Airplane!


Airplane! is a 1980 American parody film written and directed by David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, and produced by Jon Davison. It stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty and features Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Lorna Patterson. The film is a parody of the disaster film genre, particularly the 1957 Paramount film Zero Hour!, from which it borrows the plot and the central characters, as well as many elements from Airport 1975 and other films in the Airport film series. The film is known for its use of surreal humor and its fast-paced slapstick comedy, including visual and verbal puns, gags, and obscure humor.
Airplane! was released by Paramount Pictures and was a critical and financial success, grossing $158 million worldwide against a budget of $3.5 million. The film's creators received the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Comedy, and nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and for the BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay.
In the years since its release, the film's reputation has grown substantially. The film was ranked sixth on Bravo's 100 Funniest Movies. In a 2007 survey by Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, it was judged the second greatest comedy film of all time, after Monty Python's Life of Brian. In 2008, it was selected by Empire magazine as one of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time and in 2012 was voted number one in The 50 Funniest Comedies Ever poll. In 2010, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot

Ex-fighter pilot Ted Striker is a traumatized war veteran turned taxi driver. Because of his pathological fear of flying and "drinking problem", he has been unable to hold a responsible job. His wartime girlfriend, Elaine Dickinson, now a flight attendant, leaves him before boarding her assigned flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. Ted abandons his taxi and buys a ticket on the same flight to try to win her back. However, she still continues to reject him during the flight.
After the in-flight meal is served, several of the passengers and the flight crew fall ill, including Captain Oveur. Passenger Dr. Rumack discovers that the fish served onboard caused food poisoning. With the flight crew incapacitated, Elaine contacts the Chicago control tower for help, and is instructed by tower supervisor Steve McCroskey to activate the plane's autopilot, a large inflatable pilot doll named "Otto", which will get them to Chicago, but will not be able to land the plane. Elaine and Dr. Rumack convince Ted to take the controls. When Steve learns that Ted is piloting, he contacts Ted's former commanding officer, Rex Kramer, now serving as a commercial pilot, so that he can help talk Ted through landing the plane. Ted becomes troubled when Rex starts giving instructions, and briefly stresses out from flashbacks to the war. Both Elaine and Dr. Rumack bolster Ted's confidence and he takes the controls under Rex's guidance.
As the plane nears Chicago, the weather worsens, making landing difficult. With Elaine's help as co-pilot and Rex's guidance, Ted is able to land the plane safely with the passengers suffering only minor injuries, despite the landing gear being sheared off. Rescue vehicles arrive to help unload the plane. Impressed by Ted's display of courage, Elaine embraces and kisses him, rekindling their relationship. The two watch as "Otto" takes control of the plane, inflates a female companion, and takes off.

Cast

Production

, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, wrote Airplane! while they were performing with the Kentucky Fried Theatre, a theatre group they had founded in 1971. To obtain material for comedy routines, they routinely recorded late night television and reviewed the tapes later primarily to pull the commercials, a process Abrahams compared to "seining for fish". During one such taping process, they unintentionally recorded the 1957 film Zero Hour!, and while scanning the commercials, found that the film was a "perfectly classically structured film" according to Jerry Zucker. Abrahams later described Zero Hour! as "the serious version of Airplane!". It was the first film script they wrote, completed around 1975, and was originally called The Late Show. The script originally stayed close to the dialog and plot of Zero Hour!, as ZAZ considered they did not have a sufficient understanding of film at the time to structure a proper script. ZAZ's script borrowed so much from Zero Hour! that they believed they needed to negotiate the rights to create the remake of the film and ensure they remain within the allowance for parody within copyright law. They were able to obtain the rights from Warner Bros. and Paramount for about $2,500 at the time. The original script contained spoofs of television commercials but people who proofread the script advised them to shorten the commercials, and, eventually, they removed them. When their script was finished they were unable to sell it.
While failing to sell their script, the trio knew director John Landis, who encouraged them to write a film based on their theatre sketches. They managed to put the film, called The Kentucky Fried Movie, in production in the late 1970s, and entered a movie set for the first time. David Zucker said "It was the first time we had ever been on a movie set. We learned a lot. We learned that if you really wanted a movie to come out the way you wanted it to, you had to direct. So on the next movie, Airplane!, we insisted on directing."
Eventually the Airplane! script found its way to Paramount through Michael Eisner. Eisner had learned of the script via Susan Baerwald, another scriptwriter with United Artists, who had passed on the script that she thought was funny. Eisner had Jeffrey Katzenberg track down and meet with ZAZ to discuss details. Around the same time, ZAZ had also been contacted by Avco Embassy Pictures who had also expressed interest in producing the film, but ZAZ decided to go with Paramount.
Paramount insisted that the film be shot in color rather than black-and-white as ZAZ wanted, and to be set aboard a jet airliner rather than propeller plane to better identify with modern filmgoers. In exchange, Paramount agreed with ZAZ's decision to cast serious actors for the film rather than comedy actors. Principal photography began on June 20 and wrapped on August 31, 1979, with the bulk of filming having been done in August. Jerry Zucker stood beside the camera during shooting, while David Zucker and Jim Abrahams would be watching the video feed to see how the film would look; they would confer after each take.

