by Sam Wasson
But despite terrific reviews and a devoted cult following, Global Television notified Andrew Alexander that SCTV’s second season would be its last; henceforth they wanted to go with American programming. In search of a new home, Alexander tried the CBC, whose executives told him they weren’t looking for comedy. NBC’s Fred Silverman took one look at what Alexander was selling and complained, “Far too intelligent.” Alexander had no other leads.
Martin Short’s childhood fantasies, played out in the attic of his parents’ home in Hamilton, Ontario, were of celebrity entertainers like Jack Paar and Frank Sinatra. And yet, without knowing exactly why, in a farther-back part of his brain, where he stored his comedy albums, Short prized Nichols and May above all the others. “I used to feel,” he said, “like when you’re twelve or something, something happened. There’s a dividing line. Either you wanted to be Mike Nichols and Elaine or you wanted to be Newhart. Why do people say ‘I want to be a stand-up’ and why do people say they want to do improv?” For years, Short repressed the impulse. He became an actor, moderately fulfilled, sometimes less so. In January 1977, in Los Angeles, Short and his wife, Nancy Dolman, were walking to meet their friend Paul Shaffer, and his friends Bill Murray and John Belushi, for dinner at the Sunset Marquis Hotel. Suddenly he stopped on Santa Monica Boulevard and told Nancy he had to sit down. There was a bench.
“What’s going on?” Nancy asked.
“I can’t go and hang at Paul’s hotel. Not only do they all have success, but they have direction. I don’t know what I want to do, and I’m so pathetically lost that I just want to sit on this curb. I feel fine as long as I stay right here.”
Nancy took his hand. “How long are we going to sit here?”
About two hours, as it turned out.
The Shorts passed on dinner, and instead got tickets to see War Babies, the L.A.-based improv group playing the Cast Theater in nearby Hollywood. The show knocked Marty out. He knew what he had to do.
The next morning, Short called Andrew Alexander at the Fire Hall. “I want to join Second City.”
Two months later, Short was back in Toronto, replacing John Candy in the Fire Hall’s ninth revue, the Flaherty-directed The Wizard of Ossington.
Short threw himself into the work, fired by the open encouragement of the ensemble, his friends for five years, and the self-imposed pressure of making up for lost time. He ran directly to the cliff’s edge. Taped improvisations Short brought home and diligently typed into sketches; characters he named and refined quickly—like the adorable nerd, Ed Grimley, who debuted in Ossington—giving nuance to their personality and physical life as an actor would, with uncommon and deliberate attention to detail. Grimley’s voice he adapted from his brother-in-law’s; his gray and orange shirt came from Short’s teenage closet. But most significantly, for all his boldness, and oddness, and preposterous physical daring, Short committed to his characters’ inner reality. In the case of Grimley, it was his panic and pervasive enthusiasm, “and I quickly understood . . . that it’s not the action, it’s the reaction, and that if you create a sincerity within a character, that sincerity has the power, not a joke.” The lesson informed the rest of his career. “For me, it was very liberating because I was used to setups and punch lines.” Henceforth, Short would not hold back: the greater his commitment to Grimley, inside and out, the greater the audience’s commitment to him. As long as he came from somewhere emotionally, there was no such thing as going too far. “My work,” he said, “completely shifted after Second City.”
And then Del Close came up from Chicago to direct East of Eatons (a pun on the name of a Canadian department store chain).
In the name of art, Close offered up workshop ideas that raced past the edge. The Toronto improvisers, who, Flaherty said, “were more interested in show business and comedy and characters than baring their souls onstage,” bridled at Close’s exercises, especially the one Del called Autobiography. Meaning his own.
He assigned Dave Thomas the role of Doctor and Catherine O’Hara, Nurse. The scene: Del’s father’s suicide.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Thomas returned. “I’m not doing that.”
“Theater is not a democracy. I’m the director. You do what I say.”
“I’m here to do comedy. I’m not bringing my own baggage into this and I’m sure as hell not bringing yours.”
