Original subtitles

These are the Kentucky Fried Movie DVD extras.

Which makes us, are we extras?

No, that's a good pun though. Thank you.

Extras also means?

See you in the movie business.

Okay, sorry.

Well, we call them background, though. Background, that's right. They're called

background, not extras.

Extras is a little real rude, isn't it? Yeah, who was the guy, John, who was my

AD and all that?

Kretschmer? Kretschmer, always used to say background artist.

He was like the ultimate polite.

He's the most polite and wonderful assistant director. Performance artist.

Yeah, well, that was, yeah.

It was 1971, and I was just out of college. Jerry was doing his practice

teaching because he was an education major.

And Jim Abrams, our friend, was a private investigator for a law firm in

Milwaukee. And Jerry was in Madison at the University of Wisconsin.

So I managed to get a hold of some videotape, which my dad borrowed from a

friend of his.

And so we just thought we could make spoofs of TV commercials and

maybe put them and combine them with a live show because Jerry also knew our

friend Dick Chudnow who was another TA at Madison and they had a performance

group which was improvisations. And so we combined that with our TV commercials

and we just made a stage show.

I thought my razor was dull until I heard that last answer.

Should we start over?

No, no, no.

It's fine.

Yes, that was excellent. You would agree with that. I was all correct. Everything

in there was correct. Very monotone, but just right on. I'll try to vary the

pitch a little bit. But I just got off the plane. I should say David just got

off the plane. We're in London now, and David just got off the plane from

America. So this is not my usual self.

His suitcase is actually just back there. You can see it in the background.

It's probably in the back of the shot anyway. So, okay, just to set the stage.

Well, I think at some point we decided we didn't want to be a performing group,

you know, and we had done some television, but it just didn't seem to

be our thing either, so we thought, wait a minute, you know, maybe movies would

be good. And, you know, then Ken Shapiro had done Groove Tube, the

film, which was a bit film, and I think there was, no, I guess that was it. It

was just that one, and we thought, gee.

we have this whole show with all these different bits and you know it's be fun

to write new stuff and and and try to make a movie and maybe we could actually

get that made because we could do it cheaper so i think that was kind of the

genesis of it and then we met john landis and because we didn't know

anything about david actually saw

John Landis on The Tonight Show.

And he was on The Tonight Show because he was a 21-year-old kid who had

directed a movie called Schlock.

And so he was on the show. And so David got his number

from the distributor of the movie and called Levitt Pickman and called John.

And what did John's reaction was? How'd you get this number? I said, well, they

gave it to me. And he was like about to get on the phone to Levitt Pickman to

scream at them.

I said, no, no, I don't want anything from you. I just wanted to invite you to

our show. We have this Kentucky Fried Theater show on Pico, so come over and

see it. And he did.

And then we took him out to lunch, the three of us, Jim

and David and I, took him out to lunch and just asked him questions about,

how do you make a movie?

And he said, first you need a script.

And we said, we know that, but what does one look like?

And so he went out to his car and brought us back one of his scripts,

which happened to be titled American Werewolf in London.

And this was like years before he ever got that on film.

But we actually, we took that and we used that as kind of a template so we

knew how to do it. Not the structure of the movie, but just the format.

Because we didn't even know, you know, fade in, how dialogue was, I mean, we

knew nothing. As a matter of fact, I think the reason David called him was

because he thought, gee, the guy's 21, maybe he'll talk to us, because, you

know, nobody else would.

So, and he was right, and John was really nice, and he was just very happy

to, you know, tell us what he knew, and kind of got us started.

I don't think so. I don't think that actually in a way it sort of made it, it

seemed to make it easier because it was all, you know, most of it could be done

on locations and, you know, could be done fairly simply.

you know, it didn't really require, well, in those days I guess they didn't

have special effects, so forget that. No, special effects hadn't been invented

yet. Hadn't been invented yet, but we knew they were coming, but anyway. We

did the whole movie on really one big mansion on the grounds and in the

mansion in Pasadena.

What was it, the Dovidina? The Dovidina Mansion it was called, and some of the

sets were constructed outside, and we just, you know, prayed that it wouldn't

rain, and they didn't have any ceilings, so that the light, we just used natural

light, just like they used to do in the silent movies.

Yeah, we also prayed that they'd be funny.

Yeah.

Kentucky Fried Movie was just a really fun movie to shoot. I mean, every day

there was something wild going on. Every day there was a great gag, or two, or

three, or twelve.

And I think probably, I don't know, if you're trying to...

It's hard to say what the most fun one was.

A Fistful of Yen was, I think, really fun to shoot. But, oh, you know what? I

will tell you what I think the most fun was.

My personal, I think, would be the Zinc Oxide.

Zinc Oxide and you, that was great. That was really a treat to film. Yeah, it was

great. Cleopatra Schwartz, of course, was...

Well, then it doesn't make any sense if it's not an answer. So, okay, go ahead.

You answer.

