‘Airplane!’ was almost ruined by Barry Manilow and David Letterman
nypost.com“Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!” (St. Martin’s Press) by the film’s creators David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, with interviews by Will Harris, Paramount executive Tom Parry broke the news to the team, known collectively as ZAZ. “Their jaws dropped, and then they broke into gales of laughter,” Parry says in the book. “And they said, ‘You got us!
That’s the funniest thing we’ve ever heard!’ The thing is, the guys used to do things like toilet-paper my car, and they thought I was getting back at them.
And I said, ‘No no! It’s real!”Parry managed to dissuade Manilow from taking the role by emphasizing that the film would have three first-time co-directors.
But the insanity of the casting idea in the first place emphasizes how difficult “Airplane!” was to cast, and how widely misunderstood it was even by those in charge of creating it. “Airplane!” evolved from ZAZ’s popular L.A.
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