Airplane! was released in the summer of 1980 to instant critical acclaim. To this day, you’ll still see it ranked among the greatest comedy films ever made. A parody of disaster films like Zero Hour! and Airport 1975, it starred Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty as a former couple trapped on a plane with a sick flight crew. It was also the first movie to be directed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (collectively known as ZAZ), who went on to produce the original Naked Gun trilogy.
Getting things from script to screen with Airplane! proved to be a difficult task for the first-time directors, though, as a lot of the different casting choices being thrown around didn’t pan out. One who made sense on paper was David Letterman in the lead role as Ted Striker (which eventually went to Robert Hays). Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker had caught Letterman’s stand-up act at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood and asked him to come in for an audition. A couple of years after he didn’t get the part, they brought his screen test with them during an appearance on Letterman’s late-night show; you can see how all of that played out right here:
The directors liked him and thought he had the looks of a leading man, but Letterman just wasn’t comfortable acting. He kept telling them during the audition that he couldn’t act, and afterward, one of them actually came up to him and told him flat out, “You’re right, you can’t act!” Jerry Zucker still tried to be optimistic and told Letterman’s agent that he thought they could make him into an actor. His own agent’s response? “Fat chance!”
It wasn’t meant to be, but you can see why they wanted Letterman. One name that makes absolutely no sense on paper or anywhere else, however, was pop star Barry Manilow. Three weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin, Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker were informed that Manilow was the studio’s choice for the lead actor. Tom Parry, in particular, was the Paramount executive who told the trio, and as he put it, “Their jaws dropped, and then they broke into gales of laughter.”
They thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Apparently, the directors were keen on practical jokes and had toilet-papered Parry’s car in the past, so they naturally thought he was getting his revenge with the Manilow thing. Not so, he insisted: Paramount really wanted him for God only knows what reason. Parry finally talked Manilow out of pursuing the role by pointing out how inexperienced Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker were, and we were all thankfully spared the experience of sitting through an actual disaster movie.
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