“Then you’re fired.”
“All right,” Thomas said, “I’m outta here,” and left.
Two hours later, Andrew Alexander got Thomas on the phone. “You’re coming in tonight, right?”
“Only you can fire me. And unless you’re firing me, I’m coming in.”
After the show that night, Thomas offered Close an olive branch, a ride home.
“I would have done just what you did,” Close conceded in the car. “Don’t ever take shit from anybody.”
There was a time when Close could improvise away the pain, but a quarter century of torrential brainstorms had exhausted his capacity for new ideas. Grasping, he hired an enormous bodyguard named Tiny to keep him from drinking. It didn’t work.
When Close came in drunk, improviser Robin Duke asked, “Where’s Tiny?”
“I gave him the night off.”
Alexander had no choice but to divest Close of his directing responsibilities and send him back to Chicago. “Del could find the truth in the scene, asking what’s real here,” Alexander observed. “He was committed to it, but he wasn’t so good at finding it in himself.” Close responded to his dismissal by creating more havoc, clogging his hotel toilet with kitty litter and storming the theater that winter night—having drunkenly walked over a mile from his room on Bloor Street—in his socks, with no jacket, shivering and cursing Alexander with, “You demon! You Judas!”—and, finally, as if he had run out of ammo—“You cheeser!” John Candy intercepted Close’s clumsy swing at Alexander, then, along with Dave Thomas and Sheldon Patinkin, rushed him out the back of the theater to his hotel lobby, where Close reached up, grabbed the bell clerk by his tie, and yanked his face against the desk. “Del wanted to kill Andrew,” Patinkin said. “He was not kidding.” They sat there in his hotel room amid the stink of kitty litter to be sure he didn’t kill himself.
From Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Close would continue to send in ideas for new sketches and improvisation. They were mostly ignored.
In the summer of 1977 John Landis, the director of Animal House, flew to New York to meet John Belushi. The character of John “Bluto” Blutarsky, samurai-silent party animal, had been written specifically for John, and Landis was happy to bring him aboard.
Universal, however, was not so sure about any of it. The new crop of star filmmakers found zero political or artistic value in the script’s tale of punks versus preps, and Hollywood’s dwindling old guard saw nothing in its belligerent, tasteless, insolent, airheaded gags. The latter at least had the good sense to know it was out of touch with baby boomers, and as a sort of stopgap, allowed the Animal House script to linger in development for many drafts, not saying yes but not saying no either. Universal president Ned Tanen didn’t get why the film’s supposed heroes were such losers. “That was part of the trick of Animal House,” Ramis explained. “Universal couldn’t believe that those were the heroes of the movie—the slobs, the idiots. But that was a big thing when I was in college, the smartest people would act as stupidly as they possibly could.” To Ramis, goofing off was a political act.
When Chevy Chase, the star of Saturday Night Live’s first season, turned down the lead in the film, Universal happily signed Tim Matheson, an actor on the rise. Coupled with a valuable yes from Donald Sutherland—“that’s what got the movie green-lit,” Landis said—the studio warmed to the idea of letting Belushi play Bluto. It was, after all, a small and ugly part. Someone had to take it.
Nearly as soon as Belushi bounded into Landis’s room at the Drake Hotel, he was brandishing demands of a rewrite, pushing for additional Bluto scenes, calling up from room serv
ice an unbelievable order of beer, oysters, shrimp cocktails, margaritas—improvising in character, Landis realized, for a part he said wasn’t big enough.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” Belushi finally conceded, asked if he could borrow twenty bucks from Landis—a trust test Landis passed—and flew out of the room.
Moments later, room service arrived with the food. Laughing, Landis picked up the phone and called Universal’s Sean Daniel. “I think we got him.”
