R.I.P. Paul Maslansky, The Mind Behind the “Police Academy” Films

We’ve just learned from the Herald of Quietus Eve Golden that film producer Paul Maslansky has passed (1933-2024). The Maslankian oeuvre is a motley one; but in light of the fact that his most successful film creation turned 40 years old this year, I am inspired to send him off with this mixed memoriam.

Maslansky’s movies ranged from low-budget horror to theoretically respectable films of quality with prestige talent, but the common demoninator in almost all of them is that they are offbeat and alienating. It’s a kind of wondrous that he managed to keep going for the first 20 years of his career. His first film was the Italian production Castle of the Living Dead (1964), directed by Warren Kiefer and starring Christopher Lee, featuring a young Donald Sutherland (hence the naming of Kiefer Sutherland). This was followed by She Beast (1966), Sudden Terror a.k.a Eyewitness (1970), Death Line a.k.a Raw Meat (1972), the blaxploitation joint Sugar Hill (1974), the horror-action hybrid Race with the Devil (1975), Walter Hill’s Hard Times (1975), George Cukor’s stab at Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird (1976), the post-apocalyptic Damnation Alley (1977), the Marjoe Gortner vehicle When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? (1979), Dom Deluise’sHot Stuff (1979), the dreadful Hal Needham-Kirk Douglas team-up The Villain (1979), the all-star comedy Scavenger Hunt (1979), and the comedy-action picture Ruckus (1980). Dizzying, right? My head is spinning.

Then in 1984, Maslansky hit the jackpot with Police Academy films. That’s right, the Police Academy films. I was the target demographic when the first one came out, a 19 year old straight male, and even I have always looked down my nose at these stool specimens, which of course earned millions and millions of dollars. More than that, I was a major comedy fan, of both classic and (then) contemporary movies, including low-brow slapstick (I wrote a whole book on it). And I STILL didn’t like these comedies, despite the fact that many of them employed talent (directors, comedians, actors) I actively loved. But of course the fact that I was a comedy afficionado was the very reason I couldn’t abide these movies.

The original idea had been Maslansky’s. The light bulb went on when he heard that San Francisco had (typically) announced a policy wherein their police academy would have to accept ALL applicants. (They weren’t obligated to hire them as cops, but they did have to admit them to the academy and give them a shot). So the concept was that the titular institution (in an unnamed city) was suddenly flooded with kooks and weirdos and misfits. A sound idea, made even more promising-sounding by the fact that the original movie was directed by Hugh Wilson (creator of WKRP in Cincinnati and Frank’s Place) and co-written by Neal Israel and Pat Proft.

The lead was Steve Guttenberg, then fresh off of Barry Levinson’sDiner (1982) and the massive TV movie hit The Day After (1983). (To give you a sense of how long ago this was, a pre-Moonlighting Bruce Willis had auditioned for the part and was rejected, and Tom Hanks, Michael Keaton, and Judge Reinhold were all considered for the role.) Guttenberg’s character’s name, Carey Mahoney, rhymes with that of ventriloquist doll Jerry Mahoney, which I’ll assume is intentional. The choice of casting this very Jewish guy as an obviously Irish character, whether intentional or not, is a gag that goes all the way back to vaudeville.

A pre-Sex in the CityKim Cattrall was cast as the female lead, a snooty rich girl who joins the force out of boredom. Other cadets were fairly familiar faces to this observer: football player Bubba Smith, Bruce Mahler fromFridays(with Debralee Scott from Welcome Back Kotter initially playing his wife, later a cadet herself), Marion Ramsay from Keep on Truckin’,Leslie Easterbrook from Laverne and Shirley, and Donovan Scott, from 1941, Popeye, and Zorro the Gay Blade. Some people became known from the Police Academy movies themselves, notably that beat-box sound effects guy Michael Winslow, and David Graf, who played the psychotic character Tackleberry (“Tackleberry” — I shudder to type it). The authority figures (ranking police characters) were played by George Gaynes (the hilarious soap opera actor from Tootsie), Ted Ross (The Lion from The Wiz), and G.W. Bailey from M*A*S*H.

