The film was low budget and we only had seven weeks to shoot it. Soon her hair was coming undone and she was laughing uproariously. I looked up the aisle and saw her sitting with the script on her lap. She was very prim and proper, with her hair in a tight bun. There was something on every page that made me laugh out loud and the stewardess noticed. ‘On some moronic level, people do care whether the plane lands and whether Ted and Elaine get together.’ Photograph: Allstar/Paramount
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As more and more fans of Some Like It Hot die off, Airplane! will probably become the No 1 funny movie of all time in polls. Today’s comedy artists – from the Farrelly brothers to Seth MacFarlane and Judd Apatow – all say how the film influenced them. What’s surprising is how long it’s lasted. We believed it’d be a hit, so when it actually was we weren’t surprised. Robert Stack, who played Captain Rex Kramer, used to say: “I get it – we’re the joke!” It’s a satire on a style of acting and that makes it timeless. They also coached Barbara Billingsley, the passenger who steps in to translate. Al White and Norm Gibbs auditioned together and said: “Do you mind if we do our own thing?” We didn’t write any of that, it was all them. When we were auditioning for the “jive talk” sequence, the script just read: “Shi-mo-fo.” We apologised to the actors saying that was the best three white Jewish guys from Milwaukee could do.
On some moronic level, people do care whether the plane lands and whether Ted and Elaine get together. We did all these ridiculous jokes, but always come back to grave danger. The other thing that’s really important is we took the story seriously. He was born to do comedy but was trapped in serious roles for years. Leslie loved goofy things and his timing was impeccable. We told the actors to pretend that they didn’t know they were in a comedy. It eventually came down to this guy who wasn’t a famous name but you’d seen him in lots of things.
Sigourney Weaver and Shelley Long tried for Elaine, the air stewardess, and were both good, but Julie Hagerty was so strikingly different we knew she was the one.Ī bunch of actors turned down the doctor part, among them Vincent Price and Jack Webb. Bruce Jenner read for Ted Striker, the ex-pilot, three times but wasn’t right. Lines like “I am serious – and don’t call me Shirley” would have been 50% less effective. The studio wanted Bill Murray or Chevy Chase, the reigning comic actors at the time.
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