There aren’t many parodies that outstrip their subject, leaving them in the dust to the extent that most people don’t even realize what they’re looking at is a parody at all. Artists tap or play into fads, trends, perceptions, and misconceptions all the time: “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is a death-of-grunge woe-is-me piece of “complaint rock” practically written in character by Billy Corgan, and it’s become The Smashing Pumpkins’ biggest hit; five years later, Corgan was taken to task by Jon Pareles for the lyric “If I were dead, would my record sell?” He chastised The New York Times music critic for taking his words at face value, unable to see the conceptual framework of the Machina album and its attendant characters and plot lines. Well. It does all get a little bit complicated in Pumpkinland, you don’t have to be a super-fan to know that.
Elsewhere in music, “Weird” Al Yankovic has enjoyed tremendous success, but none of his songs have ever come close to overshadowing their subjects. “Eat it,” “Smells Like Nirvana,” “Dare to Be Stupid,” and “Fat” were hits, but Michael Jackson held the crown. So did Devo. In film, the last wave of spoof movies hit in the late-2000s, with dreck like Epic Movie, Date Movie, Disaster Movie, and the actually decent Not Another Teen Movie (a 2001 precedent, not a proper movie of quality on its own like the Scary Movie films, but, as opposed to Epic Movie, watchable). These films not only parodied current hits—300, The Day After Tomorrow, The Notebook, Napoleon Dynamite—they took on commercials as well, like Paris Hilton eating a fat Carl’s Jr. burger near-naked on the hood of a car.
My dad has written about the lousy quality of commercials now, and this extends everywhere: clothes, food, films, books, music, politics—the 2020s run on Bargain Basement prices and Bargain Basement rules. You’re not even expected to know how to read or write anymore. Now, 55 years ago, there was an odious piece of commercial art called Airport directed by George Seaton and adapted by him from Arthur Hailey’s bestselling novel. Hailey’s Airport was a drugstore and airport smash that millions of people read (a decade later, you could still get it on spinner racks, which is exactly what the creators of Airplane! did when they appropriated the conversation about Swiss abortions being “medically safe” with “no risk of complications”). Millions more saw the film, which star Burt Lancaster called “the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever been in.”
Phooey. Airport is good, especially considering how successful and ruthless Airplane! was and still is. The ZAZ parody tackles the entire 1970s disaster epic craze, along with films like Saturday Night Fever, From Here to Eternity, and of course its primary basis, 1957’s Zero Hour! (Airplane! is a remake of Zero Hour!; when John Landis advised ZAZ that their script was “basically plagiarism,” they optioned remake rights for a song). Airplane!’s generational success and cultural endurance made Airport invisible, but not laughable: this is a tough, serious, and hardly humorless American blockbuster, and a dark turn for producer Ross Hunter, known for his Doris Day movies and Universal “smileys.” Consider, too, the cast: Lancaster, Jean Seberg, George Kennedy, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, Maureen Stapleton, Jacqueline Bisset, Dean Martin, and Barry Manager of the Overlook Hotel Nelson.
By the time Seaton made Airport, he was near the end of a long, auspicious, and hardly-talked about career, dotted with titles like Miracle on 34th Street, Teacher’s Pet, and, as screenwriter, The Song of Bernadette. He had a fruitful relationship with producer William Perlberg, but by 1970, nine years before his death, he was working with Hunter on what would become his biggest hit and his penultimate film (1973’s Showdown, a Western starring Rock Hudson and Dean Martin, came and went, although Quentin Tarantino has praised its “low-key modesty”). But Airport was never known as a “George Seaton film,” nor was the director singled out and studied like so many others by the French New Wave or Americans like Andrew Sarris and James Monaco. In 1970, and ever since, Airport has merely been an event movie that catalyzed a decade of disaster films, from Earthquake to The Towering Inferno to Rollercoaster and on (not to mention the three Airport sequels). Airport is used as a point of comparison with the far hipper and more brash and experimental work of the then emerging New Hollywood, and as a piece of trivia—1970 was the nadir of the film industry so far, and financially, Airport saved Hollywood’s ass.
This is how Airport is seen today, if it’s seen at all: as crass, commercial, bloated, and uncool. But this is all received “knowledge,” because next to those junky made-for-TV looking Mission: Impossible sequels, Airport is a cinematic marvel: well-lit, brisk, and a deft piece of entertainment that’s hardly dated in the 55 years since its release. I wonder if Nathan Fielder took a look at it before he prepared the second season of The Rehearsal, given how fixated Airport is on showing process and actual navigation techniques. Several real airport personnel are shown and given lines, even in split screen sequences with Martin and Nelson. It’s amusing noticing how much Airplane! took from Airport, from the abortion conversation (transposed to the P.A. announcers in the beginning), to the nuns, the annoying nerd kid, stewardesses slapping passengers, the shoehorned-in love story. But it’s even more remarkable that, despite this, the film not only works, it makes today’s disaster epics (like Twister) pale in comparison.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits
