Watching Leslie Nielsen in any straight dramatic role now, it’s near impossible to take him seriously (and you won’t have to look far – one of his Columbos is bound to be on this weekend). Every line, no matter how sincerely it’s delivered, sounds like it should be a punchline; and his craggy face, though earnestly deadpan at all times, belying some ludicrous situation you imagine he’s about to cause: his car crashing and exploding because he’s left the handbrake off; accidentally pushing a someone down a flight of stairs; or wrestling a rare tropical fish.
It’s the fault of the filmmaking team known as ZAZ – brothers David and Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams – and their rapid-fire comedies. Airplane! gave Nielsen his first taste of comedy, but it was The Naked Gun – released 30 years ago this week – that cemented Leslie Nielsen as the funniest straight man in movies.
The real genius of the Zucker-Abrahams comedies – as well as the slapstick, puns, innuendo, visual gags, and all-out silliness – is their insistence of casting dramatic actors, inspired by the unintentional hilarity they derived from po-faced genre movies. As part of their live comedy show Kentucky Fried Theatre – which ran for five years and later evolved to the feature length sketch comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie – the trio would re-dub serious movies for laughs.
“Some of those movies would have Leslie Nielsen in them!” says David Zucker. “The plan with Airplane was to actually remake one of these movies and even use the same straight-laced characters, like Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Peter Graves, and have them do the script as if it was re-dubbed. But the intention was to not to use comedians. We all thought comedians were funny and talented, but we thought the serious movies were funnier – unintentionally funny.”
And that’s exactly what the team did, lifting the plot and dialogue for Airplane wholesale from air disaster movie Zero Hour! Leslie Nielsen, at that time best known from The Poseidon Adventure, Forbidden Planet, and recurring roles in US television drama, was cast as Dr Rumack, who delivered arguably the most quotable line in comedy history: “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley”. Nielsen would ultimately go on to be the face of the ZAZ-style comedy, but he wasn’t their first choice for the role.
“He wasn’t that well known at the time,” says Zucker. “We’d gone through Jack Webb, Efrem Zimbalist Jr, Vincent Prince… all well known, classic actors. But they all turned it down for one reason or another. When it came to Leslie Nielsen, I don’t think we even knew his name. But we knew he was the captain of the Poseidon.”
After Airplane came the short-lived Police Squad (1982), which re-hashed the Airplane formula but this lampooning the TV cop show, led by the wooden-headed, calamitous, ever-incompetent Lt. Frank Drebin. Again, Nielsen wasn’t the first choice – “We went to Robert Stack, but he was doing Unsolved Mysteries on TV!” says Zucker – and, much like with Zero Hour and Airplane, the ZAZ team found a template to spoof.
“There was a TV series on in the late 1950s called M Squad, starring Lee Marvin,” says Zucker. “That became the model for Police Squad. If you watch any episode of M Squad it’s got the same cast as Police Squad.”
Watching Police Squad now, it’s way ahead of the comedic curve – the predecessor to the post-modernism and fast wit of The Simpsons or Family Guy. But ABC cancelled Police Squad after just six episodes. Anthony Thomopoulos, the head of entertainment at ABC, famously told a press conference, “Police Squad didn’t work because you had to watch it,” referencing its sheer number of gags and visual details packed into each scene.
“They couldn’t cancel it fast enough,” says Zucker. “In those days it couldn’t get an audience. Police Squad wasn’t sitcom-y enough for the American audience. The press was upset by the cancellation – the show was the darling of the critics. So we put it in the drawer because we loved the concept.”
ZAZ made Airplane II and WWII spoof Top Secret! but eventually revived Lt. Frank Drebin for The Naked Gun (or The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad! to give the full title).
Written by the Zuckers, Abrahams, and regular collaborator Pat Proft (also the writer of Police Academy and Hot Shots!), and directed by David Zucker, The Naked Gun has Police Squad charged with protecting the Queen during a visit to Los Angeles. But the feckless Drebin stumbles into a plot by businessman Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban) to kill the Queen using a mind-controlled assassin. The mind-control plot device was borrowed from 1977 Charles Bronson actioner Telefon. “I think it may have even had the same line we used – ‘The best assassin is one who doesn’t know he’s an assassin.’”
The film brought in a new supporting cast. Replacing Alan North as Captain Ed Hocken was George Kennedy, star of the Airport disaster series that Airplane had essentially killed off. “We wanted George Kennedy for Airplane but Universal wouldn’t let him do it,” says Zucker. “They essentially said that if he appeared in this spoof he wouldn’t have a job waiting for him in the Airport series… I think we ended it anyway!”
More leftfield casting choices were Pricilla Presley as Drebin’s love interest Jane (“Nice beaver!”) and OJ Simpson as Police Squad officer Nordberg. Presley was perfect for ZAZ’s casting modus operandi, as a regular on the so-serious-it’s-hilarious soap Dallas.
