Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  “Chris,” asked Farley’s college dean on learning the sophomore hadn’t preregistered for the next semester, “what do you want to do?”

  “I want to be at Second City. It’s a comedy company in Chicago.”

  Sydney Pollack, anticipating improvisation, saved Bill Murray’s scenes for the last three weeks of production. “He knew we would be trouble,” Hoffman confessed. His first day of shooting, Murray arrived late, having stayed up the night before, drinking with his brothers. According to Pollack, Murray did “an enormous amount of improvising” in Tootsie. He had very few scripted lines. “In that sense,” he concurred, “it was like Caddyshack. The only difference was that this time I was working with Dustin Hoffman, a really incredible actor.” And Hoffman, true to Murray’s audition, worked right back. “Every take he does is amazing,” Murray observed, “and they’re all different.”

  It was Elaine May who insisted Pollack improvise the film’s birthday-party sequence on the grounds that party scenes, when written, never come across as parties. The director took the director’s note. “Bill,” Pollack said before one such take, “can you say something that sounds almost profoundly true but is really nonsense?” Pollack didn’t warn the extras—a group of admiring women hanging on Murray’s character’s every word—that an improvisation was imminent, so when Murray, as Jeff, a playwright, started in on how he imagined his ideal audience, not a full house at the Winter Garden but a group of people who had just come out of the worst rainstorm in history (“These are people who are alive on the planet”), and from there, wishing for a theater that was only open when it rained, Pollack captured—along with this perplexing sprint of dialogue that Murray balanced, perfectly, on the pinpoint of seriousness—the incredulous reactions of the extras. And in one take.

  Fred Willard’s agent called and said Rob Reiner wanted him in his first feature, This Is Spinal Tap. The part—a colonel on a military base—struck Willard as another one of those square types he’d grown tired of playing, but he knew and liked Reiner and Harry Shearer, one of Tap’s band members, and had vague memories of working with Christopher Guest on Broadway, in Little Murders, so, with some nudging from his agent, Willard agreed to at least take the meeting.

  On the day, while Reiner was at lunch, Willard watched the twenty-minute demo reel of improvised scenes, interviews, and heavy metal numbers Reiner had cut together. “What I was looking at was extraordinary,” Willard said. He had never seen anything like it—indeed, no one had—a rock documentary about a “fake” band so serious and considered in its presentation—shot on 16mm by Peter Smokler, who had handled rock documentaries like Jimi Plays Berkeley—it was easy to mistake Reiner’s demo for an actual documentary, which in a way it was. The only detail distinguishing these twenty minutes from The Last Waltz or Don’t Look Back, classics of the form, was that these musicians—and Guest, Shearer, and Michael McKean were actual musicians—were improvising as fictional characters, but with such stunning commitment to natural, low-key reality, they passed for the real thing.

  “They’re improvising?” Willard said at the TV screen. “You mean they’re not real people?”

  By the time Reiner came back from lunch Willard had made his decision. “I want to be in this movie.”

  “We don’t have a lot of money—”

  “I don’t care. I want to be in it.”

  Reiner was himself no stranger to improvisation. In 1961, his father—actor, writer, director Carl Reiner—and Mel Brooks improvised The 2000 Year Old Man on vinyl and television from characters they had been fooling around with for years, and as a nineteen-year-old student at UCLA, Reiner junior had founded his own improvisational troupe, the Session, with his friends Larry Bishop, Bobbi Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, and another second-generation improviser, David Arkin. The Session—primarily social satirists—found their own theater on Sunset, disbanded after a year, and Reiner joined the Committee, first in San Francisco, and then, in the late 1960s, appeared with them in Los Angeles. He said, “It seemed like there was a tremendous cross-pollination between the rock & roll world and the improvisational-satire world. These rock & roll people were all fascinated by what we did—we improvised onstage—and they were always hanging around: Mama Cass, guys from Blood, Sweat and Tears, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Steve Miller, Janis Joplin.”

  A decade later, in 1978, Reiner, Shearer, Guest, and McKean came together to work on The TV Show, an hour-long sketch spoof of television genres—including the rock ’n’ roll variety show. “We were shooting a takeoff on Midnight Special,” said Shearer, “just lying on the ground waiting for the machine that was supposed to make the fog effect to stop dripping hot oil on us—and to relieve the tension of that moment, we started adlibbing these characters that had nothing to do with the show.” Reiner joined in, and playing Wolfman Jack, introduced the others, members, as it turned out, of a British metal band. “Michael and Chris pretended to be childhood chums from Squatney,” Reiner recalled. “Harry said he came from Nilford-on-Null, a small village in the British midlands not far from Wolverhampton.” They worked a version of their improvisation into The TV Show and made their first appearance as Spinal Tap.

  The characters stuck with them. “At that stage,” Reiner said, “there was no cohesive plan, just a sense of ‘let’s take this further and see where it goes . . .’” Discussions of doing some kind of roadie movie were abandoned after the release of Roadie in 1980, but whenever the improvisers reconvened, the conversation resumed. The idea to do Tap as a feature-length documentary seemed a triple boon, first because documentary was a natural habitat for rock bands in the movies; second, “we wanted to improvise as much as possible,” Guest said, “and the documentary form allows you to do that”; and third, the form, said Shearer, “lent itself to the exposure of the self-important.” Filming Spinal Tap as a documentary—the province of mostly high-minded, socially conscious filmmaking—delivered its own irony: a solemn, deadpanned look at a bunch of idiots.