What Jerry meant to say was that he enjoyed the Cleopatra Schwartz

commercial the most because it involved nudity. In fact, those are the days when

Jerry actually showed up on the set.

I used to call in ahead of time and see if there was going to be any nudity.

Yeah, were there going to be any breasts today? Oh, yes. Sure, Jared, come on in.

Sometimes we have to lie about it.

We actually thought it would be funny.

I don't think we wrote any... I don't think we've ever written anything...

Just to meet girls.

No, that probably would have been worthwhile, but just for the box,

because we thought this is what's popular in the box office, other than

the fact that we knew we were...

unbridled in terms of just, you know, it's a hard hour, we were going to go

for it, we were, you know, we didn't have to be restrained.

So, but other than that, we only write what we think is funny and fortunately

we're all just really immature, so it tends to, you know, be that kind of

humor.

The spoof movie trailers that were in Kentucky Fried Movie, evidently we did

invent that because now that we think of it, we can't think of anybody who did

them before we did, so we may well have... Yeah, I had no idea. We were not

aware at the time that we were inventing anything.

Or sprocket holes, which turned out... Yeah, sprocket holes we invented.

The movies prior to Kentucky Fried Movie, there were no sprocket holes, and

they would make it really difficult for film. They were done on kind of these

rubber rollers.

So who knew? And David and Jim and I invented that. But I

guess someone had just mentioned to us that they thought

it was the first time that a trailer had been

spoofed, a preview of coming attractions had been spoofed. I actually wasn't

aware of that, but if that's true, then we'll take credit for being the first.

And we never did it again after that.

That's true.

There had been a lot of spoof commercials.

I think the first one that we saw that kind of delighted us was Putney Swope.

It had a spoof of a TV commercial that was really

funny. But look, television did spoofs of...

TV commercials all the time. I mean, you know, I'm sure, you know, Milton Berle

and all those shows. Oh, they probably did, that's right. Yeah, they all did

that stuff. So we can't even claim that then. Yeah, well, that's, but that's,

yeah. But in a film, but it wasn't in a movie. I don't know. And, you know,

background, we also did a lot of background humor.

And that, I mean, I remember seeing a movie called Harold and Maude, which had

some wonderfully funny background gags when he would... He would be trying to

commit suicide and burning himself in the background while something else was

going in the foreground.

I think that impressed us a lot.

He was a friend of John Landis.

Anybody who was famous was a friend of John Landis because we didn't know

anybody. But Landis had worked on a bunch of movies prior to that, and he

got Bill Bixby in.

Who's the guy that was on Laugh-In? Henry Gibson. Henry Gibson, yeah, they

were all friends of John's. Yeah, and Goldie Hawn.

She wasn't in it.

Oh, she wasn't in it. Nobody knew her.

You'd have to ask Donald. I think he... I mean, I still don't get that gag.

Yeah. I mean, it was just as used to have Donald Sutherland in, but other

than that, just to have him fall into a cake without any reason.

It wasn't really that funny, but we were really impressed with ourselves that we

had Donald Sutherland. We got to meet Donald Sutherland. And then we resolved

to whenever we had a big celebrity cameo in the future, we were going to make it

funny.

My favorite subsequent to that is Ethel Merman in Airplane. That's my favorite

cameo in any of our films.

Was she gay?

Ethelman was totally gay and she was wonderful.

She was a really sweet, nice woman and I

think her only stipulation was, because I don't think we paid her very much, but

she wanted to bring her hair person.

Which we agreed to pay for. Yeah, to fly her hair person out and to do her hair.

And you can look at her hair in the movie. It's that famous kind of beehive

or whatever that was, that hairdo that she had.

But that was her, and she loved it. But she was great.

Ethel Merman was just...

really a thrill to have her on the set I mean I think really certainly up to that

time I was meeting her was was

was one of the most more exciting

things in terms of, you know, hanging with famous actors.

Jerry had led an exceptionally dull life up to that point, so this was a thrill.

Ethel Merman.

Ethel Merman. Yeah, no, I'd take Ethel over all of them. She was great.

Well, a lot of it, I mean, we used to play football and baseball, and Jerry

would be in watching, you know, those musicals. Yeah, you know. It was kind

of, yeah.

I lived with mom for about the first 40 years of your life.

Yeah, yeah. I lived with a lot of Judy Garland.

We would always

screen films in front of an audience. You can't put a comedy out, I don't

think, without...

pre-screening and and to see what works and a number of screenings and we've

done that with all our movies now do you remember i know we did a lot of editing

on kentucky fried movie do you remember what things particularly were i don't

remember particular things but i do remember that the first screening of of

kentucky fine movie like every comedy we've ever done had been it was a

disaster the first time we we played it not not quite the disaster that airplane

was when that first screening but You know, I remember I invited friends. We

screened it up and we tested it in San Francisco.

And I invited, at that time, I had friends.

I remember those days. San Francisco.

And, you know, five or six friends. And I invited them. I would never do that

today. Of course, today I'm not doing movies either.

