Flying High: And at Bargain Rates
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
bar to enjoy "Miller Time." This is pretty light stuff, not far removed from the TV fare it pokes fun at. But it doesn't try to be anything more. It has good pace and a mood of nutty high jinks...
...The Blues Brothers is one of the more disappointing films of the year...
...Among his credits was Hollywood Boulevard, made in ten days in 1976 for $50,000...
...This is the same sense of humor that Airplanel has, which isn't surprising since Abrahams and the Zuckers made it, too...
...As a matter of fact, Airplane/ began as a production by doing something really unheard of in Hollywood: reducing its budget...
...Davison,~ Abrahams, and the Zuckers brought in Airplane...
...Abrahams and the Zuckers felt so strongl~ that their remake of Zero Hour must be deadpan to be funny, they turned down one chance to do the film because the company putting up the money wanted to use established comedians like Bill Bixby and Dom Deluise...
...for $3.4 million, less than half the original estimate...
...at the box office...
...broke into pictures by letting Corman exploit them at salaries way below scale...
...Except for the jokes, every line of dialogue and every camera angle is the same...
...At one point, for instance, a house- wife who has just recited a Yuban commercial a few scenes earlier becomes hysterical...
...This means that Airplane...
...As a protdgd of Corman's, Davison had learned how to keep costs down...
...Indeed, the fact that the public doesn't see much difference between the two films is the source of the problem...
...The rule of thumb in the movie industry is that a picture has to gross two to three times its original cost to show a profit...
...As the camera pulls back we see that a long line is forming, each passenger carrying a more lethal weapon than the one in front of him and all together turning the action into a momentary reprise of Murder on the Orient Express...
...This is precisely the sort of movie that Abrahams and the Zuckers found hilarious, an old action flick just the way it comes, straight out of the can...
...It is by sticking close to whatever is satirized, by playing it straight, that the movie gets a laugh out of us...
...Corman has made two hundred quickies in the last twenty years, almost all of them profitable, and half the movers and shakers in Hollywood today --Francis Ford Col~pola, Peter Bogdanovich, Jack Nicholson, etal...
...The resulting movie, as producer Jon Davison has pointed out, "is probably the most slavish remake ever done...
...The argument the moviemakers were able to use to get their way about the casting, of course, was that such talent is cheaper than movie comics with big reputations...
...He doesn't appear in Airplane!'s credits because his 1956 contract stipulated that his name was not to appear on any remake...
...Another passenger on the plane begins shaking her to bring her back to her senses, but does it so violently that he appears to have lost his own senses instead...
...There's a message for the movie industry in the difference between Airplane/and The Blue Brothers, though it's a message to which that industry has proven remarkably deaf in the past...
...at $8 million...
...At the peak of their earning power, which is a very short period of time the way films are marketed today, Airplane/and The Blues Brothers were each grossing about $1 million a day...
...The humor in these gags is inseparable from their mildness...
...The first of two parts...
...It needs to earn $80 or $90 million to become profitable, and its director and stars won't actually begin to get a percentage until $100 million...
...The deal which Abrahams and the Zuckers wanted was finally made at Paramount, where producer Davison, a man with vast experience in working cheap, was assigned to the project...
...Abrahams and the Zuckers held out until they found a company that would agree to use serious actors who were either unknowns or old TV stars like Peter (Mission Impossible) Graves and Lloyd (Sea Hunt) Bridges...
...It is therefore one of the smash hits of the year...
...COLIN L, WESTERBECK, JR 12 September 1980:503...
...To The Blues Brothers' $32 million in production expenses you can probably add another $8 mil- lion for advertising and promotion, thus bringing the total to a neat, round $40 million...
...Airplanel is an adaptation of a movie that was no doubt shown at the theater at some point, a 1956 feature entitled Zero Hour...
...went into the black as soon as it passed the $10 million mark, which it did within a couple of weeks of its release...
...What gives the contrast its special irony is that The Blues Brothers was made by the producer-director team of Weiss and Landis, the very same that collaborated with Abrahams and the Zuckers on Kentucky Fried Movie...
...Its satire is warm-blooded, more a kind of antic consumerism than anti-consumerism...
...Roughly equal numbers of moviegoers were attending each...
...This makes the contrast between Airplane/and The Blues Brothers a really killing one, even though the public is una- ware of it...
...He says that the studio "first budgeted Airplane...
...They said that the last disaster spoof, Columbia's The Big Bus, had cost seven, and they added a million for in- flation...
...The movie earned $50,000 for the Spanish rights alone, so the production cost was covered by Spain...
...Airplane...
...The story of an ex-fighter pilot who has to take over the controls of a passenger flight when the crew gets food poisoning, Zero Hour was written by Arthur Hailey, whose later, more successful Air-port series is another of Airplane?'s targets...
...In this parsimony they were, again, only being true to their success with Kentucky Fried Movie...
...Halley must have had an intuition that ZeroHour could come back to haunt him...
...Yet to the people in the movie industry itself, the two pictures are hardly equatable since there was a $28.6 million difference in what they cost to make...
...As soon as he saw Paramount's budget for Airplane/, Davison thought it was too high...
...It has good pace and a mood of nutty high jinks that's infectious...
...That's what it has cost for The Blues Brothers to stay even with Airplane...
...is a pastiche of visual puns, one-liners, sight gags, running gags, and slapstick, all of it based on familiar allusions to TV and other movies...
...Seeing this, a third passenger steps in to push him aside and calm the woman, but then this interloper loses control even more and begins slapping her...
...For four years Davison had worked at New World Pictures as production chief for the undisputed king of Poverty Row, Roger Corman...
...It was a bet I made over lunch with Roger," explains Davison...
...This approach is true to the philosophy which guided programming at the Ken- tucky Fried Theater...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 16
