Returning to San Francisco on June 19 for “Airplane! Live” (Curran Theatre, SF), a screening of the classic comedy and discussion with his original film co-star Julie Hagerty, actor Robert Hays recalls a moment in the City by the Bay almost too perfect to be real.
Speaking to 48 Hills, he remembers walking along Fisherman’s Wharf during a shoot for the 1986 ABC series “Starman,” in a light morning drizzle, when a craving hit.
“Man, wouldn’t it be nice to have a bowl of clam chowder right now?” he recalls thinking. Moments later, there it was—a steaming pot on a barrel just steps away. “It was perfect. It was like, holy smokes. Thanks, God, that was wonderful.”
It’s the kind of improbably timed gag that could have come straight out of Airplane!—the 1980 film that turned deadpan delivery into an art form and made Hays, then best known for the ABC series “Angie,” a household name.
More than four decades later, the film is still landing laughs, drawing fans back to relive its classic gags. And for Hays, San Francisco is layered with memory, humor, and a specific kind of cinematic déjà vu.
“I have friends who live there,” he says, lighting up. One friend lives in a “gorgeous” house in Russian Hill, built just after the 1906 earthquake and fire, with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and Coit Tower.
There’s also, crucially, food. “My friend knows everything—the best sourdough, the best burger,” says Hays. “I’m always well fed, gain extra weight, and it’s all absolutely worth it.”
Directed by the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trio, Aiplane! stacks absurdity atop seriousness, trusting the audience to meet it halfway. Hays knew from the beginning it was something special, just not how special.
“What I didn’t realize was how big it was going to become,” he says. “But I knew when I read the script that it was the funniest script I ever read. There was something on every page that made me laugh out loud.”
Hays read the script on, yes, an airplane flight. A flight attendant noticed his reaction and asked to read it herself.
“She was very prim and proper, hair pulled back in a bun,” he remembers. “No reaction at first. Then I looked back later on, and she was laughing so hard—her hair was flopping all over, her knees were splayed, and her feet were kicking out.”
“I thought, ‘I’m not the only one who thinks this is funny.'”
Even then, his expectations were modest. Hays figured the low-budget comedy might find a cult following on college campuses. But as the studio replayed daily footage for eager viewers, something bigger began to take shape.
“We started thinking, ‘Wow, maybe this could really be something,'” he says, careful not to say it out loud for fear of jinxing it.
“Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker said to everybody, ‘I want you to play this seriously,'” Hays recalls. “They didn’t want comedians doing slapstick—they wanted it real. That’s what really sold it.”
The same commitment to humorous sincerity would carry over into Hays’ later work, even in more straightforward roles, such as Bob Seaver in Disney’s Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. “Comedy works better when you have that drama in your gut,” he says. “Whenever I’m doing comedy, I have that frown internally.”
Fans still quote the film back to him 46 years later. “They say, ‘Hey, you still have that drinking problem?'” parrots Hays. “Or they’ll say, ‘Surely you can’t be serious.'”
The film also works because it contains an element of twinkling rebelliousness. “Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker grew up with the Marx Brothers—so anarchistic, so anti-authority. That’s what you see all through the film.”
That spirit—of puncturing power, of “taking the piss,” as he puts it—feels as relevant now as ever, even as the boundaries of what audiences accept have shifted.
“Could you make Airplane! today?” he repeats, recalling a question often posed to the filmmakers, who’ve historically responded, “Oh, absolutely—just without the jokes.”
He laughs, but there’s sincerity beneath it. “Back when it was made, people could take themselves less seriously,” he says. “It would be pretty hard to make that today.”
For all its absurdity, Airplane! is also, in its own way, a film about seriousness—about masculinity, authority, and expectation. Hays’s character, Ted Striker, is a man haunted by past failures, thrust into increasingly ridiculous circumstances.
“I think that’s a byproduct of the era,” says Hays. “But also, the more serious we were, the more the comedy really worked.” He gestures toward the archetype: the hyper-masculine hero delivering life-and-death lines. “If you’re doing that in these ridiculous surroundings, it makes it even funnier.”
The result is a film that both inhabits and undermines the tropes it borrows from—an approach that continues to resonate with audiences who recognize the structure, even if they’ve never seen 1957’s Zero Hour! or the’ 70s-spanning Airport trilogy which Airplane! parodies.
That resonance is something Hays has witnessed firsthand in San Francisco. At a previous anniversary event, he recalls, the response was electric. “They were laughing so hard,” he says. “It was explosive laughter. It was like we just got swept back in time.”
Following this screening, Hays and co-star Julie Hagerty will take the stage to share stories and reflect on the film’s legacy, offering a rare window into a production that, for all its chaos onscreen, was built on a disciplined foundation.
That grounding extended beyond the set and into Hays’s personal life, where unexpected connections often mirrored the film’s sense of improbability.
Take his relationship with Cherie Currie, the former Runaways frontwoman—a pairing that might seem unlikely on paper. After a difficult period marked by a four-year battle with cocaine dependence, detailed in her 1989 memoir Neon Angel, Currie had become sober by the time they met, even working as a drug counselor.
“She had gone through a whole program and had cleaned herself up,” says Hays. “She’s an amazing woman.”
Their meeting hinged on coincidence and timing. A gym encounter turned into dinner, then something deeper. “We just really fell in love with each other,” he says.
The marriage, from 1990 to 1997, evolved into a lasting friendship and a sense of gratitude. “I’ve been very blessed,” says the actor, who shares a son, musician Jake Hays, with Currie.
As Hays’ improbable career and life continues to fly, Airplane! still lands its classic gags.
AIRPLANE! LIVE WITH JULIE HAGERTY AND ROBERT HAYS June 19. Curran Theatre, SF. More info here.