“She was playing it so straight,” says Zucker, “we thought if we could get that performance in The Naked Gun it would be a great compliment for Leslie. At the table read she was nervous about doing comedy and I said, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t be asked to do comedy, it’s played as drama…the jokes are there on the page.’ In fact, when directing this style, one of things I say to actors is, ‘Let the lines do the work’. Priscilla understood immediately and trusted the material. She was the one I had to direct the least. I did a lot of work with Leslie because the comedy had to be dialed in more precisely, but you would never catch Priscilla trying to act funny.”
Former football player OJ Simpson, several years before his infamous murder trial, was essentially The Naked Gun’s version of basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s cameo in Airplane. “OJ wasn’t a great actor,” says Zucker, “but these athletes are very economical to hire and they’re a marque name.”
And OJ’s Nordberg gets some of the film’s best gags: after creeping aboard a boat full of hardened heroin pushers, Nordberg is shot, bumps his head, burns his hand on a stove, leans into wet paint, has a window slam on his fingers, goes face-first into a wedding cake, and get his foot caught in a bear trap (heroin dealers on a boat with a wedding cake is still one of comedy’s all-time great concepts).
Later at the hospital, and near death’s door, Nordeberg tries to tell Drebin about the drugs bust gone wrong. “Heroin…” he groans. “Nordberg, that’s a pretty tall order,” replies Frank, completely missing the point. “You’re gonna have to give me a couple of days on that one.”
Once again it was Nielsen’s straight-man performance that makes it. Almost every line is a gag, but he delivers them like a tough, uncompromising film noir flatfoot, too dense to recognise his own wit or the lunacy happening around around him.
“When I see five weirdoes dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of 100 people, I shoot the bastards,” he tells the mayor.
“That was a Shakespeare-in-the Park production of Julius Caesar,” she replies. “You killed five actors. Good ones.”
Nielsen proved his slapstick chops too: gurning like he’s been hit with g-force 10 while hitching a ride with a learner driver in a high-speed chase (“Go for it, Stephanie!”); accidentally destroying the villain’s apartment – with crockery-smashing and priceless-painting-destroying pratfalls – and dangling off the rude bits of a nude statue; and taking out a terrorist league including Ayatollah Khomeini, Robert Mugabe, Colonel Gaddafi, and Mikhail Gorbachev in a Three Stooges-style punch-up. “And don’t let me ever catch you guys in America!” he tells them on the way out. (The lookalike world leader, which The Naked Gun films did better than anyone, has become a true lost art in comedy.)
“There was a lot of slapstick,” says Zucker, “but we learned as the franchise went on that Leslie was better when he was messing up other people than when the situation called for him to be messed up.” Which brings to mind Frank sitting on Nordberg’s hospital bed, folding the near-dying cop in two; or later declaring his love for Jane while knocking the poor wheelchair-bound Nordberg down the baseball stadium steps – scenes that come directly from the ZAZ comedy rulebook.
“Over the years we developed 15 rules for our movies,” says Zucker. “They’re mostly things you shouldn’t do. The first rule is called ‘joke on a joke’, so if the character in the foreground is being funny, the background has to be serious, but if the character is being serious, what’s happening in the background has to be funny. We also have a glossary of about 60 terms that we use on the set. We evolved these terms and learned from our mistakes.”
The gag-for-gag hit rate doesn’t quite match Airplane, but The Naked Gun’s daftness is still infectious. Its success led to two sequels, the also-very-funny Naked Gun 2½ and less-funny-but-passable 33 1/3. It also inspired a cycle of spoof comedies – Hot Shots, Loaded Weapon 1, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Scary Movie – imitating but never matching ZAZ’s hit rate of visual gags, puns, and bone-achingly funny slapstick.
“The style of comedy is very specific and without having the discipline and following the rules, people can’t do it,” says Zucker. “The genre fell out of favour because it was done badly.”
Leslie Nielsen himself starred in a slew of poor imitators – Spy Hard, Wrongly Accused, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and 2001: A Space Travesty – as he became Hollywood’s go-to man for spoof-style japes. They failed, of course, because, aside from being objectively dreadful, they broke another of ZAZ’s golden rules: they cast Nielson as a comedian.
“Leslie did a bunch of bad movies with other directors,” says Zucker. “They cast him because they thought he was funny. But you can’t just turn the camera on him like you can with an Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, or Kevin Hart. Leslie was a serious actor. All the humor came from behind the camera. He was funny off screen but in a prankster sort of way and when he would go on a talk show he’d take his fart machine. But be didn’t write his lines. In fact, when he died, articles online and eulogies quoted ‘the great Leslie Nielsen lines’, but they were all written by Pat Proft!”
Talk of a Naked Gun reboot has circulated for several years, with The Hangover and Vacation star Ed Helms rumoured to be the new Frank Drebin. Zucker confirms that he is indeed writing The Naked Gun 4. “We could very well cast a comedian for it,” he says. “But it’s going to be the same – straight actor. It’s just a script, we don’t have anyone in mind at the moment. We turn the script into Paramount at the beginning of next year so we’ll see how it works out.”
But could The Naked Gun work in 2019? “That kind of humour always works,” says Zucker. “And it’s missing from cinema today. That’s why I think The Naked Gun can work again. People still want these belly laughs and that’s how to get them. Serious characters and good slapstick.” Serious? Surely he can’t be.
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