Scary Movie's David Zucker sees no reason not to reboot The Naked Gun now that he's had all the life sucked out of him
Director David Zucker all but defined the spoof movie with films like Airplane!, Top Secret, and The Naked Gun, then entered a hilariously meta phase of his career where he began spoofing the inherent emptiness of spoof movies via the Scary Movie franchise. Or, at least, that’s what fans of his earlier work tell themselves. As it turns out, no, Zucker actually tries to make genuine comedy, and in this interview with Hollywood.com, he offers a fascinating glimpse of how your spoof movie sausage gets made: Basically, Bob and Harvey Weinstein see another sausage, then they demand it be ground up into their own sausage, no matter how that might taste.
Confirming most suspicions, Zucker dispassionately describes how every Scary Movie is conceived first by “rounding up all the ideas that must be in the movie, and piecing them together into something watchable”—a backwards approach that means taking Weinstein-demanded references to other movies and appearances from Lindsay Lohan and Mob Wives’ Big Ang, then haphazardly stitching them into an adequately cohesive story that may not even become clear until the movie’s almost made. “Much later into production we incorporated Mama and even Evil Dead,” Zucker says of how the release of those movies’ trailers toward the end of filming finally gave Scary Movie 5 its main villain, thus explaining a lot.
Anyway, given Zucker’s compliant surrender to the whims of his movie overlords—an indifference that’s made him more fart machine than man—it’s probably no surprise to hear him say that he’s equally open to just rebooting his own The Naked Gun, if that’s what the studio wants. “You could do another Naked Gun, with a reboot. Like Star Trek,” Zucker shrugs, noting that, like Star Trek, it’s “an international brand” for Paramount. Also, the rules of life and death are vague—not that Zucker thinks replacing the late Leslie Nielsen would be much of a struggle. “There are people who can do that and they're not famous. You wouldn't know who they were. But I know actors who can do it,” Zucker said, in a cuttingly satirical spoof of a person who no longer gives a shit.