Jim Abrahams, the writer-director who with brothers Jerry and David Zucker turned the comedy genre on its ear with such zany efforts as Airplane!, Police Squad! and The Naked Gun films, died Tuesday. He was 80.
Abrahams died of natural causes at his home in Santa Monica, his son Joseph told The Hollywood Reporter.
The trio made their first mainstream impression by writing the sketch-filled Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), directed by John Landis in his prelude to Animal House, and they also combined for Top Secret! (1984), starring a young Val Kilmer, and Ruthless People (1986), featuring Bette Midler and Danny DeVito.
Without his childhood buddies from Wisconsin, Abrahams directed Big Business (1988), starring Midler and Lily Tomlin, and co-wrote and helmed Hot Shots! (1991) and its 1993 sequel, both starring Charlie Sheen.
Joke-filled and laden with sight gags and puns, the humor of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, or ZAZ as they came to be known, was fast, frenetic and just downright silly. Parody was their specialty. Everything was ripe for ridicule — the more absurd, the better.
Nothing demonstrated this better than Airplane! (1980).
While scouring TV for material, they stumbled upon Zero Hour! (1957), a black-and-white melodrama co-written by Arthur Hailey about a troubled World War II pilot (Dana Andrews) who has to overcome his fear of flying when the crew of the commercial plane he’s on falls ill (from eating bad fish!) and he’s the only one who can land the aircraft. They immediately saw the potential for parody.
To make it all the more perfect, Zero Hour! was owned by Paramount, which was looking to greenlight a ZAZ project in the wake of The Kentucky Fried Movie. The filmmakers secured the rights for $2,500, commandeered the film’s plot and dialogue and even named their hero Ted Striker (played by Robert Hays) after Andrews’ character.
Michael Eisner, who was running Paramount at the time, told THR in 2012: “I don’t know what motivated me except that at the time everyone was making airplane movies. Films like Airport, based on the Arthur Hailey book, were as ubiquitous as superhero movies are today. And they kind of always worked.”
With Abrahams and the Zuckers all getting writing, directing and producing credit, Airplane! opened in June and brought in $83.5 million off a modest budget of $3.5 million. At the time, it was the No. 3 grossing big-screen comedy in history, trailing only Animal House and Smokey and the Bandit.
“The humor is an ingenious concoction of satire, spoof, burlesque, slapstick, raunchy dialogue and low-comedy sight gags. The jokes are directed at sex, politics, religion and almost everything else. The level of humor is not always consistent, but the filmmakers have thrown almost everything in with a shotgun approach, and the routines work more often than not,” Ron Pennington wrote in his THR review.
“The direction is as wild and wooly as the script, but the team of Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker has a good eye for visual jocularity, and they set the sight gags up for maximum effect.”
Instead of employing comedians, ZAZ used familiar TV drama actors Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen to deliver their tongue-in-cheek dialogue. They knew it would sound much funnier if delivered deadpan by performers known for their serious work.
“The biggest struggle was to cast straight actors as opposed to comedians,” Abrahams said in a 2019 interview. “At first, Paramount was resistant to that idea. They didn’t quite understand why we wanted to do something like that. There was something very endearing about those four actors spoofing themselves in the movie. In essence, they had had full careers, and they were kind of having a laugh at their own expense.”
Nielsen, who plays Dr. Rumack, the voice of reason on board the plane, particularly embraced the role, nailing the punchlines of such exchanges as:
Rumack: “Can you fly this plane and land it?”
Striker: “Surely, you can’t be serious.”
Rumack: “I am serious … and don’t call me Shirley.”
Struggling to find a follow-up film after Airplane!, Abrahams and the Zuckers turned to TV and in 1982 created Police Squad!, a midseason send-up of police procedurals for ABC that starred Nielsen as the intrepid, if inept, Det. Frank Drebin.
Though the series was critically acclaimed and scored two Emmy nominations — one for Nielsen and one for ZAZ’s writing, it aired just six episodes before being canceled. But cable reruns brought it a new following, and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, directed by David Zucker, made it the big screen in 1988, grossing $78.8 million.
With Nielsen reprising his role as Drebin alongside squadmates played by George Kennedy and O.J. Simpson, the comedy generated two sequels — The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991) and The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994).
James Steven Abrahams was born May 10, 1944, in Shorewood, Wisconsin. His father, Norman, was a lawyer, and his mother, Louise, an educational researcher.
Abrahams’ friendship with the Zucker brothers dated to their childhood years; their fathers were business colleagues, the families attended the same synagogue, and the boys all went to Shorewood High School and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (Abrahams graduated from college in 1966, followed by David in 1970 and Jerry in 1972.)
The roots of the ZAZ mayhem can be traced to 1971 when they (and Dick Chudnow) founded the Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison. A mix of improvisational sketches and pre-taped spoofs of commercials and TV shows, the multimedia revue gave them the boilerplate for the style that would make them famous. They called it “comedy judo,” using the audiences’ expectations against them.
“There were a bunch of groups in that era who were making political jokes, and there were lots of easy, obvious targets,” Abrahams said. “But that was just never our instinct. Our instinct was always to watch a movie and say, ‘Isn’t’ that silly?'”
Kentucky Fried Theater proved popular enough that it convinced the trio to re-create the experience in Los Angeles in 1972. Landis caught one of their shows and convinced ZAZ to fashion their bits into a movie script that he would direct.
The Kentucky Fried Movie hit theaters with a lineup of sketches that included the film parodies “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble,” “Cleopatra Schwartz” and “A Fistful of Yen” and spoofs of commercials for Household Odors and the United Appeal for the Dead. Stringing it together was a running bit featuring an anchorman breaking such news as “I’m not wearing pants … film at 11.”
Donald Sutherland, Henry Gibson, Bill Bixby, Tony Dow and George Lazenby popped up in cameos, and Abrahams and the Zuckers played various characters throughout the film.
“I remember making The Kentucky Fried Movie and thinking, ‘Someday I’m going to get married. Someday I’m going to have kids. And someday I’m going to have to explain this to them,'” Abrahams quipped.
After the success of Airplane!, the trio passed on the 1982 sequel — after all, there was no follow-up to Zero Hour!— before combining elements of an Elvis Presley musical and a World War II spy thriller for Top Secret!
As Abrahams and Jerry Zucker explained in a 2014 interview, it exposed their flaws as writers.
“We kind of figured after Airplane! that we’d be able to pop one of these babies out every year or two. We didn’t quite understand what we had with Airplane!, I don’t think,” Abrahams said. “We didn’t quite get the importance of a story. We struggled coming up with a story for a while. We came up with a lot of bad ideas.”
Added Zucker, “We were funny guys who really didn’t understand, had no clue, about movie structure.”
Abrahams, however, rebounded with Hot Shots!, a no-holds-barred spoof of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun that he conceived with Pat Proft, who had written the first Police Academy movie and would co-write two of the Naked Gunfilms.
Then, with Hot Shots! Part Deux, Abrahams and Proft poked fun at the Rambo movies.
Abrahams also directed Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990), a coming-of-age film starring Winona Ryder, and Jane Austen’s Mafia!, a 1998 Godfather spoof starring Jay Mohr and Christina Applegate. He and Proft also served as co-writers with Craig Mazin on the David Zucker-helmed Scary Movie 4 (2006).
In addition to his son Joseph, survivors include his wife, Nancy Cocuzzo, whom he married in 1976; his daughter, Jamie; another son, Charlie; and his grandchildren, Caleb, James and Isaac.
In 1993, Charlie, then 11 months, developed a difficult-to-control form of epilepsy. Daily seizures became part of the family’s life.
Desperate for relief, the Abrahams put Charlie on a ketogenic diet of high-fat foods, and Charlie’s seizures stopped within days. Within a month, he didn’t need medication. After five years on the diet, he was able to eat regular food. The seizures never returned.
Out of gratitude and as a way to help others who were experiencing what they had gone through, the Abrahams in 1994 founded the nonprofit Charlie Foundation for Ketogenic Therapies, which helps fight epilepsy, other neurological disorders and select cancers. (He also directed a 1997 ABC telefilm about a woman and a son with epilepsy, … First Do No Harm, starring Meryl Streep.)
“When you have a kid as sick as Charlie was, a hundred times a day you say, ‘Oh, please God, make the seizures go away. I’ll do anything.’ Then, when they did go away and we began to trust that it had really happened, I looked up and sure enough, there was God, patiently drumming his fingers,” Abrahams wrote in an essay for Cure Epilepsy.
“Charlie’s seizures had stopped, and now it was my turn to make good on my promise — I had to do anything I could to help other families who were living the nightmare from which we had finally awoken.”
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