New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

In the world of Chapter Two (much like the “world at large” or the “real world” or any world of your choice you may wish to put air quotes around), there are ridiculous coincidences and meaningless connections that may fold like a cheap collapsible chair under close scrutiny, but which can certainly sound impressive when strung together coherently and rattled off breathlessly by someone who sounds as if he knows of what he speaks.

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.)

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5