In Memoriam: Jim Abrahams

I wasn’t more than 8 years old, and it was a late spring / early summer central Iowa evening spent entirely under a tornado watch, meaning I was allowed to stay up late in case we had to hurry to the basement to seek shelter. My parents must have been staying abreast of the situation via radio, or maybe the tiny monochrome TV we also owned, because the color television in the living room was tuned to HBO which was showing “Airplane!” (1980). I had never seen it, and though I don’t remember anything specifically from watching it that night, I still remember the overall experience, how my parents probably put it on to calm me down. It’s hard to worry about twisters dropping from the sky when you can’t stop laughing. Over 30 years later, during the early days of the first global pandemic of my lifetime, I had a similar experience in stumbling upon “Hot Shots!” (1991) on some television channel one evening and hearing a joke I didn’t remember. “Interesting perfume,” remarks Topper Harley (Charlie Sheen) to Ramada Thompson (Valeria Golino). “It’s Vicks,” Ramada replies. “I have a cold.” For a few seconds, the world was brighter.

“Hot Shots!” was co-written and directed by Jim Abrahams who co-wrote and co-directed “Airplane!,” the first letter of his last name doubling as the middle letter of the so-called Team ZAZ acronym – (David) Zucker, Abrahams, and (Jerry) Zucker. The trio grew up together in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 60s, early 70s where they formed a sketch comedy show called Kentucky Fried Theater. Though the era was turbulent, they eschewed commentary for generating laughs. KFT received a rave from George Hesselberg of the Badger Herald independent student newspaper and in speaking recently with the Wisconsin Alumni Association, Hesselberg noted, “(W)hat I was the most impressed with is how serious they were about being funny. The ‘seriousness’ was everywhere at that time, the antiwar feelings and all. There was a big hole in the humor blanket — and here are these guys being very serious about being funny.” That observation evokes the most celebrated punchline in “Airplane!”: “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”

That seriousness about being funny is what set “Airplane!” apart as the funniest American movie of the 80s. Unlike the chaos of a movie like “Animal House” (1978), as Janet Maslin noted in her contemporary New York Times review, “Airplane!” had “a steadier comic attitude.” “The film’s sense of humor is distinctly predatory,” Adam Nayman wrote in honor of its 40th anniversary, “sizing up every possible element in the frame—the actors, the sets, the music, even the subtitles—and treating their basic integrity as either momentarily or wholly expendable in the service of a joke.” The great revelation of “Airplane!,” though, was to task its actors with playing serious rather than silly. Almost no one is on the joke. (The exception is Stephen Stucker essentially playing the movie’s own peanut gallery as a person.) When I caught up years later with “Airport,” the 1970 disaster movie from which “Airplane!” cribs its conclusion, I was surprised how in its way, the latter did it better. “Good luck, we’re all counting on you,” Dr. Rumack (Leslie Nielsen) enters the cockpit to say at an especially dramatic moment, calling back to an earlier line, his posture and voice oblivious to the airliner rattling and rocking, simultaneously the greatest release valve and the greatest send-up of a release valve in screenwriting history. That’s impressive. 

After “Airplane!,” ZAZ dabbled in television with the cop show spoof “Police Squad!” that despite being unceremoniously cancelled after only six episodes still paved the way for the other funniest American movie of the 80s, “The Naked Gun – From the Files of Police Squad!” Nielsen reprised his role from the small screen as the immortal Lt. Frank Drebin, becoming an unconventional movie star along the way, his impeccable stone face a stand-in for the last sane man, in a manner of speaking, in a world gone to cats and dogs, which is why the Nothing to see here sequence endures, the This is fine meme before the This is fine meme, before memes themselves. What’s more, as a testament to its own unflagging creativity, a movie which begins as a police procedural spoof improbably morphs not only into a preeminent baseball movie spoof but the preeminent baseball movie by virtue of nothing more than one extended sequence on the diamond, taking all the game’s stuffy regimented pageantry and running it through the shredder, epitomized in Lt. Drebin mangling The Star-Spangled Banner.

 

ZAZ would eventually split, amicably, not acrimoniously, and in 1991 both David Zucker’s “Naked Gun” sequel and Jim Abrahams’s “Hot Shots!” took their turn at the top of the box office. A spoof of “Top Gun,” and all manner of movies in-between, the latter could feel a little closer to the trio’s 1977 sketch comedy debut “Kentucky Fried Movie” than the true narrative subversions of “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun” but it was funny, occasionally even truly inventive (one could mount a contrarian case that despite “Terminator 2” and “Point Break” the best action scene of 1991 is the funeral scene in “Hot Shots!” – I mean this) and more than anything, perhaps, Abrahams deserved immense credit for turning leading man Charlie Sheen’s unchanging facial expression and monotone into the perfect vehicle for ludicrous wordplay and deadpan punchlines. The inevitable follow-up, “Hot Shots! Part Deux” (1993) was, aside from the Great Expectations joke, perhaps best for the accompanying half-hour mockumentary, “A Filmmaker’s Apology,” in which Abrahams spoofed Eleanor Coppola’s “Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” about the turbulent making of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” “We had access to too much money, too many extras, too much manpower,” Abrahams says at the start, tongue firmly in cheek even if it might double as a clarion call on behalf of filmmakers who have access to no money, no extras, and no manpower. 

I don’t think Abrahams was ridiculing Coppola, just gently lampooning him and his tendency toward self-mythology even while innately pointing out there were a couple different ways to make a movie. Fittingly, both “Apocalypse Now” and “Airplane!” were both eventually deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the National Preservation Board and selected for preservation within the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress, two sides of the same coin. “Apocalypse Now” was about the horrors and horrifying riddles of existence and in its own way, so was “Airplane!” and so was “The Naked Gun” too which is what I thought of when Abrahams died last week at the age of 80. Near the end, Ricardo Montalban’s villain dies when he falls to the cement below, run over by a bus, and then a steamroller, and then stomped all over once more for good measure by a marching band. Watching all this from above, Capt. Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) is moved to tears. “That’s so horrible,” he says to Drebin. “My father went the same way.”