Chapter Two: ZAZ (Not ZAZ)
By Brett Ballard-Beach
January 19, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
To wit: this column and next I will be looking at the sequels to projects that were initiated, in one way or another, by the fabled comedy writing-producing-directing team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, affectionately acronymed as ZAZ, so as to avoid confusion, I gather, with AZZ (the Association of Zither-playing Zebras or ZZA (the three digit airport code for the oft-planned international terminal on Antarctica). Two of the sequels in no way involved the ZAZ team - although many collaborators from the respective originals were involved - and neither of the other two sequels involved all three gentlemen, although one of their longtime writing partners did receive an ampersand co-writing credit on both projects.
So, if you prefer to be linguistically picky (and if you read me regularly, then you probably are), this column and the one to follow should be accurately labeled as Not ZAZ (Kinda Sorta ZAZ or ZAZ by Proxy). And rather than keep you waiting breathlessly any longer, I will now reveal that I will be starting from the Not ZAZ portion of the filmography with 1982’s Airplane II: The Sequel and 1987’s Amazon Women on the Moon.
Now that those with a curious nature have been satisfied, I want to return to all that talk about coincidence from the first paragraph. A recurring theme that I have noticed from preparing this column over the years is how a fair number of Chapter Twos are helmed by men and women with a background in television, or barring that, who were in some way involved in the production of the first film. Unless the sequel proved to be a resounding success, it was back to their day job they went. The most obvious example off the top of my head would be John Ottman, a film composer of nearly fifty scores over the last 20 years (and editor on most of Bryan Singer’s efforts) who jumped into the director’s chair for the largely forgotten Urban Legends: Final Cut (which he also scored and cut) over a decade ago and then jumped back out.
And now here comes the relevant circularity: Ken Finkleman, the writer/director of Airplane II, made his feature directing debut with the film and it remains one of only two theatrical releases on his resume. He had been a writer for Canadian television prior to and has remained so in the decades since, also directing and starring in many of the efforts. 1982 was Finkelman’s watershed year in Hollywood as he also wrote the screenplay for Grease 2, another Paramount project. Between those two films, his work featured two of the three stars of the brand new ABC cop show T.J. Hooker: Adrian Zmed in Grease 2 and William Shatner in Airplane II. That show premiered on the air in March, the same week as another cop show, a comedy, also made its debut on ABC. The comedy, of course, was Police Squad!, starring Leslie Nielsen from the first Airplane!, and created by (drum roll please) ZAZ. (Oh and there is a tie-in to Amazon Women on the Moon, but that will have to wait just a little bit.)
There is another, more personal connection inherent in this week’s pics: both Airplane!, and The Kentucky Fried Movie are among the few films ever explicitly forbidden me by my parents. The former, even with its PG rating, was never deemed suitable for my six-year-old eyes when it first began airing on pay cable in the early ‘80s. (As you might gather, given my past revelations in Chapter Two, I did end up seeing Airplane II before Airplane!) I also quite clearly recall seeing KFM with my parents as one of our very first videocassette rentals after purchasing a Zenith VCR in October 1983. It remains the only film ever where my parents told me to cover my eyes (during both “Sex Record” and the concluding Eyewitness News parody) and after revisiting it last week for the first time in 28 years, I am grateful for their judgment call.
Now I am aware of all the honor and praise accorded to Airplane!, its place in American comedy film history, and all the lesser (and lesser) “parodies” that it has inspired, all the way on down to Friedberg and Seltzer’s continual onslaught, but I persist in thinking that their other directorial efforts as a trio - 1984’s Top Secret and 1986’s Ruthless People - are as funny, if not funnier, with the latter producing solid laughs from start to finish, featuring macabre and clever plotting, and containing terrific character actor performances, all without needing to rely strictly on the spoof genre. (ZAZ wrote Top Secret, but not Ruthless People.) The Naked Gun was their last gasp as a writing trio (although ZAZ did executive produce the rest of the trilogy) and from there, their individual writing and directing careers proceeded in quite different directions. I will cover that a little more in-depth next week.
I hadn’t seen the entirety of Airplane II since I was still in single digits age-wise, but a few months ago I caught about 30 minutes (sans sound but with captions) while working out at the gym and I found myself laughing along to the words. I figured it was worth devoting a column to it. In some (re: many) ways, Airplane II is a rip off of the first film, featuring not only most of the original cast in the same roles, but reprising the exact same gags from the first film, repeatedly. The original borrowed its plot primarily from an old Paramount disaster movie (Zero Hour) but also laid to waste a decade’s worth of increasingly and exceedingly ridiculous Airport movies. The line between (un?) intentionally hysterical junk and straight-faced parody is exceedingly thin.
