Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Del Close lived directly behind the Blues Bar. A year earlier, on the recommendation of his dear friend Severn Darden, he had checked into a Texas rehab facility and kicked his alcoholism with a form of aversion therapy Del compared to the “rehabilitation” scene in A Clockwork Orange. Off drink, he was indeed a changed man, but Del was still doing drugs, and Belushi, only thirty steps away at the Blues Bar, knew it. Crashing on cocaine (“We had a budget in the movie for cocaine for night shoots,” Aykroyd said), Belushi knocked Del’s door down for a speed injection. He was facing a dance sequence and fading fast and Del obliged him with a needle to his ass. “Junkies give the best shots,” he said.

  Before the first shot on the first day of filming Caddyshack, Harold Ramis’s first feature as a director, someone asked him, “Where do you want to put the camera?”

  “Well, let’s, uh . . . I think I should shoot it this way.”

  “Uh-huh,” replied the First AD. “So do you want us to move all those trucks that we’ve parked there, and the generator, and the lunch tables, and the tent, and the catering?”

  “Let’s not do that.”

  When the soundman called “Speed!,” production assistant Trevor Albert looked over to Ramis.

  “Harold,” someone fed him his line sotto voce. “Action.”

  He was in Davie, Florida, sent there by Orion to reproduce, from a script by Ramis, Doug Kenney, and Brian Doyle-Murray, the magical moneymaking elixir of Animal House. Ramis had originally pitched Orion an explicitly political dark comedy—a true story—about the proposed Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, but Orion’s Mike Medavoy asked Ramis to dial it down. “If you have something urban and contemporary,” he offered, “I’d be happy to consider it.” The writers came back with Caddyshack, an unruly-kids-against-the-dour-grown-ups story rife with Doyle-Murray’s memories of country club social strata and Ramis’s gentle leftism. It wasn’t exactly what Medavoy asked for, but it was just what he wanted: another invisibly political anti-institutional comedy, Animal House on the green.

  “And I want to direct it,” Ramis told producer Jon Peters.

  “Yeah,” Peters replied. “You look like a director.”

  Months later, Ramis was on set, squinting over the Rolling Hills golf course, thinking, This directing thing, it really doesn’t seem so hard. They ask you questions; you answer them. The task was to make everyone comfortable, to sacrifice, if he had to, admiration for affection. “I want everyone to feel good on a movie set,” he said. “So I spend maybe too much of my day making sure everyone’s happy.” To enhance the collaboration, he would, like a socialist leader or improvisational director, willingly defer artistic authority, shocking cast and crew with an honest confession of “I don’t have a fucking clue what to do at this point.”

  His theory was he was in good hands: theirs. “We knew we were funny,” Chevy Chase said. “They were a tight group coming in,” explained editor William Carruth. “They trusted each other and backed each other. Everybody stood behind Harold and tried to help him as much as they could.”

  “I never saw reason not to improvise,” Ramis said.

  As Carl, Billy Murray played a version of the Honker, a character Ramis knew from Second City. For one of Carl’s scenes, sparsely designated in the shooting script, sans dialogue (“Carl, the greenskeeper, is absently lopping the heads off bedded tulips as he practices his golf swing with a grass whip”), Ramis used his understanding of Murray’s muscle to produce a most memorable improvisation.

  “Bill,” he said, “when you’re playing sports, do you ever just talk to yourself like you’re the announcer, and you’re actually—”

  “I know exactly what you mean. Say no more.”

  In one take, two cameras rolling, Murray improvised the film’s famous commentator monologue: “What an incredible Cinderella story . . . This unknown, comes out of nowhere, to lead the pack . . . at Augusta. He’s on his final hole. He’s about 455 yards away, he’s gonna hit about a 2-iron I think. [Swings, decapitates a flower] Oh, he got all of that. The crowd is standing on its feet here at Augusta. The normally reserved Augusta crowd . . . going wild . . . for this young Cinderella who’s come out of nowhere. He’s got about 350 yards left; he’s going to hit about a 5-iron it looks like, don’t you think? He’s got a beautiful backswing . . . [Swings, decapitates flower] That’s—Oh, he got all of that one! He’s gotta be pleased with that! The crowd is just on its feet here. He’s a Cinderella boy. Tears in his eyes, I guess, as he lines up this last shot. He’s got about 195 yards left, and he’s got a . . . looks like he’s got about an 8-iron. This crowd has gone deadly silent . . . Cinderella story, out of nowhere, former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters Champion. [Swings, another flower] It looks like a mirac—It’s in the hole! It’s in the hole!”

