Here are some Airplane behind the scenes stories we think you’ll enjoy.
But First
Airplane! almost didn’t take off. Studios didn’t initially see the potential of the the script for a disaster movie takeoff, which played the comedy completely straight in a way you had to see to understand. It was also crucial to cast Ted Hays and Julie Hagerty as romantic leads the audience would stay invested in despite the absurdity all around them.
But after brother Jerry and David Zucker and their friend Jim Abrahams proved their comic chops with the cult classic Kentucky Fried Movie, they got the runway to make Airplane!, one of the most beloved comedies of all.
And now… the Airplane! behind the scenes stories.
The Studio Wanted Bill Murray or Chevy Chase
Airplane! writers-directors David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams — aka ZAZ — always wanted their actors to play it straight — and to cast stars known for drama. But Paramount Pictures, understandably, thought that since the 1980 release was a comedy, it should feature some of the biggest comedy stars of the day.
“The requests kept coming in from the studio that we have this or that actor in to read,” David Zucker said in ZAZ’s excellent 2023 book Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane. “Comedians like Bill Murray and Chevy Chase.”
Chase and Murray, of course, ended up in another huge 1980 comedy, Caddyshack (above).
Leslie Nielsen Had a Fart Machine
Leslie Nielsen, known before Airplane! for dramatic roles, was also known for carrying around a machine that made rude noises.
“I think that the little fart machine he always carried with him might have been his way of coping with a career filled with heavy drama,” Jerry Zucker said in Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!
“A friend of his made them for him. I do remember he was selling them on the set. After a while the whole crew had them and all you’d hear was constant farting sounds. I could never get mine to work right, but Leslie… played it like a virtuoso.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recalled that Nielsen loved to press the button “whenever we were doing dialogue. At first, I thought he just had some sort of intestinal problem.”
The PA Announcers Were a Real Couple Who Actually Did Airport Announcements
ZAZ couldn’t find the right actors to read the lines from the feuding PA announcers, so they tracked down the people who did the real airport PA recordings. It turned out to be a married couple who had sold the PA system to the airport.
“So we asked them to come in and give it a try. They did it perfectly,” Jerry Zucker said in Surely You Can’t Be Serious.
Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Grew Up Making Fun of Serious Shows
Jim Abrahams and brothers Jerry and David Zucker grew up together, and their dads were business partners in a real estate company.
In their 2023 book Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, Jerrry Zucker explained that they spent hours, growing up, watching serious TV shows like The Untouchables, Sea Hunt, and Mission: Impossible — “shows where the characters just took themselves so seriously, and we’d blurt out ridiculous lines for them to say.”
And in Airplane, “we actually got those same tough-guy actors to say the lines we always wished they would have said.” They included Untouchables star Robert Stack, Sea Hunt star Lloyd Bridges, and Mission: Impossible star Peter Graves.
That was the origin of their approach to comedy — play it totally straight, and totally absurd.
ZAZ Were Always Huge Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Fans
Surely You Can’t Be Serious includes a letter that Jim Abrahams, 25 at the time, wrote to his local newspaper, The Milwaukee Sentinel, complaining about its overly harsh coverage of Abdul-Jabbar, who was then known as Lew Alcindor. (Abdul-Jabbar played for the Milwaukee Bucks from 1969-75.)
Years later, of course, ZAZ cast Abdul-Jabbar in Airplane! to make fun of the practice of action movies casting sports stars.
In Airplane!, of course, Abdul-Jabbar pretends he’s just co-pilot Roger Murdoch, not Abdul-Jabbar, even as a 10-year-old boy calls him out.
The Creators of Airplane! Influenced Four-Time Oscar Nominee Willem Dafoe
As young men, ZAZ founded a comedy theater in Madison, Wisconsin with their friend Dick Chudnow. They named it Kentucky Fried Theater after the fast food chain.
A young Willem Dafoe was among those who saw an early Kentucky Fried Theater Show in the early 1970s, when his older sister Dee Dee took him to see one at the University of Wisconsin.
“That really made me think, I could be doing this,” he told Esquire in a 2018 profile “You don’t have to be a card-carrying industry person.”
Soon the team moved to Los Angeles and started a new theater.
