Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 511 - Legendary Film Director Jim Abrahams

Episode Date: April 17, 2021

Jim Abrahams is an American movie director and writer, best known as a member of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker. Abrahams was born in Shorewood, Wisconsin, the son of an educational researcher, and a lawyer. He is best known for the spoof movies that he co-wrote and produced with the Zucker brothers, such as Airplane! (for which he was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay) and The Naked Gun series. Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

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What up, Power Project crew? This is Josh Sutledge, aka SettleGate, here to introduce you to our next guest, Jim Abrams. Jim Abrams is a movie director and writer, best known for being a member of Zucker, Abrams & Zucker. Jim Abrams was born in Shorewood, Wisconsin, and is the son of an educational researcher and lawyer. He is best known for the spoof movies that he co-wrote and produced with the Zucker Brothers,

such as Airplane, which was nominated for a BAFTA award for best screenplay, and the Naked Gun series. He has also directed several movies on his own, such as Big Business, and he further honed his skills in parody with Hot Shots and its 1993 sequel, Hot Shots Part Deux. Abrams and his wife, Nancy, are also the

co-founders of the Charlie Foundation, which is a foundation designed to help cure pediatric epilepsy. But that is a different story for a different time. Please enjoy this conversation with our guest, Jim Abrams. All right, so you started the Charlie Foundation many years ago when your son was suffering from epileptic seizures can you explain to me a little bit of what like what is an epileptic seizure what is what does it mean well an epileptic seizure is when the wiring in the brain goes south and it can manifest it can be a very subtle movement, like an eye roll, almost a blink, and it can be what most of us think of more commonly as what they call a tonic-clonic seizure, where you lose control of your muscles and you black out,

and it can be anywhere in that range that a seizure occurs. Most of us don't know is that there's a world epilepsy population of around 60 million people. Wow. So it's much more common than we know, and I think part of that is because there's thousands of years of stigma against people, ignorance against people who have epilepsy because the movements can be so jarring to anybody who doesn't know. It can be scary. And so over the centuries, there have been tons of myths

about what causes epilepsy and what seizures are, whether it's demonic possession, stuff like that. Right. And what does cause it? What caused it in your son? Any idea? Is there a genetic component to it or something like that? There can be. Seventy percent of people who develop seizures, never find out why.

And Charlie, my son is one of them. We never did learn why it just out of the blue, one day he started having seizures. And at first they were kind of subtle, but then they got to be much bigger and more dramatic and all that. Yeah, I'm a parent too, and it just seems to be terrifying to have your child suffer from something, and especially when they suffer from something that you don't know what the hell to do about. Right.

Where did you guys start? You just try to put it in the hands of the doctors, but maybe they don't always have answers, right? No, that didn't work out. See, yes, we started going to see doctors, first a local neurologist, and then there was a point in my career where things were going quite well, and so indirectly I had connections with lots of big shots at lots of hospitals.

So we actually took Charlie. His main pediatric neurologist was at UCLA. But we also got to take him to see heads of pediatric neurology in Boston, Seattle, stuff like that. And they were all in agreement about what we should do. What the treatment options are, they all said, well, you can give them drugs or you can do brain surgery, and that's about all we can do for you. And how old was he at this point? He started having seizures right around his first birthday

And so the following months were and they kept getting worse and by you know He wound up averaging about 12 seizures a day. Oh, we could see I mean, it's really a sick kid. They last how many seconds? Right. How long do they last? I'm sorry. They could last anywhere from a split second to 45 minutes. were told back then in the early 90s that if a seizure lasts more than 30 minutes, it can be dangerous. It can screw up a person's brain. So what we would do when you would

start a seizure, first thing Nancy or I would do was just yell out the time. And then if we were like, he was like 20 minutes into it and he was still, the seizure was still going on, we'd climb in the car and go to the hospital and they would inject something that would kind of knock him out and hopefully stop the seizure. But it was only, that was a 30 minute time slot. We were told about. But then a few years later, out of the blue, we learned, no, actually, it's after five minutes that a seizure can do brain damage. So we had held him there, I mean, I laugh out of pain. We had held him for long periods of time, many times, and just kept watching and watching, waiting for 20 minutes to pass

