Word: zucker
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...Lansing, "and I enjoyed them. I said, 'My God, what happened to that genre?'" Paramount hired Andy Breckman, a writer best known for his work with Saturday Night Live and David Letterman, who penned a screenplay free of fart jokes and full of ambitious, carefully crafted gags. Enter Jerry Zucker...
...nothing else, Rat Race marks the return of a director who was one of Hollywood's kings of comedy in the 1980s. Zucker got his start in show business 30 years ago as part of the Kentucky Fried Theater, a comedy troupe he formed in Milwaukee, Wis., with his big brother, David, and their buddy Jim Abrahams. They built the sets, hung the lights, wrote the sketches and, because of budgetary restrictions, did all the acting themselves. "We all embarrassed easily," recalls Zucker, "so we hated to have a joke that clunked or a long time between jokes. We wanted...
...time of ZAZ's last directorial collaboration, Ruthless People in 1986, they had all matured. First, they refrained from including an exclamation mark in that film's title. Second, "we were all capable of directing a movie ourselves," says Jerry, who now runs Zucker Productions with his wife Janet. On their own, David directed the Naked Gun movies, and Abrahams regressed to unnecessary punctuation with the Hot Shots! flicks. Jerry, for his part, decided it was time to put the spoofs behind him. "I got tired of satire," he says. "It was fun, but I didn't feel like doing...
...Zucker originally envisioned a dream team for the Rat Race cast. "We started out looking at the $20 million players," says the director, who had hoped that comedy titans like Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith and Adam Sandler would trim their fees to form a star-studded ensemble. "I guess in the beginning we all thought everybody would just have to work for two weeks, so we could afford these deals," says Zucker. "But then when we laid out the schedule, it was four or five or six weeks for each actor." He quickly set his sights...
...might say Rat Race is an updated variant of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, except that the new film was directed by a guy who actually has a sense of humor (Jerry Zucker) and written by a funny guy named Andy Breckman...