Airplane II takes its mad bomber subplot from Airport (Sonny Bono convincingly channels Van Heflin) but its primary plot is where the true genius/stupidity/insanity of Finkleman’s scenario rests. The storyline picks up at some distant point in the future, after the events of Airplane!, which are constantly referenced, on the evening of the first commercial space shuttle flight from Earth to an already-colonized moon. (the first operational flight of Space Shuttle Columbia occurred in November 1982, one month prior to the film’s release.) So, technically speaking, Airplane II: The Sequel is a science fiction film (and I would add, a dystopian sci-fi, but that’s for another time). But, obviously, this is a ridiculous film, 100% more fiction than science, and no effort is actually made to have the film resemble the notion that it is set in the future, least of all in the cast members who all look about the same age they did two years prior. In summation, my rational mind is caught somewhere between appreciation and complete mental shutdown at this most ludicrous of plot devices.
Of course, the key question is do the jokes work? And the answer is yes, even without Robert Stack or Leslie Nielsen on hand to once again deliver deadpan subversions of most of their straight roles, there are more than enough loonies to go around to keep a straight face while exhibiting ridiculous behavior. Attention must be given to the performances of two actors in general for raising the bar on what could have been an entirely lackluster go-around and for a more general mean-spiritedness on Finkleman’s part, which keeps things more interesting than they have a right to be.
Robert Hays’ performance in the lead role of Ted Striker possibly didn’t do as much for him as for the likes of Stack, Nielsen, Raymond Burr, Peter Graves, and Chuck Connors, precisely because they had a longer history behind them from which to draw a contrast. (I have seen very little of his post –Airplane!/II output though he has worked consistently in movies, television, and cartoon voiceover over the last three decades.) It may also be because if there is any center to the hurricane of insanity in the Airplane! films, it is Striker.
He is the ZAZ universe’s idea of a straight man: part oblivious, part insightful, heroically stupid and stupidly heroic, all at the same time. In what might be an archetypal role for him, Hays makes for one of the more unusual leading men of the ‘80s: attractive (I would say), and yet not sexual or threateningly masculine in the least. (Almost by default, co-star/romantic interest Julie Hagerty seems the more masculine of the two.) Still in his early 30s at the time, he has the soft features of a boy band idol who unexpectedly aged overnight. He keeps one’s interest actually rooted in the nonsensical plot, and manages to sustain his “drinking problem” gag from the first, repeating it at least half a dozen times. (ZAZ would push this character type even further with the casting of Val Kilmer in his acting debut as teenybopper singing megastar Nick Rivers in the subsequent Top Secret!)
1982 was a great year for William Shatner from a career standpoint: the hit summer film Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan was preceded by the launch of T.J. Hooker (to run for four years) in March on ABC and he capped it all with a breathlessly hysterical performance as Buck Murdock in Airplane II. Shatner only shows up in the final 20 minutes playing a counterpart on the moon to Bridges’ control room role back on Earth, but he grabs up all of the late laughs in the film. Having not followed his post-Star Trek ‘70s television work (and occasional feature film), I cannot vouch for whether this represents any kind of sea change from earlier performances, but he comes off as ruthless in his self-mockery, at one point delivering an extended rant on “blinking lights” that sounds like a Captain’s Log as rendered by a madman. It’s a terrific comic performance.
As I have stressed, a lot of Finkleman’s script recycles gags and situations from the first film. It is a credit, then, to the strength of the ZAZ team that the jokes hold up, even in the wake of three decades of lame spoof wannabes, and perhaps to the fact that I hadn’t seen Airplane II a million times. But I credit him for the ridiculous plot and the very funny first act setup, which features one of the best uses of gratuitous breasts ever, two chuckle-worthy gags involving dogs, a mental hospital escape that evokes (for me anyway) the cover of Band on the Run, and Rip Torn back when he had a full head (and face) of hair. Later on, he manages to make winking nods to Star Trek, Star Wars, Mission: Impossible, and 2001 (he is the voice of the HAL-esque computer that goes haywire).
I am torn over whether my enjoyment of Airplane II is really a ringing endorsement of ZAZ for all the similarities between the two, or Finkleman’s success in a no-win situation. (It is probably not for nothing that Paramount didn’t pursue any further films in the series. Airplane II only grossed about a quarter of what Airplane! did but it made more than Top Secret! eventually would.) It pulled off blank-faced stupidity as well as its predecessor, gave me just as many laughs, and I have no doubt that, me being me, I will be pointlessly pondering over the ludicrousness of the plot semantics for at least another 25 years.
Amazon Women on the Moon is a follow-up to The Kentucky Fried Movie in spirit and concept more than anything. Coming ten years after the fact, it follows a similar pattern of short skits and fadeout jokes, intermixed with recurring gags and a central “feature-length” faux movie at the center. Finished in 1986, it wound up being dumped on to only 50 screens in September 1987, grossing just over $500,000. Director John Landis (who directed KFM and also executive produces here) shares the helm with four other directors. Between them, the five contribute nearly 20 segments, primarily built around the notion of a television station’s attempt to play a 1950s sci-fi film as the late night feature, only to see it constantly interrupted with commercials, technical problems, and the like.
