- Kentucky Fried Movie (writers)
- Police Squad! (pilot)
- Airplane!
- Top Secret!
- Ruthless People
0 voters
They directed the other four…which is best?
Backward and forward.
Loved that scene. It rivals the opening tracking shot in Touch of Evil…
I love Airplane! but Top Secret gets my vote. Sure it’s more of a mishmash but the Beach Boy parody is priceless .
By the way, that middle name should be “Abrahams”, not “Abrams”.
My bad. This wasn’t a case of a typo…I looked up the collaboration to see which movies they had to their credit, so I had the name right in front of me. Yet I always thought it was Abrams and I looked right through it. I learned something new today 
I liked the visual gags. The vehicles driving in a circle at 3:00 is a favorite.
Just re-release Airplane! with some lens flare added in.
While I do love Airplane! I voted for Ruthless People. Although Airplane! is brilliantly done, at the end of the day is is a snarky parody of a cheesy movie. Think MST3K covering Zero Hour, but with a full movie studio and budget at their disposal. Ruthless People is hilarious, has quotable lines, but also has a fairly complex plot with multiple twists.
It’s been a long time since I saw “Ruthless People”, and I think it was the only time, so I don’t remember any quotable lines from it, but has ANY movie more quotable lines than “Airplane”?
ETA: I LIKED Ruthless People. I don’t want to denigrate it, it’s just too long back. I also like “Top Secret” al lot, which I saw originally in the theater and have seen a few times more. I’m just more accustomed to Airplane and Top Secret.
Take him to Detroit.
AIrplane because it’s the funniest movie ever made. Although the others aren’t far behind.
Are you lonesome, tonight? Is your kitchen, a fright…
What about the “Naked Gun” movies? Weren’t they also Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker productions? I liked all three parts as much as Airplane and Top Secret.
Naked Gun = David Zucker only.
And btw: Hot Shots was Jim Abrahams only.
See chart here:
Jerry Zucker directed Ghost?!
Thanks for the charts! And one Zucker directed Ghost??? 
It was one of the most ridiculous films I’ve ever seen, where my girlfriend and I laughed ourselves out of the cinema because the cheesiness was so brutal. I remember a scene at the end when the bad guys got sucked into hell, right through the concrete of a street, Whirling, with dark clouds around them. 
ETA: Maybe, in hindsight, it was also meant as a surreal comedy.
Try as he might, he couldn’t stop directing comedy? 
I’m like you—would have guessed all of ZAZ were behind some of those other pics. For whatever reason, they went their separate ways. Was there a falling out? Did they feel they had to go solo, get out of each others’ shadows? No idea.
See my ETA 
.
“If everybody had a 12 gauge
With a surfboard, too…”
Also, that line about forcing him to look at Leroy Niemann paintings being a violation of the Geneva Convention.
Can you educate me as to why just the pilot of Police Squad not the full series?
This page indicates that they actually created the series…and that there were only six episodes.
Remember the “freeze frame” that wasn’t at the end of each episode?
If the three created Police Squad! and it led to the Naked Gun films, why didn’t the three work on those together? This article says that it’s rare to find three directors working together because they divide the pay three ways.
I would also figure TV directors to earn less. A movie in theaters might generate millions and millions of dollars. Looking at the Wikipedia page:
Written by David Zucker
Jim Abrahams (1 and 2)
Jerry Zucker (1 and 2)
So as writers they were all in on the first two.
The IMDB listing for Police Squad! lists seven different directors for the show’s six episodes. ZAZ only directed the pilot. The five other episodes were directed by others.