Casting

David Zucker explained that "the trick was to cast actors like Robert Stack, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves, and Lloyd Bridges. These were people who, up to that time, had never done comedy. We thought they were much funnier than the comedians of that time were."
David Zucker felt Stack was the most important actor to be cast, since he was the "linchpin" of the film's plot. Stack initially played his role in a way that was different from what the directors had in mind. They showed him a tape of impressionist John Byner impersonating Robert Stack. According to the producers, Stack was "doing an impression of John Byner doing an impression of Stack." Stack was not initially interested in the part, but ZAZ persuaded him. Bridges' children advised him to take the part. Graves rejected the script at first, considering it tasteless. During filming, ZAZ had explained to Graves that his lines spoken to a young boy, like "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?", would "be explained later in a part that you aren’t in". On the DVD commentary, Abrahams said, "I don't understand. What did he think was tasteless about pedophilia?"
Initially for Dr. Rumack, ZAZ had suggested Dom DeLuise, Christopher Lee, and Jack Webb, all who had turned it down, before they came to the idea of Nielsen. Nielsen, in contrast, was "just a fish in water" with his role, according to Jerry Zucker. Nielsen had done leading roles in his career to this point but had been desiring to get into more comedies and had been looking for some film to help in this direction. He was considered "closet comedian" on set, pranking his fellow actors between shoots, but immediately took to his serious, deadpan role as Rumack for filming. During filming, Leslie Nielsen used a whoopee cushion to keep the cast off-balance. Hays said that Nielsen "played that thing like a maestro".
The role of Ted Striker was written for David Letterman, who had previously auditioned the role of the news anchor in Kentucky Fried Movie. Letterman screen tested for the role in 1979, but ultimately was not selected. Bruce Jenner also had read for the part. Instead, ZAZ opted for Robert Hays, who was a co-star of Angie. Elaine's part was auditioned for by Sigourney Weaver and Shelley Long but eventually went to Julie Hagerty. The directors advised the pair to play their roles straight. Hays and Hagerty developed a on-screen chemistry that worked in the film's favor; they spent time to perfect the bar dance routine set to "Stayin' Alive", among other scenes.
For the "red zone/white zone" send-up of curbside terminal announcements in which public address announcers "Betty" and "Vernon" argue over the red and white zones, ZAZ went through the usual process of auditioning professional voice actors but failed to find ones who could provide the desired verisimilitude. Instead, the filmmakers ultimately sought out and hired the real-life married couple who had recorded the announcement tapes which were then being used at Los Angeles International Airport. ZAZ lifted some of their dialog directly from the 1968 novel Airport, written by Arthur Hailey who had also written Zero Hour! script. The lifted lines included ones about an unwanted pregnancy, which David Zucker said of the couple "they got a kick out of it".

Music

The film's score was composed by Elmer Bernstein, who had previously done films like The Magnificent Seven, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Great Escape. ZAZ had instructed Berstein that they did not want an epic score like his past works but “a B-Movie level score, overdone and corny". ZAZ said that Bernstein completely understood what they were trying to do and had laughed throughout a previous cut of the film, and wrote a "fantastic score".
In 1980, an LP soundtrack for the film was released by Regency Records and included dialog and songs from the film. It was also narrated by Shadoe Stevens, and only featured one score track, the "Love Theme from Airplane" composed by Bernstein. The soundtrack was altered for the European 'Flying High' release, with several of the featured tracks swapped for pieces original to the LP.
On April 28, 2009, La-La Land Records announced that it would release the first official score album for Airplane!, containing Bernstein's complete score. The soundtrack was released digitally on February 19, 2013, by Paramount Music.

Release

Before its release, the directors had been apprehensive, owing to a mediocre response at one of the pre-screenings. But the film earned its entire budget of about $3.5 million in its first five days of wide release.
The film opened on June 27, 1980 in seven theatres in Toronto, grossing $83,058 in its opening weekend. It also opened in two theatres in Buffalo, grossing $14,000 in its first week. The film then expanded on Wednesday, July 2, 1980 to 705 theatres in the United States and Canada grossing $6,052,514 in its first five days of wide release, finishing second for the weekend with a gross of $4,540,000. Overall, it grossed $83 million at the US and Canadian box office returning $40 million in rentals, making it the fourth highest-grossing film of 1980. The film grossed $158 million worldwide.