But it's a danger. The first screening is always dangerous. We just pray.

Because there's 20 minutes in there that's not going to be funny.

And comedy really survives on that pace.

Everything's going to be funny.

And so every movie, at least 20 minutes is going to be cut out. So if you can

imagine just sitting there for 20 minutes and nothing's funny, it's pretty

deadly. And it's spaced throughout the movie.

No, there were some things that came out completely, but I just don't remember.

We needed everything,

so we kept everything in. There was not one thing that we filmed? Not one thing

that came out. Maybe there was a fixative where the thing caught fire.

I don't know why that wasn't funny, though.

The fixative sketch was a mock on an ad that was...

playing a lot for one of these, you know, call-in products that

you'd order. Order by phone. Order by phone things. And it was just this, I

don't know.

It was a coat. Paste or powder or something. Well, no, the product was a

powder that you put on when there was a hole in fabric.

You'd put this on and somehow it would patch it. I don't even remember what it

was actually supposed to do, but it showed this coat.

in the real ad, and they'd put the thing on, and the guy said, fixative, you

know, fixes anything, and instantly, and it'd be just droning on, and what was,

we did. No, it was, I remember the ad said, we're burning a hole in this coat

to show you. Oh, that's right. And so they had a cigarette, and they would

burn a hole in a coat on the camera, and then they would show, you know, it

burned a hole in it, and then they put the fixative fabric adhesive, and they

showed it just.

knit together and sewn up and you couldn't even see. What we did was we

kept that announcer going and we burned the hole in the coat and then it burst

into flames. It kept burning.

And then the whole coat in there throwing on fixative and water and all

that kind of stuff. Yeah, it was funny. I don't know what... That was one of

those rare cases where we were right and the audience was wrong.

You know, it could have been... Hundreds of people were just wrong.

It happens.

We wanted to release the movie with an explanation of why some of these bits

were funny.

Maybe it burst into flames too fast. It was probably the special effects.

And we couldn't afford to do take two.

Maybe we did, but each time I think the coat burst into flames.

In general, we like to spoof anything that

took... itself seriously.

I mean, that would certainly be the best, those

would be the best vehicles for us.

And disaster movies at that time were very in vogue, The

Towering Inferno.

And invariably they turned out to be B movies.

Yeah. You know, even today, I just saw about a half hour of 2012.

Have you ever seen that? No. It's exactly, you know, that kind of stuff

that we would spoof.

Oh, 2012, yes, right, right, right. 2012, Independence Day. Right, right,

right, yeah.

Invariably, there's something about these disaster movies where they have,

you know, a big cast, and you have to get into everybody's personal life, and

the stuff is just, the dialogue is unintentionally funny.

Well, actually, we wrote Airplane before we wrote Kentucky Fried Movie.

And we couldn't get backing to do Airplane. So when Landis came to see our

show and suggested, why don't you guys do a movie of your show, then we did

that because we were trying to get into the movie business.

When our movies were hits, I have to say, nothing surprised us until Top

Secret.

We spent months and months and years trying to convince people to

finance these movies, whether it was Kentucky Fried Movie or Airplane or

Topsy or whatever it was.

We kept saying, this is going to be a big hit. This is comedy gold or whatever

we were saying. But we really did believe it. We thought the movies were

funny and they would be a big hit.

Well very difficult because you see it is kind of an axiom in Hollywood that

you can only you only do they'll only let you do what you've already proven

that you can do so you know at the time we did Kentucky Fried Movie we had

proven that we could run a very successful small theater in a live show

in LA so we want to take the next step we wanted to write and produce a feature

film so when we did that then With Airplane, we were insisting on directing

it. And not only being first-time directors, but we were insisting that

all three of us direct at the same time. So, you know, we hadn't even gone near

proving we could do that. I think the biggest question really was... I mean,

there was... There were a hundred...

you know, questions that people had about an airplane.

But I think that one of the biggest was would satire, does satire work on film?

Because there had been evidence to make people think that it didn't. There was a

movie called The Big Bus, which was supposed to be, you know, which was

satire. But it just wasn't, you know, we were doing a completely different kind

of satire than that.

convince people that this was different.

And nobody really understood the way we wanted to cast it. I

mean, we would explain it, but it's an easy thing to realize when you see it.

But to explain it to someone beforehand has actually turned out to be pretty

difficult.

Paramount, who finally, you know, every studio in Hollywood turned it down, and

finally Paramount said, okay, we'll make this. And the first day of dailies, when

Leslie Nielsen says, I am serious and don't call me Shirley, that was in the

first day's rushes.

We got a call from the studio, you know, saying, okay, now we get it.

We got a lot of blank looks before that.

We were, as we cast one by one, actors like Robert Stack, Peter Graves,

Lloyd Bridges, and Leslie Nielsen.

And I remember Leslie Nielsen was the last straw for our casting director.

He said, Leslie Nielsen? Leslie Nielsen is the guy you cast the night before.

And we were just so thrilled to have Leslie. And it was like a month before.

