Interview [Written]: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker
From Screencrush:
Ahead — as ‘Top Secret!’ approaches its 30th anniversary — in their own words, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker and Val Kilmer tell the story about the rise, then fall, then rise again of what today is considered a comedy classic, Top Secret!.
Here is an excerpt:
Jim Abrahams: There were four years that went by, and we kind of figured after ‘Airplane!’ that we’d be able to pop one of these babies out every year or two. We didn’t quite understand what we had with ‘Airplane!,’ I don’t think.
Jerry Zucker We were funny guys who really didn’t understand, had no clue, about movie structure.
Jim Abrahams: ‘Airplane!’ was based on this movie ‘Zero Hour!,’ and that’s a story about a guy with post-traumatic stress disorder and, if you look at it in ‘Airplane!’ pretty carefully, that’s what Bob Hayes’ character had. He was plagued by demons from the war and it affected his personality.
Jerry Zucker: You could teach structure from either ‘Zero Hour!’ or ‘Airplane!’ — we don’t take credit for either, obviously.
Jim Abrahams: It was a really good story and David, Jerry and I just kind of hung our jokes on it. It was really a gift that we stumbled across that movie. So, it took a little while for us to figure that out — exactly why ‘Airplane!’ was so effective.
Jerry Zucker: Without the jokes, there’s still a story. At some moronic level, you care about if the plane lands safely and if the boy and girl get together and that helps the jokes work.
Jim Abrahams: We didn’t quite get the importance of a story. We struggled coming up with a story for a while. We came up with a lot of bad ideas.
Jerry Zucker: There was some idea we pitched to Michael Eisner that was so bad he thought we were putting him on.
Jim Abrahams: We went in and pitched something at Paramount sometime after ‘Airplane!’ and before ‘Top Secret!’ and I think before ‘Police Squad!.’ The first guy we pitched it to was Jeffery Katzenberg, who loved us because ‘Airplane!’ had been so successful and we were kind of a hot item back in those days. We pitched the idea and it sucked. And Jeffery kind of sat there and listened to us and he said, “You’re kidding.” It was such a bad idea he thought we were kidding. Then he calls Michael Eisner in, just to make sure. And we pitched the same idea to Eisner and he said, “I hate it.”
Jerry Zucker: We had this ‘Police Squad!’ idea, but we didn’t know how to make a story out of it, so we made a TV show out of it. So, really, that’s what we did next after ‘Airplane!.’
Jim Abrahams: We were really struggling to try to figure out what to do. Then ‘Police Squad!’ came up and we spent a little time figuring that one out — and that eventually got canceled.
Jerry Zucker: The thing with ‘Naked Gun,’ it fell into the category that all good sequel movies fall into, that it was based on a single strong character — or two in the case of ’22 Jump Street’ — that you can throw into a bunch of different situations and stories. With ‘Airplane!,’ it’s a group of people and the story itself was a specific story of how Ted and Elaine were breaking up and he found his courage. You couldn’t really have done a sequel to ‘Zero Hour!.’ So, for us, ‘Airplane 2’ was just going back on an airplane and trying to come up with 500 more jokes about things on an airplane.
Jim Abrahams: Then we figured the best thing to do was to put together a bunch of our favorite jokes — really good jokes — and string it together with what seemed like a story and that’s what wound up being ‘Top Secret!.’
Here is the original trailer for the movie:
HT to The Bitter Script Reader for the link.
For the rest of the interview, go here.
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