"The Whole Movie is Doing an Impression of the Genre": Akiva Schaffer on The Naked Gun

In the early 1980s, Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker pioneered a niche of slapstick- and wordplay-heavy spoof-comedies with films like Airplane! and Top Secret!, which displayed straight-faced silliness as a creative modus operandi. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (or ZAZ) also produced the short-lived ABC TV series Police Squad!, which parodied police procedurals and starred Leslie Nielsen as the inept, overconfident Detective Frank Drebin. After Police Squad!'s cancellation, ZAZ to...