so we knew we were 10 minutes from a hospital where they could give him something to stop the seizure. And then how old were your other children at that time? Yeah, they were six and seven years older than Charlie was. So it was pretty, that's, and I'm glad you asked that question, because I think one of the really overlooked aspects of epilepsy in children is the effect on siblings. Yeah. Because as all of a sudden, A, they were kind of the hot shots of the house for all those years until their brother came along. And then he was so sick,

and his mom and I just had no alternative other than to spend lots more time and pay lots more attention to our sick little kid as opposed to these other kids. And that makes siblings, that stirs up a whole bunch of feelings and emotions in siblings. I heard on another podcast you mentioning you tried to hide it from your other children, but you didn't do a good job of it. Looking back at it, do you think you would have been,

I don't have any clue what I would do in the situation, but looking back on it, do you think it would have been better just to kind of sit them down and say, here's what's going on, like we just have no other choice because he's very, very sick? I think it would have been, I think that's probably what we did say. But that didn't... It doesn't help, really. I don't think it helped you.

Still need time. I mean, still, when you're a six- or seven-year-old and your friend comes over to play and your little brother has a seizure, it can be embarrassing. Right. It was only in later years that Charlie's older brother said, how could I hate someone I love for having a disease he can't control?

So it's very complicated. And I think it's even more complicated for boys, older brothers, But I think it's even more complicated for boys, older brothers, because we don't even know we have feelings until we're old men. And girls, from the time they're little, girls, from the time they're little, they're talking about feelings and stuff like that. So Jamie, our daughter, was much more equipped to deal with Charlie being sick than Joseph, his older brother.

At that time, did anyone know anything about how a ketogenic diet or a low-carb diet, how it could help? Yes. Yeah, it was well-known, and it was well-documented. I mean, one of the big... But it wasn't mentioned to you? No, none of the doctors who we took Charlie to see mentioned anything about diet. Not a syllable about diet. Not a syllable about diet. And the way I sort of found out about it is that I mentioned Charlie's main doctor was at UCLA, and one day we were at UCLA, and after the doctor's appointment, I went to the medical library at UCLA and looked up epilepsy.

I don't think I was, I know I wasn't trying to find a cure. I mean, that wasn't on my radar. We'd taken to all these great specialists and, you know, they said we were pretty much out of luck. But when I looked up pediatric epilepsy in the medical library, very early on, you come across ketogenic diet. And you find out that it was developed in 1921 at the Mayo Clinic to sort of mimic the effects of fasting.

It's been known forever. There's even biblical references to people who have bad seizures who fast and the seizures go away. And that just sat there for hundreds of years until the Mayo Clinic decided, came across that kind of information. They said, can we make a diet that sort of tricks the body into thinking it's fasting?

And that was the ketogenic diet. So they started using the ketogenic diet on people with epilepsy as early as the 20s. And what I found in the medical library was that different doctors from different hospitals in different decades, every decade from the 20s to then the 90s, had tried the ketogenic diet on a number of kids with difficult to control seizures. the ketogenic diet on a number of kids with difficult to control seizures. And about 30% had their seizures go away. Another 30% were significantly improved. And for 30%, it didn't work. Well, that's an outstanding kind of statistic to stumble across

especially after nobody had mentioned anything to us and so when you found this information out and started to mention it was there resistance towards that or were the doctors

or were you just like hey this is what my kid's doing I don't care what you say well no we were still young and naive or are you just like, hey, this is what my kid's doing. I don't care what you say. Well, no. We were still young and naive. So, yeah, there was resistance. As a matter of fact, at the same time, Nancy, my wife, had come across through a friend of a friend, an herbalist in Houston, Texas, who gave herbs to kids with bad seizures.

And evidently it had some positive effect. So we went to Charlie's pediatric neurologist at UCLA and said, well, listen, we've got two things we've come across. One is this diet that's supposed to help a lot of kids with epilepsy, and the other is an herbalist who works out of a strip mall in Houston, Texas. So Charlie's doctor said, you know, flip a coin. I don't think either will work. And so for the last time, we took his advice, flipped the coin, came up Houston.