  Following an improvisation, Ramis would turn to the production crew: if they laughed, Harold moved on; if they didn’t, he asked the improvisers to try again.

  Ramis started shooting with a script hundreds of pages long, and his try-again attitude made the material pile up even more, confusing the storyline, and him. Amid the jokes, Murray’s inspired embellishments around the hostile gopher subplot, came the whispers: “What is this movie about?” Looking back, Ramis said, “We were afraid of communicating anything real in the Caddyshack days. Romance embarrassed us, along with real emotion of any kind, admitting any kind of vulnerability.” They were—in violation of Second City ideals—going for laughs über alles. “I see where the movie’s going,” Ramis said, “but then, Oh boy, there’s a great joke over here.”

  “The atmosphere was chaotic and creative and infused with the scent of confidence and marijuana,” said Trevor Albert. The pot was Harold’s; the coke was theirs, mostly. Rodney Dangerfield carried a quarter gram with him every day. “The significant part of Harold’s job,” Albert added, “was going to be creatively focusing this immensely talented cast with an all-you-can-snort paid vacation to Florida.” It was fall 1979: they were young, celebrated, and knew they could get away with a little anti-institutionalism of their own. After-hours parties, hangovers, and jam sessions raged through a motel they had colonized right off the golf course. (“If you say you remember Caddyshack,” said actor Michael O’Keefe, “you probably weren’t there.”) Hijacking golf carts, cast and crew were spotted on the fairway spinning donuts at two in the morning. One night, Ramis and Kenney decided to re-create the Patton/Rommel tank battle and destroyed a dozen golf carts in the process. “I developed a mantra on Caddyshack,” Ramis said, “which was, ‘It’s not my money.’”

  “You know there’s a hurricane coming,” Ramis warned Carruth in the motel’s ad hoc pot-encumbered cutting room. “You got your supplies?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ramis dropped two grams on the table.

  “You got your supplies.”

  Still unclear about his story, which had fractured into funny set pieces like a Second City revue, Ramis got lost under all that footage. There was always an “on the other hand . . .” Inviting outside opinions, Ramis’s collaborative approach only intensified his indecisiveness. “Editing,” Ramis said, “was a disaster.”

  Caddyshack’s first cut was four and a half hours long. In Hollywood, veteran editor Ralph Winters did what he could before abdicating the film to editor David Bretherton. He came up with an eleventh-hour solution, a flimsy through-line on which to hang all of Caddyshack’s disparate material: add more gopher.

  There was a banging on the door. “Chrissie, wake up and get dressed.”

  It was her roommate, her best friend, Donna.

  “Bill Murray is downstairs and we have to take him to Long Beach . . . I’ll explain in the car.”

  Out on the street, Bill Murray was indeed sitting there in Donna’s Honda Civic. With him was his friend John Byrum. In bumper-to-bumper traffic on their way out to Long Island, the guys had gestured for the girl in the Civic to pull over. “Can you tell us how to get to Long Beach?” Byrum
asked. “Hey,” Donna replied, “your friend looks like Bill Murray.” Then Byrum told her; it was Bill Murray. “Let me stop and get my roommate,” Donna returned, “and we’ll take you to Long Beach.”

  Upstairs in the apartment, Byrum and Murray offered Chrissie a large bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon and off they went.

  Murray and Byrum were traveling the country, road-writing a feature film adaptation of The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham’s novel of spiritual seeking and rebirth. Denver, Iowa City, L.A., and now, with Donna and Chrissie as their guides, onward to Long Island, New York, Murray and Byrum were seeking out loud bars and restaurants where they could write their movie in the chaotic middle of life. “We weren’t trying to make a funny movie,” Murray said, “but the intention was to show that this search doesn’t mean you lose your sense of humor.” Byrum would direct and Murray would star.

