MOVIES : You Mean Leslie Nielsen <i> Won’t</i> Play Davy Crockett?

David Zucker has been associated with some of the most successful and popular comedies of all time, including “Airplane!,” “Ruthless People,” “The Naked Gun” and one of last summer’s big hits, “The Naked Gun 2 1/2.” With that kind of track record, Zucker, who, along with his brother Jerry recently signed a long-term deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment, can pretty much make any movie he wants.

Does the filmmaker have another genre-bending comedy in mind for his next project? Don’t bet on it. If Zucker gets his way, he’s going to bring the life and times of Davy Crockett to the big screen. And it won’t be a spoof. No kidding.

“Barbara Bush is not going to be hanging from the Alamo,” he claims, referring to the pummeling the First Lady took in “The Naked Gun 2 1/2.” “This is not going to be zany.”

But according to Zucker, Crockett had a wild sense of humor--that’s what makes him so appealing. “Crockett was the Will Rogers of his day,” says Zucker, whose office walls are covered with Crockett memorabilia that includes rifles, flintlock pistols and coonskin caps. “He had a tremendous wit, he made people laugh and he loved to play pranks on people.”

Crockett’s sense of humor is not the only aspect Zucker finds fascinating. “He was the first heroic figure that my generation really got exposed to,” notes the 44-year-old Zucker, who says he discovered Crockett during the ‘50s, when he watched the Disney TV show that starred Fess Parker. His recent cameo appearance in his own “Naked Gun 2 1/2”--toting a flintlock rifle and wearing a fringe jacket--was an obvious tip of the coonskin cap to Crockett. “He was socially conscious and because of that, was an underdog in his political fight when he was in Congress.”

Zucker’s interest in Crockett was reignited when he came across a copy of the Alamo Journal, a magazine devoted strictly to Crockett. “Once I knew there were other people who had this same interest, I started talking about it more,” he says. “Then I started thinking about a movie.”

Zucker says he doesn’t know what part of Crockett’s life he’ll focus on or what direction the film will take, but he says he has no intention of doing anything similar to “The Alamo,” John Wayne’s sprawling, historical 1960 epic that starred the Duke as Crockett. “I’m not making a John Wayne film,” he says. “I would be on real shaky ground, with my skills, doing a totally serious movie about Crockett.”

Before starting to work on the screenplay, Zucker and several Crockett buffs--including University of New Mexico history professor Paul Hutton, who will collaborate on the script with Zucker--recently set off with a video camera on an eight-day research expedition. “I had this idea that I would love to go back to some of the same places that Crockett had been,” he says. “I thought it would be a good idea for me to see the locations that until then had just been names on a page to me.”

Following the exact trail Crockett took when he journeyed from Tennessee to Texas, where he died fighting at the Alamo in 1836, Zucker and his companions interviewed people in towns along the way and dug up research material in local libraries. “What the Crockett historians get excited about is different than what I do,” says Zucker. “If they discover an old receipt that was signed by Crockett, that’s like me getting a three-picture deal.”

One highlight of Zucker’s tip was his stop in Nacogdoches, Tex.--where Crockett joined the army of the Republic of Texas--a town not only significant in the life of Crockett, but in the lives of his other idols, the Marx Brothers. “That’s the town where they decided, in the days of vaudeville, to go from being a singing group to being a comedy act,” he says. “The Marx Brothers, as we know them, were born there.”

Now that he and Hutton are working on the script, Zucker intends to make the story accessible to today’s filmgoers. “It’s not going to do me any good if I make the ultimate, historically heavy movie about the real Davy Crockett and three people go and see it,” he says. “But I believe I can make this material really entertaining enough to make it a good movie.

‘Of course, there will be one co-ed shower scene,” Zucker adds. “But it’ll be a log shower.”