concept of ‘Top Secret!’: that it was not necessarily grounded in reality, but it would have kind of this heightened sense of craziness – even to which genres we were picking, which was a split hybrid between Elvis movies and the World War II movies. David Zucker said they had been working on the script since Airplane! "but we just couldn't figure out how to do it. We made repeated attempts to combine a rock and roll movie with a World War II movie but it was very difficult to do ... We already had ideas for scenes we wanted to do and we tried to fit in plot around those scenes". A fourth writer, Martyn Burke, was brought in to work on the plot. "If it weren't for Martyn we'd still be sitting in that room", said Jerry Zucker. The film was mostly written at the offices of ZAZ's lawyers. The film's budget was a reported $8.5 million, whereas Airplane! was made for $3.2 million. Key portions of Top Secret! are parodies of The Conspirators, including the street scene with the novelty vendor. Casting Kilmer was cast after the directors saw him in a play called Slab Boys with Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon. He turned up to the audition dressed like Elvis Presley. "I like to think of it as the role Elvis never got but should have", said Abrahams. Lucy Gutteridge, who plays the female lead, had just appeared in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Nicholas Nickleby. Unlike Airplane!, the film does not feature a large number of cameos by famous actors, because, as Zucker explained, "That was one of the jokes in Airplane! and we had done it and wanted to move on." Two well-known actors who were cast in the film were Omar Sharif as Agent Cedric and Peter Cushing as a Swedish bookstore proprietor. Soundtrack Release The film was test screened at various colleges and as a result of audience responses, the length was cut from around two hours to 90 minutes. The film was scheduled for release on June 8, 1984 but Paramount pushed the date back to June 22, angering some exhibitors. The official reason was that Paramount wanted to avoid competing against Ghostbusters and Gremlins although rumours spread that the studio was dissatisfied with the film's quality. Producer Jon Davison denied this saying "Paramount has a lot of confidence in