Double-yellow fever: the Rat Race contestants line up. Left to right, Jon Lovitz, Rowan Atkinson, Cuba Gooding Jr, Whoopi Goldberg, Amy Smart, Breckin Meyer, Seth Green, Lanai Chapman and Blaine Cody.

rat race

In a business where, as William Goldman famously remarked, “nobody knows anything”, Jerry Zucker must be reckoned to know a thing or two. And the thing he knows best of all is comedy - big comedies with big gags and lots of comic actors doing what they know best. Which is pretty much what Rat Race is.

Zucker burst into the top tier of Hollywood money-makers 20 years ago with Airplane, which he co-wrote and co-directed with the two other founding members of the Madison, Wisconsin, Kentucky Fried Theatre group: brother David and childhood friend Jim Abrahams. A string of hit comedies followed.

Ever since, Zucker has shown a knack for branching out in the right direction. First there was the supernatural romantic comedy, Ghost (1990), which he directed. Then there was 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, which he produced. Now there is Rat Race, which he both produces (with wife Janet and Mummy producer Sean Daniel) and directs.

For Zucker, whose last directorial outing was the medieval tale First Knight in 1995, it’s a question of returning to his roots. “I love being back doing a broad comedy,” he said on the Rat Race set last November. “Maybe I just got tired of it after a while and started looking for other things. But I’m grateful that this script came along. It’s been a real blast.”

director Jerry Zucker on set with Gooding and Goldberg.

Adds Janet Zucker: “He felt that he needed to do something to make him and the world laugh. Comedy is not usually treated as important, but in some ways it’s the greatest gift we can give an audience to help them forget their problems. Jerry also loves to work with big canvases: the notion of doing a big physical comedy with big stunts was very appealing to him.”

Like Airplane, Rat Race looks back to a movie genre that was successful a few decades ago. With Airplane, it was disaster movies in which, as the late Irwin Allen told The Hollywood Reporter back in 1972, “a group of people who have never met before are thrown together in terrible circumstances. In the first six minutes, 1,400 people are killed and only the stars survive.”