Writing
The show was set to mock cop procedurals the same way Airplane! mocked disaster movies. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker wrote the pilot episode, in which most straight lines were directly copied from an M Squad episode. Pat Proft, who had worked with the ZAZ on Airplane! and The Kentucky Fried Movie, wrote the third episode. Robert Wuhl was invited to join the writing staff after he had auditioned for the lead role in Airplane!. He would co-write the show's second and sixth episodes with Tino Insana. Both episodes contained cultural references to old movies such as On the Waterfront and The French Connection. In the audio commentary Wuhl recorded for the DVD release, he mentioned that it was a nice opportunity, but that he did not really feel a connection with the show, especially because of its short run.
Read more about this topic: Police Squad!
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“In the course of writing one historical book or another, it has happened that I could hardly restrain myself from simply copying entire documents. Indeed, I sometimes sank down among the documents and said to myself, I can’t improve on these.”
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)
“In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn’t be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model.... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)