When the creators of the 1980 comedy classic “Airplane!” were casting the lead role of pilot Ted Striker — eventually played by Robert Hays — they saw a slew of actors who weren’t right for the role.
Finally, with only three weeks until filming, executives at Paramount Pictures told the filmmakers that they’d selected an actor to fill the role: crooner Barry Manilow.
In keeping with a recent oral history of the film, “Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!” (St. Martin’s Press) by the film’s creators David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, with interviews by Will Harris, Paramount executive Tom Parry broke the news to the team, known collectively as ZAZ.
“Their jaws dropped, after which they broke into gales of laughter,” Parry says within the book.
“They usually said, ‘You bought us! That’s the funniest thing we’ve ever heard!’ The thing is, the blokes used to do things like toilet-paper my automotive, and so they thought I was getting back at them. And I said, ‘No no! It’s real!”
Parry managed to dissuade Manilow from taking the role by emphasizing that the film would have three first-time co-directors.
However the insanity of the casting idea in the primary place emphasizes how difficult “Airplane!” was to forged, and the way widely misunderstood it was even by those in control of creating it.
“Airplane!” evolved from ZAZ’s popular L.A. comedy theater Kentucky Fried Theater, which might also encourage their 1977 film “The Kentucky Fried Movie.”
(An earlier version of the script for “Airplane!” was titled “Kentucky Fried Airplane.”)
Researching TV commercials to parody, ZAZ would record television overnight, hoping to seek out bizarre infomercials to mock.
One night, they inadvertently recorded a super-serious 1957 airplane disaster movie called “Zero Hour!” a couple of World War II veteran with PTSD who’s forced to fly a passenger plane after the pilots come down with food poisoning.
“‘Zero Hour!’ was intensely serious and unintentionally hilarious,” Jerry Zucker said within the book.
“One gem in the course of the movie was the signature line: ‘We want to seek out someone back there who not only can fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner,’” Abrahams recalled within the book.
“We didn’t need to change it. Imagine being kids who spent one hundred pc of their lives searching for things to spoof after which coming across a line like that. I’ve often thought that’s how Jonas Salk will need to have felt when he discovered his polio vaccine.”
The ZAZ team bought the rights to “Zero Hour!” and constructed “Airplane!” directly on top of it, writing jokey retorts to the unique film’s actual lines.
It was crucial then that they forged actors who could perform the creators’ insane comic scenarios with the believability of a disaster movie.
For the role of Elaine Dickinson, the flight attendant/pilot’s love interest eventually played by Julie Hagerty, Shelley Long had an ideal audition, while Sigourney Weaver took herself out of the running.
“She got here in wearing a Forties stewardess costume complete with full makeup and a forties hairstyle,” David Zucker says within the book. “Right off the bat she told us that she refused to do the ‘sit in your face and wriggle’ line.”
While Hagerty got here along soon after, Striker was proving harder to forged, and the names of many actors — and non-actors — were tossed out in desperation.
Olympic champion Bruce Jenner read for the role thrice.
ZAZ even asked David Letterman to audition after seeing him perform on the Comedy Store.
“We did a scene once, after which they gave me some notes, after which we did it perhaps two more times,” Letterman says within the book.
“And I kept saying all along, ‘I can’t act! I can’t act!’ after which one among them got here to me after the audition and said, ‘You’re right: you possibly can’t act!”
“I remember calling Letterman to inform him he didn’t get the part,” Jerry Zucker said. “He thanked me profusely.”
Beyond the romantic leads, one key to the film’s success can be to rent the type of actors who had starred in movies and TV shows like “Zero Hero!”
When “Mission: Unattainable” veteran Peter Graves, who eventually played the gladiator-loving Captain Oveur, first read the script, he thought it was so awful that he threw it across the room. (Graves died in 2010, but is quoted throughout the book in old interviews.)
“I did greater than turn it down. I was upset. I assumed it was trash!” Graves says.
“I said, ‘That is insane!’ And never only that, it’s the worst taste I’ve ever seen — from any piece of fabric I’ve ever read!’”
Confusion concerning the script didn’t end after the actors, including Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges, were forged.
“I remember sooner or later, Lloyd and Bob were rehearsing a scene,” Hays says within the book. “I remember Lloyd being slightly type of frustrated and confused, and saying, ‘What the hell’s happening here?’ Since it was so silly! It was so crazy, and he didn’t quite get it.”
“So finally Stack jumps in,” continues David Zucker, “and says, ‘Look, there’s a spear going into the wall behind me and a watermelon falling on the desk in front of you. Nobody’s listening to us! Just keep talkin’, Lloyd!’”
Ultimately, “Airplane!” became an everyday presence on virtually every “Funniest Movies of All Time” list, and even won over the skeptics in its own forged.
Years after the movie’s release, Graves was standing in a checkout line behind a lady and a twelve-year-old boy. The boy kept peering back like he might recognize him.
“She finishes paying, and the child’s still taking a look at me,” says Graves.
“And I just leaned down and said, ‘Son, do you want movies about gladiators?’ She grabbed that child and headed for the hills. Nobody has seen her since.”