Also Read: The 15 Funniest Comedy Movies We’ve Ever Seen
They Took a Lot From a 1957 Airplane Movie
Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker started out writing Airplane! as a parody of all disaster movies, but based it especially on the 1957 airplane drama Zero Hour.
They used the concept — a romance in mid-air, as our heroes struggle to land the plane safely — but packed it with jokes.
ZAZ Had No Idea How to Write a Script, at First
When ZAZ started out on their Zero Hour parody in the 1970s, they weren’t sure how to start. Then they saw John Landis on The Tonight Show in 1973, talking about his low-budget monster movie tribute Schlock, of which Johnny Carson was a fan. Landis had made the film at 21.
Zucker called him up and invited them to a performance of their comedy show at the Kentucky Fried Theater, where ZAZ told Landis about their movie idea. But they didn’t know anything about writing a screenplay, so he gave them a copy of his own An American Werewolf in London, which he would finally get to make into a movie in 1981.
ZAZ used it as a template as they wrote Airplane. But when they couldn’t find backing for Airplane, they decided to make a film based on their live comedy sketches — which became Kentucky Fried Movie.
Robert Hays Came Up With the Jacket Joke
In the Saturday Night Fever sequence, Robert Hays had the idea for one of the best jokes — he stalks onto the dance floor and dramatically throws off his jacket… only to have someone throw it back at him,
“That was my idea! I actually came up with something!” he self-effacingly said in Surely You Can’t Be Serious.
It’s a great throwaway joke — pun very much intended — but for our money the funniest moment in the Airplane disco scene may be when Elaine picks Ted up, loosely grips his legs (then just his shoes) and swings him around the dance floor.
Airplane! Filmed Alongside Raging Bull
The classic comedy and ultra-serious Martin Scorsese drama both shot at Culver City Studios.
“So once in a while, we could walk over to their stage and watch Martin Scorses direct Robert De Niro in boxing scenes,” Jim Abrahams said in Surely You Can’t Be Serious.
The Crash Scene Could Have Been a Real-Life Disaster
Airplane! wrapped shooting on August 8, 1979. Its final shot was the 747 crashing through the glass, into the terminal.
Because it involved a fake plane nose on a flatbed 10-ton truck, tempered glass that was essential for safety, 100 extras and 50 stuntmen, it was a huge production. Howard Koch, who was in charge of the production for Paramount and was known for being laid-back and supportive, was shocked at the expense.
“That was one of the few times we saw Howard furious,” David Zucker said in Surely You Can’t Be Serious.
But the shot was worth it: Besides getting a huge laugh in the film, it was used in the trailer and promotion , and provided the backdrop for cast and crew photos.
Leslie Nielsen Really Hit That Lady
Lee Bryant plays the hysterical woman who is battered by fellow passengers. The script called for her to be shaken, but Bryant has the idea that Lorna Patterson, as the flight attendant, should shake her very hard, and that a man should then take over, shaking her even harder, then slapping her.
After that, Leslie Nielsen’s doctor slaps her — twice — and then a nun takes over. Soon we see a long line of passengers lining up — one in boxing gloves, one holding a knife, one holding a gun.
“Leslie was the only one who actually slapped me,” Bryant later said. “He even threw in an extra one. I guess he was improvising.”
Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Cast Their Moms
David and Jerry Zucker cast their mom, Charlotte Zucker, as the woman putting on makeup during turbulence. Jim Abrahams mom, Louise Abrahams Yaffe, is the character who introduces Leslie Nielsen’s character in the film by saying, “”Oh stewardess? I think the man next to me is a doctor.” (He is wearing a stethoscope at the time.)
The moms also posed for a picture with TV mom Barbara Billingsley.
ZAZ Had Serious Leave it to Beaver Credentials
Leave it to Beaver, the squeaky clean black-and-white family sitcom that aired from 1957-63, was a staple of the Zucker household.
It starred Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver, Hugh Beaumont as Ward Cleaver, Tony Dow as his their teenage son Wally, and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver, aka Theodore.
Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker were huge fans of the show that they even cast one of Tony Dow in their first film, 1977’sThe Kentucky Fried Movie. In a courtroom scene, he played his Leave it to Beaver character, Wally, while Jerry Zucker played Theodore. Then, of course, they cast Barbara Billingsley in Airplane!
