Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker : New Hollywood's “Zany Godards”

• Accounts of the New Hollywood cinema tend to focus on the drama authors – Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma... – and when the usually-neglected names are given more salience, these are again drama authors – Ashby, Cimino, Penn. Yet, New Hollywood cinema also produced remarkable comedy authors who shared with the more respected 'serious' authors some of the cultural tenets from which the New Hollywood germinated: a cinephile knowledge of both the Hollywood tradition and the European auteur cinema, a willingness to rejuvenate Hollywood by hybridising the home tradition with the foreign innovations, a penchant for stylistic experimentation, and an interest in metalanguage and self-reflexivity. Comedy authors like Mel Brooks and the first Woody Allen moved their first cinematic steps in the context of the New Hollywood and manifested their cinephilia through parodical homages, in the form of scattered moments in Allen's films (e.g. the Antonioni homage in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex) or more diffusely in Brooks's spoofs (e.g. Blazing Saddles). I argue that the most peculiar comedic product – or perhaps by-product, given its later manifestation – of the New Hollywood is the ZAZ trio: David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. ZAZ started as the 'Kentucky Fried Theatre' while studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1960s – blending vaudeville nonsense with the irreverence of college lampoon – and later moved to TV appearances. Although their film debut came late vis-a-vis the New Hollywood canonical time-frame – The Kentucky Fried Movie (dir. John Landis, 1977) – the essence of their comedy is well-grounded in the New Hollywood spirit. Film-fans like most of the Baby Boomers, they interpreted the New Hollywood cinephilia through the lenses of their nonsensical and deconstructionist satirical sensibility. More than Brooks and the early Allen, their comedy is systematically focussed on the ridiculing baring of the stylistic and narrative cliches of film genres, to the point that ZAZ's classics (Airplane!, Police Squad, and Top Secret) can be considered sort of zany versions of Jean-Luc Godard's deconstructions of the Hollywood genres – e.g. À bout de souffle and Une femme est une femme.This paper places the ZAZ trio within the context of the New Hollywood cinema and shows how the inaugural film of their catalogue, Airplane!, possesses such self-reflexivity that it can indeed be called a New Hollywood film. Airplane! is not so much a parody of the air-travel disaster movies such as the 1970s Airport series, as a satirical remake of Zero Hour! (1957), a B-movie whose dialogue lines are even quoted verbatim. As Godard both paid homage and deconstructed the Hollywood genres through obtrusive stylistic choices that revealed the technical apparatus, so ZAZ, in their directorial debut, took a mediocre B-movie and remade it by exaggerating its traits. They turned the 'bad' into 'comic' and drama into comedy precisely by applying New Hollywood's cinephile self-reflexivity.

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HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Filmvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Studies on Film (hsv//eng)

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Film Studies

Filmvetenskap

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