One of the great joys of director Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun is that movie-goers will be hard-pressed to identify the funniest moment: it’s so consistently hilarious that your favorite may just be the one you most recently recall. That being said, one of the most memorable scenes in the new legacyquel is definitely Pamela Anderson taking the stage in a jazz club to perform an improvised scat song she dubs “Sassafras Chicken in D.” It’s a side-splitting bit – and I was shocked to learn about the extreme effort that went into filming it.
CinemaBlend’s Jeff McCobb recently spoke with both Anderson and co-star Liam Neeson during the press day for The Naked Gun, and the very first question he asked the duo was about the actress’ jazz performance. While you might think that she simply got on a stage and spouted a bunch of improvised nonsense into a microphone, the exact opposite was the case, as everything was scripted, and it took half a day to shoot it. Said Anderson,
It was 12 hours. We shot it for 12 hours. But it was much longer, and it was scripted, so this was not ad libbed. This was Akiva. Yeah, they wrote this out. They— and I worked with somebody on it, and I memorized it, and I still sing it in the shower. I can’t get it out of my head.
To be honest, this is actually a perfect example of why I love The Naked Gun coming out right now. In the last 20 years, improvisation has developed as a dominant force in feature comedies – a movement that aimed to take advantage of performers’ natural comedic talents that was aided by the rise of digital filmmaking (productions could do infinite takes and experimentation without worrying about the expense of literal film). Properly capturing the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker energy, however, is an exercise in specificity – in dialogue, physicality and timing – and it’s great to see how that approach was honored.
Everything about the sequence in the new 2025 movie is hysterical, from the befuddled expressions of the jazz band as Pamela Anderson’s Beth Davenport tells them what song she wants to sing, to Beth’s odd sound-making, to the ridiculously enraptured look on the face of Danny Huston’s Richard Cane (whom she is trying to distract while Liam Neeson‘s Frank Drebben Jr. does some snooping). Perhaps the only thing that could have made it better would have been Anderson making use of her actual skills playing the alto saxophone – but she told Jeff that she was too intimidated to bring up her talent on set:
I was scared to tell Akiva anything about my sax playing because that might have ended up in it. Yeah, I play saxophone. Not well, but I do play. I love jazz. I think the imperfect quality to jazz, it suits me.
Early reactions to The Naked Gun have been effusive, and you will have your own opportunity to see the rare modern theatrical comedy on the big screen this weekend as it hits cinemas on Friday, August 1. It’s an amazing movie to watch with a packed crowd, so do yourself a favor and check it out.
