From Flying High to Scary Movie 4, David Zucker and Robert Weiss have made millions from parodies. As William Booth discovers, they like to make fun of each other, too.

David Zucker opens a manila envelope and pulls out a sheaf of glossies documenting his long, strange association with one Robert Weiss.

"I’ve brought some evidence of the movies we’ve made together," Zucker says. He seems a little nervous, a little squirrelly. Weiss sits next to him on the settee, a bear of a man, noshing a bagel and shmear, warily. "I don’t have pictures of our relationship," Zucker explains.

"The police," says Weiss, chewing slowly, "have those."

And they’re off. Zucker and Weiss have been making films for three decades. Their collaboration has resulted in the iconic touchstones of late-20th-century cinematic parody, such as 1980’s Flying High, widely acknowledged as the progenitor of the feature-length spoof. The form has since been endlessly imitated, and consistently profitable. Their original classic was followed by the Naked Gun series and the current Scary Movie franchise, up to the very profitable new release SM4.

If you are unfamiliar with the genre, you need to know this: in Scary Movie 4, escaped monkeys drive forklifts.

A Michael Jackson look-alike comes to save the little children from a war of the worlds. The real Dr Phil amputates his own foot. Charlie Sheen dies of lethal erection.

Scary Movie mocks horror films and pop culture. The Zucker-Weiss product is spoof, it is slapstick, it is stupid. And it has made Leslie Nielsen rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams.

Zucker places his photographs on the glass table. Here is a picture of him and Weiss, along with their other longtime collaborators Jim Abrahams and David’s brother Jerry Zucker, all sitting down, poring over a script, while behind them three naked women are writhing seductively, bound in chains.

"I believe this is a script conference," Zucker says, from the set of their first film, The Kentucky Fried Movie, released in 1977.

"We can show our kids some day," Weiss says. "Here’s Daddy hard at work."

They can do this all day long.

So how did they meet?

"Police training," Weiss says.

Weiss ran a company called Video Systems, which made instructional movies. He needed extras to play victims, cops, perps.

Their first film? Recognition of Injuries, Weiss recalls. "For the LAPD." Jerry Zucker (who went on to direct Ghost) played a victim of a traffic accident. David Zucker, an ambulance attendant. Abrahams was a dead guy on a gurney. Their friend John Landis (who later directed Animal House) played another stiff. Would not Recognition of Injuries be a valuable addition to any film archive?

Trust me. I’ve looked," Weiss says. "It was destroyed for legal reasons."

Gone but not forgotten. "Better that way," Weiss says, and pats his partner’s knee.

When Weiss, who has fallen into the role of producer, and ZAZ, as the writing-directing team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker came to be known, tried to pitch Flying High, the studios were reluctant.

"Nobody would do it. No way. Impossible," Weiss says. "Thrown out of everywhere. There’s the unwritten rule: they will only let you do what you have done."

Because there have been so many imitations, we forget that Flying High was once unique.

"It was the first full-length film parody,’’ says Zucker. "It was comedy without comedians - that was what was different about it.’’

Before, there was sketch comedy. There was Mel Brooks and Blazing Saddles, a spoof of westerns, but it starred comedians.

Flying High was a spoof of the disaster movies popular in the ’70s, especially the Airport films based on Arthur Hailey’s best-selling potboiler, but it had straight actors such as Lloyd Bridges and Peter Graves.

The Naked Gun series parodied cop shows, with washed-up B-movie cop actors. The Scary Movie franchise does horror flicks like Saw, The Ring and The Grudge.

Where did this idea of the spoof come from?

"We’d watch the old, late-night movies, and we’d talk back to the screen," Zucker says.

"The breakthrough we had was saying, ’OK, we’re going to re-create those old movies. But have actors speak lines we would have dubbed.’ "

Weiss: "Also one thing we all shared in our background growing up was Mad magazine. The feature called ’Scenes We’d Like to See’. Six panels. First five were straight setup, a western, a gangster movie, and in the last panel there was what we call the switch and spin. Where they’d reverse your expectations, do something wildly different. This had always made us laugh growing up. And was the philosophical underpinning of this kind of humour."

