Leslie Nielsen Secured His ‘Naked Gun’ Follow-Up By Sending Secret Codes on ‘SNL’
The original Naked Gun movie was one of the biggest comedy hits of the ‘80s, but Leslie Nielsen’s follow-up spoof wasn’t quite as successful.
Released just two years after The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, Repossessed starred Leslie Nielsen as an aging priest named Father Mayii, who’s tasked with expelling a demon from the body of a woman who had previously been possessed when she was a child. As an added novelty, she was played by Linda Blair, star of the original William Friedkin-directed classic The Exorcist.
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While arguably better than some official Exorcist sequels, Repossessed was a critical and commercial dud. A review in The Toronto Star blasted the movie’s “pseudo-Zucker Brothers attempt at satire,” noting that it “delights in trotting out a bevy of naked women with pendulous breasts and happily indulges in vicious sexist remarks that seek immunity in the name of parody.”
So why did Nielsen agree to be in this movie? Well, it all came together in the oddest possible way.
Repossessed director Bob Logan described the process while guesting on the CUZ I HAVE TO… podcast. At the time, Logan was an established comedy writer, having penned material for legends such as Garry Shandling, Joan Rivers, Sam Kinison and Rodney Dangerfield. When working with Linda Blair on a low-budget film, Logan tried to sell her on the idea of making an Exorcist parody. But Blair, who was sick of jokes about head-spinning and pea soup, shot down the idea.
Logan “wrote it anyway,” modeling his screenplay off of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun. Blair “didn’t get” the script at all, so Logan took her to see The Naked Gun, which was still in theaters at the time. Blair “laughed her ass off” and told the director, “Okay, I’ll commit to it, but I have one request: You have to get Leslie Nielsen to play the Exorcist.”
That may have seemed like a long shot, but Logan had met Nielsen years ago while working as a sketch comedy writer, and the actor had given him a business card. So Logan tore through his files and eventually found the card. He called the number and left a message on Nielsen’s answering machine, nervously pitching his idea for an Exorcist spoof.
The next morning, Logan was awoken to a 6 a.m. phone call from Nielsen, who remembered his writing and seemed open to making Repossessed, with one weird caveat. “Tell you what, can you FedEx a script out to me?” Nielsen asked Logan. “I’ll get it probably tomorrow, and I’ll read it on Thursday. I’m out here in New York because I’m hosting Saturday Night Live.”
“After I read it, there’s a certain sketch we’re doing about products,” the Police Squad! star continued. “The idea is I’m endorsing about 65 different products, because I’m a big star now. At the end there’s a certain line I’ll say, and the camera dollies in on me, and when it does, if I wink to the camera, that means I like your script.”
That Saturday, Nielsen did indeed host SNL, introducing himself to the audience as someone who says “unfunny things in an unfunny way, and somehow it seems to end up funny.”
Sure enough, toward the end of the show, Nielsen appeared in a sketch in which he endorsed various age-appropriate “Geritech” products such as “DripMaster” and “BungKing.”
“I see the camera slowly starts zooming in on him, and my heart starts pounding,” Logan recalled. “And the camera gets close on him… and then he winked. And you had to scrape me off the ceiling, literally, because I knew that he liked it.”
That being said, I’ve watched the clip of the sketch on YouTube about 10 times, and I can’t see a single wink. Is it possible that the wink was actually in a different sketch? Or is the online clip from the show’s dress rehearsal?
At least he didn’t sign onto the movie by sending Morse code messages using his famous fart machine.
