JIM ABRAHAMS
(10 May 1944 - 26 November 2024)
The American director, producer and screenwriter Jim Abrahams, who has died from leukaemia at the age of 80, will be most remembered for his work with the brothers Jerry and David Zucker on a number of wacky comedies beginning with Airplane! in 1980. This was an evocation and send-up of all those disaster films of the 1970s where everybody was involved in group jeopardy calamities provided by earth, air, water or fire. With their tongues firmly in their cheeks, the trio of Abrahams and the two Zuckers had everything that could possibly happen on a flight packed into one film, a disaster comedy. They used ordinary actors and not funny men which gave the film an air of supposed seriousness. At the time Leslie Nielsen was not noted for comedy roles and neither were Robert Stack, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges or Kenneth Tobey. With its barrage of both aural and visual gags, plus cod end credits, Airplane! turned out to be a great success. There was a sequel (Airplane II: The Sequel), but the trio of movie musketeers were not involved and it was not as good as the original.
James Steven Abrahams was born in Shorewood, Wisconsin, to a Jewish family, researcher Louise and lawyer Norman. Abrahams knew the Zucker brothers through school and synagogue and all three went to university together. Abrahams worked for a law firm but soon got involved in making shorts and videos to show at a local bookshop. Eventually they started making feature comedies such as Top Secret!, an action comedy with Val Kilmer, Omar Sharif and Peter Cushing in a parody of an Elvis movie but it failed to be that popular. Between their first two movies they had made the Police Squad series for TV but that didn’t take off. However, it did reveal a source for Lieutenant Frank Drebin, the lousy detective played by Leslie Nielsen in their Naked Gun trilogy. Before that, though, came Ruthless People with Bette Midler and Danny DeVito, and Big Business with Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin, a comedy based on the identical twins plot of The Comedy of Errors. The two films were not written by the trio and were just not funny enough.
Hot Shots! and Hot Shots! Part Deux were parodies of Top Gun and Rambo but the best of the Abrahams-Zucker collaborations remain in The Naked Gun and its two sequels which, if nothing else, made comedians of George Kennedy and O.J. Simpson. Abrahams wrote and executive-produced the first Naked Gun and just executive-produced two and three. He often made small appearances in the films, too.
Jim Abrahams was married to Nancy Cocuzzo and together they founded The Charlie Foundation to Help Cure Pediatric Epilepsy. They had three children, Charlie, Jamie and Joseph. Abrahams was a man of the cinema who helped to bring great joy to millions of people just by making them laugh – a lot!
MICHAEL DARVELL