In some respects, Police Academy followed the successful formula of Animal House: a group of wash-outs and losers constantly running afoul of the powers-that-be, with the twist of course being that, unlike that film, the characters in these films are not anti-authoritarian, they actually WANT to succeed at being police. That’s okay, that can still be funny, in fact that notion has a comedy pedigree dating back to the Keystone Kops, though that being the case one would prefer an element of satire or social criticism in the films, this being the age (this still being the age) when police across America remain disproportionately aggressive toward people of color. “Racist” might be too strong a word but I seem to remember that the black characters in the Police Academy films were throwbacks. In other words, each character in the film is written in short hand: rich girl, timid girl, fat guy, clumsy guy, etc, and the black ones were just “black”. Like, that’s their character trait. It’s probably no coincidence that the Police Academy movies started to slip in popularity around the same that West Coast Hip Hop started to explode. If anything, if there’s a satirical element to this series, it’s coming from a deeply conservative place. Think about it — the inspiration was how ridiculous that hippie liberal town San Francisco was for trying to be inclusive in their hiring practices. In light of that, the poster above “just don’t call them when you’re in trouble” is downright risible.

Anyway, we can’t expect everything to be Brecht, and that was especially the case in the Reagan ’80s. I’m obviously a slapstick lover, I don’t need everything to be intellectual — I just need it not to be stupid. And the Police Academy movies are, almost by definition, stupid. Porky‘s level, summer camp comedy stupid. The creators were on record as actually wanting to achieve the comic success of the baked bean farting scene from Blazing Saddles. I can think of nothing I loathe and scorn so much as that fucking scene. It is a scene for chimps to laugh at. But anyway, that’s the level of most of the humor in the Police Academy movies. I could forgive two or three moments like that over the course of a film if the rest of the movie was full of clever gags, but, like most modern comedy features of the past, oh, 80 years or so, the gags are both few and far from clever.

No characters, no plots, no gags, no jokes — why, it’s a blueprint for minting money! So this juggernaut chugged along for years after most people were even paying attention. Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment(1985) had the characters actually being admitted to the police force and dealing with crimes, with the addition to the cast of Tim Kazurinsky of SNL, Bobcat Goldthwait, Art Metrano,Howard Hesseman, Colleen Camp, and Julie Brown, with appearances by old vets like Ed Herlihy and Jackie Joseph. That one and the next one Police Academy 3: Back in Training (1986) were directed by TV sit-com vet Jerry Paris.Jim Drake, a protege of Norman Lear, directed Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987) which featured (in addition to the regular cast) young unknowns David Spade and Sharon Stone, old timer Billie Bird, and the wrestler Randall “Tex” Cobb.

Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach (1988) is the first one without Steve Guttenberg. Directed by Alan Myerson, it has the truly shark-jumpy premise of the entire cast going to Miami for a police convention. It has a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes — and of course debuted in the #1 slot at the box office the week it was released. And from here things get even more high concept cockamamie.

In 1988, Maslansky collaborated with Ruby-Spears on the creation of a Saturday morning animated Police Academy series for kids. We have now reached the Gilligan’s Planet phase of the series’ de-evolution.

The next movie in the theatrical series had the provocative title Police Academy 6: City Under Siege (1989) and was directed by Peter Bonherz of The Bob Newhart Show, and had turns by comedy legend Kenneth Mars and the great Gerrit Graham, but again no Guttenberg.

The sixth installment earned twice its budget at the box office, but nevertheless it was five years before a new one returned to movie screens. This one, Police Academy: Mission to Moscow (1994) was shark-jumpier than ever, with Ron Perlman as a Russian mob boss, and Christopher Lee (who’d starred in Maslansky’s first film, recall) as a Russian police commander who sends for the entire Police Academy cast to come to Moscow to solve his crime problem!

Though there were no more Police Academy movies, next came the syndicated TV program Police Academy: The Series (1997-98). The beat-box guy Michael Winslow was the only cast member from the films to carry over. The only other well known name in the cast was Joe Flaherty, who played a Commadant character.

Maslansky had a thing for academies, I guess. In 1989 he also produced Honeymoon Academy (1989), a straight-to-video comedy starring Kim Cattrall and Robert Hays of Angie and Airplane! as a couple of romancing spies. One other major academy, that of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, omitted to bestow an award.

After this the void in the comedy cop-o-verse has been filled with such TV shows as Reno 911! (2003-2009, with a later revival) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013-2021), both of which I actually liked. Meanwhile Maslansky went on to produce, or co-produce a couple of releatively legit and mainstream films, Return to Oz (1985) and The Russia House (1990). Go figure! Since 2018 there has reportedly been yet another Police Academy film in development, status unknown.

For more on classic comedy film, including the theme of comedy cops, please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — now also available on audiobook!