[Editor’s note: The following interviews contain spoilers for “The Naked Gun.”]
It’s a scene that comes out of nowhere, and the one people want to talk about after seeing the new “Naked Gun” movie. At the mid-way point in the film, Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) and Beth (Pamela Anderson) have fallen in love, setting into motion an ‘80s-style montage following the new couple on a lover’s getaway to a winter cabin.
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At the isolated cabin, a book of spells brings Frank and Beth’s cheerfully-made snowman to life. At first, the snowman is part of the couple’s silly, intimate games, but eventually becomes a third wheel, resulting in homicidal rage and the love montage descending into something more akin to a horror movie.
The snowman is so off-the-wall, brazen, and hysterical — the perfect mix of “The Naked Gun” and the Lonely Island style of humor — and it is also the best example of how co-writer/director Akiva Schaffer put his own distinct stamp on the franchise.
When Schaffer was on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, he discussed the snowman scene and how wary he was of doing “fan fiction” of the original. “No offense to other reboots and redos and legacy sequels out there, but a lot of them are so stuck on re-doing the stuff that the original did,’” said Schaffer. “You watch them and are delighted, but it’s like empty calories, and when it’s done, you barely remember that you saw it because, my theory at least, is they’re not really a new movie. They’re fan fiction of the old movie.”
That fear of doing a “paint by numbers Mad Libs” of the original was very much on Schaffer’s mind when he and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand reached the mid-point of their story. “We got to the point in our script, we were like, ‘Wow, this love story deserves a montage,’” said Schaffer. “The original ‘Naked Gun’ has a very famous, very good montage set to ‘I’m Into Something Good.’”
The 1988 original love montage is truly a classic — the cheery Herman’s Hermit 1964 hit is a smart fit, watching Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley laugh their way through a first date to see “Platoon” is still funny, and who can forget that body condom? The original had done all of that so well, but so had others.
“We knew it had to be different than that,” said Schaffer. “And then also there’s been 30 years of making fun of montages, whether it’s ‘Team America’ doing a montage, or whatever, there’s not a lot of room left in the montage. We were debating not doing a montage and had a few other ideas.”
Schaffer said he was aware of “Jack Frost,” but had only seen the trailer of the 1998 killer snowman movie. It wasn’t a sub-genre (if you can even call it that) he’d been consciously considering spoofing, but one night when he got up at four in the morning to use the bathroom, the snowman scene started to play out in his head.
“When I got back in bed, it had been percolating that day in the writers’ room, and I just saw the entire thing and wrote it into bullet point notes, and then texted it to Dan and Doug,” said Schaeffer. “The next morning, I came into the writers’ room and they were like, ‘Yeah. Done.’ It honestly only changed teeny bits for production reasons, a cabin instead of a house, but it never really changed.”
That’s not to say everyone involved with “The Naked Gun” reboot initially understood the brilliance of the scene. “It was polarizing in script-reads. People I really respect, like Andy Sandberg, when he read it for me, he was like, ‘Snowman’s the best. Do not let them cut it,’ knowing it would be cuttable,’” said Schaeffer. “It makes sense once you see the movie, but at one point I did have to threaten to quit.”
Schaffer is clear that he felt supported in making the film he wanted to make, but due to the opposition, he pared down the snowman so that if it didn’t play, it could be removed from the film without leaving a hole. For example, there were drafts of the script in which the snowman reappears at the end of the film — able to reconstitute itself from the fountain after the climactic action scene — that never got shot.
“After the first test screen, it was the number one scene in the movie,” said Schaffer. “The people that really fought me on it after ate a lot of crow without me asking. I tried to let them off the hook easy, and go, ‘That’s fine,’ but they were like, ‘No, dude, we were wrong.’”
A Paramount Pictures release, “The Naked Gun” is now in theaters.
To hear Akiva Schaffer’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
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