So we got on a plane with Charlie and went to the strip mall in Houston. And this guy, nice guy, gave us some herbs and they didn't work. And around the same time, because I was now obsessed with this diet thing, I had come across a study that was published in a medical epilepsy, which is the number one epilepsy medical journal in the United States. And in the article in epilepsy, it was written by a doctor from Johns Hopkins Hospital and a couple of other people who worked at Johns Hopkins. And it was published in 1992, the year before Charlie got sick.

So it's kind of hot off the presses in the biggest magazine or journal. And it said they had tracked 58 consecutive kids who were as sick as Charlie, multiple daily seizures, multiple daily medicines, and of the 58 kids, 29% became seizure-free on the ketogenic diet. So I called the doctor from Johns Hopkins who wrote the article, and we chatted, and he said, send Charlie's records.

And we did, and he said, why don't you bring Charlie to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and we'll try the diet. And at the time, Charlie was on four anti-epileptic medicines and averaging, like I say, about a dozen seizures a day and experiencing what they called progressive retardation. And two days after Charlie started the diet at Johns Hopkins, his seizures disappeared. Wow. They seizures disappeared. Wow. They went away.

And within a month, Dr. Freeman from Hopkins had weaned him off all of his drugs. And that was, it was right before his second birthday, and he just turned 29. He's never had another seizure. He just turned 29 recently? in real life and and he's uh he he's no longer on a ketogenic diet he was on the diet for five years um we had one experience back then the lore and i think it still is the um when the kid does as well as charlie on the diet, after two years, they can wean him off and he can just go back to a regular diet.

And our experience was that after a couple years on the diet, when we weaned him off, his seizures returned. I know, that was scary. But we called Dr. Freeman and he said, you can either do drugs, you can do nothing, or put him back on the diet. So or put him back on the diet so we put him back on the diet for a couple years and after that when we weaned him off his seizures were gone and he's never had another seizure never taken another anti-epileptic drug and he's

eaten whatever he wants for the last 25 years. When you saw that he didn't have, so did he have seizures every day, no matter what, pretty much? Before he was on the keto diet? You know, for a few months in there, I actually kept charts. I imagine you do everything, anything you can. And because they were always, like, lowering or adding drugs or stuff like that. You wanted to see how he reacted and everything. Yeah, it's a different thing.

And I think there were days when he wouldn't have seizures, and I know there were days when he'd have like 100 seizures. When he would go two, three, four days, when he went two or three or four days without a seizure, what was that? It must have been unbelievable like once he went like a week without it yeah well they used to when they would try a new drug there were back then there were maybe eight or ten anti-epileptic drugs and so when you would switch from one drug to another, there would be what they call a honeymoon period,

where the drug would temporarily seem to be doing the trick, but invariably they would stop working. And so then doctors would start to lower a dose of this and raise the dose of all sorts of stuff like that. So we were, certainly at this, raise the dose, all sorts of stuff like that. So we were, certainly at the beginning with the diet, we were very apprehensive. We thought, well, maybe this is just one of those honeymoon periods. It's very difficult having children and just trying to steer the ship of what they learn, how they learn, where they go, who their friends are,

just all the different stuff as parents that you face. It must've been really difficult for you and your wife. Did you guys, I mean, I imagine you guys would fight about it. It must've caused a lot of stress in the household and it must've been really brutal. So somebody that's listening to this that maybe has a kid that has seizures or maybe has a kid that has a disease, what would your advice to them be to be able to get, how do you get through that period and still stay together? Yeah, that's a good one. I mean, I think what you mentioned before about to the extent you can, but even that's sort of subjective, you know,

to involve the siblings in what's going on with the disease and the treatment of the disease. But you can't, I mean, if they're little kids, it's really hard. Because if they're little kids, you don't want them to know that mom and dad are panicked too. So you've got to keep a stiff upper lip. And I don't have, I mean, we did the best we could, but I think there was constant tension

that was pretty much rarely acknowledged. I wish I had a better answer. Yeah, no, that's great. You just did what you could. Yeah, it's just survival. And then your son now, is he healthy? He had to have a lot of treatment, it sounded like. Yeah, he did.