Reception

Airplane! received universal acclaim from critics and is widely regarded as one of the best films of 1980. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 97% based on 64 reviews, compiled retrospectively, with an average rating of 8.42/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Though unabashedly juvenile and silly, Airplane! is nevertheless an uproarious spoof comedy full of quotable lines and slapstick gags that endure to this day." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 78 out of 100 based on 18 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote "Airplane! is sophomoric, obvious, predictable, corny, and quite often very funny. And the reason it's funny is frequently because it's sophomoric, predictable, corny, etc". Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote "Airplane! is more than a pleasant surprise... As a remedy for the bloated self-importance of too many other current efforts, it's just what the doctor ordered".
In 2008 Airplane! was selected by Empire magazine as one of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time. It was also placed on a similar list by The New York Times, a list of The Best 1000 Movies Ever Made. In November 2015, the film was ranked fourth in the Writers Guild of America's list of 101 Funniest Screenplays.
MaximOnline.com named the airplane crash in Airplane! number four on its list of "Most Horrific Movie Plane Crashes." Leslie Nielsen's line, "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley", was 79th on AFI's list of the best 100 movie quotes. In 2000, the American Film Institute listed Airplane! as number ten on its list of the 100 funniest American films. In the same year, readers of Total Film voted it the second greatest comedy film of all time. It also came second in the British 50 Greatest Comedy Films poll on Channel 4, beaten by Monty Python's The Life of Brian. Entertainment Weekly voted the film the "Funniest movie on video" in their list of the 100 funniest movies on video.
Several actors were cast to spoof their established images: prior to their roles in Airplane!, Nielsen, Stack, and Bridges were known for portraying adventurous, no-nonsense tough-guy characters. Stack's role as the captain who loses his nerve in one of the earliest airline "disaster" films, The High and the Mighty, is spoofed in Airplane!, as is Lloyd Bridges' 1970–1971 television role as airport manager Jim Conrad in San Francisco International Airport. Peter Graves was in the made-for-television film ', in which an SST was unable to land owing to an emergency.
Nielsen saw a major boost to his career after Airplane!s release. The film marked a significant change in his film persona towards a new specialty in deadpan comedy, notably in the three Naked Gun films based on the six-episode television series Police Squad!, in which he also starred and which was created and produced by the Abrahams–Zucker–Zucker team behind Airplane. This also led to his casting, many years later, in Mel Brooks' '. Brooks had wanted to make that film for a long time, but put it off because, as he said, "I just could not find the right Dracula." Brooks said he had never seen Airplane! until years after its release. When he did, he knew Nielsen would be right for the part. When it was suggested that his role in Airplane! was against type, Nielsen protested that he had "always been cast against type before", and that comedy was what he always really wanted to do.
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
said of the film: "I was in Rhode Island the first time I saw Airplane! Seeing it for the first time was like going to a great rock concert, like seeing Led Zeppelin or the Talking Heads. We didn't realize until later that what we'd seen was a very specific kind of comedy that we now call the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker school." Farrelly, along with his writing partner Bennett Yellin, sent a comedy script to David Zucker, who in return gave them their first Hollywood writing job. Farrelly said, "I'll tell you right now, if the Zuckers didn't exist, there would be no Farrelly brothers."
Thirty years later, the documentary ' opened with a scene from the film.
The MythBusters TV show episode "Airplane Hour" reenacted the climax of the film; to see if an inexperienced pilot could land a plane with only a call from Air Traffic Control. The Mythbusters had to use a simulation to test the myth but concluded that the scene was plausible. They did, however, mention that most planes today have an autopilot to land the plane safely.
In the 2012 film Ted, the main character, John Bennett, tells the story of how he met Lori Collins. The flashback is a close recreation of the scene where Ted Striker met Elaine Dickinson in the disco.
In early 2014, Delta Air Lines began using a new on-board safety film with many 1980s references, featuring an ending with a cameo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reprising his role as co-pilot Roger Murdock.
In 2014, Travel Wisconsin began airing an ad with Robert Hays and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reprising their roles from the film. Kareem makes the comment "Why did I ever leave this place?" referring to his time playing for the Milwaukee Bucks. Hays also reprises his role as an airline pilot in '.

Sequel

, first released on December 10, 1982, attempted to tackle the science fiction film genre, though there was still emphasis on the general theme of disaster films. Although most of the cast reunited for the sequel, the writers and directors of Airplane! chose not to be involved. In the DVD commentary for Airplane! David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker claim to have never seen nor to have any desire to see Airplane II.