On set in Oregon later that year, Landis found himself expanding Bluto, setting the stage for Belushi’s run-amok by directing certain scenes like a silent film director, calling out to the actors during the take, yelling at them (cameras still rolling) with a smile on his face to do it again and again—“Stop! That’s terrible! Do it again!!”—creating, between the takes, high-energy pauses for spontaneous action to occur and even spill into the scripted scenes themselves. Throughout, unscripted glimpses of Belushi’s sweetness—the antidote to his savage side—kept presenting themselves, less in dialogue than behavior, insisting their way into Landis’s attention. “John,” Tim Matheson said, “was the only one Landis would let go off-script.”
Though he was present at the creation, instrumental in taking Animal House from idea to screen, Ivan Reitman feared his creative contributions, upstaged by Belushi’s bravura performance, Ramis & Co.’s sweetly tasteless script, and director John Landis’s canny elevation of the ensemble, would be ignored by Hollywood and the press. With the Lampoon boat leaving the port and no time to conscientiously form his retaliatory movie, Reitman raced himself into production on his next feature, this time as director, “for my own confidence.” There was no time to plan. Taking a cue from the innocent anarchy of Animal House, Reitman and writer Dan Goldberg decided on a summer-camp comedy. Meatballs. “Summer camp is so much fun,” Reitman reasoned. “It’s full of beautiful girls and guys having so much fun and falling off of ladders and stuff.” They hammered out a draft in a month. Minimal revisions. Barely a second draft. And they started casting. Who did they like for the lead?
“It’s got to be Bill Murray,” Reitman told Goldberg. “Bill Murray’s going to do it.”
“Do we have him? Do we have a contract? Do we have a deal?”
Their casting director was unconcerned. “No, no, no, but don’t worry. It’s going to happen.”
Without a commitment from Murray, or a plan B, Reitman began location scouting, hiring his crew, proceeding as if Murray’s involvement was already secured. When Murray’s name came up, generally within the context of, “Has anyone heard from him?” Reitman said, “I think he’ll do it.”
All summer long Reitman tried to get a yes from Saturday Night Live’s newest phenomenon, sending out script after script to wherever Murray had been sighted, whether in Washington, playing minor-league baseball with the Grays Harbor Loggers, or whatever address Murray’s lawyer—who may even have been guessing—whispered to Reitman. Murray’s replies, when they came back, were clear nos. He didn’t like the script. (Who did?) Privately, Murray worried if, after a lifetime of shortform improvisation, he could sustain a feature-length scripted part—and the lead, to boot. “It’s all artificial rhythms,” Murray said of film acting, “that’s the thing about movies, because they’re manufactured. Stand-up comedy or live TV has its own rhythm because there’s a natural oomph with the audience. But film is completely artificial, and that’s why it’s hard.” But Reitman persisted; didn’t Murray see that Meatballs could do for him what Animal House was doing for Belushi? “I’m only 30,” Murray shrugged two years later. “From 20 years, I had no ambition to do anything, and then I got a job, sort of accidentally, and then another job, and another. But I don’t think I want to be Charlton Heston. I don’t want to be doing movies when I’m fifty years old.” Better to spend his summer off from Saturday Night Live traveling around the country playing minor-league baseball and golf.
To lure Murray, Reitman hired Harold Ramis, Meatballs’s fourth writer, to punch up the jokes and focus the script, to write to Murray’s strengths. Again, Murray declined.
“We’re going to start shooting one way or the other,” Reitman decreed.
Early in August 1978, a week after Animal House opened to life-changing box office—winning acclaim for everyone but Ivan Reitman—Reitman made good on his promise and, to the distress of many around him, began shooting Meatballs, a comedy with a weak script, no lead, a tiny budget, and a rigid schedule: when summer ended, the director would lose his background campers, the unpaid extras of Ontario’s Camp White Pine.
On that very day, Murray’s lawyer notified Reitman that “Mr. Murray was considering doing the movie.” Unbeknownst to Reitman, Belushi had advised Murray that it didn’t matter what or how bad the movie was as long as he was the star. In the meantime Murray was getting bored with minor-league baseball.
Two days later, Bill Murray arrived at Camp White Pine. He was wearing baggy pants and a Hawaiian shirt. “What are we going to shoot today?”
