Comedy Legend David Zucker Reveals Untold Stories Behind Ryan Reynolds, Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Hollywood’s Hidden Secrets
David Zucker
The best spoof is when you have what we call materials. And so we watch serious movies. And for airplane, for instance, we watched a movie called Zero Hour. Did you ever remember that?
Ashley
No.
David Zucker
Oh, well, you go on YouTube and put in Zero Hour Airplane. It’s scene for scene. We copied the plot, a lot of the dialogue. We even bought the rights to the movie. And that’s what airplane is. Actually, it’s Zero Hour. It’s a melodrama about a guy who boards an airplane. He’s got PTSD from the war. There’s food poisoning. Pilots are knocked out. He’s got to fly the plane down. So that was all in one. So for Star of Malta, we just love this film noir, anything made from 45 to 55. And Zero Hour was 1957. So it’s in that ballpark. There is a movie called Detour, very famous noir movie. And I can’t even think of who the actors were that were in it, but it was a B movie. And it was filmed in 1945. And so, we took that plot, but it only went two acts. So, another thing we teach in Master Crash is if you want to write a movie, you got to know the three act rules. And first act, you get your hero up a tree. Second act, you throw stones at him. And the third act, you get him down. And it’s very important to have a character arc. And a lot of people don’t know that. We didn’t know that when we did Top Secret. So, Val Kilmer, we wrote a movie for him. He didn’t have a character. So at the end, the audiences were not as satisfied as they were with airplane. So we took Detour, which had two acts. They appear to have run out of money in that. It just ends. Partially to budget and partially toward to the haze because of the haze code. You have to have, if a hero kills somebody, the character has to get a comeuppance. You have to pay the price. Anyways, so we added a third act, a whole third act to Detour. And a love story that actually has a happy ending. And it’s great. It’s a wonderful movie, low budget, $12 million. So, we somehow got the money raised. We’re in pre-production and we’re casting. But now we have to, for the money to kick in, we need to cast the lead, the lead actor.
