With his brother Jerry and their friend Jim Abrahams, David Zucker created a modern take on the spoof movie genre with the 1980 instant classic “Airplane,” named by the American Film Institute among the ten funniest films of all time. Working as a writer, producer and director, Zucker has been involved with a long string of box office smashes, from the critically acclaimed “Naked Gun” series to the more recent “Scary Movie” franchise.
Before all that success came struggle - which, to some extent, continues to this day. Zucker spoke with Eric Estrin about having to prove himself at the start of his career - every step of the way.
We came out from Milwaukee in 1972. We’d actually done a live theater show with videotaped segments and some filmed segments in Madison, Wisconsin in 1971, and the show was a big hit there, but we could only charge a dollar a ticket and we only had 70 seats. So we loaded up a U-Haul truck and moved the whole show to Los Angeles in June of 1972 as Kentucky Fried Theater.
We ran it as a show here for five years until the day the check cleared for the initial budget for Kentucky Fried Movie. It was on Pico Boulevard near 20th Century Fox, and in the whole five years no one from Fox ever bothered to come to see it.
It’s been like that my whole career.
Trying to get “Kentucky Fried Movie” made -- that was the hardest thing. We didn’t have any connections in the business. We just came out from Milwaukee and we didn’t know anybody. We were really looking for like, all in, half a million dollars to do the movie. We came into contact with a guy who had made some money in real estate, and he was interested. At that time it was my brother [Jerry] and I and Jim Abrahams, and John Landis and Bob Weiss. And Landis was going to direct and Bob Weiss was going to produce. And we had no track record.
So this guy said, “Why don’t we just go in at twenty-five thousand to do 10 minutes of it? You guys go and shoot the ten minutes and then I can show it to my neighbors who are also rich guys, and we can all chip in and make the movie.” And that sounded like a good idea.
So we wrote up the script for the 10 minutes and brought that back to the guy and he looked at it and said, eh, $25,000…? Let me talk to my neighbors and see if they want to do this. So we came back the next day and he said, “Well I talked to my neighbors and they don’t want to do it. I’m not doing it either. You’re out of here.”
On the ride home, Jerry and Jim and I were talking and, you know, we were completely depressed and discouraged.
