The Naked Gun

Naked Gun was built by reversing scenes from serious genre films. David Zucker's team watched straight movies, including noir, Bond and Clint Eastwood films, and took their scenes, lines and plots, then flipped what the audience expected in each scene. Airplane! had followed the 1957 drama Zero Hour almost exactly, so the structure was already built and only the surprises needed writing.

Naked Gun combined several films, one of them Telefon, a Charles Bronson movie about mind control by beeper. They took Telefon's idea but not its whole plot, which kept it legal. Zucker adds that a surprise alone is not funny: "It has to be a surprise that gets a laugh."

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Making Frank Drebin a man who needs love fixed Top Secret's flaw. Zucker learned from Top Secret that a hardware problem is not enough: the hero needs "an inner psychological problem that he had to solve" in the first act. Drebin starts Naked Gun with a girlfriend who left him, so the plot becomes boy meets girl, loses girl, gets girl.

Top Secret had some of his best jokes but no clear emotional story and did less well than Airplane! and Naked Gun. The same boy-gets-girl ending carried Naked Gun 2½ and 33⅓. Without a story, he says, more jokes just become tiring by the third act.

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Putting the O.J. gag in the background made it about 50% funnier. In Naked Gun, O.J. Simpson tumbles down the steps behind Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley while the scene carries on, and Zucker says playing it in the background raised the laugh by about 50%.

He learned it from Harold and Maude, where a man sets himself on fire behind a conversation that keeps going. The background gag must relate to the scene: an unrelated spear and falling watermelon in Airplane! got no laugh.

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End a joke once it has landed instead of carrying it forward. Zucker asks of every gag whether he can live with it after it lands. In Naked Gun the pistachio-pink lips are gone in the next scene, and Nielsen's scratched, messy look after crashing through a skylight disappears in the next shot.

A costume or a joke license plate fails because you are stuck with it. His rule: "a joke can't stay after it's a joke."

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Straight acting, relentless pace and fixed rules keep the films working decades later. Actors never acknowledge a joke, every beat is a setup or a joke, and any gag a preview audience called funny without laughing was cut. An 800-person Sketchfest screening 40 years later reacted like the first audiences.

Priscilla Presley was cast from watching her in Dallas, never read for the part and needed no direction; she was told to do what she did there. The rules date from 1972 and work mainly as a list of what not to do, and Zucker prefers a two-shot to a reaction shot because cutting to a reaction cuts the laugh by about 50%.

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