Lighter side of Crockett a serious pursuit
LOS ANGELES — Davy Crockett was a funny guy. So says Hollywood producer/director/writer David Zucker, a man who ought to know funny. Zucker’s the man who brought us “Airplane,” “The Naked Gun,” “Scary Movie” and other harebrained movie spoofs. He’s also spent his life obsessed with Crockett.
At 69, the slender, curlyhaired movie producer still resembles the kid who fell under the Crockett spell growing up in Milwaukee. His grandparents were immigrant Jews from Hungary and Russia, his father was in commercial real estate, and his own wild frontier was the Zucker backyard. For young Davy Zucker and countless other kids growing up in the mid-’50s, Walt Disney’s coonskin cap-wearing Crockett as portrayed by Fess Parker Jr., was a true action hero. And, yes, Zucker had the faux buckskin outfit (with plastic fringe), although Milwaukee department stores sold out of coonskin headgear before he could get his hands on one of those ring-tailed beauties.
We were standing on the stairs of his comfortable Brentwood home last Saturday afternoon, Zucker pointing out priceless Crockett
memorabilia hanging on the wall: Crockett letters, 19th-century newspaper articles, lithographs, “Crockett Almanacs,” portraits, vintage cartoons. He has a replica of a Crockett rifle hanging in his office (near a miniature blowup automatic pilot from “Airplane”), a Crockett portrait in the upstairs bathroom. He has a photo of himself as a youngster in his Crockett outfit and another of himself on the set of “The Naked Gun 2 ½,” in which he made a cameo appearance helping out a SWAT team while wearing buckskins and a coonskin cap and carrying a long rifle. (One reviewer said he looked like a Jewish Daniel Day-Lewis.)
He also owns the most famous Crockett letter of all, the one in which the spurned Tennessee congressman announces that everybody else can go to hell, but he’s going to Texas. That letter alone is probably worth at least $500,000.
“We were just really swept away, as everybody was,” Zucker said, recalling his childhood. “I don’t know, something about the man just hooked us, our generation of kids.”
‘Utterly changed my life’
Austin writer Stephen Harrigan is more expansive. “I have all sorts of theories about why the Disney movie was so overpowering to kids my age,” Harrigan told Bob Thompson, author of “Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier.” “One is, he was just such a cool guy, Davy Crockett. He had great outfits, and he was at home in the wilderness. There was a Peter Pan quality to him that was intoxicating. And then, you know, it’s a three-hour movie more or less, and you’re following this guy all the way through, and you’re 7 years old, it’s 1955, every movie has a happy ending. And all of a sudden the coolest guy ever seen on-screen gets killed.”
The Crockett aura, Harrigan told Thompson, “completely and utterly changed my life.” He would spend eight years in the 1990s writing the critically acclaimed “Gates of the Alamo,” with his Crockett character as the most engaging of the major Alamo figures in the novel.
Zucker, like most of us who grew up in the ‘50s, outgrew his Crockett infatuation. Or so he thought.
At the University of Wisconsin, he and his brother Jerry and their friend Jim Abrahams created a small theater group they called Kentucky Fried Theater, perfecting their cockeyed brand of sketch comedy in the back of a Madison, Wis., bookstore. In 1972, they rented a U-Haul truck and headed to Los Angeles, where they bought a small theater and parlayed their sketch-comedy success into their first feature film, a series of ridiculous takes on the media called “Kentucky Fried Movie.” That was in 1977. Three years later the Zuckers hit it big with “Airplane.”
Meanwhile, an artist who had a studio down the street from the theater, Robert Weil, started dropping by. Weil collected antique rifles as folk art. “In the mid-’80s, he showed me all these books and stuff about folk art and rifles,” Zucker recalled, “and then we found out that there were some guys who lived in L.A. who were into this stuff. Into Crockett.”
On Crockett’s trail
Zucker was hooked again. “We all kind of became interested in history because of Davy Crockett,” he said. “I wanted to know ‘Where is this Alamo, and what happened?’ I wanted to know the real story behind it.”
He started collecting Crockett materials, began researching his life and made a pilgrimage to the Alamo in the late 1980s. He remembers staying at the Hilton on the River Walk, where a bellboy warned him that the old mission is surprisingly small. He hoped the California visitor wouldn’t be disappointed.
Not long afterward, Zucker and Paul Hutton, a University of New Mexico history professor, set off on an eight-day research expedition. They drove the route Crockett most likely followed from Memphis through Arkansas, into Northeast Texas, down to Nacogdoches and on to San Antonio for the last great adventure of his 49 years on earth.
Zucker also began hosting a big “Crockett Rifle Frolic” every two years on his ranch near Ojai, southeast of L.A. Artisans, craftsmen, historians, teachers, gun nuts and Hollywood friends would camp out in period dress.
So why Davy Crockett? Why not Jim Bowie? William Barret Travis?
“Crockett wasn’t only this hero guy, but he was funny. And that’s what mostly piqued my interest,” Zucker said. “He made his points through humor, and I identified with him.”
One more role
Thompson, the “Born on a Mountain Top” author, agrees that there’s more to Crockett’s enduring appeal than the Disney phenomenon. The man’s personality sets him apart. “Life on the frontier was hard,” Thompson writes. “Humor was a balm. And there’s little doubt that Crockett’s natural ability to connect with voters through laughter — however exaggerated or invented individual examples of it may be — fueled his political rise.”
Zucker has worked off and on for decades on making a movie about his hero and for a while considered casting the late Robin Williams as Crockett. He worried that with Williams as his star moviegoers would be expecting an Alamo “Airplane.” Hutton, who co-wrote the script, says they also approached Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner but didn’t get a bite. Now, Zucker has pretty much given up on the Crockett project. “It’s just too hard to do,” he said last week.
Judging by the notecards pinned to the bulletin board in his convertedgarage office, Zucker’s fans can look forward, not to the King of the Wild Frontier but to another “Naked Gun,” perhaps with Steve Carell replacing the late Leslie Nielsen as Police Inspector Frank Drebin (who always had pictures of Crockett and the Alamo hanging in his apartment).
There’s always a chance the Jewish guy in the coonskin cap will make another cameo appearance. “The most fun I’ve ever had was when I played Davy Crockett in ‘Naked Gun 2 ½,’ ” Zucker told True West magazine a few years ago. “I don’t think you need any more evidence how pathetic my life is.”