And the first two years of brain development are the most important. And so he does have some autism, Charlie. But he made it to school and is a teacher and boxes and plays piano and stuff, but he does have

some residual. And that's part of what keeps me motivated. Because I think if all the doctors we had taken him to had just mentioned the word diet to us, we would have put him on the diet right away. I mean, right away. Statistically, now there's so much more science and everything, but statistically, today we know in the published medical guidelines

for the use of the ketogenic diet for people with epilepsy is that the diet should be strongly considered, that's their word, after the failure of two medicines. Well, that would have been a few weeks with Charlie. Right. And the diet would have worked right away with Charlie. And so for the year when he was really sick and we were drugging him and when he had a brain operation and all that stuff was unnecessary. We didn't have to do that. Was there any other doctors at the time practicing that, like in different countries or anything like that?

I think that when Charlie started the ketogenic diet, he was one of maybe a dozen people in the world who were on a ketogenic diet for any reason. Right. For any reason at all. And most of them, I'm sure, were on the diet for epilepsy because all the other subsequent stuff that we know about today hadn't really emerged.

How did you get him on a ketogenic diet? I mean, a clinical ketogenic diet is a tremendous amount of fat. And then at that time, there's a lot of stuff out there now, a lot of products you can take nowadays. But they didn't have the conveniences back then. So were you just feeding them bacon and oil and stuff, basic butter. Pretty much, we were very lucky in that there was a dietician at Johns Hopkins

who was back then in the early 90s on the verge of retiring. But she was still there when Charlie went on the diet. And so she was there during the heyday of the diet. At first when the diet for epilepsy was developed in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, stuff like that, it was an early intervention.

It was one of the first things they tried because there were no drugs, or very few drugs. And Mrs. Kelly, the dietician, was at Hopkins when we took Charlie there. So she had 40 years of experience with kids on a ketogenic diet back then. And so she would literally fax us meal plans. Oh, nice. When we initiated the diet, we stayed in Baltimore for about a week. But then we came home and she would fax us meal plans when she'd kind of wait.

But you're right. It was bacon, you know, two grams of bacon, lots of heavy whipping cream because it had a heavy fat contact. The other thing that's sort of, there have been so many changes since then, but there was no food labeling in the early 90s.

Oh, yeah. Right? So everything had to be weighed and measured. We had this old ram scale, and we were adding oil to everything. Plus, he was a picky eater, so it would take forever to feed the cat. Right.

You had to basically wait for him to be very hungry kind of thing. You didn't have the luxury of doing that. Right. Because he had to be fed three meals a day, you know, because you wanted his level of ketosis to remain high. because you want his level of ketosis to remain high. Right. So it was sort of, right. And Nancy would go to health food stores

and just look for anything that had no sugar and tasted decent. Right. I mean, there wasn't much. So it was, and there's a lot of, like, hot dogs you would eat, cheese. I think they say the grocery store has, I think 80% of what's in the grocery store has sugar in it. Yes.

Even the bacon and some of the meats that you get. Right. I just saw some sort of talk about that. There's 600,000 processed food products in the United States today, and 80% are loaded with sugar. And it's owned by like six or seven companies. Right. We must have watched the same TED Talk or something.

Yeah. Yeah, it's incredible. We're up against it when it comes to our health and nutrition. It makes it very difficult. What have you seen with your research and with the Charlie Foundation and bringing the keto diet to just get a lot more attention, what have you seen it also be able to help? Have you seen it be effective with uh like type 1 diabetes

type 2 diabetes what have you seen it be effective for any other types of disease yeah especially when it concerns children um yeah can i just backtrack yeah absolutely second yeah for sure one of the things i discovered why the ketogenic diet is underutilized is that physicians and even dietitians but physicians are not taught nutrition and diet therapy and for me that was like mind-blowing how could you not teach I mean this is all about what we eat for all of us even when you're in the hospital they feed you crappy food they feed you and you're there because your heart or something doesn't make any sense i know but for me that was a real what when you start to