  In the spring of 1981 Murray was a movie star, the famous face of the high-grossing Meatballs, and his next hit—Stripes—was only months away from release. He had signed with Michael Ovitz, the most powerful agent of Creative Artists Agency, the most powerful agency in Hollywood. “Bill was always difficult to find,” Ovitz said. “A call would come in from India, and it would be Bill saying, ‘Here I am at the Taj Mahal.’ I wouldn’t believe him, and he would put his Indian taxi driver on the line to prove he was out there. Or he’d show up at my house in L.A., out of the blue, ring my doorbell and say he was a pizza delivery-man. We’d let him in, he’d actually have a pizza, we’d eat it and then he’d disappear again.” Years later Murray would explain, “I live a little bit on the seat of my pants, I try to be alert and available. I try to be available for life to happen to me. We’re in this life, and if you’re not available, the sort of ordinary time goes past and you didn’t live it. But if you’re available, life gets huge. You’re really living it.”

  Arriving at the beaches of Long Island, the writers checked into an unsatisfactory motel and took their recruits to dinner. Chrissie had her first martini and Bill Murray sang her “Happy Birthday.” It was not her birthday.

  After dinner, the writers decided to forgo the motel, forgo Long Island altogether, and return to Chrissie and Donna’s apartment, back in Queens, and watch Judgment at Nuremberg. They had a print and a projector with them. The girls slept through the movie.

  The next morning, Murray sat with Chrissie as she put on her makeup and readied herself for work. Just shut the door, she told him on her way out, and it would lock. Okay, he said. She uttered a transfixed goodbye to Bill Murray, and left.

  When she returned home that night, she found the projector cover and a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon sitting in her refrigerator.

  SCTV’s original deal with NBC, settled in the spring of 1981, was for nine ninety-minute shows, a major increase in running time. To speed up the flow of material, Dave Thomas, head writer of this new SCTV, suggested the “three-minute-and-under rule,” which allowed cast members to circumvent the customary table read and get any sketch they wrote immediately into preproduction. “We needed to get things moving fast,” Thomas explained. “And we had to trust each other enough to move these shorter sketches to the front of the line.” Shorter material meant more material, about twenty to thirty pieces a show, and more material meant more writers, so Andrew Alexander hired Bob Dolman, John McAndrew, and Doug Steckler, a former Second City improviser, born and raised in the small town of Vermillion, South Dakota, who showed, early on, a knack for writing the best “local” humor pieces about Melonville, SCTV’s fictional home base. (“You really want to know where Melonville is?” said Dolman. “Vermillion, South Dakota.”) In no time the rookies learned that the best way to get a piece on the big board was to first pitch it to a cast member and, with joint enthusiasm, refine it together in advance of the table read. Collaborative writing was especially useful to improvisers like Andrea Martin and John Candy, who, insecure on their own, ignited in the presence of others. “Actors would ‘Yes, and’ us writers until it didn’t go anywhere or it caught fire,” Steckler said. “They would give you all the fish line you needed to get the idea out there.”

  “SCTV wasn’t a show that was heavily improvised on tape,” Moranis said. “It was improvised in the writing room.”

  Improvisers and writers would meet in their individual offices off the conference room to play out the beginnings of a promising idea. “Improv is very much the first draft,” Dolman said, “the creation of something by saying ‘Yes, keep going.’ At SCTV we had the freedom to use that tool to generate a lot of material.” From office to office, word of funny scenes spread with the sound of laughter, and stealing away from their desks, their own pieces, writer-improvisers followed the scent through half-opened doors, pulled up chairs without asking to come in, and, in effect, touched their paintbrushes to the idea incumbent, layering in a character or idea of their own, and watched the colors change together in the swirl. “You welcomed the input,” Steckler said. “No one got possessive of an idea.”