But this had never been done before. But as Jerry said, the first day of Daley's,

they got it.

You know, when we cast Leslie Nielsen, nobody got it. Leslie Nielsen in a

comedy? And we actually, you know, when we talked with Leslie, when we first met

him, we said, we just want you to play it straight.

like you do all the other roles you played and it's going to work great.

What we didn't realize was that Leslie was a closet comedian, but which anybody

who knew him knew because he was a prankster and he was always making

jokes. I think Leslie kind of shared our sense of anarchy, of wanting to...

pull the clothes off the emperor or whatever, or announce that

the emperor didn't have clothes, or shop at the Emporium or something.

And so Leslie was really, more than anyone else, I think, was

kind of one of us. And that was a surprise.

It's great to write for someone, so we knew we could just imagine Leslie doing

it, and we knew certain things that he was great at.

And certain things we knew that wouldn't be funny with any other actor, but

Leslie Nielsen doing it, then this would be funny. Leslie could get away with

things that very few actors could get away with.

Leslie was never trying to be funny. He was always, so you never, you never

really expect it. So because his job isn't, you know, quote, comedian,

unquote, it's always, it always has that aura of the unexpected

when something, when Leslie does something. So he can get away with lines

like nice beaver that, for a comedian, it would be a smart aleck remark.

But for Leslie, it just played right in with that.

We're not trying to be funny.

We would frequently go into a screening with a two-hour movie, into a first

preview, a two-hour movie, and we would think it all would be funny, but we

knew... that we'd be lucky if 90 minutes of it was funny, because that's just

always what happens.

I think it is pretty... I mean, look, movies have done it. There have been two

-hour comedies.

I think for our kind of comedies, those satires, where

you really... You know, it's really not about the plot.

that it's more of a joke book, that it's hard to keep people laughing

for more than an hour and a half. And with this kind of comedy, it's hard to

take a plot too seriously, but if you don't get the plot up to at least a

modicum of respect, then you don't have a movie. So they always seem to...

work out to 85 minutes or you know 83 minutes and we you know we but but in

the some of the well I'm including credits we we do everything we can't

yeah you do you know really no no you just it's you eke

out 80 85 86 minutes or even 82 minutes with the credits

because it's just You know, the comedies depend on the pace.

Our comedy influences, surprisingly, weren't really other comedies, but it

was, I would say, first off, I mean, we were so affected by serious

movies, and so we would watch a lot of serious B movies and think that those

were somehow funnier than the comedies of the day.

In the 1960s and 70s, I think we were all fans of Woody Allen and Mel Brooks.

Also in college, the Marx Brothers.

The Marx Brothers. Mad Magazine, I would say, was a huge influence when we were

kids. That was probably the first comedy influence because that was a satire

magazine, and they did scenes we'd like to see. It was a textbook of satire.

Yeah. And they had little things in the margins, you know, they would...

Backgrounds. Yeah, and so that was... And we loved that. We loved Mad

Magazine. And I think that was probably our first, you know, real influence.

And we loved the Marx Brothers.

But that was a little bit later. That was when we were in college.

When we first...

We ran our show in Madison, Wisconsin, Kentucky Fried Theater.

got a notice from the phone company that Kentucky Fried Chicken had written

them and said they're sorry they cannot allow this comedy

group, Kentucky Fried Theater, to be using their name and they wanted them to

discontinue the phone line and the phone company sent back a notice to both the

Kentucky Fried Chicken and us saying until there was some sort of legal

direction, they would continue to list both of us. And that was the last I

think we ever heard of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Yeah, once they were comfortable with the fact that we weren't selling

chicken, it was okay.

But then in our live theater on Pico Boulevard in L.A., only a block

west of us was an actual Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

And so I think somebody who worked there once told us that they had, actually

some people would call and it would be confusing because the name of our show

at our Kentucky Fried Theater was Vegetables.

And so somebody called the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant saying, do you

have vegetables?

And so whoever the clerk was that answered the phone said, no, but we have

coleslaw. So it was like, it was a comedy of errors.

It is life imitating art a little bit.

We've talked from time to time about doing a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie,

and actually we own the rights to it now because they've gone back to us.

We're waiting to be contacted by investors.

That's right, so if anybody sees this.

We've talked about it, just a matter of, you know, because we're all doing

different stuff and busy, whether we want to really take the...

time and do it.

Maybe we will, I don't know.

When we wrote the script, we'd all meet at 9 a.m. At that time, it was above our

theater. We had living spaces and our office, essentially, was there.

We would write the script from 9 to 5.

Yeah, we really had a ritual. We'd get up in the morning, we'd drink coffee.

Talk about politics for an hour. Yeah, talk about politics until the coffee,

until we were all like, until our motors were running.

And then we'd start, wherever we happened to be, whether we were in the

middle of some scene and, okay, how are we going to do this, or whether we were

just, we'd always start just throwing jokes up.

Sometimes we'd look at old movies or TV commercials or, you know, to get ideas

for spoof.

