Subscribe
Follow Us
Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? If so, you're probably also a fan of the 1980 classic Airplane! — one of the most revered studio comedies of all time.
It therefore came as an even bigger shocker than Ted Striker's drinking problem that the first test screening for the famous film was a colossal failure. The stunning admission comes from a new oral history of the film entitled Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! (and speaking of oral history, how is there not a picture of the smiling blow-up auto-pilot next to that phrase on the book cover?!).
The book was put together by the film's famous trio of filmmakers — David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. They also spoke to Yahoo! Entertainment about the book, expanding on the big reveal of the less-than-stellar initial reaction to the film's first test screening.
“It was worse than terrible,” David Zucker admitted. “First screenings are generally a disaster, because you don't know where the funniest parts are yet, so you have to put everything in. And then after the terrible first screening, you cut it down.”
The story of that awful first test screening includes a great deal of Hollywood history. For starters, the head of Paramount at the time was Michael Eisner, who famously went on to run Disney for many years. Eisner thought the film would be a hit, but was against the idea of doing test screenings. The Zucker brothers and Abrahams convinced him otherwise, because they wanted to see which jokes were the funniest to the audience for their final cut.
Eisner eventually agreed with the caveat that Paramount executives attend the screening in addition to regular moviegoers. However, the recruiter assigned to find an array of average audience members somehow dropped the ball, and left the directors scrambling at the last minute.
“We had to race out in a panic and recruit people who were waiting in line to watch tapings of Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days,” David Zucker explains. “English was not a first language for many of them, and then you had all these executives with their arms folded going ‘What is this movie?' It was tough.”
Eisner's second-in-command at Paramount happened to be Jeffrey Katzenberg, who himself went onto a huge career with Disney Animation, and as one of the founding members of Dreamworks. Katzenberg was first to assuage Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker's fears after the test screening. As David Zucker explains, “Jeffrey was right there afterwards saying, ‘Don't worry, this movie is still funny'.”
“That was one of the many lucky breaks we got in the business,” added Abrahams. “Katzenberg and Eisner were executives that both had creative experience, not just business backgrounds. They were always supportive of us, and their suggestions were invaluable.”
Thank goodness for the sake of movie history, there was one person with a good sense of humor in that infamous first test screening. “There was one guy who laughed really hard during the whole movie,” Zucker said. “And we cut the movie to that guy's laughter, because the rest of the audience was silent.”
Besides some timely cuts, the filmmakers also added a new intro to the film to set the tone right off the bat — the famous Jaws-spoof of the plane tail whizzing through clouds into the sky.
“We needed something at the very beginning that would set the tone for the movie,” said Abrahams. “So we came up with that Jaws joke and it worked beautifully. Still does.”
This and many other behind-the-scenes stories are recounted in the new Airplane! book, which sounds like a must-read, whether you ordered the steak or the fish for dinner… or lasagna.