  By week’s end, all convened in the conference room to present their work.

  “It was like taking a test,” Dolman said. “But that was the extent of our creative censorship. Our only judges were our peers at that table, but they were all funny people we admired.” With ninety minutes to fill, table reads worked more democratically than ever. Rarely was a scene argued out of the room; a laughing or quiet consensus made obvious the distinction between good and less good, and anyway, Flaherty said, “when we did those shows we needed so much material we didn’t have time to second-guess our instincts, and by that time, our instincts were so good.” So good, in fact, Flaherty encouraged a certain amount of flop sweat at the table. After all, one never knew if the initial discomfort around a rickety sketch would lead to the threshold of uncharted comic territory. On the rare occasion a scene was rejected, Dolman said, “we never felt ostracized from the family. We knew it was safe to fail, so we allowed ourselves to risk. Our fear was ‘I hope this is good,’ not ‘I hope I don’t lose my job.’” As Del Close would, Flaherty directed the table toward the unknown, the potential bomb, but where the demon in Del relished the sadistic, Flaherty watched in grateful amusement, and as “an American observing Canadians observing Americans,” in Steckler’s words, he was their tuning fork—“the anchor” Dolman and Andrea Martin called him—not always making sense, but never wrong. Still, as in every family, feelings got hurt. “As a writer,” Flaherty said, “you take offense to someone who doesn’t like your thing. There was some of that, I think. More than we wanted to admit. It’s one thing when someone else is taking the heat—like Lorne Michaels. It doesn’t affect the group. But when it’s coming from inside the group, there can be some resentment there that builds up.”

  To release hostility, the ensemble had an ideal outlet. Resisting, as one, the rotation of dutiful executives NBC dispatched to control them encouraged the sense of underdog purpose at SCTV and further focused their oppositional tastes. When one unsuspecting batch of executives called Dave Thomas into their office to present him with their list of demands, he shot back, “The cast wants to do it their way. If you don’t like it, you have the right to cancel the show,” and into the writing room would come another network disciplinarian, “because NBC had to have some guy in there,” Dolman said, like Barry Sand, Al Rucker, or Don Novello (aka Father Guido Sarducci), who all found themselves offering unsolicited suggestions, getting a round of blank nods from the conference table, and ultimately retreating to a back office. NBC didn’t understand that SCTV didn’t work like Saturday Night Live. “They weren’t used to the fact that the cast and the writers were running the show,” said SCTV’s own producer, Pat Whitley. “They never understood that there was no Lorne Michaels.”

  Relocating to Edmonton to shoot season four further suppressed the threat of network interference. “NBC,” Doug Steckler recognized, “was afraid of the cold,” and finally left them to themselves. Their director, John Blanchard, “knew that the cast was goin
g to tell him what they wanted and he could either contribute or back off,” Whitley said. “He was really politically conscious and he also had a great eye.” In an era when VHS copies were difficult to come by, Blanchard, in preparation of a parody, always managed to find his source material—as he did with SCTV’s ambitious send-up of The Godfather—bringing to set detailed visual notes that would be essential to the show’s brilliant, and even beautiful, cinematic jokes, adding his own layer of visual satire to the segment. And after a take, Flaherty said, “we would sit at the monitor and all of us would have to okay it.” In between, Flaherty might offer notes on an impression, or another cast member would contribute an idea. In an SCTV sketch, even the utility players are rich in detail; one gets the sense that any supporting character could be the center of his own sketch, and sometimes would. Hence Moranis’s introduction of Skip Bittman, Bobby Bittman’s brother, or Candy’s William B., Sammy Maudlin’s Ed McMahon, who, in a misguided effort to host his own talk show, fails. The web of interconnected characters—show biz failures, phonies and dreamers fighting their own delusions, the fearful shadow side of 1063 Avenue Road—further indemnified SCTV’s evolving creation of a world apart, like one of those magnificent volumes of nineteenth-century literature where you get not only the stories of individuals but an entire society, Middlemarch cum Melonville. “In terms of television sketch comedy,” Del concluded, “I don’t think it’s ever been equaled.”