Let's Do Lunch
- Jul 11
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 17
On this week’s Naked Lunch podcast, co-hosts Phil Rosenthal and David Wild welcome Julie Haggerty and Robert Hays/ As the show writes, “SURELY you can't be serious that Phil and David welcome the stars of ‘Airplane! to ‘Naked Lunch’ -- and don't call us Shirley! The episode starts off with Julie, then Robert makes his entrance as they discuss everything from making the original film and their current live tour together where they show and discuss the 1980 comedy classic. And eventually Monica Horan Rosenthal and her friend Dani Modisette join this joy ride.”
It’s a very fun and charming episode, filled with some terrific behind-the-scenes tales. I especially enjoyed their stories about Leslie Nielsen who I worked with on “The Naked Gun” films – and I will only say that their stories about his love of his whooping cushion “fart machine” are 100% true, he absolutely loved it and carried it with him everywhere, even on set. (He’d hide it under his belt.) And he was as enjoyable a guy as they make him appear in this conversation. Though I didn’t work on “Airplane!” with the ZAZ team (Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker), I did work on four movies with David Zucker, and his “Rules of Comedy” overlap with all they say here.
Two comments on things said in the conversation:
When asked who the guy was in the taxi cab that’s left running the whole movie, the best they can remember is that he was a politician involved with “Proposition 13,” a very controversial ballot measure to block property taxes from being raised. Actually, that’s only sort of right – his name was Howard Jarvis, but he wasn’t a politician. He was just a longtime advocate for the property tax measure (that was a bit more contentious than it might sound. It had great benefits of keeping property taxes down, but also problematic for not allowing the state to have the income needed to make improvements.) And Jarvis was sort of a blowhard character who the ZAZ guys wanted to have fun with, which is why they chose him to be they guy suck in the taxi with the meter running the whole time.
Also, they briefly discuss Ken Finkleman, who wrote and directed the sequel to “Airplane!,” and no one seems to know anything about him, other than he also did “Grease 2,” and so they all basically dismiss him. As they note, the ZAZ guys didn’t want to be involved with the “Airplane!” sequel and distanced themselves from it. But that aside, Ken Finkleman was a talented Canadian filmmaker who, among other things, wrote, directed and starred in an edgy, dark, wonderful comedy series called “The Newsroom.” This was not the later HBO series, but ran for three seasons on PBS from 1996-2005, and in between they made a two-hour TV movie. (Finkleman was asked in an interview about the title, and said that HBO asked him for permission to re-use the title. He said he was okay with that because he didn’t plan to revive his series.) It was done is a sort of documentary style that predated the original British version of “The Office.”
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