tests and procedures, but again no money from diet therapy. There is a world epilepsy population of over sixty million people. Most of those people begin having their seizures as children, and only a minuscule percentage ever find out about ketogenic diet therapies. When I realized that 99 percent of what had happened to Charlie and my family was unnecessary, and that there were millions of families worldwide in the same situation, I needed to try to do something. Nancy and I began the Charlie Foundation (charliefoundation.org) in 1994 in order to facilitate research and get the word directly to those who would benefit. Among the high points were countless articles, a couple appearances of Charlie’s story on Dateline NBC, and a movie I produced and directed about another family whose child’s epilepsy had been cured by the ketogenic diet starring Meryl Streep titled First Do No Harm (1997). Today, of course, the diet permeates social media. When we started, there was one hospital in the world offering ketogenic diet therapy. Today, there are 250. Equally important, word about the efficacy of the ketogenic diet for epilepsy spread within the scientific community. In 1995, we hosted the first of many scientific global symposia focused on the diet. As research into its mechanisms and applications has spiked, incredibly the professional communities have found the same metabolic pathway that is triggered by the ketogenic diet to reduce seizures has also been found to benefit Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, severe psychiatric disorders, traumatic brain injury, and even some cancers. I”
― David Zucker, Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!

“There was also a joke that we had filmed where the announcer says, “Air Poland, please clear the runway.” And then we cut into the cockpit, it’s Jose Feliciano, Ray Charles, and Stevie Wonder. Two of the guys were look-alikes, but we actually got Jose Feliciano. Jerry: I got a call from someone at the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.”
― David Zucker, Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!

“Jim: We got the idea of subtitling the Black dudes after we saw the 1975 Blaxploitation movie Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree. When we left the theater we thought it was pretty good, but we couldn’t understand a lot of the jive dialogue. The cast was 95 percent Black. So we thought wouldn’t it be fun to put a couple of those characters in Airplane! and subtitle them with idiotic white guy translations?”
― David Zucker, Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!