In his time, David Zucker directed four iconic comedy classics – the legendary “Airplane!” (aka. “Flying High”), “Top Secret!,” “Ruthless People,” and :The Naked Gun”.
Since then, he has also worked as a writer and/or producer on those films along with the likes of “BASEketball” and the “Scary Movie” franchise. However, he’s also been pretty vocal about the state of comedy in films today and how things play it too safe.
With the recent “The Naked Gun” reboot now well past us, Zucker has now offered his take on the film and tells Woman’s World that it missed the mark of the classic spoof style of comedy he pioneered with his brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams.
He also indicates the film spent way too much money, and adds that’s something comedies shouldn’t do:
“My brother, Jerry, and our partner, Jim Abrahams, started doing spoof comedies 50 years ago, and we originated our own style — and we did that so well that it looks easy, evidently. People started copying it, like Seth MacFarlane for the new ‘Naked Gun.’ He totally missed it.
You shouldn’t spend too much money on comedies, and one of our rules is about technical pizzazz. Big budgets and comedy are opposites, and in the new ‘Naked Gun,’ you could see that they spent a lot of money on scenes full of technical pizzazz while trying to copy our style.”
He adds that he thinks it was made exclusively for financial reasons: “Everybody’s in it for the money now, and that feels like the only reason why they wanted to do a new ‘Naked Gun'”.
MacFarlane was a producer on the reboot while Lonely Island co-founder Akiva Schaffer directed the film and penned the script with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand.
Interestingly the original “The Naked Gun” cost $12 million, which works out to $33 million in today’s dollars – not that far from the $42 million actually spent on the reboot.
