The other wheeze that made Airplane! groundbreaking was the refusal to cast comedians. Abrahams and his co-directors knew their script would sound much funnier if delivered by serious actors but had difficulty in persuading their studio backers.

“At first, Paramount was resistant to that idea. They didn’t understand why we wanted to do something like that,” Abrahams recalled. Among those the studio suggested was Bill Murray, who had just become a star on Saturday Night Live, but the ZAZ trio stuck to their guns.