The classic comedies 'Airplane' and 'The Naked Gun' almost never happened

Immediately, we were interested in World War II spy films and Elvis movies

Just because they were so serious, we thought we could spoof it, and that became top secret

One of the earliest running jokes in my family was anytime someone would be like

oh, we'll do this on Sunday. We'll be like, Sunday? Sunday, it's the best to run

You know the joke I always think of? I know a little German. He's sitting over there

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

Well, my brother and I just kind of did some student films in college

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

because I made a student film for a lecture class taught by this big-time professor who was very popular

and everybody had to turn in a student film of 10 minutes

And everybody else was doing all these studies in light and shadow

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

And it got a huge laugh in my study section. And the TA said, you've got to enter that in a film festival

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

And my brother Jerry and I showed it and it got huge laughs

And I think we were hooked. We said, okay, now we can make people laugh on film

So that was a key. That was a real breakthrough. And then after college, we started Kentucky Fried Theater with our friend Jim Abrams

What would you say was the thing that you were doing that was different than other people were doing

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

And so we just we thought that was low hanging fruit, like Trump jokes are now

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

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

who was one of the vice presidents at NBC saying, I want to do Kentucky Fried Theater on national TV

And they did it. And, you know, the rest is history. So, uh, so it was so, but

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

spoofs, all the stuff that Saturday Night Live eventually did and did it well. I mean

Lauren, you know, is a genius and there's no accident about that

So how do you get from there to making Kentucky Fried movie

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

and so uh jim and jerry and i decided okay we're gonna write a movie because we saw

we were fans of mel brooks and woody allen and you know not like worshipping because we thought

okay we could do that too uh not necessarily better but uh we said we could do this so we

wrote airplane and that was in 1975 and got nowhere and john landis came to see our show

And we told him our tale of wool that we can't get a movie going and we're bored of doing the show

And he said, well, why don't you do a movie of your show based on your show

And that became Kentucky Fried Movie. John directed it. It was we did it for 10 cents and it made, you know, 20 million

So then we were in the movie business. But then we rewrote Airplane

And that was again turned down by every studio. And believe me, it's a story of my life

just being turned down and it continues today. But fortunately there was a brilliant movie executive

named Michael Eisner, who happened to be the head of Paramount at the time

And he heard about the script, had us into his office and he said

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

and that's how we got to Paramount. You know, there were other challenges

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

So we pitched them not doing it on an airplane, but Airplane 2, Bob and Julie land the plane

their happy ending, he takes her home to meet his family, to get married, and it's the godfather

and and so he's yeah and and golf at the time would have been great and to their credit

uh Eisner and Katzenberg loved the idea but they had to run it by Francis first and Francis for his

own reasons he wanted to do Godfather 3 so that we couldn't do that so we're looking around for

something else to do. And well, first we did Police Squad in 82. But it turned out, you know

it wasn't right for television. And we put a pin in it, and we were, you know, destined to do it

later, of course, as Naked Gun. But immediately, we were interested in World War II spy films

and Elvis movies, just because they were so serious, we thought we could spoof it. And

you know that became top secret would you say it's harder in general to do a successful spoof

these days if it's a copy of course so they just did uh we we did a uh an original script for

uh naked gun four and it was again i want to do something fresh original different so we didn't

set it in an LA cop station. It's Mission Impossible, right? Yeah, it's Mission Impossible

Bond, Bourne Identity, International Spy Spoof. But it's still the naked, it's that style of

humor. It's our sensibility. And it was a great, it still is a great script. We've retitled it

we'll eventually do it. But Paramount didn't want to do it, wanted to just stay safe. And

And so and Seth MacFarlane came in and tried to replace Leslie Nielsen in this old idea, this 35 year old idea

You know, OK, Leslie Nielsen was a fresh idea, an old guy as the cop and the hero

And that was fresh 35 years ago. It ain't fresh now. So it's it's really tough to replace Leslie Nielsen

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

Not only that, but it's the same formula. It's Drebben in a cop station with Nordberg, and they're doing this stuff

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

I've been able to get away with it twice on each thing

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

Because I'm being asked, would you be interested in doing another scary movie

No. I mean, first of all, the Wayans have a chance at really doing something good

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

i don't know what they have planned for six but i saw the trailer and it seemed like it was

really funny so they're one of the few sort of filmmakers who have their own style who have

their own thing going on that i really trust when they come out with a new thing i try i admire

these guys because they're original i've heard you talk about them and also like you know like

Austin Powers as being examples of, you know, of, they have their own style and they don't necessarily have to follow your own

set. You like the set of 15 rules that you guys have set rules and the

Wayans don't follow it. And Mike Myers don't follow it. And, you know

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

So that's, you know, you have a podcast. Yes. It's called naked comedy

been released yet. So we're having a bunch of people on and I'm going to have Cameron on

in a couple of weeks. And I'm going to show, she really wants, she gets comments all the time

that people ask her about the hat. Anyway, she said, do you have the clip of the hat

you know, of the giant hat on wheels? And I want to start looking for it. I don't know who owns

Scary Movie 3 at this point. Is there anything else that you wanted to plug

that we didn't get to? The important thing is mastercrash.com. It's actually a free community

and you can join and be in on a lot of the

antics that we're up to. And maybe learn something along with me because in some of these

because a lot of the classes I'm just interacting with the students

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