A Ton of ‘Naked Gun’ Jokes Ended Up on the Cutting Room Floor
One of the best things about the new Naked Gun reboot, starring Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson and (to a lesser extent) “Weird Al” Yankovic, is its mercifully lean running time.
The movie is just 85 minutes long, meaning that you could fit in two screenings of The Naked Gun in less than the time it would take to watch all of Titanic. And unlike Neeson and Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet couldn’t even be bothered to fall in love in real life.
Director Akiva Schaffer recently revealed that, while the plan was always to make a compact comedy, he intentionally shot an excess amount of footage knowing that most of it would end up on the cutting room floor — and this strategy nearly upended their plans to include a cameo from one of the franchise’s few legacy cast members.
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Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Schaffer explained that the reboot’s brief shot of Priscilla Presley, who of course played Frank Drebin Sr.’s love interest Jane Spencer in the original trilogy, nearly didn’t happen. “Priscilla was a last-minute addition,” Schaffer noted. “She lives in L.A., but we shot in Atlanta, and in Atlanta, we knew it would be so great to ask her to come be in this, but I didn’t want to make her get on a plane unless I was sure it would be in the movie.”
Why wasn’t he certain that Presley’s scene would make the final cut? Because the filmmakers routinely filmed extra scripted lines, knowing that only the very best material would make it into the movie. “We knew we were shooting 115 pages plus; every day had five pages of alt jokes,” the Hot Rod director clarified. “And I knew the movie was going to be 85 minutes, so I knew everything we shot every day might not be in the movie.”
During an interview with Collider, Schaffer stressed that the extra gags weren’t just the result of “a bunch of people riffing” as you might expect from a Judd Apatow project, because the Naked Gun-style jokes “have to be really scripted and planned out.”
“In the writing process, just even trying to beat a joke, you end up with 10 versions of the same joke. And you never know which one’s going to be the funniest on the day, coming out of an actor’s mouth,” Schaffer stated. “Sometimes the third alt that you shrugged about, Liam says it with a little twinkle in his eye and that’s the funniest one.”
Despite the plethora of jokes, the goal was always to release an 85-minute cut because the first two Naked Gun movies are both exactly one hour and twenty-five minutes long. But reportedly many of the scrapped lines will be edited together and included as a bonus feature whenever the movie is released on Blu-ray and/or streaming.
Hopefully they include the deleted fart joke that Neeson is still pissed about.
