On the Laugh Track

O n your mark ... get set ... go!!

The frenzy set off by the gun blast accompanying these well-worn words can just as easily refer to the film industry’s marketing mania, a race fueled by visions of a big box-office opening. So, the question is: Does a comedy like “Rat Race,” which doesn’t have a snappy two-word high-concept line or the magic number “2” following its title, have what it takes to stay in the running against the summer’s more visibly promotable fare?

It can, according to director Jerry Zucker, a veteran of such comedy successes as “Airplane!” and the “Naked Gun” series. “‘Rat Race’ plays to a very broad audience. I made it for everybody,” Zucker says. “I wanted a movie that my children and my parents could go to. And Andy [Breckman, the film’s writer] and I were making a movie that was funny to us. If we didn’t laugh at something, it didn’t go into the movie.”

The high-spirited “Rat Race,” which opens Friday, boasts Whoopi Goldberg, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Jon Lovitz, Rowan Atkinson, Seth Green and Breckin Meyer among others as a hapless group of Las Vegas low rollers who win special gold coins in slot machines. They’re then each given a key and invited to participate in a free-for-all race from Vegas to New Mexico, where the first one to open a locker in the Silver City train station can lay claim to its contents: $2 million in cash. Smarmy hotel owner Donald Sinclair (John Cleese) announces: “There’s only one rule: There are no rules!” And the race is on. Cue the mayhem.

There’s planes, there’s trains, there’s a rocket engine-propelled automobile, and there’s even a flying cow. “Rat Race” has its share of amusingly tasteless moments, but it doesn’t have the reliance on the orifice-related, scatological references, which have become de rigueur in many film comedies these days, the majority of which are centered between the colon and crotch of adolescent boys.

Zucker is quick to credit Breckman with creating a palette of distinct comic characters who will go to almost any lengths to catch up to the cash. “Andy did a wonderful job of delineating these characters and setting up moments that we can identify with, empathize with, want for them-and laugh at,” he says. As the script was being developed, Zucker adds, “Andy and I would brainstorm, then he would go away and write, and then we’d construct the big physical sequences,” set pieces such as a hot-air balloon ride gone awry and a monster truck rally. “One of my instructions to Andy when we were working on those was always more”--which meant more gags and gimmicks with bigger and broader payoffs.

With its episodic structure and unconnected characters running in parallel paths towards a common goal, “Rat Race” hearkens back to the ensemble race-and-chase comedies that had a surge of popularity in the 1960s.

Inspired in part by Mike Todd’s 1956 all-star extravaganza, “Around the World in Eighty Days,” these films generally have huge casts, are short on story and character development and long on stunts, slapstick and shtick.

Leading the pack is “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963). Perhaps producer-director Stanley Kramer had wearied of such socially conscious fare as “Inherit the Wind” (1960) and “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961) when he made the madcap story of a chase across California for the then-vast sum of $350,000.

Spencer Tracy plays straight man for a cast that includes Phil Silvers, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney, Ethel Merman, Terry-Thomas, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Jonathan Winters, plus cameos from comedy legends such as Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis and Buster Keaton. The only element in the film longer than its cast list is its length: “Mad, Mad World” clocks in at a whopping three hours and six minutes.

Blake Edwards’ “The Great Race” (1965) doesn’t offer loads of big-name stars--Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood carry the day just fine--but it does stretch across much of the world, with ber -gallant Curtis and Snidely Whiplash-esque Lemmon facing off in an early 20th century auto race from New York to the “finis” line in Paris.

British filmmaker Ken Annakin co-wrote (with Jack Davies) and directed “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or, How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes” (1965), the story of a 1910 air race featuring vintage aircraft and glorious panoramas of English and French countryside.

Annakin and Davies repeated the formula (with some of the same cast) in 1969’s “Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies,” focusing on a 1920s-era car race that sets off from several European locations and climaxes on the hairpin curves of the hills above Monte Carlo.

Burt Reynolds and stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham cut to the chase with “Smokey and the Bandit” (1977) and its 1980 sequel. They added the racing element--and a host of familiar faces--in “The Cannonball Run” (1981), based on the 3,000-mile Cannonball Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, although it’s unlikely that the actual race included such entrants as Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. as Vegas gamblers disguised as priests, Jamie Farr and Roger Moore.

“Cannonball” and its sequel are best known for their high-speed high jinks, crashing stunts and (like “Smokey and the Bandit”) for being among the first films to feature cast-cracking-up outtakes over closing credits.

With “Speed Zone!” (1989), the forgettable third “Cannonball” sequel, the franchise came to a screeching halt.

“Rat Race” director Zucker and then-partners David Zucker (who remains his brother) and Jim Abrahams coined their own comedy genre in the 1980s with “Airplane!” (1980), “Top Secret!” (1984) and the short-lived sitcom “Police Squad!” (1982), which spawned the “Naked Gun” films. But the movie industry has changed, and Zucker admits frustration at the marketing challenges his new film faces.

“When you look at the films that came out this summer, there are just so many sequels,” he acknowledges. Pointing to his own track record, he recalls that “Airplane!” “opened at about $5 million. I don’t know what the equivalent of that would be today, but it certainly wasn’t a blockbuster.” “Ghost” (1990), he says, took in $12 million in its early days in release. Both films went on to be big hits--”Ghost” ultimately grossed more than $500 million--but in today’s marketplace, Zucker wonders if relatively modest openings like those would earn continued studio support and screen space.

More than just a return to a film form from another era, “Rat Race” also represents a return for Zucker to his own cinematic roots.

“I try to be genre neutral and just look for a movie that excites me,” Zucker says of his choice of directing projects. “I’m generally looking not to repeat myself or do something exactly like I’ve done before. Had a great drama come along I would have done that,” he notes of the road that led to “Rat Race.” “But when I started to work on this film, I realized how much I’d missed comedy. “