Two of the other directors (Carl Gottlieb and Peter Horton) had extensive background in television, the former as a writer and director, the latter as an actor - he’s best known for thirtysomething - who was just beginning to switch over to directing. Cult director Joe Dante had worked with both ZAZ (he directed two episodes of Police Squad!) and Landis (on the omnibus film Twilight Zone: The Movie) and had recently helmed a pair of episodes of Steven Spielberg’s television series Amazing Stories and one episode of the television reboot of The Twilight Zone.
The Kentucky Fried Movie launched both Landis and ZAZ (who wrote the screenplay) on their successful career paths and 35 years later, its comedy, though largely dated, still holds up. As a whole, the film satirizes and lampoons the burgeoning media of the time, particularly reality programming, and local news programming with their attempts to mix the homey with the outraged (and outrageous), along with a lot of fake commercials. The kung fu parody A Fistful of Yen (imagine Enter the Dragon crossed with one of the lesser Bonds of the decade) takes up nearly a third of the film, and is enjoyable but goes on far too long.
In the brief closing skit, “Eyewitness News,” the gag is that it’s the station that’s watching as a distracted couple gets hot and heavy on the couch. ZAZ play three of the four on-camera leerers, and the meta aspect of the scenario, implicating themselves as the voyeurs and perverts elevates the sketch above being just a vulgar little ditty to send the audience on its way (I can only imagine this moment playing out on a big screen at a drive-in in 1977 for if there was ever a movie meant for drive-in viewing, it’s KFM.) The other big surprise, is that the soft-core sex actually manages to be, well, sexy.
I make this point because Amazon Women on the Moon seems just as hung up on sex, and even more misogynistic. Screenwriters Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland have been a comedy writing team since the 1960s, penning for sitcoms and variety specials but also thousands of episodes of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (between 1966-1992), and Late Show with David Letterman (since the mid-90s.) It would seem reasonable to assume that they would make an ideal pair for crafting a smart satire on television programming. Amazon Women is almost entirely a laugh-free venture, with its 85 minutes stretching out to feel twice as long.
For a representation of the film’s problem, in miniature, it is only necessary to look at the title skit, which works so hard to recreate a really bad 1950s sci-fi film, it forgets to include any room for jokes among the tacky production design. This happens again with the Steve Guttenberg-Rosanna Arquette pas de deux “Two I.D.s” which has a fabulous blind date set-up, and then proceeds to suck all the air out of the room as it progresses. Barrie and Mulholland reveal where their comic tastes rest in a mildly amusing take on a modern funeral, in which Catskill comedians mercilessly heckle the not-so-dearly departed, and in an embarrassed (and embarrassing) tale of a boy whose quest to purchase the right pack of condoms gets him way more attention than he would like.
The writers seem more determined to pay homage to the comic inspirations of their youth than to find a way to play off a contrast between an earlier style of joke telling and the more aggressively vulgar comedy of the 80s. The opening skit, in which Arsenio Hall plays a yuppie who comes home to find his plush condo transformed into a death trap, suggests the E.G. Marshall segment of Creepshow in its broad strokes, and unwittingly sketches a through line to the Final Destination films, but it also has some anger and fire just underneath the surface. It’s a terrific beginning that points the way towards a better film than the follow-up segments are able to deliver.
In writing the last few paragraphs, I think I have been able to gather together the key difference between KFM and Amazon Women. In KFM, a lot of people are getting laid (with one minor exception) and the audience is invited to watch. Amazon Women is an extended exercise in “coitus interruptus” (re: the “Video Date” segment) and the only person getting fucked (after a fashion) is the viewer. KFM is crude, profane and frequently hilarious, a hot-blooded make out session in the backseat of the car, while Amazon Women is an endless cold shower after an unsatisfying bout of self-gratification on the couch.
It’s a fitting irony then that two of the deleted scenes on the DVD are better than almost all of the segments in the film, although I can understand why they were cut, and agree that this was the right decision. Neither one would fit in. “The Unknown Soldier”, helmed by Horton (though it has the feel of a Dante piece, something in line with his “war trilogy” from the ‘90s), is a dark and bitter tale of the absurdities of combat, where every victory has a gray lining. “French Ventriloquist’s Dummy” (which Dante did direct) is an absurdist scenario that one can easily imagine Charlie Kaufman spinning out to feature length. Dante regular Dick Miller is a ventriloquist who finds himself at a loss for (English) words when there is a dummy mix-up at the airport. It’s nonsensical but charming, and far too wistful to have any place in Amazon Women on the Moon.
Next time: Frank Drebin vs. Topper Harley. Plus: my favorite line from any ZAZ (Not ZAZ) film.