For a remake of a film like The Naked Gun to work, the people working behind and in front of the camera have to have a profound understanding of surreal, comedic absurdity. Few people are better suited to the task of helping to steer such an enormous vessel full of sight gags, puns, overly literal expressions, physical comedy and elaborate set pieces than producer Erica Huggins, President of Fuzzy Door Productions, the company tasked with bringing the antics of Lt. Frank Drebin (Jr., now played by Liam Neeson) and the LAPD Police Squad back to the big screen after thirty years away.
Alongside fellow producer and Fuzzy Door founder, Seth MacFarlane, Huggins helped revive The Naked Gun (in theatres everywhere this weekend) for a new generation that might not be as familiar with the comedic art of parody. Not only does The Naked Gun represent the resurrection of classic characters and a specific kind of humour that has become a genre rarity, but Huggins, MacFarlane, and director Akiva Schaffer (a member of The Lonely Island, and helmer of similarly outlandish larks Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers) were trying to make a comedy that could bring people out to theatres in an age where many similar films might be released straight to streaming.
“If it works, it feels amazing,” Huggins says with a hearty laugh during a call earlier this month when asked about how big screen comedies are a bit of a gamble these days.
“We’re so excited to be a comedy that plays in theatres, and not just a light comedy at that, but a big, bold, in-your-face, wall-to-wall jokes comedy,” she continues. “We thought we were going to get a theatrical release when we started this, but nobody ever knows for sure. Somewhere along the line in the process, someone could’ve come to us and said it was going to be released in another way. We’re very lucky that the studio saw it and were won over by it.”
“I think the marketing team did a brilliant job from the very beginning of time on this to get people talking about it. They did a great job of showing people what kind of comedy this was, because parody is something a lot of people didn’t grow up with in this world. It hasn’t been a type of comedy that’s been mainstream or out in theatres for at least a decade. For a minute, we were worried that we would have to teach people again what a parody is, but thankfully we don’t. (laughs) Everybody gets it, and humour is at a point – especially with social media – where people see how this can be fun.”
In her varied career, Huggins has seen and done a lot, some of which falls perfectly in line with making something as irreverent as The Naked Gun. Before joining Fuzzy Door, Huggins worked for Imagine Entertainment, where she was President for five years. That job saw her overseeing a varied array of projects, but The Naked Gun hearkens back to the start of her career, when she started out as an editor.
Her first proper industry job was working as an assistant editor on mercurial auteur Michael Cimino’s The Sicilian, a job where the director fired her, told her she’d never work again, only to then be hired to work on his next movie anyway. That sounds like a pretty absurd, but very Hollywood kind of situation. Two more editorial jobs in her early years included working on a pair of silly, but sly horror movies from Rachel Talalay, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and Ghost in the Machine, films that take an already outlandish premise to fantastical heights. But the jobs that would most prepare Huggins for a future in comedy would be working in the editorial department on three films by John Waters (two of which were produced by Talalay): Hairspray, Cry Baby, and Serial Mom. It was those experiences working with Waters that she credits with helping her understand the power of watching a comedy with an audience, and appreciating the power of sharing a laugh with others in a dark room
“I think laughter is the best thing you can give to people working at any level of entertainment. It’s also the hardest to be actually good at,” Huggins cautions. “It’s so hard to make it work. Watching something streaming at home, that’s one thing, but to get people to come out to a theatre full of three hundred people, you want to be able to feel that energy. You want to experience that with others, and I love that experience. Maybe it was because I worked with a guy like John and I got to have those experiences in a theatre that the thrill of coming back to comedies like this now has been such a rewarding thing. And honestly, I think the world just needs to laugh right now. The world needs it. So we’re crossing our fingers and hoping that the world will laugh at this.”
It doesn’t hurt that the property being worked on is one that Huggins was a fan of before the opportunity to produce it came her way. The Naked Gun films (and the short lived Police Squad television series that inspired it) are packed to bursting with non-stop jokes around every corner. It’s a high standard to live up to, but with the help of similarly minded comedic talents like Schaffer and MacFarlane and performers like Neeson (playing off his tough guy image to brilliant effect), Pamela Anderson, and Paul Walter Hauser, the film is able to achieve what many would think impossible: a reboot that fully captures and embodies the spirit of the original film in a way that will please older fans and bring new ones into the fold.
“As a producer, I get to pick the things that make me excited. And this is a case where the original is a movie that I loved so much when it came out,” she says with an ear to ear grin. “I was such a fan of these kinds of movies, and we haven’t seen them in such a long time. The idea of having a chance to work on something so iconic was such a thrill, but also intimidating. The idea of making another Naked Gun movie after the originals were such perfect movies, and that meant we had to try something different.”
“It’s all about writing good jokes, and finding a touch point for where the joke is going,” she continues while speaking about the process of making a comedy that requires both spontaneity and rigid control. “Then it’s about figuring out the tonnage of jokes you need for a project like this because it’s constant jokes. And it’s not just the words, but also the physical jokes, and the foreground and background gags. There are a lot of things that need to connect to make it work.”
Sometimes those elaborate gags and jokes require a lot of care and attention, and it often falls to the producer of the film to help realize the filmmaker’s comedic vision. Huggins says that there was a specific sequence in The Naked Gun – one that she wisely doesn’t want spoiled – where the production had to move a lot of things around for the sake of a great gag.
“There was a point at which we had too many pages and not enough days, and we were starting to talk about things that needed to get cut, and there was one scene in particular that came up that we’re trying not to spoil. It was a scene that we weren’t willing to give up, so it became a matter of cobbling together ways of getting other days off the schedule to make our budget work because it would take a considerable amount of time. It’s a scene that not only speaks to the love story at the heart of the film, but also the sense of humour that Akiva Schaffer brings to the film with his Lonely Island background. This kind of skitty, surreal insanity that creates a story within a story, and we were so excited to see if it would work or not, and that was one of those scenes where we drew a hard line and were determined not to lose it.”
“The brilliance of these kinds of movies is that they work on a really simple level,” Huggins says about how the scene in question speaks to the appeal of The Naked Gun. “You’re not going to be thinking about the twists and turns, so you’re not thinking that something doesn’t make any sense because you’re just laughing at everything. Keeping a sequence like that in is just pure joy because you don’t have to think about it. It’s just pure joy.”
The Naked Gun opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, August 1, 2025. Come back in three weeks for a subscriber exclusive clip talking about the dynamics of one of the new film’s sure to become iconic scenes.
