could provide the desired verisimilitude. Instead, the filmmakers ultimately sought out and hired the real-life married couple who had recorded the announcement tapes which were then being used at Los Angeles International Airport. ZAZ lifted some of their dialog directly from the 1968 novel Airport, written by Arthur Hailey who had also written Zero Hour! script. The lifted lines included ones about an unwanted pregnancy; David Zucker said the couple "got a kick out of it". Music The film's score was composed by Elmer Bernstein, who had previously provided soundtracks for classic films like The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Great Escape. ZAZ told Bernstein they did not want an epic score like his past works but "a B-Movie level score, overdone and corny". According to ZAZ, Bernstein completely understood what they were trying to do, had laughed throughout a previous cut of the film, and wrote a "fantastic score". In 1980, an LP soundtrack for the film was released by Regency Records which includes dialog and songs from the film. Narrated by Shadoe Stevens, it only features one score track, the "Love Theme from Airplane!" composed by Bernstein. The soundtrack was altered for the European Flying High release, with several featured tracks swapped for pieces original to the LP. In April 2009, La-La Land Records announced it would release the first official soundtrack album for Airplane!, containing Bernstein's complete score. The soundtrack was released digitally on February 19, 2013, by Paramount Music. Release Prior to the film's release, the directors were apprehensive following a mediocre audience response at a pre-screening, but the film earned its entire budget of about $3.5 million in its first five days of wide release. Airplane! opened on June 27, 1980, in seven theatres in Toronto, grossing $83,058 in its opening weekend. It also opened in two theaters in Buffalo, grossing $14,000 in its first week. The film then expanded on Wednesday, July 2 to 705 theaters in the United States and Canada, grossing $6,052,514 in its first five days of wide release, finishing second for the weekend with a gross of $4,540,000. Overall, it grossed $83 million at the US and Canadian box office and returned $40 million in rentals, making it the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1980. Worldwide, the film earned $130 million in its initial release, and by 2002 it had made $171 million. Reception Airplane! received