understand and appreciate the forces at work that are trying to talk us out of a healthy diet. For me, that was a powerful part of the learning curve. When you learn the influence, the ignorance of physicians, when you learn the power of drug companies, medical device companies, when you learn that some hospitals approve new protocols, not because based on revenue generating before efficacy. I mean, there are a lot. And when you learn that hospitals have trouble getting reimbursement for trained ketogenic dietitians, I mean, there's a lot of forces who don't want

this information out there. I remember my dad was very sick. He was in the hospital for like 70 days. And as he was there, he was in Jamaica Queen's Hospital. I spoke with one of his doctors and the doctor's like, oh, you know, I've heard so much about you from your mother he's like i'm glad you're finally here because i wanted to ask you a bunch of questions about nutrition and i was like how is this possible how is he asking me questions about like of course i study it and i research it just because i'm into fitness and i like training and all that but i don't have any letters in front or behind my name for anything. Right. And they just said they only took one nutrition course, is what some of the physicians were mentioning to me.

It was for a semester, and there wasn't really a huge focus. I became friendly with a guy named Tom Minahan, who's a physician, an emergency room doctor, and his daughter had bad epilepsy. And he went through the same drill that most of us go through of taking his daughter, you know, trying all these medicines on his daughter, and it didn't work. And so finally he got a ketogenic diet and put her, Mallory, on the diet. And I think when last we talked, she'd been seizure-free for over 500 days. And as part of his job as an emergency room physician,

what he does is he travels around the United States and lectures other emergency room physicians about emergency room protocols and stuff. So because of his daughter's experience with the diet, he's added two slides to his presentation. And I've been at a couple of them. There'll be like 100 physicians in the audience watching him present his stuff. And he's added two slides. He said, number one, how many of you physicians in the audience have ever heard of a ketogenic

diet? And his guesstimate is around 5%. And then after that, his follow-up question, of the 5% of you who have heard of a ketogenic diet, how many know it can be a cure for epilepsy? And no one has ever known that. I always ask people, you know, do an informal survey among physicians you know and ask them how much time did you spend in medical school

learning about diet, you know, diet therapy and nutrition. And that's, it's virtually, it's very little or none. What else have you seen the ketogenic diet be able to assist with? Yeah, so I think the first news, I mean, this is like, I was sitting on the sidelines, you know, just promoting the diet for epilepsy. And I knew it was, it had,

Atkins had promoted it, I think as early as the 70s, as a weight loss diet. So that's the first I knew of other kind of stuff. But then in the late 90s, middle, late 90s, we started to hear about using the diet for cancer. There's a guy named Tom Seyfried. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm familiar with him. Yeah, great guy. And he was on sort of the leading edge of that. Actually, the diet for cancer goes back to the 1930s. It has almost as long a history as the diet for epilepsy. There's a guy named Otto Warburg who developed glycolysis, and this whole idea that you can use a ketogenic diet for cancer

goes back to the 1930s. And he won a Pulitzer Prize. So it was lying there. It was for a long time. But somewhere in the mid-late 90s, Tom Seyfried and a bunch of other scientists began to figure out how the diet can be used for cancer. And I can't

and the mechanisms, I mean I go to these meetings all the time and for the use of the diet, for anything. And I can never, I'm just, I can't understand what they're saying. It's just too complicated. It's like way above my head. But I kind of know what they're talking about. So it makes me feel good. But you can sort of feel,

understand with cancer what's going on because cancer cells at least feed off of sugar. And if you deprive a diet of sugar, the cancer cells don't get any food. They don't get any. So even I can get my mind around that. And so, but it's much more sophisticated like that than that and now as you mentioned there is they know so much

more about which cancers it's more or less effective right um in mechanisms for different cancers. What about other childhood diseases? Has anybody brought it up to you that maybe it's effective for type 1 diabetes or type 2 diabetes? Definitely for type 2 diabetes. Type 1 is complicated, kind of, right? Pardon me? Type 1 diabetes is kind of complicated. I think it's more complicated.