Zucker: "Which we continue to this day. In Scary Movie 4, the first thing you see in each scene is us putting the audience in that world. We start out very seriously. There’s Tom Cruise’s house in War of the Worlds. Or there’s Sarah Michelle Gellar’s house in The Grudge. Or the bathroom from Saw. Always starts as a serious setup."

Then the joke. They hope.

"These things work because our audience has watched literally thousands of hours of television and film," Weiss says.

"And so what we want to do is stimulate the archetypes and images they already have in their brain, and then the audience starts to work for us. When these jokes work best is when the audience is most surprised where we take them."

Zucker: "If you have people winking and not playing it earnest and it doesn’t feel like a real movie, then you have layers between you and the jokes we want to make. You’re sitting there expecting what is the next funny thing. Chevy Chase comes on-screen and you’re waiting for him to do some shtick. We don’t do that. When Leslie comes on, everything he says is a surprise because he says it with the utmost sincerity. We hire these guys because they’re straight actors."

For Flying High, the filmmakers originally approached Jack Webb, of Dragnet.

"He didn’t have a big sense of humour," Weiss says. "No, he didn’t."

"One actor, the guy who appeared on Rat Patrol, the TV show? That guy was angry,’’ says Zucker. "He hated us."

"Probably dead by now," says Weiss.

"So now we could get him," says Zucker.

"Dying for work," says Weiss.

They got leading men like Bridges (as a glue-sniffing air traffic controller) and Graves, who plays a gravel-voiced pilot and invites young Joey up to the cockpit and delivers that immortal line: "Do you like gladiator movies?"

Their casting director said: Leslie Nielsen? Are you crazy? "Leslie is the guy you go to the night before," Weiss says. "When you’re desperate. He was the most obscure character actor."

"But we knew him, from these half-assed B-movie swamp odysseys," says Weiss.

"Nobody knew there was this guy inside him," Zucker says. "He’s smart. He knows not to crush the scene. The advice I give is let the lines do the work. Don’t put any spin on it."

"There are two kinds of actors you want," Weiss says. "The smart ones who know not to help. And the ones who don’t know what’s going on, and they’re OK too."

How does one persuade, for example, Phillip McGraw, aka Dr Phil, to appear in a movie with a pitch that goes something like this: you’re going to be in a disgusting bathroom from Hell with Shaquille O’Neal and we’re going to have you saw your foot off.

"This call was made by Bob Weinstein," Weiss says of the Weinstein formerly of Miramax, who also runs Dimension Films, which is releasing SM4. "I don’t think he encountered any opposition."

Just the opposite.

Weiss: "Some of the people we call, they say their kids are giant fans. Same with Dr Phil. They’re happy to do it. Fun for him and fun for his family."

Sometimes, though, those they approach are not so happy. They tried to get Don King. "His people didn’t get it," remembers Weiss. "They read the script and somehow they kept thinking we were going to cut his head off and they kept asking, ’Why would Mr King appear in a movie where his head is cut off?’ "

"I have no idea," Zucker says.

Through the years, none of their targets has sued.

"Though we would have welcomed the lawsuit," Zucker says.

"Would have been good publicity." Alas, no filings. "It has never reached the point where it could have helped us," Zucker says. "They’re smart enough to keep quiet."

Weiss: "We sound disappointed, don’t we?"

The spoof genre is generally "critic-proof" fare. Scary Movie 3 garnered $US110 million ($A147 million) in US box office sales. In all, their Scary spoofs have grossed $A778 million worldwide.

At the end of the interview, we head towards the valet-parking line. Zucker pauses. "Can you spin all this in the most favourable light?"

"We’re not evil mercenaries," Weiss says. "Make us seem erudite," Zucker suggests.

"Not complete illiterates," Weiss says.

"You know what reporters always like?" Zucker asks Weiss. "They like a little something - a way to end their articles, what’s called a kicker. Here’s a little something."

He offers a crisp $20 bill. When we play along, reach out, Zucker says, "You don’t have any change, do you?"

Scary Movie 4 is now showing.

 Washington Post