Comedy Legend David Zucker Reveals Untold Stories Behind Ryan Reynolds, Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Hollywood’s Hidden Secrets
David Zucker
Oh, well, we were in Milwaukee. So, you know, there’s nothing going on there in entertainment business except local TV stations. And I even applied there and always was turned out. My dad suggested I buy a new car and I did. And he thought that would impress them, but it still didn’t. So, it’s so we started our little theater with my brother and Jim Abrams and another guy we knew from high school. And that was the first Kentucky Fried Theatre. And we did a live show in Madison and we did that for a year. And it was gangbusters. I mean, so we were doing stuff that nobody else was doing. It was fresh. It was original. And people thought it was very funny. So, we moved the show out to L.A. where we established the Kentucky Fried Theater in L.A. on Pico Boulevard. It was one hundred and forty seat theater. And we ran that for five years and it became the most successful small theater in L.A. history. And then but we didn’t want to do theater. We had no interest in that. We really want to do. We thought we’d be a TV performing group or movies, something. So, we wouldn’t have to perform on stage. But and so then we wrote Kentucky Fried movie and actually we wrote Airplane first. But, you know, nothing doing. So we did Kentucky Fried theater. I’m sorry, Kentucky Fried movie. And that was, you know, twenty-two separate sketches. And that was really successful. But we went back to our Airplane script, rewrote it and then still got turned down by every studio in town, except for there was one guy. So, and I have found in my career, sometimes there’s only just there’s just one person. It just takes one person to either take a chance, be crazy, believe in you something. And then that, you know, then that opened the door. So like, yeah, Michael Eisner had us into Paramount. Yeah.
