Getting the Script Settled

Don’t you love it when a plan comes together? In the case of a motion picture, the screenplay is the plan. Although it’s possible to make a bad film even with a good script (it’s been proven), it’s difficult to make a good film with a bad script. Did the screenplay spring to life like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, created fully formed and perfect? That doesn’t happen often. Usually, it’s more like Rubik’s Cube: At a certain point, after a lot of work, re-writing, and switching things around, it finally snaps into place, a blueprint for what turns out to be a decent movie.

Getting the script accepted for finance and filming is the indispensable first step in launching a film project. The choice of a director, actors, music, locations, costumes, set design; everything is based on what starts on paper. We’re looking at a few cases of how movies got made, roughly 1929-82, when it was literally a matter of paper, an industrial process that employed Hollywood’s platoons and legions of anonymous stenographers and typists. Script topics will include the atomic bomb and a trend-setting comedy from the Zucker brothers. Coincidentally, they both involve airplanes.

The Beginning Or The End is a 1947 movie about the making of the atomic bomb. It’s also the title of a 2020 account by Greg Mitchell of how that film got made. You get an overload of political “attitude,” but when it comes to film production, overall, it sticks to the facts. It has a lot of credible anecdotes about how things got done in Hollywood: legal clearances, budget fights, dealing with actors and publicists, worries about competition, upheaval in the executive suites. The usual.

In this case, only two months after the war ended, there were already two dueling Manhattan Project histories: Paramount’s, written by best-selling author Ayn Rand; and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s, written by Frank Wead, a Naval aviation pioneer who wrote military dramas. If you know Ayn Rand, you won’t be surprised that she turned in a script that hailed the bomb as a product of unfettered, basically amoral geniuses. The army barely enters into her story. J. Robert Oppenheimer rather liked her heroic conceptions, even though Rand was then called an extreme rightist and he’d flirted with Communism. However, General Leslie Groves strongly disliked it, and so did Paramount, which quit what Variety called Hollywood’s “atom race” and sold its project to MGM. Now the field was clear for Metro to tell its story.

But what was the story? Was it a rousing, end-the-war triumph? A moral tragedy to stain a nation’s soul? Or a war brought to an end, but with a sober, ominous question mark lingering in the sky? MGM cautiously went with the third option. Author Greg Mitchell, being anti-nuclear, is righteously for option two. He thinks the movie’s basically positive view of creating and dropping the Bomb was forced on Hollywood by government pressure. He’s not 100% wrong, but Mitchell ignores the fact that most Americans of the time strongly felt that way; it didn’t take General Groves to convince them.

The filmmakers were vulnerable to pressure. They were reliant on Groves to okay the script on security grounds. His decisions could not be appealed. They were reliant on the Army to provide access to facilities and aircraft. For a historical drama, they had a lot of living individuals who could demand money or simply refuse to be depicted. Finally, although the White House had no direct power over the studio, President Truman (rather a big participant in the story) could have denounced the film, in those days wrecking its release. So the studio compromised: the suffering on the ground after the Hiroshima blast would not be shown. But neither would Frank Wead’s made-up scenes claiming the Japanese were months away from having nuclear weapons themselves.

Surprisingly, nearly everyone comes across as having decent motives, if not always noble ones. It’s the only one of the atom bomb movies that was able to interview and consult with the leaders of the Manhattan Project. In effect, it was the only onscreen Oppenheimer that Oppenheimer himself would be part of.

A sidenote: even in 1945, the basic way pictures got written, organized, and managed was already a generation old. The potentially chaotic process of those endless rewrites, which came from the studio, the studio’s lawyers, the director, the Army, agents or lawyers working for the real-life people in the story, or the film’s stars, and getting written sign-offs on approved edits was labor intensive. Every studio employed far more stenographers and typists than actors.

As films like The Beginning Or The End were revised, and re-revised story points and lines of dialog, the (allegedly) final shooting script was mimeographed. When scenes were changed at the last minute, a different color paper was used, so the production crew could easily see if everyone was literally on the same page that day.

