in the head
by an iron boot?
Of course not. It never happens.
Sorry. That's a dumb question.
Skip that.
There you go. Have a nice day.
Municipal bonds, Ted.
Talking double "A" rating.
Best investment in America.
Well, I'll give him
another 20 minutes, but that's it.
EnglishWait a minute, we're starting
and there's the Paramount logo.
- I remember when we thought that up.
- That's Jerry speaking.
OK, we'll ID ourselves.
I'm Jerry Zucker.
Jim Abrahams.
- David Zucker.
- Jon Davison.
And this is Paramount Pictures
presenting...
It's in colour.
You probably wanted us
to say something.
We have nothing to say.
This shot was done by Rodney Blalack.
And...
It's a lot of cotton wool and
a little airplane tail on a track.
- But... was this in the script...
- Yes.
Or was this added?
It's on a big plywood table.
I remember when we started talking
to Elmer Bernstein about the score,
trying to tell him
that we wanted a B-movie score.
We did not actually want,
like, a really good score,
- but he got it.
- Rose to the occasion.
That's the old LAX
before they did the second deck.
Anyway, should we talk about how...
how the movie actually got started?
- Good.
- OK, so...
This was probably 19... the first
draft we probably wrote in 1974?
Yeah, while we were doing
our "Kentucky Fried Theatre".
We got material for the theatre by
leaving a video recorder on all night
to get the commercials
so we could do spoofs,
'cause that's when they do
the stupidest, cheapest commercials.
And so one morning we were looking
at what we got the night before
and there weren't
many good commercials,
but there was this airplane movie,
a disaster film,
which was "Zero Hour" from 1957,
starring Dana Andrews,
Linda Darnell and Sterling Hayden.
Written by Arthur Hailey.
Right, who did
all the "Airport" movies.
So we said we could do a parody
of this and see what happens,
so we wrote a movie we called
"The Late Show" because the idea
was to tie all our commercial gags
together with some movie in-between.
You were going to watch
all these commercial spoofs
but then we'd go to the actual movie
for a couple of minutes
and then back to commercials.
The first guy we brought
that script to was Lloyd Schwartz...
Whose wife that is.
And that's Barbara Mallory.
He liked it but he said
this "Airplane" story seems... funnier
and more interesting
than your commercial spoofs.
Cut out the commercials
and just do the story, so...
That's what we did, huh?
Then we wrote the first draft,
which had 20 good jokes
from the final version,
and a lot of talking
and a lot of shoe leather.
There's your credit, Jon.
The voices you hear...
- That's Howard...
- Howard Jarvis.
They were the actual people
who did the no parking at LAX.
The red zone, yeah.
We got the actual couple.
And they make a living
by making the machinery.
- They make the machinery.
- Yeah.
Wait, here comes my wife.
- Stop for a minute.
- Nancy... there she is.
I met her, she was an extra
and we met that day.
And there she was,
so I said, "Stop the camera."
That's Jerry Zucker right there.
There's me and there's David.
It's good to have three directors.
While two are acting one can direct.
And this is the model
Howard was angry about.
- That cost $40,000.
- Yeah.
It's not a model, it's full-size...
three-quarter size.
And they covered it in plaster
and it weighed...
Good to see some guy pulling cable,
here now, on the left.
- Right there!
- Just on the left.
The technician pulling cable.
This picture was so cheap.
Half these people are just people
going to their flights
The people right behind are extras,
but they couldn't shut down
this main thoroughfare,
so I remember shooting in the airport
was like shooting in an airport.
We either couldn't control
the costumes of the extras or...
she just misinterpreted
our instructions,
but you can see the big collars.
On the plane everyone was