I think there's more complicated. I think there's some information, again, but for type 2 diabetes, my understanding is that anyone, most people with type 2 diabetes should be on a ketogenic diet. It would be, you know, the whole, because it's a correlation between sugar and type 2 diabetes and uh you know starting the foundation and now being you know super

passionate about it uh it sounds to me like you shifted your focus from being a director and a writer screenplay writer and things like that into just diving all the way into this. To me, it seems really courageous to be somebody in Hollywood and then to just say, like, I'm nobody. I don't know anything. I'm going to go and research this myself. I'm going to go to the library. I think that's unconventional thinking on your part. I think that's unconventional thinking on your part. I think that's pretty

damn awesome. Because I think a lot of people think like, oh, you know, you mentioned you have good connections with some big people and stuff. And so it would be easy just to say, I'm just going to throw money at this. I'm just going to throw my, going to leverage my celebrity off of this, you know, just by connecting with the right people, but you just took it a step further and you just kept researching it. You just, you had to know. And so I think that's really awesome that you took it upon yourself. What do you think was like a, obviously you're dealing with the difficulty of your son is a driving factor, but I heard you talk about this scenario where there was this building on fire and the neighbor mentioned to the fire. Yeah and the neighbor mentioned to the fire department

about them going up higher and how they could put it out. I think that really sums up maybe your mindset in some ways. Well, I really do. That's interesting. Yeah, so that was Mrs. Zabotsky's Law. And basically Mrs. Zabotsky's Law, this started years ago when I lived in Milwaukee and was just starting to partner up with Dave and Jerry Zucker. And Mrs. Zabotsky was our next-door neighbor.

And one day when the Zuckers were gone, were not at their house, Mrs. Zabotsky walked out on her second-story porch and noticed the Zuckers' house was on fire. So she called the fire department, and they came and they tried to squirt water on the fire, but they couldn't get the water up to where the fire was. So she said to the fireman, why don't you come and stand on my porch, and then you can squirt from there. And so they did, and then the fire went out. They put out the fire, which led to Mrs.

Sabatsky's law, which is never assume you can't do someone else's job better than they can. And then, of course, the humbling corollary, which was never assume someone else can't do your job better than you. So it's kind of a two-edged sword. But I think that was sort of, with Dave and Jerry and me, that was sort of with David and Jerry and me that was sort of our motivation when we because we were just these three guys from Milwaukee with no movie training or anything like that and but we thought we had a good idea and so we got into the movie business yeah how did you guys meet up well our our dads um were actually business partners when we were boys in Milwaukee.

And I'm three years old, and David is six years old, and Jerry. So our families knew each other, but not all that. That's interesting. I didn't know you guys all knew each other for that long. Yeah. That's interesting. And our sisters were college roommates and stuff. So, yeah, our families were close, and then later after school,

we ran into each other and started messing around with video recordings and having fun making stupid jokes about farts and stuff. What kind of comedy were you into at that time? Was there something that was inspiring you that you saw? I think our inspiration was I don't remember really. It was pre I'm trying to think. Annie Hall. Pre-everything.

Yeah, it was pre-everything. We had electricity. So that was a long time ago. But I think the main inspiration for us was seeing how many things people took seriously that didn't have to be taken seriously. We never got into political humor because other people were seriously that didn't have to be taken seriously like we never got into political humor because other people were doing that stuff

but when we would look at TV, early TV especially and movies from back then all these things were taken seriously and it's gosh it just seems so easy to poke fun at the FBI and Father knows best and love story.

I don't know, do you know Love Story, the movie Love Story? Yeah. It's about this guy, this couple, because we did a little spoof on this couple, and if she gets sick and she goes to hospital and she's dying of cancer and we did a little skit about it and she says to him how you doing honey he's coming to visit her and he says well i've got this kink in the back of my neck and he goes on about just his neck is sore and she's i don't know So we would just have so much fun making fun of those kinds of things. And then you kind of got Kentucky Fried Movie started

when you guys were in Milwaukee, you said, and then you kind of moved out here to California. Did you all move out together to California to actively pursue making movies? Yeah, David and Jerry and a couple other kids who were in the theater group and I, we like... You just thought you were going to make it happen. Well, our goal was to make it onto The Tonight Show, to be honest. We could make The Tonight Show, you know, it's all good. Did that ever happen?

