"How Silly Can You Get?" - Top Secret oral history contains the secrets to writing spoof movies

These days, the term "spoof movie" tends to conjure up images of churned out hackery from the likes of Friedberg/Seltzer, whose films play less like the Airplanes and Naked Guns of yore, and more like restaged sequences from recent films with a fart joke or a pop culture reference tossed in.  Product like many of the SCARY MOVIE films plays less like satire on the works it references and more like a series of "Hey, remember this moment from a 9 month-old pop culture phenomenon?" The story is threadbare and many scenes are little more than gag after gag.

The godfathers of this genre are David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, whose career-making film Airplane literally invented the spoof movie genre.  Only Mel Brooks could have a claim to getting there first, but there's a wackiness and joke density that permeates Airplane which films like even Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein don't match.

The ZAZ team made it look so easy with Airplane that when working on the film's follow-up, Top Secret! even they didn't seem to understand what really made the film work.  (I personally love the film, though.)  Its something they cop to again and again in this oral history of Top Secret!

I'm reprinting a number of their quotes here because it goes to the heart of what a good movie needs - a strong story and structure.  Everything else is gravy.

Jerry Zucker: We were funny guys who really didn’t understand, had no clue, about movie structure.

Jim Abrahams: ‘Airplane!’ was based on this movie ‘Zero Hour!,’ and that’s a story about a guy with post-traumatic stress disorder and, if you look at it in ‘Airplane!’ pretty carefully, that’s what Bob Hayes’ character had. He was plagued by demons from the war and it affected his personality.

[...]

Jerry Zucker: That’s part of the problem of doing a second movie after a big hit, everybody says, “Well, you must know.” And the fact is, we didn’t. We knew how to tell jokes, but we didn’t understand yet how to make a movie. I don’t know why nobody said, “Hey, take a structure course.”

David Zucker: We thought we hit it out of the park, because it was so funny. We knew we had the jokes. But I think we learned a lesson.

Jerry Zucker: I think some of our best jokes are in ‘Top Secret!,’ but it’s really hurt by not having a story. It doesn’t have much of a story or a hook … joke-wise, we started to run out of gas at the end of ‘Airplane!.’ But the movie doesn’t run out of gas.

Another lesson they touch on is the issue of topical jokes and references:

Jim Abrahams: Especially after ‘Airplane!,’ we started to figure out the rules of comedy beyond just our own instincts of “does that seem funny or not.” And one of the rules that we came up with was if we’re going to parody a specific scene from a movie, that it needs to work on its own. And if you get the fact it’s a parody of a specific movie, well that’s kind of frosting on the cake. 

 David Zucker: When I reflect on it, it’s better that we didn’t do topical humor. And the unique thing about movies like ‘Airplane!’ and ‘Top Secret!’ is that they are still funny. So, when I see them with audiences, they still laugh. 

 Jim Abrahams: There’s a scene on a beach in ‘Airplane!’ where Bob and Julie got wiped out by a wave. In reviews for ‘Airplane!,’ people said, “Wow, wasn’t that a clever spoof of the scene from ‘Here to Eternity.’ Well, we had never seen ‘From Here to Eternity.’ We had no idea that it was a spoof, we just thought it would be funny for a couple to get wiped out by a wave while they’re kissing on the beach. But that got us thinking that if you’re doing a spoof from a scene from a movie, it has to work regardless or not whether or not you get the reference.

 Comedy is about more than just silly gags.  Most comedy writers will tell you that the rules for writing a comedy are the same as writing any other film.  Build off of a strong structure, have a story that makes sense, and have characters who are consistently drawn.  Do all of that and the humor will arise naturally.

You can find the oral history of Top Secret! here.

Rejection letter - Spoof Movie

Dear [Redacted]

Thank you for your submission GALLERIA GUARDIAN MOVIE. I appreciate you advising me ahead of time that it was a spoof movie in the tradition of the SCARY MOVIE series. Not having seen PAUL BLART: MALL COP, I would not have been in a position to recognize that 60% of your screenplay was indistinguishable from the original film, save for the occasional addition of a fart or ejaculation moment.

(Kudos on playing that latter joke in the salad dressing scene, by the way. I assure you no one will see that one coming.)

Regrettably, this script doesn't suit our needs at this time. As you might know, the spoof movie has a very short shelf life and most of films you spoof (PAUL BLART, OBSERVE & REPORT, SAW, I LOVE YOU MAN, THE READER, and of course, MAC & ME) have all already been chewed up and spit out by pop culture. By the time this film could be cast, produced, and released, nearly every pop culture reference in here would be incredibly out of date.

Furthermore, you borrow from those films so liberally that it borders on plagerism. Your one saving grace is that even though you copy at last 3/4 of the dialogue almost directly from the source material, somehow the mere process of running it through the rendering plant that is your copy of Final Draft manages to make the writing so dumb that no legitimate author would ever want to actually fight for ownership of it.

No, I don't need you to send me an updated copy, no matter how much you love the riff on HOT TUB TIME MACHINE you came up with last weekend. Usually these spoof movies work best trying to wring laughs from material that wasn't humorous in the first place. (So at least in that regard, you were quite astute in building much of the film around OBSERVE & REPORT.)

Before you waste another two hours writing a spoof movie compilation of 2012 & ALICE IN WONDERLAND (don't steal that idea, I'm working on it myself) let me give you nickel's worth of free advice. Spoof movies are pretty much the lowest form of spec writing these days. In the old days, the genre still represented creativity. The filmmakers would take the broad strokes of a premise or plot of a major movie rather than cribbing directly for most of the film. Characters might be evocative of specific characters from other films, but rarely to the degree that your writing demonstrates. The plots were also less directly cribbed. For instance HOT SHOTS was similar to TOP GUN really only in that both movies were about hot shot fighter pilots who have romances with female instructors. The stories were completely different.

In contrast, most of your jokes are entirely based on taking bits that were funnier in other movies and simply retelling them. The thought process behind any joke seems to be “Hey, remember how funny this gag was in a much better context?”

If this genre isn’t dead yet, scripts like yours will kill it.

I am not returning your submission to you as you requested. I couldn't bear to keep it in my office for one moment longer than necessary so I shredded it and then burned the pieces.

Best of luck in your writing career,

The Bitter Script Reader