"Airplane was turned down by every studio."
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Immediately, we were interested in World War II spy films and Elvis movies
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Just because they were so serious, we thought we could spoof it, and that became top secret
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One of the earliest running jokes in my family was anytime someone would be like
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oh, we'll do this on Sunday. We'll be like, Sunday? Sunday, it's the best to run
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You know the joke I always think of? I know a little German. He's sitting over there
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That's the other one I was going to bring up. Those are my two favorite jokes in the whole movie. Tell me about how you guys started doing comedy and that first theater that you guys put together in Milwaukee
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Well, my brother and I just kind of did some student films in college
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And when I was a junior and he was a freshman and Jerry was the star of the movies and I was the director, they gained instant fame on campus
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because I made a student film for a lecture class taught by this big-time professor who was very popular
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and everybody had to turn in a student film of 10 minutes
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And everybody else was doing all these studies in light and shadow
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and esoteric meaning. I don't know what it was. But I shot my brother running around the campus trying to find a place to pee and being chased by a guy with his pants down
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And it got a huge laugh in my study section. And the TA said, you've got to enter that in a film festival
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I never did, but he did show it to the professor. And the professor had me, two weeks later, show it in front of the entire 800-seat lecture
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And my brother Jerry and I showed it and it got huge laughs
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And I think we were hooked. We said, okay, now we can make people laugh on film
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So that was a key. That was a real breakthrough. And then after college, we started Kentucky Fried Theater with our friend Jim Abrams
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What would you say was the thing that you were doing that was different than other people were doing
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We weren't doing political satire. Everybody else, the committee and there was some other sketch groups who were doing improv and a lot of Nixon jokes
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And so we just we thought that was low hanging fruit, like Trump jokes are now
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It's just it's so easy. It's already parody. And so we did media satire and we did spoofs on commercials and nobody did that
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In fact Lorne Michaels brought Dick Ebersole to see the show And this was in the mid in 74 75 And he pitched Saturday Night Live to Dick Ebersole
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who was one of the vice presidents at NBC saying, I want to do Kentucky Fried Theater on national TV
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And they did it. And, you know, the rest is history. So, uh, so it was so, but
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and we were doing stuff that nobody was doing and we, we combined, also combine music with commercial. We had a video monitor on stage, so we did commercials
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spoofs, all the stuff that Saturday Night Live eventually did and did it well. I mean
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Lauren, you know, is a genius and there's no accident about that
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So how do you get from there to making Kentucky Fried movie
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Okay, so we didn't want to be dancing around on stage at age 45. So we were on a bunch of national TV shows as a sketch group, and that went nowhere. And I always kind of said, we made a joint decision with the networks not to do any more TV
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and so uh jim and jerry and i decided okay we're gonna write a movie because we saw
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we were fans of mel brooks and woody allen and you know not like worshipping because we thought
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okay we could do that too uh not necessarily better but uh we said we could do this so we
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wrote airplane and that was in 1975 and got nowhere and john landis came to see our show
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And we told him our tale of wool that we can't get a movie going and we're bored of doing the show
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And he said, well, why don't you do a movie of your show based on your show
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And that became Kentucky Fried Movie. John directed it. It was we did it for 10 cents and it made, you know, 20 million
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So then we were in the movie business. But then we rewrote Airplane
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And that was again turned down by every studio. And believe me, it's a story of my life
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just being turned down and it continues today. But fortunately there was a brilliant movie executive
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named Michael Eisner, who happened to be the head of Paramount at the time
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And he heard about the script, had us into his office and he said
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you're in, you don't have to pitch this. I wanna do this movie. So that's how we, when it's easy, it's easy
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and that's how we got to Paramount. You know, there were other challenges
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like trying to find another idea We didn want to do Airplane 2 And although the wanted us to do it But I never want to do the same thing over and over again I always want to do something different
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So we pitched them not doing it on an airplane, but Airplane 2, Bob and Julie land the plane
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their happy ending, he takes her home to meet his family, to get married, and it's the godfather
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and and so he's yeah and and golf at the time would have been great and to their credit
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uh Eisner and Katzenberg loved the idea but they had to run it by Francis first and Francis for his
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own reasons he wanted to do Godfather 3 so that we couldn't do that so we're looking around for
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something else to do. And well, first we did Police Squad in 82. But it turned out, you know
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it wasn't right for television. And we put a pin in it, and we were, you know, destined to do it
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later, of course, as Naked Gun. But immediately, we were interested in World War II spy films
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and Elvis movies, just because they were so serious, we thought we could spoof it. And
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you know that became top secret would you say it's harder in general to do a successful spoof
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these days if it's a copy of course so they just did uh we we did a uh an original script for
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uh naked gun four and it was again i want to do something fresh original different so we didn't
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set it in an LA cop station. It's Mission Impossible, right? Yeah, it's Mission Impossible
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Bond, Bourne Identity, International Spy Spoof. But it's still the naked, it's that style of
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humor. It's our sensibility. And it was a great, it still is a great script. We've retitled it
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we'll eventually do it. But Paramount didn't want to do it, wanted to just stay safe. And
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And so and Seth MacFarlane came in and tried to replace Leslie Nielsen in this old idea, this 35 year old idea
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You know, OK, Leslie Nielsen was a fresh idea, an old guy as the cop and the hero
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And that was fresh 35 years ago. It ain't fresh now. So it's it's really tough to replace Leslie Nielsen
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So we weren even trying Our hero in now we call it counterintelligence spelled with one L and a J And the hero would have been a 30 like Andy Samberg Yeah you can replace Leslie Nielsen I mean it impossible he a one type of talent
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Not only that, but it's the same formula. It's Drebben in a cop station with Nordberg, and they're doing this stuff
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I don't want to have anything to do with it. The minute you put your finger on what the formula is, it's done
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I've been able to get away with it twice on each thing
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You know, and I'm talking about the Naked Gun and scary movies. I did two, and I didn't want to have anything more to do with it
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Because I'm being asked, would you be interested in doing another scary movie
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No. I mean, first of all, the Wayans have a chance at really doing something good
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I mean, they're good at it, at what they do. it's a specific you know they do r-rated really really edgy stuff and uh some of it's gross out
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i don't know what they have planned for six but i saw the trailer and it seemed like it was
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really funny so they're one of the few sort of filmmakers who have their own style who have
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their own thing going on that i really trust when they come out with a new thing i try i admire
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these guys because they're original i've heard you talk about them and also like you know like
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Austin Powers as being examples of, you know, of, they have their own style and they don't necessarily have to follow your own
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set. You like the set of 15 rules that you guys have set rules and the
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Wayans don't follow it. And Mike Myers don't follow it. And, you know
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but if you try to do the Zuckers, then you're in trouble if you don't follow, if you don't know the rules
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So that's, you know, you have a podcast. Yes. It's called naked comedy
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been released yet. So we're having a bunch of people on and I'm going to have Cameron on
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in a couple of weeks. And I'm going to show, she really wants, she gets comments all the time
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that people ask her about the hat. Anyway, she said, do you have the clip of the hat
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you know, of the giant hat on wheels? And I want to start looking for it. I don't know who owns
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Scary Movie 3 at this point. Is there anything else that you wanted to plug
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that we didn't get to? The important thing is mastercrash.com. It's actually a free community
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and you can join and be in on a lot of the
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antics that we're up to. And maybe learn something along with me because in some of these
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because a lot of the classes I'm just interacting with the students
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and they can ask questions and stuff. And that's how I came up with that, the hat fix, you know, all these years later
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