While the film was finally before the cameras in the summer of 1946, John Hersey’s Hiroshima was published in The New Yorker, which had a major impact on the evolving way elites saw the Bomb. The Vatican condemned the new weapon literally from day one; by ’46, several mainline Protestant denominations joined them. Winston Churchill introduced the term “The Iron Curtain.” The postwar world was looking rougher than we hoped. MGM was buffeted on all sides, sensitive to shifts in public opinion, nervous about the reception of its moderately expensive, somber tribute to the Manhattan Project. That meant even more rewrites and retakes.

The result was a well-reviewed movie, regarded as a responsible, serious effort to depict current history. Toned down to a fault, lacking major stars, it wasn’t a flop, but given its expensive special effects, it was a box office disappointment to MGM.

A generation later, after the TV boom ended the studio-as-movie-factory business model, small armies of clerical workers were still needed whenever films were written, but they were now freelancers, like the writers who employed them. The typists, all female in those days, transformed scribbles and pasted rewrites into something a studio could read, let alone sponsor.

Their freelancer clients sometimes hit it big. A brash, friendly young trio from Wisconsin needed help making scotch-taped, line-by-line fragments, handwritten and mistyped, into a professional looking screenplay. David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker hit the jackpot.

Surely, You Can’t Be Serious is the inside story of writing and making Airplane!. The anecdotes are good, true to Hollywood life, and really capture the differences in culture between the end of the Seventies and now. Until then, nobody would dare make those jokes, and nobody would dare make them today.

Reading about Airplane! and its predecessor, Kentucky Fried Movie, is to learn some of the self-imposed writing and directing rules of the mighty Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team. One rule: one joke at a time. If the background is funny, the foreground is serious, or vice versa. Another rule: don’t keep a gag on screen once you get a laugh. This can be tricky; if the license plate is a joke, make sure it appears on screen only once.

They rejected studio suggestions of “comedy” actors, like James Coco, Dom DeLuise, Mickey Rooney, or Alan Arkin. Paramount had trouble understanding why these “young hipsters” insisted on deliberately un-hip, middle-aged actors from TV, like Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Peter Graves. ZAZ had a framework that, like the early years of SNL, encompassed a spectrum of pop postwar culture of film, television, and advertising. But unlike most new filmmakers of their generation, they weren’t film students the way that Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas and Spielberg were. ZAZ came to films from live comedy.

By now it’s well known that the basic plot of Airplane! was modeled on a 1957 B-movie, Zero Hour, but it also derives comedy from other non-comedies about airliners in distress, like The High and the Mighty, The Crowded Sky, Fate is the Hunter, and above all Universal’s Airport series—’70, ’75, ’77 and ’79 by then. But the script didn’t start out as Airplane!. It started as something easier for ZAZ to do, closer to home: filming brief comic skits that had been honed and polished on stage.

The Late Show, as it was originally called, was going to depict a late-night movie show on local TV, featuring a fictitious film about an air disaster, including a host, fake commercials, and coming attractions for other (mythical) programs. A decade or two later, you’d see this kind of premise on cable TV every weekend. You can just about discern the outline of Airplane! in this very different version.

They didn’t get any encouragement from Hollywood, and temporarily put this project aside in the mid-Seventies to pursue an easier to produce one, Kentucky Fried Movie. They did it the basic way: they each put up $10,000 and got some of their relatives to donate. Out of something like $50,000, they managed to film a couple of provocative scenes from the script. Partial nudity was less expensive than car crashes or special effects.

“The boys” made a critical decision to hire a (slightly) more experienced director, John Landis. Watching him work was their film school. The result was funny enough to get the United Artists theater chain (not UA studios) to put up $600,000 to finish the film. It was a modest success. Now the ZAZ boys had, at least, a track record of one finished film.

But getting Airplane! launched still took years. Using preview screenings of rough cuts to judge audience response has been standard practice in Hollywood since before sound came in. Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers carried it a populist step backwards into the writing/rewriting and reshooting process. These guys ran a tape recorder on every preliminary audience screening. If a minute went by without a laugh, they went back in and ruthlessly cut it. There were no “beloved’ or “sacred” scenes. This was easier when there was not much plot structure to worry about. To quote a Rob Long book title, Set Up, Joke. Set Up, Joke.: They weren’t out to win the Writers Guild of America award.

The next time we return to Selling the Script, we’ll take a look at why certain projects didn’t make it: The similarities and differences between two of Paramount’s juiciest off-screen dramas, a certified USSR Communist in 1930 and a certified SNL cokehead in 1982.