But, you know, we'd really write a sort of a pretty normal working day. And then

at the end of the day, we'd kind of say, all right, we're all out of gas and see

you tomorrow.

Well, it was helpful to be in a group because you could always tell, I mean,

if somebody...

thought of an idea, you would get an instant reaction.

Either it was funny or it wasn't. And if the initial idea wasn't that funny,

somebody else would add it and change it. A lot of the

bits in all our movies

were built as opposed to one person saying, wait a minute, I got an idea.

This is how we should do it. One person would say, wait a minute, maybe...

maybe we should do something about this, and then somebody, how about this, and

then somebody, no, no, no, but this, you know, and then add something to it, and

then, you know, so it was a real collaborative effort, but I think, you

know, after a while, or really pretty close from the beginning, we had

the kind of respect for each other that if one of us proposed

it, a joke and the other two didn't laugh we just go on you know they're

just we would say oh i guess it's not funny you know because we we had that

kind unless unless there was something that you would you'd think maybe the

other two didn't understand what you were talking about or something but if

they got what you meant and they didn't laugh then that was uh um you know you

just accepted that as as as the final arbiter of of of of whether it was any

good and also we we attach very little value or no value to whoever thought up

what joke and so and what would happen and because we we just didn't have any

individual pride of authorship so that we never told you we we had a really we

had an understanding which kind of evolved naturally that we just didn't

talk about who's who wrote what jokes.

And it served us well. And a lot of times it was just kind of almost

forgotten. And we really have. We just can't, I mean, there's all these, the

classic lines from Airplane or The Naked Guns, I don't think we remember who

thought of what.

And as a result, it was all about...

you know, the final product and what was funny and not about how many jokes I

have in or David or Jim's. And by the way, I should say that the other side of

the thing of proposing a joke and not getting laughed was if you say something

and the other two laugh, that's great. You know, it is...

It was really a fantastic collaboration.

Not that we didn't have our disagreements and our battles, but

underneath it all was a real love and trust, and

we never went against the family.

I thought that. I thought that.

First of all, if you had we, I actually.

I'll never forget, David and Jim and I, we all went to see, maybe even with Bob

Weiss, I can't remember.

Enter the Dragon.

We saw the Bruce Lee film, Enter the Dragon, and we loved it. And we came out

just karate chopping everything in sight. Pretty clumsily, of course, but

we thought it was great.

Which actually is, it's probably worth mentioning that to do the kind of spoofs

that we do, the kind of satire, we really need to have some, a little bit

of affection for what we're satirizing. I mean, if it's in a whole movie like

Airplane or a 20-minute segment like, or half an hour like.

Fistful of Yeah. But we really liked those airplane movies.

Airport 75.

We loved those, but we also saw the silly, you know, we could also make fun

of them. So that was perfect. If we found something really hateful, I don't

think we would have... We couldn't do it. We couldn't do a... We never had an

interest in doing something. And we loved the Dirty Harry movies. We thought

they were good movies, yet there was so much to make fun of also.

Yeah, so, you know, I don't know, I don't remember the moment where someone

said, hey, let's do, you know, Enter the Dragon.

Let's do a spoof of that film.

But we, you know, it just seemed like tremendous

fun and plenty of meat there.

And, you know, so I think we just dove in and never looked back.

I would say that was a high point. I love the idea that David put that

into Naked Gun 2, right? Yeah, well, I remember when I saw Ghost,

aside from the fact that I loved it.

tears coming, I mean, everybody cries at the end of that thing.

But I called up Jerry, I was just so excited, and I don't know if you thought

I was excited about the movie, I said, that pottery scene, we can spoof this.

Exactly.

That's David's, yeah.

It's like, hey, more material.

Yeah, the movie was good, yeah, yeah. But we can spoof this great pottery

scene. But also, the tagline was wonderful, and if you look at that,

you know, it was a trailer. Actually, It was a teaser trailer first and then put

into the movie, right?

Yeah, the teaser trailer. We did a couple of teaser trailers for The Naked

Guns. And the greatest thing is being in the theater when these trailers played.

And so you hear the, you know, unchained melody by the Righteous Brothers and a

tight shot of the hands on the pottery wheel.

And I would watch as every guy in the audience is going.

All right, it's another chick movie or something.

And then the shot widens out, and it's Leslie and Priscilla. And then everybody

is just laughing.

But also I love the tagline was, from the brother of the director of Ghost.

That's right. So it's like, how often do you get a chance to do something like

that? That might be in the high point of both our careers. It went down shortly

after that.

I did have that worry that perhaps

just anything I did would just end up being, people would laugh at, even if I

was intending it seriously.

And in fact, the first screening, which actually went really well, but

there's that scene where

Patrick goes into Whoopi's body, you know, and so before, so he's

now as Whoopi, and you see, but

it's still the two women sitting together, and the hand comes over, and

you're not sure whether this is now going to be too...

women, you know, together.

And the audience was tittering.

