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If nothing else, Rat Race marks the return of a director who was one of Hollywood's kings of comedy in the 1980s. Zucker got his start in show business 30 years ago as part of the Kentucky Fried Theater, a comedy troupe he formed in Milwaukee, Wis., with his big brother, David, and their buddy Jim Abrahams. They built the sets, hung the lights, wrote the sketches and, because of budgetary restrictions, did all the acting themselves. "We all embarrassed easily," recalls Zucker, "so we hated to have a joke that clunked or a long time between jokes. We wanted them laughing all the time." They broke into Hollywood in 1977 with The Kentucky Fried Movie, a collection of bits adapted from their stage sketches. As a three-headed writing-directing team, the Zucker brothers and Abrahams (known as ZAZ) struck it rich with Airplane! in 1980 and created the Police Squad! TV series, which later became the Naked Gun movies--one of Paramount's most enduring franchises.
But by the time of ZAZ's last directorial collaboration, Ruthless People in 1986, they had all matured. First, they refrained from including an exclamation mark in that film's title. Second, "we were all capable of directing a movie ourselves," says Jerry, who now runs Zucker Productions with his wife Janet. On their own, David directed the Naked Gun movies, and Abrahams regressed to unnecessary punctuation with the Hot Shots! flicks. Jerry, for his part, decided it was time to put the spoofs behind him. "I got tired of satire," he says. "It was fun, but I didn't feel like doing it again." So he directed Ghost, the hit 1990 supernatural romance that won Goldberg an Oscar, as well as First Knight, the dud 1995 Arthurian epic starring Sean Connery and Richard Gere. He also produced 1997's My Best Friend's Wedding, but not until Rat Race did he get back behind the camera to make another madcap comedy. "It took me a while to get over First Knight," Zucker says. "I like to communicate to a mass audience. If I fail at that, I feel I haven't made a good movie."
Zucker originally envisioned a dream team for the Rat Race cast. "We started out looking at the $20 million players," says the director, who had hoped that comedy titans like Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith and Adam Sandler would trim their fees to form a star-studded ensemble. "I guess in the beginning we all thought everybody would just have to work for two weeks, so we could afford these deals," says Zucker. "But then when we laid out the schedule, it was four or five or six weeks for each actor." He quickly set his sights on a cast that was much cheaper, yet rich in comic abilities. Under Zucker's guidance, Breckman spent nine months honing the script to make the most of those talents.