The Naked Gun writers discuss how they wanted to address O.J. Simpson in the new film
One of the biggest shadows cast over the original trilogy of Naked Gun movies is the Zucker brothers casting of O.J. Simpson in the role of Nordberg. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for the Zuckers to put sports figures in some supporting roles, as they also used athletes like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a classic role in Airplane. However, Simpson played somewhat of a prominent character, and with the new incarnation of the spoof film addressing how the characters are the offspring of the originals, this left the writers with something hanging.
Director Akiva Schaffer wrote the film with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. Gregor and Mand have recently sat down with The Hollywood Reporter, where they talk about addressing the elephant in the room. THR asks what their discussion was like in approaching the issue and Mand explains,
The O.J. thing was one of the first questions Kiva, Dan and myself got when people heard we were doing Naked Gun: ‘What are you going to do about Nordberg and O.J.?’ It was one of the first joke areas we worked on in the movie, and we knew pretty quickly that we wanted it to be a fast reference [and] that we didn’t want to live in the idea of O.J. too long. Pretty quickly, we came into the idea of a Hall of Fathers because it also was attached to another question we got, which was like, ‘Is Liam playing Frank Drebin?’ We had a lot of alts of different O.J. jokes in the first couple of weeks, but then settled into this area.”
Additionally, certain hallmarks of the franchise remain in tact as this film keeps the tradition of including Weird Al Yankovic in some capacity. The writers talk about throwing in some fan service, where they also wanted to sneak Priscilla Presley in the film. Gregor expounded, “Weird Al, from the jump — there’s a couple things to us that feel like the fan-service demands that we have to give, in some way or another. It’s the same thing with having credit-sequence jokes and just some moment to hear that old wonderful theme song and see the police siren light. We did write at least a half dozen different places for him within the movie. There was one point where he was going to be the singer at Cane’s gala.”
“Priscilla, we talked about just because she’s an icon, and she’s still with us. We didn’t want to force it in. Luckily, she was game to do it, and that was really exciting for us,” Mand added.
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