In fact, it's all good. Did that ever happen? In fact, it did. Awesome. And we sucked. And like for the first 20 years after that, this was like 1974 that we were made on the Tonight Show. For the first 20 years after that, whenever I would go back to Milwaukee, our hometown,

I'd wind up apologizing to people who had stayed up late that night because we were pretty bad. But, you know, it was helpful. We learned a lot. We learned that it's helpful. It's not that what we,

the skits that we did were bad. It's that we never rehearsed with the camera and so the camera would be over here but the joke would be over there so that was an early lesson in directing is oh you know if you're going to do a joke might as well put the camera on the joke so people can see it. Where did some of the ideas come from to have multiple jokes going on at one time? Because a lot of times, in one of the movies, someone's being waited on, and then the guy walks away and he has no pants on.

Right, right, right. There's just stuff like that going on in the background. Right. Did you guys have inspiration from something else, or was it just you guys were just being wacky and just trying to make each other laugh almost? I think we were, in addition to having access to video equipment, which nobody did back then,

so we got to film stuff and show it to an audience in the theater, which was called Kentucky Fried Theater. We actually performed also. And that was a tremendous learning experience for us too because none of us was comfortable being on stage acting. I mean, it didn't come naturally to any of us. We'd get nervous. So we learned editing,

and we learned how to pile jokes on top of jokes so the audience wouldn't have enough time to think these guys can't act. But that's where that sort of style, that kind of relentless, real quick joke, joke, joke thing started. And it came up out of our just being so uncomfortable on stage and hating it when people weren't laughing. Sucked at acting, so it was just like dump jokes on top of it.

I think for, I mean, once we got the theater open and running in Los Angeles and we started getting reviews, we never had an empty seat in the house. And I think part of the appeal was people, when they saw us up on stage, they said, oh my gosh, that could be me. I mean, that guy's not an actor, that's for sure. So maybe that had something to do with with it what was the first breakthrough like did like

in terms of movie or where you guys were like okay now we can now we can make anything that we want it could be as dumb as we want like did you have a breakthrough where there was like kind of clear that you guys could make whatever films you wanted to move on to. Yeah, I mean, Airplane just opened the door to Hollywood for us for as long as we wanted. I mean, it really, it was so, it just worked pretty well, and we understood that kind of humor so we could do that. I mean, you know, I worked on movies after that. We did.

It was not that kind of humor. And we really weren't all that good at it. But we really had a very strong feel for parody and those kinds of jokes and stuff. So, yeah, but Airplane really... And Airplane was kind of a fluke, too. I mean mean we knew we were doing the theater and the way we would get

new jokes for the theater for Kentucky Fried Theater is we would leave the videotape recorder on all night but that was an innovation back in those days and we would

come to work the next day and play back what we had recorded the night before because that's when the stupidest stuff was on TV. That's when the stupidest commercials were on, you know. And the stupid, everything. And one day we got to work, it's like in the early 70s, and we had recorded a movie called Zero Hour. And Zero Hour was a 1957 melodrama starring Dana Andrews and Sterling Hayden and Darnell and stuff, and it was the story of Airplane.

It was Airplane. But it was a melodrama dead serious and so we just sort of rewrote zero hour as a comedy do you think airplane maybe worked because maybe at the time because it came out like 1980 1980 yeah it's like 40 years ago right um do you think maybe it worked really well? Because maybe at the time, like, I don't know, travel just wasn't as prevalent as it is now. You know, it's pretty easy for people to get on a plane.

It's fairly affordable. Oh, that's interesting. And so maybe back then it was like, it was, I guess, maybe I would just say that maybe flying was a little bit more of like a novel thing, right? The travel was a little bit more of a novel thing. People still got dressed up to go on a plane. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there was that.

And the other thing that was so fortunate was that the 70s was a decade of disaster movies. There was Airport and Airport 77 and the towering Inferno and all these Poseidon Adventure, all this stuff. And they were all basically the same silly movie. So we sort of, we were very, very lucky to come across Zero Hour and figure out, ooh, we can just make this a comedy. Who's funnier, Lloyd Bridges or Leslie Nielsen? Well, they had different approaches. They really did. Leslie was kind of, I think Leslie was more just a natural comedian.