It's a little uncomfortable. Yeah, it's uncomfortable.

The audience was tittering and I was like, oh, you know, oh no, my worst

nightmare has come true.

I've done this heavily dramatic scene and people are, you know, with this

music, you know, the Unchained Melody playing in the background.

And that's also where Jared chose to put his directing credit.

Yeah, right, exactly.

And people are... are laughing, you know, they're not exactly howling, but

tittering, you know, and it really almost like ruined the rest of the

experience. And basically the, you know, the scores were high in the movie was

people were, you know, like the movie and stuff. But in the end, I think I

just said, okay, if it's the movie is a roller coaster, there's

comedy and action and thrill, whatever, you know, in it. And so I'm just going

to go, I'll just consider this you know, making the audience uncomfortable part

of that ride.

And in fact, I took out every ambient noise.

I mean, I even took out, you know, like air conditioning hum and traffic outside

and anything.

So it's totally silent to make it more uncomfortable just because I just

thought, well, great, go for it. That's another emotion sort of in a way.

And then I just, you know, so I just, I...

I relaxed with it a little bit.

A stage musical, yes. It opens in London.

Previews open end of March in London.

And Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote the screenplay, wrote a musical. Not the

music. The music is Dave Stewart and Glenn Ballard wrote the music.

And I think it's going to be, from what I've seen and heard, I think it's going

to be fantastic.

It is a lot different, but I mean, and I think there are jokes to be had, but not

to fill up an entire movie.

I mean, we just, our feeling is that, you know, we didn't really even have

enough jokes to fill up, you know, the first airplane movie.

And then we didn't, Paramount wanted us to do Airplane 2, and we just, you know,

declined to do that.

And so, but I think there are some great airplane jokes. It's just not enough to

do an entire movie.

There could be a 10-minute airplane sketch within a new Kentucky Fried

Movie. I mean, Kentucky Fried Movie, you can go anywhere and do anything. It's

just wide open. You can satirize anything you want. With an airplane

movie, you're stuck on an airplane again and a control tower and whatever.

I don't think either of us felt like we wanted to either then...

or now, and it came up again, someone at Paramount had suggested that

maybe this would be a good time to do another one, and I don't

think none of us had any real interest in that.

Our experience has kind of shown that there are a limited amount of genres

that can really

be sent up in a movie spoof. I mean, so far, I mean, we did okay with the

airplane, the airport, you know, disaster movie genre. And then the cop

genre, you know, the satire of Dirty Harry was very good.

And then the Wayans, when they did the scary, the first scary movie, showed

that, I mean, there's a huge, you know, well of material to be mined from horror

movies. But then those last two, oh my God.

Wait a minute, but I did those, Jerry. Oh, I forgot, sorry. Yeah, those were

great, the last two scary movies. They still hold the box office records. Yeah,

yeah. So if there's any...

investors out there who would like to finance more movies that we could do.

Yeah, exactly.

If everybody who watches this would send a dollar... Well, then we could finance

another movie. But, you know, the Wayans, they did a movie called Dance

Flick, which was a satire of dance movies, and I don't think people want to

see that genre.

I did a movie called...

high school high, and it's the dedicated teacher genre.

Just those genres aren't as good, although my filmmaking was excellent.

Brilliant.

It's a lost gem.

Yeah, it's a lost gem. You can still...

Get that on DVD.

No, they removed it.

It's just completely gone.

There aren't a bunch of genres that you can't really send

up anything.

I think it usually has to have a bad guy or a big disaster in it.

This has to be something that people are familiar with.

And lend itself to that. And just kind of be fun, you know? Yeah, fun genre.

You know, the Chopsaki movies are just fun to watch, so they're great to

satirize, and so are the disaster movies.

Even when they're bad, they're sort of fun to watch.

No, ever since I really just was internationally recognized as a much

superior director to David, I don't think we've really, you know, that just

kind of... Yeah, and I just went on to do just huge box office hits.

But they didn't have the art to them that Ghost had.

But I just went on to have a hugely successful career. So there wasn't any

competition.

No, we always talk and help each other with our...

talk to each other about what we're doing.

We're very good at pretending that we're really happy with the other's success.

So that kind of makes it go.

Like when Jim did the Hot Shots movie, whenever we talked to him, we were

really pretending that we were proud of him. Yeah, pretending that we were proud

of him.

And not jealous.

And he never found out that we were actually crushed.

He showed that he could be a success without us.

One day I wanted to tell him that it was so...

good that I actually threw up and tried to kill myself.

But I don't know. I just thought maybe I better not go there. And I had convinced

myself that he could never do anything without us. And then he went to do hot

shots. Yeah.

Yeah.

Hot Shots were great. Sorry,

kidding, kidding.

You better be sure to include this in it.

Yeah, the Hot Shots were great movies.

And a great idea for a spoof, too. Yes, there's another example of a really, you

just, you want to be there. It was just fun to be on the battleship and in the

planes and all that stuff. It was just, you know, beyond.

above and beyond the Top Gun satire. And stuff that sticks with you. He had one

character in it called Dead Meat. And you just, you knew that guy was going to

die. And so every time I see a movie where you know a certain character is

going to die, and I just think of that character in Hot Shots, Dead Meat.

Dave and I were pretty close growing up, but we played, I mean, we

were... We have an older sister, and so we were the two younger boys, and we

would always be inventing games all the time and pulling pranks and all that.

And we fought, you know, too, and stuff, and argued all the time, but we were

kind of, you know, we were kind of tied together. We, you know, did a lot of

stuff together.

Except when David went off to college, and I was still in high school, and he

got... bell-bottom pants, and I was like, I think I disowned him.

Yeah, he was shocked. Yeah, I was shocked. I was shocked.

It was 1967 and 66

or something like that, and I was a junior in high school, and he was a

freshman in college.

My grades weren't that great, but I did make quite a fashion statement. Yeah,

bell-bottoms. In those days, yeah.

And then we made films.

We made comedy movies when we were in college. And that's kind of what started

our real professional collaboration.

One was about Jerry taking LSD and then peeing all over the campus in Madison.

Sort of. Yeah, but those were the... It's a rough description. And we did a

satire on Midnight Cowboy.

And later we both got to work with Dustin Hoffman and John

Voight. Oh, that's right. That's funny.

One of the class times was

12.05.

Just the way they scheduled it, every class at that time was

12.05.

you know 120 and whatever is that went on and and uh so the title was 1205

cowboy and and it was uh just some guy who started on the dish crew because we

worked on the dish crew at a dormitory in madison you know and and uh um

you know it was sort of followed sort of vaguely the the you know, the story.

It was not a great work of art, but the people on campus liked it.

I think people were definitely ready for Kentucky Fried Movie.

I think every, in a sense, everything paves the way for what comes afterwards.

You know, certainly

it became acceptable to have that kind of language and nudity in the theater.

Now, interestingly enough, it would be tougher now to do Kentucky Fried Movie

because that's all allowed on cable, television. You can do...

You can do anything and say anything on the

internet.

But at the time, part of the appeal of that movie

was naughty stuff that you couldn't see on television.

you still have to do in movies. I mean, we're in the business, in the movie

business, of getting people to leave their homes for something. So if you can

do funny and make people laugh out loud, you always have to be kind of shocking,

and you have to do something new that people haven't seen before.

But there always is material like that.

I think the cinema-going experience has...

has remained relatively unchanged I mean the big difference is now there's so

much competition because you can you can see it at home there's so much content

available at home used to be three networks you know and and and now

there's a hundreds of cable channels and and the internet but but when you walk

into a theater and you sit in a seat and you see images projected on the screen,

it's really basically the same experience.

I mean, what's on the screen has changed a lot in terms of what you can do and

the, you know, with

special effects, CGI, and 3D and everything.

But I think basically it's still that thing

of a group of people sitting together to watch a story.

And especially in comedy, it's so important to have that theater

experience where you have people, you know, a shared experience and you hear

the laughs.

I mean, Jim's...

Kids who are now in their mid-20s saw Airplane for the first time, I don't

know, three or four years ago at one of these anniversary screenings of Airplane

and they were just blown away by it. They had never seen it in front of an

audience. And to sit in the audience and they're all laughing and it's a

completely different experience than they had watching it on video at home.

There is no right number when we screen a movie we like to have at least 300

people because I mean when we're in the editing process because

that's kind of what we need to get a sense of what's working and what's not.

But in terms of just enjoying a movie, I mean, if you have 20 people there who

are good laughers and really enjoying it, it becomes a much better experience.

But there's nothing like a big auditorium with hundreds of people.

There's a lot of Kentucky Fried movie that doesn't really hold up I think but

but there's a lot of it that does you know and so I'm kind of like Take the

optimistic point of view that that it's great that that's so much of it does

hold up But but there's a run-in fistful of yen.

Yeah, where he says he's getting the tour through the prison and he's and

Evan asks who are these and he says

just lost drunken men who don't know where they are and no longer care.

And who are these?

And then he says, well, these are lost drunken men who know where they are and

care, but don't drink.

And we played with that thing, and we kept playing. And it was every time,

it's a laugh, and it's still funny today. And I think we're really proud of

stuff like that that has lasted all these years. Some of the more topical

stuff that...

Something that includes specific references to specific commercials maybe

can't be as effective.

But most of it really holds up. And of course, naked breasts always hold up.

Always hold up.

In film. Yes, right, in film. In film, they always do. They're just preserved

forever.

It was $700,000.

It was the budget of Kentucky Fried Movie.

And that was in 1977.

Wait a sec, 77?

It was out in 77? It came out in 77.

So we shot it in 77? It came out August in 77.

