David Zucker

Born in Milwaukee in 1947, David Zucker made his career with two other people: his brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams. As Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker they wrote and directed Airplane! in 1980, and the model they used there, gags stacked in the dialogue, the background and the frame at once while every actor plays it dead straight, has been copied by every parody film since, mostly badly.

Police Squad! (1982), which he is credited with creating, put the same method on television, and the film franchise that grew out of it is the most durable thing any of the three made. Zucker directed The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988 and The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear in 1991. Top Secret! (1984) and Ruthless People (1986) round out the group era, the first the strangest thing they attempted, the second an actual plotted comedy with actual performances in it.

On his own the record thins. BASEketball (1998), My Boss's Daughter (2003), Scary Movie 3, Scary Movie 4 (2006) and An American Carol (2008) are Zucker directing without the other two, and only the Scary Movie pair are still quoted. By then the form he helped build had been ground down by imitators into simple reference-spotting, and his later films are not immune to that.

He acts occasionally, mostly as himself: three segments of The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), an appearance in O.J.: Made in America, a version of himself in Winning Time.