I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

I think we grew up thinking that the funniest things on TV were the old, serious movies. I always liked the Marx Brothers, but the thing that always made us laugh were movies like Zero Hour. That's what inspired us.

Everything about it worked, and I don't mean just the movie, but in our experience, we realized there's also a component of luck involved in this business. We had absolutely the most competent people in the studio working on the release and ad campaign.

Our fathers were actually business partners in the same real-estate firm, and we got together and thought, How can we get a movie together and get distribution and create a new movie genre? We started by making satires of commercials.

I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early 70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire.

We didn't realize it at the time, but the release date, the ad campaign and the poster are so important.

Our producer Jon Davison thought it would be a good idea to put in additional TV scenes. So, they sent me a tape of these additional TV scenes, and I watched them, and I didn't think they were that great. I didn't think it was worth putting them in.