LOOKS LIKE I PICKED THE WRONG WEEK TO QUIT READING ORAL HISTORIES: On the making of Airplane!, including insight on David Letterman's and Sigourney Weaver's auditions, and ...
J. Zucker: When we offered the role [of Murdock] to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I think we offered him $30,000, and then the agent asked for $35,000 because that’s how much this rug cost that Kareem wanted to buy. It was an oriental rug—an art piece, not one to walk on, I don’t think—so our initial reaction was, “That’s got to be the best line we’ve ever heard from an agent.” It was like, “Boy, this guy’s really creative!” But then a couple of weeks later, there’s an article in Time with a picture of Kareem standing in front of the oriental rug that he’d bought for $35,000 after we’d paid him.
D. Zucker: That was another lucky break that we got, because Kareem himself was not the first choice for that role. We actually wrote it for Pete Rose.
I particularly liked the Julie Hagerty lunch date story in there.
ReplyDelete