The 1980 disaster movie spoof Airplane! was a flyaway success. Made for $3.5m, it grossed over $170m and forged a new style of film comedy. It was written and directed by the trio known as ZAZ: the brothers Jerry and David Zucker, and their childhood friend Jim Abrahams, who has died aged 80 of leukaemia.
There had been movie send-ups before, notably from Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and the Monty Python team. One of the innovations of Airplane!, though, was to multiply the gags without lingering on them. The audience had to be quick to keep up: this was one instance where the phrase “laugh-a-minute” represented a serious understatement.
Most radically, the film dispensed altogether with comic actors. Its innumerable puns, running jokes and absurdist non-sequiturs were delivered by a straight-faced ensemble of hitherto dramatic performers including Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack and, most famously, Leslie Nielsen, a journeyman reborn here as a deadpan genius.
The trio had wisely resisted the studio’s demands to cast comedians such as Chevy Chase and Bill Murray. “We wanted the audience to feel they were watching a serious movie that we had redubbed,” explained David Zucker.
Airplane! subtly altered a generation’s use of language. “Surely you can’t be serious?” Nielsen’s character, a doctor, is asked on more than one occasion. “I am serious,” he replies soberly, “and don’t call me Shirley.”
In skewering serious dramas such as Zero Hour! (1957) and Airport (1970), ZAZ took their cue from MAD magazine, which printed finely detailed comic-strip spoofs of current releases, each panel packed tightly with gags. Though the film referenced everything from Saturday Night Fever to From Here to Eternity, its adherence to the disaster movie template kept it on course. It was a lesson which later spoofs, such as the Scary Movie series (some of which David Zucker directed, with Abrahams co-writing Scary Movie 4 in 2006) neglected to follow.
ZAZ made for a disciplined directorial unit: Abrahams and David Zucker sat at a monitor watching the filming while Jerry Zucker conversed with the actors. “We huddle after a take and compare suggestions,” said Abrahams in 1986. “The nice thing about three people working together is that you can come to quick decisions – three’s an odd number so we’d vote.” He distinguished his own approach from that of his co-directors: “David and Jerry were always the ones who had goals, drive and aspirations, while I was the one having a good time.”
The trio were not responsible for the vastly inferior follow-up, Airplane II: The Sequel (1982). “[Paramount] came to us and told us they were going to do a sequel,” said Abrahams. “But we’d thought of all the airplane jokes we could and said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”
After their initial success, they were treated as heroes. “We kind of misperceived ourselves, and what the real beauty of Airplane! was,” said Abrahams. “We really thought that making a successful comedy was merely stringing a bunch of funny scenes together … and that’s not really the way it works at all.”
Their next film, Top Secret! (1984), contained numerous gags, many of them both silly and highly sophisticated, while deadpan duties were ably fulfilled by a young Val Kilmer. But the material was too scattershot in its choice of targets, which included war films and Elvis Presley musicals. “The jokes might be fine, it might look nice and be well-directed, but it’s just not a good idea for a movie,” reflected Abrahams, who admitted that the trio’s confidence took a hit.
The madcap Ruthless People (1986), starring Danny DeVito as a businessman whose wife (Bette Midler) is kidnapped on the same day he intends to kill her, was the first time they had directed a script not written by them. Unusually, the friends found themselves at loggerheads. “Each of us had more confidence, and it was harder to lose an argument,” said Abrahams.
In between Airplane! and Top Secret!, ZAZ had ventured into television comedy with Police Squad! (1982), which was cancelled after six episodes due to poor ratings. But in its dim-witted protagonist, Lieutenant Frank Drebin, played by Nielsen in straight-faced mode, it introduced a character who would provide ZAZ’s spoofing career with its second wind.
Out of the ashes of Police Squad! emerged The Naked Gun (1988), in which Drebin foils a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. The film boasted a gag rate equal to Airplane!, as well as another batch of formerly dramatic actors (including Priscilla Presley and George Kennedy) adopting their best poker faces amid the comic mayhem.
Abrahams, who co-wrote The Naked Gun but left the directing to David, wasn’t keen on the end result. “I remember seeing the dailies and thinking, ‘Oh my God, that’s not how you’re supposed to film that joke,’” he recalled.
Two sequels followed – The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) and The Naked Gun 33⅓: the Final Insult (1994) – though Abrahams was credited only as an executive producer.
He was born in Shorewood, a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Louise (nee Ogens), who worked in education, and Norman, a lawyer. He attended the same synagogue and high school as the Zucker brothers; their fathers had also worked together. Later, the three boys were all at the University of Wisconsin-Madison together.
After graduating, Abrahams worked as an investigator for a law firm. The Zucker brothers roped him into making comic short films on video equipment. As this took up more of their time, they rented space at the back of a local bookshop, where they set up the Kentucky Fried Theatre Company, screened their videos and performed skits parodying movies, TV shows and commercials.
Three years later in 1972, they relocated to Los Angeles and built a considerable fanbase there. One of their shows was titled My Nose, in the hope that the local newspaper listings would read: “My Nose runs indefinitely.”
Eager to break into cinema but unsure how to do so, they sought advice from the young film-maker John Landis. ZAZ wrote a preliminary draft of Airplane!, which presented the central story as a film-within-a-film being shown on TV, complete with fake commercials. Having had no luck pitching this, they teamed up instead with Landis, who directed their script of irreverent bite-sized sketches, The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977).
Even with the minor success of that picture under their belt, they struggled to sell a more streamlined draft of Airplane! Fortunately, it found its way to the future industry titans Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, who were then executives at Paramount and happy to prepare the film for take-off.
By the time the Naked Gun trilogy was under way in the late 1980s, the quality of spoofs had begun to degrade. Two members of the team had already moved on to solo projects: Jerry Zucker found legit success with the Oscar-winning Ghost (1990) while Abrahams made the lively comedy Big Business (1988), starring Midler and Lily Tomlin as two sets of twins, and directed a young Winona Ryder in the teen drama Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990). He also co-wrote and directed his own Top Gun spoofs, Hot Shots (1991) and Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993), starring Charlie Sheen.
His TV movie, First Do No Harm (1997), starring Meryl Streep, was partly based on his own search for a dietary cure for epilepsy, with which his son, Charlie, had been diagnosed. After directing Nielsen in the sub-par mob spoof Jane Austen’s Mafia! (1998), Abrahams dropped out of film-making altogether to devote time instead to promoting the Charlie Foundation for Ketogenic Therapies.
A part-sequel, part-reboot of The Naked Gun, with Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin’s son, will be released next year.
Abrahams is survived by his wife, Nancy (nee Cocuzzo), whom he married in 1978, Charlie, another son, Joseph, and a daughter, Jamie.
• James Steven Abrahams, screenwriter and director, born 10 May 1944; died 26 November 2024