The Jive Scene Was Inspired by Shaft
Jim Abrahams, who wrote and directed Airplane with brothers Jerry Zucker and David Zucker, explained in an Airplane behind-the-scenes commentary that “the whole notion for jive dialogue originated from when we went on saw Shaft,” referring to Gordon Parks’ 1971 blaxploitation-action classic, starring Richard Roundtree (above).
“We went and saw it and didn’t understand what they were saying,” Abrahams said.
They decided to include some jokes in Airplane about slang that would befuddle white people: “So we did our best as three nice Jewish boys from Milwaukee writing jive talk in the script,” Abrahams said.
The Original Airplane Jive Talk Script Was Lacking
David Zucker explained that when Norman Alexander Gibbs and Al White auditioned for their roles, “they came in and they had prepared this entire run of jive talking and we were just hysterically laughing the whole time.”
Al White explained in Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker’s excellent 2023 book Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane, that when he read the script, “I couldn’t make hide nor hair of the actual verbiage… they wanted jive as a language, which it is not.”
He and Gibbs agreed to work on it. So White consulted two books on language, one of which was by J.L. Dillard, a linguist known for his expertise on African-American vernacular, and then took the meaning of the writers’ script and tried to “jive it down, using actual words.” He explained: “It’s not a bunch of gibberish. It does mean something.”
Al White Put a Lot of Gray Matter Into the Airplane Jive Scene Rewrites
Here’s an example of Al White’s contributions, which illustrates how much he finessed the jive dialogue.
At one point, White’s Second Jive Dude tells Gibbs’ First Jive Dude, aka Arthur: “That gray matter back, lotta performers down, not take TCB-in’, man!”
White explains in Surely You Can’t Be Serious how he came up with the phrase: “I needed a word to jive down the word ‘remember,’ but I didn’t find it in either of the books, so I said, ‘Well, let me see — gray matter. That’s the thinking part of the brain, and ‘back’ for remember back. I can say ‘Gray matter back.’
“And from there I’m just saying that a lot of performers stayed down and weren’t taking care of business on the technical side… man!”
The film translates all this jive as “Each of us faces a clear moral choice.”
Barbara Billingsley Was Cast in the Airplane Jive Scene by Being ‘the Whitest White Lady on the Planet’
“Just the thought of June Cleaver in that role made us laugh,” David Zucker said in Surely You Can’t Be Serious. “She was simply the whitest white lady on the planet.”
Billingsley said in an interview for the Archive of American Television, “I was sent the script, and I thought it was the craziest script I’d ever read. My husband said, ‘I think it’s funny!’ Well, my part wasn’t written, really. It just said I talked jive. So I went to see the producers and I said I would do it.”
Jerry Zucker said meeting her “was like we had been put up for adoption, and now we were finally getting to meet our real mom.”
Al White and Norman Alexander Gibbs Taught Barbara Billingsley Jive
“These fellas were wonderful, and they taught me,” Billingley said in her Archive of American Television interview. “They could rattle off jive like you have no idea. I could never get a clue as to how it was done. … Maybe they were good teachers!”
She also said she had done some research into the history of jive, and that no one knew if it was “street talk” or if enslaved Black people had invented it because “they didn’t want whitey to know what they were talking about.”
Al White explained in the book, “I ended up writing Barbara Billingley’s jive dialogue and instructing her in the proper elocution. She was very intent on getting it right.”
White’s mother was a Leave it to Beaver fan, and White asked Billingsley if she would mind talking with her on the phone. “I called my mother, and I said, ‘Mom, I have Barbara Billingsley here, and she’d actually like to speak with you. She was so excited, and Barbara was so gracious,” White said in the book.
The Airplane Girl Scout Joke Has a Backstory
Airplane! also includes a ridiculous bar fight involving girl scounts. ZAZ loved jokes about girl scouts.
When they ran the Kentucky Fried Theater, the program included a page entitled, “Things to do after the show.” They included: Visit a dairy and see how milk is handled and prepared for delivery; plan a series of window displays on home safety; help start a library; discuss with your dentist what you can do to make your teeth more attractive.”
All those suggestions are from The Girl Scout Handbook.
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Main image: Airplane!, of course. Paramount
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