Before becoming king of a weird late-night comedy, David Letterman was another comic looking for a break. But Letterman knew his strengths and weaknesses and didn’t see himself as an actor. Unfortunately for him, after David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (ZAZ) saw him at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, they thought he might make a good lead for their upcoming movie Airplane! The rest, as they say, is history: Letterman didn’t get the part.
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In an excerpt from the new oral history of Airplane!, entitled Surely You Can’t Be Serious [via EW], compiled from interviews conducted by former A.V. Club contributor and Random Roles founder Will Harris, the writer/directors and Letterman finally fess up to what happened.
“They were really nice to consider me for a film because I can see where people would think, ‘Oh, we have a thing where we’re opening an Alpha Beta [supermarket]; can you come out and talk to the bag boys?’ That made sense,” Letterman said. “But a movie? And the guy who produced it was Howard Koch, who had a legitimate movie career and big-time credits. He was somebody that even I was aware of, and so I thought, Geez, he’s not gonna want anything to do with me!”
Letterman wasn’t just up for any role. He was up for the lead: Ted Striker, which eventually went to Robert Hayes. Still, Jerry Zucker knew “he wasn’t an actor, but he was funny” and he “looked great onscreen.” However, the “whole idea of acting” was anathema to Letterman. “I think it all seems too phony to him like he’s bullshitting,” Zucker said. “It just wasn’t him.” Apparently, that came through in the audition.
Letterman recalled doing the scene in the cockpit a couple of times as he “kept saying all along, “I can’t act, I can’t act, I can’t act.”
“We did the scene once, and then they came in and gave me some notes, and then we did it maybe two more times,” Letterman said. “And I kept saying all along, ‘I can’t act, I can’t act, I can’t act,’ and then one of them came to me after the audition and said, ‘You’re right: you can’t act!’ It was all so good-natured that I just laughed my way back to the car. I never felt any sense of disappointment because, from the very beginning, I told them, ‘I can’t act.’ And then I was right, and we all ended up parting as friends. So it was a good time.”
“I liked those guys, and when I saw the movie, it was just delightful, and I was delighted to see it knowing that I didn’t have to look at myself,” he said. “Because that would’ve ruined it. If not the whole movie, it certainly would’ve ruined it for me.”
Though Letterman didn’t get the role, footage of his screentest did wind up on Late Night. On March 15, 1982, Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker brought the screen test to Late Night, where a very uncomfortable Letterman begrudgingly aired the clip.
“Maybe if I had gotten the part, that movie would’ve made some money,” Letterman joked. Airplane was the fourth biggest movie of 1980, behind Stir Crazy, Nine To Five, and The Empire Strikes Back. Imagine that, in 1980, seven of the 10 highest-grossing movies of the year were comedies.
Correction: An earlier version of this article did not credit interviewer Will Harris. We regret the error.