So anyway, but the budget

was $700,000. thousand dollars in

1976 or 7 and which was low even

then and but I think we got a lot out of it because there were no big highly paid

actors and we really put every dollar on on screen obviously we weren't paid very

much so

It's a long story about how we got the financing, but essentially

we made, David and Jim and I

decided to invest $30

,000, which is about all we had, and made 10 minutes.

of the movie that John directed and there were four bits and we showed those

to everybody and because nobody would just finance it just on the script and

the studios all turned it down but a friend of ours Kim Jorgensen who is the

executive producer of Kentucky Fried movie

loved it and took it to friends of his that ran United Artists Theater Circuit.

So that's the people that own the theaters, not the movie company.

And they played it in one of their theaters, and people laughed, and they

figured, I think, that worst came to worst. They could make money back by

playing it in their own theaters.

And so they financed it.

That was the hardest movie to make a poster out of. There were so many

different designs, but they weren't bad.

In the end, it took a while getting there.

But there were so many bad ones on the way. United Artists Theater Circuit

marketing department, or if they had a marketing department, or they farmed it

out. No, they didn't have any kind of, because they didn't make movies really.

This was one of a handful that they made during that time. And they went to

an ad company to design a one sheet.

this is what they came up with. I think they probably went to a number of

different companies, and I just remember there were a lot of bad ones at the

beginning, and then they came up with these, which everybody said, hey, wait a

minute, this is pretty fun. Was the title the first one to have movie at the

end of the title?

I don't know.

We could have maybe have another.

No, no, no.

Dennis Hopper made The Last Movie.

Oh, okay, The Last Movie.

Yeah.

I actually wasn't really aware

that Kentucky Fried Movie had that long... Second life. Had a second life

or great longevity. Or that they were DVDs. Yeah, I don't... Yeah, they never

sent us one, no.

You know, it's different with... Airplane really has, I think,

held up, and that was... I don't think we would have ever expected that, you

know, 30 years from now, it would still be so popular.

You know, Kentucky Fried Movie is still a cult movie, and it's hard, it's

impossible to judge.

I think for us to judge...

to what extent or how popular, because I do hear people talk about it, but

there's no measure for me. I have no idea what the DVD sales are

or how people are

responding to it, other than anecdotally.

We were thrilled to have the movie not only make its money back, but make such

a big profit, because that means that we didn't have to go back to the theater.

We didn't have to be on stage anymore, so we definitely thought that now we

could be in the movie business.

That's why the money that we made from Kentucky Fried Movie, our profit

participation, which was not enormous, but it was enough that we could write

Airplane and take a year or more really to

work on writing it and getting it made without having to find other work.

There is no Samuel L. Bronkowitz, of course.

Maybe not of course. I don't think people know.

Oh, yeah, well... It was a made-up name.

Samuel Bronkowitz was a made-up name, and we did it because nobody knew. We

were all young kids, and we had to form our own company because the United

Artists Theatre Circuit wasn't writing the checks directly for services.

equipment, etc.

So we thought that Samuel L. Bronkowitz sounded like a legitimate name.

And so people would do business with us.

And in fact, more than a few times, we would call someone and

say, they'd say, well, who's this for? What's the company? And we'd say, Samuel

L. Bronkowitz Productions. And they'd say something like, oh, is he still

making pictures?

Or Samuel, oh, of course, Samuel L. Bronkowitz.

It just sounded legitimate.

And then in the trailer, we actually cast a guy as Samuel L. Brunkett.

Yeah, Samuel Brunkett, Sid Cain. Sid Cain. I believe I remember that. That's

the name of the actor. He's still alive. He's 110 now.

It just seems a shame that Leslie is gone and he's still alive. And he's

still alive, yes. You know, is there no God? Anyway, but, sorry, but it's really

cool. But, no,

that was funny. We had stationery and cards and everything, and it was, you

know, it was, and it actually did, I mean, it was fun and funny, but it

actually did serve a purpose.

Well, we're both working on a bunch of things, some comedies.

We just, I don't know if it's open, has Fair Game opened here yet?

Who's in it for you?

Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. Oh, it's on its way, yeah.

Oh, okay. That was, my wife and I produced that. The sort of Washington...

Yes, yeah, politics. So we just finished that.

And, you know, just, I don't have anything, I don't think either of us

have anything right now scheduled to, you know, about to shoot. I have a

couple of scripts that, again, I'm looking for investors for.

So if anybody, you know, buying this DVD... I've read them and they're

hysterical and they're guaranteed to make a fortune.

Well, one is actually a PG comedy, a slapstick comedy that

families would love to see. So it's not the opposite of a Kentucky Fried Movie

R-rated thing. It's a buddy comedy about, you know, it's a Laurel and

Hardy...

combination who they would they work as busboys at the White House and they

overhear spies talking about a plot to steal the secret plans to the the

government's new invisible plane and so both these guys dream of being in the

Secret Service so they you know they gradually it probably in the worst way

get get it actually get to be in the Secret Service so and the movies called

the secret Secret Service

Well, it's going to be an ensemble comedy like most of the movies that

we've done.

And we want to cast two unknowns.

And we'll make it into a franchise, hopefully.