Lloyd, Lloyd is an actor. He was an actor. And so he thinks the way actors think, like, what's my motivation? Right. Lloyd is an actor. He was an actor. And so he thinks the way actors think, like, what's my motivation? What's my character? And stuff. And he would always try to approach it that way.

And he'd say, just say the words. Just say the lines. You don't have to, don't overthink it. We never thought about it either. We're just trying to say something silly. And Leslie kind of naturally came to that. He was this sort of a natural clown. And even though he looked very, Leslie always carried a little fart machine. Of course he did.

Yeah. And it was this little thing that you would just squeeze, and it would make the sound of a fart, and he always had it on him. And he was all, like, he'd go in elevators, and he would be in the elevator, and he would go, and not only that would it make the sound of a fart, but he would sort of move uncomfortably.

One time we were doing a show promoting something or other on TV, and he took his fart machine, and the woman who was interviewing us didn't know, knowing she was so uncomfortable because he kept farting. So he really was kind of a sophomore clown. What made you think that Charlie Sheen

would be funny? Well, you know, he was great in Major League. But when we went to... Yeah, Major League's awesome. Yeah, it's awesome. He is a real... Yeah.

And that preceded... But when we went to 20th Century Fox and pitched the idea of Hot Shots, it was Joe Roth, who ran 20th Century Fox at the time, said, great, you can do it. I think you need to get Charlie Sheen. And it was his idea. So Charlie came in, we had a meeting, and it was kind of awkward.

But it turned out we got to, he was like a fish in water, doing that kind of humor. He just had a real, I don't think I ever directed him. He just went and did it. And we really connected, too. And he was a great guy. And we connected a lot through sports. And he knew I was from Milwaukee,

and a Packers fan, and a Milwaukee Brewers fan, a Braves fan, before the Brewers got there. And a couple times he gave me autographed baseballs and footballs and stuff like that. We talked sports a lot. And he was just a great guy. I don't know what became, what happened,

but he was really fun. Do you have anything left movie-wise? Is there any burning desire to create any other type of film, or would it be more... I know you've done some documentaries and stuff like that too. Yeah, yeah. But is there any more silliness that has to get out of you, or do you think you've got it all out?

Well, you know, I think the movie business, like what we do, is it's really a passion business. movie business like what we do is it's really a passion business. I did make a movie called First Do No Harm with Meryl Streep about the ketogenic diet. It very much mimicked our experience with Charlie and the ketogenic diet. It was a two-story, a different family, but who also came across the diet, and the diet cured their kid, and they encountered lots of resistance to a ketogenic diet

and all that kind of stuff. And so I think I cried every day on the set making that movie because it was so we made the movie in 70 uh 97 and charlie was sick in 93 so it was kind of recent history and like reliving it almost yeah it really was. And so that kind of spoiled me. I never could work up that much passion again for the movie business. And, of course, nobody wanted to hire me to make serious movies or even semi-serious movies. They just wanted me to do fart jokes for teenage boys, which is fine.

Oh, but there's an audience for a fart joke right there. But I just sort of lost my passion for it. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, amazing career, an amazing story, and it's amazing that you have this newfound passion. What are some other things that you have maybe coming up in the future with the Charlie Foundation? Is there some events that you have coming up or a couple of things you're excited about? Well, it's actually this year is the 100th anniversary of the ketogenic diet for epilepsy.

So there are a bunch of things that were planned and they're all pandemic kind of on the, you know, we're all kind of waiting to see how we're going to have to do stuff virtually or we can do it in person. There's a global meeting in Brighton, England in October. And there are a bunch of meetings where we get together that are very helpful because we get scientists

and physicians and dieticians together and they can compare notes and talk about the state of the art with the diet and new applications, like you mentioned, for cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. What are people like me supposed to do? Naked gun fan, airplane fan, hot shots fan? Is there anybody that does a similar style of comedy that you've seen?

Oh, gosh, no, I have. Some of the young guys coming up. I just, I haven't. I just have to keep watching old stuff. Yeah, sorry, I mean, I don't know why, I think, I don't know what it's about. I just don't know, but I don't see stuff that's as stupid as the stuff we did no one has done it stupider

no I will say if when that's when it's really working that it's like stupidity raised to an art form I love it thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it thank you strength is never weakness weakness Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time.