“Well, you know,” Reitman said, “we’re going to do this bus scene. It’s not very good.”
“It’s crap.” He threw the script pages away. “I got this.”
So—for the first time in a feature film—Bill Murray improvised on camera. Instantly, Reitman understood what he had in front of him: a collaborator. “The thing about scripts is, they’re two-dimensional,” Murray said. “There’s always something that’s not accounted for. That’s where I come in handy. I can make something happen there.” More than merely hilarious, Murray’s inventions, engendering spontaneous responses from the other actors, most of them untrained kids, facilitated honest reactions all around. Just by playing, he was spreading and receiving inspiration, making the movie better. “It’s hard to call it a technique when it’s something much bigger,” Murray said. “When the cameras roll, I think: This is the most important thing I’m going to do. It’s going to the biggest experience I’ll ever share with other people. The biggest moment of contact with people right now. And if you’re there, conscious of that . . . what you do doesn’t look hard.”
On day two of Meatballs, Reitman, quite consciously, really began to work with Murray.
“Bill,” he said. “I want you to enter there—”
“Wait a second, Ivan. What about—how about this . . .”
Reitman had already set up the lighting to suit his original idea, but there was something special in Murray’s idea, a kernel, that was better than what was written. “I knew I had a decision to make,” Reitman said, “and I decided I just had to go with it. You’re going to have to be more nimble, I said to myself. You’re going to have to be fast and smart enough, and learn when to control and when to let go. That’s how I got trained in improv directing. Meatballs was the training.”
Those around Murray, Reitman directed not to initiate improvisations but simply react honestly to whatever Murray invented. “Actors can clash in improvisation,” Reitman said. “The first way you gain control in those kinds of sequences is some characters should do it and some characters should not, or some characters should just react and not say lines.” Meatballs, then, was built around Murray the improviser. “You see it in the wrestling scene,” Reitman said. “Murray’s just wrestling with her as part of the seduction and it turns out to be this sexually powerful thing choreographed in a real way.” Before the scene, Reitman spent fifteen minutes with Murray working out his blocking in broad strokes, “and whatever else happened in the choreography of it was up to Bill.” Reitman rolled two cameras on the improvisations, allowed three or four takes, each one different, and each one, Reitman said, “more delightful than the other.”
With every improvisation, Reitman was witness to a new side of Murray, a big-brotherly sweetness at odds with his Lampoon and SNL personae. With women, he showed his playful innocence—it wasn’t sex his characters wanted, but fun—and it lifted him, Murray, out of sarcasm. “On Saturday Night Live,” Reitman said, “all you saw was this wacky sort of
side, but [Murray] has a very warm, genuine quality. I think I brought out some glimpses of that . . .”
“And I don’t think a director, as often as not, knows what is going to play funny anyway,” Murray said. “As often as not, the right one is the one that they’re surprised by, so I don’t think that they have the right tone in their head. And I think that good actors always—or if you’re being good, anyway—you’re making it better than the script. That’s your fucking job. It’s like, Okay, the script says this? Well, watch this. Let’s just roar a little bit. Let’s see how high we can go.” Far better than anything on the page, Murray’s sensitivity to the younger actors sent the film in unanticipated directions, incurring in Reitman new ideas for scenes, as many as seven or eight story points—added later—to augment what was now the emotional centerpiece of the film, Murray’s relationship to the character of Rudy, the lonely kid he charms out of his isolation. “We’d see a scene shot,” Murray recalled, “and we’d say, ‘This is garbage, let’s look for another idea.’”
For Meatballs—his first starring role—Bill Murray got above the title credit. And Ivan Reitman had a hit.
“I saw Meatballs when it opened,” said Columbia Pictures president Frank Price, “and though there were a lot of people in this business that didn’t think Bill Murray was an incredible star, I thought he was going to be huge, and I knew that Ivan had great talent.” Price would finance their next picture, Stripes. On Murray’s insistence, Harold Ramis would cowrite and costar.