  Features had been improvised before, and the faux-documentary approach had already been used to successful effect—on radio, in War of the Worlds, and on film, in Take the Money and Run and All You Need Is Cash—but a fusion of the two, a fully improvised film in the documentary style, a genre that would come to be known as mockumentary, came to the fore with Reiner & Co.’s concept for This Is Spinal Tap.

  Development money customary for a script, Reiner spent on a scene-by-scene outline—which began as a two-metalheads-and-a-girl, Yoko Ono, story—a detailed history of the band and its members, and a demo reel intended to lure further investors (and, as it turned out, Fred Willard). “We were literally walking from one lot to the next,” Reiner said, “with a can of film under our arms. Columbia, MGM, Twentieth, Orion. We went everywhere.” The yes finally came from Avco-Embassy in the form of just over two million dollars: five weeks to shoot an outline of all Whats and no Hows. McKean said, “Going into each scene, improvising, we knew what information had to be conveyed, but the dialogue was totally flexible. The questions you see Rob Reiner asking us in the film were the first time we’d heard them.” Rarely did Reiner need more than three or four takes of each scene. “The first time,” he said, “I’d just turn on the cameras and see what happened. The second time, we added things or changed focus. The third time was to get variations and the fourth time was for cutaway shots.” Throughout, Reiner kept his attention on the characters’ attitudes, maintaining their parameters. He looked out for the story. Was each improvisation consistent with what had already been established and where Tap needed to go? Was a tangent compelling enough to reevaluate the outline, or was it what Reiner called a comic “wild card,” hilarious, but liable to lead them astray? “It’s the discipline,” Shearer said, “of what is otherwise a free form of expression.”

  When Fred Willard improvised his scene, Christopher Guest, to keep from laughing and ruining the take—a priceless moment impossible to re-create, even on a second take—had to phys
ically hide behind McKean to keep his reaction from the camera. Willard, Guest decided on Spinal Tap, was one of the funniest guys in the world, an enormous asset to any improvised scene, but to the other improvisers in that scene, an equally enormous liability. When Willard was on, some would literally have to walk—or run—out of the shot to keep from breaking up.

  “That day shooting Spinal Tap led to me being in the movies Christopher Guest would make years later,” Willard reflected. “So it was an afternoon well spent.”

  In the summer of 1983 Billy Murray was shooting The Razor’s Edge through remotest Europe and India, where Columbia executives, impatient about his approaching start date on Ghostbusters, couldn’t reach him. Their messages, increasingly desperate, didn’t find the production until they hit Ladakh, a scarcely populated region of mostly monks in the north of India. “Is Bill finished?” came one such missive, three days late. “He’s supposed to be doing Ghostbusters on the 25th.”

  Rushing from Delhi to London, Murray returned via Concorde to New York, exhausted and underweight, and shifting metaphysical gears from a movie about the search for freedom and meaning to a Hollywood comedy about ghost hunting, thinking, What am I doing here? Slime? “I mean,” he said, “you’d look around on the set in Ladakh, and there were thirty-five monks looking at you, just looking at you. And you realized that they were looking for a reason. It was a reminder all the time. A reminder that you’re a man and you’re going to die, so you’d better not waste this time here.” Where to go and how to be there: this was the quandary in Murray that Ramis saw as “always checking situations out for the moral quotient. What do I really feel? What do I really want? Is this good, is it moral, is it with it? Is it the right thing to do?” To fully feel the moment, to allow his liquid self to flow through its secret message toward a new becoming, was Murray’s life’s improvisation, often unfriendly to understanding. Even by his friends. Aykroyd said, “He’s off on another kind of journey that people, including me, don’t always understand.”

  It was not slime, but his ensemble allegiance to Aykroyd, Ramis, and Reitman, and theirs to him, that brought Murray there, to Ghostbusters, to a part Aykroyd had written for Belushi. “I think after John died,” he said, “we all realized we had been getting away from each other and we should stick closer together and help one another out.” He was returning the favor Aykroyd paid him some time earlier, when, putting his own film, Ghostbusters, on the line, he advised Murray, “Tell whoever wants Ghostbusters that they have to take The Razor’s Edge too,” a gamble Columbia’s Frank Price—a longtime supporter of Murray’s—was willing to risk. “The word in Hollywood,” Price explained, “was I was making a stupid decision. Ghostbusters was expensive, special-effects comedy, and it was generally conceded that comedies had a ceiling on how much money they could bring in.”

  By any standard, Animal House, Meatballs, Stripes, and Caddyshack were low-budget investments; The Blues Brothers, approved at $17 million and coming in at around $27 million, approached Ghostbusters’ $30 million budget, but where the former had the security of Belushi’s bankability, and arrived in theaters at the tail end of Saturday Night Live’s first great wave of popularity, Ghostbusters’ elaborate special-effects plan was a sink-or-swim proposition liable to bury the whole production—and Saturday Night Live’s star, having slipped from the firmament, didn’t mean what it once had. Timing the film’s release to the summer of 1984—primetime for high school audiences—Price made Reitman guarantee a finished film almost exactly one year from the day he gave the go-ahead, in June of 1983, giving Reitman and company a mere twelve months to write Aykroyd’s deliriously impractical outline into a script, and shoot, edit, and add the two hundred or so special-effect shots no one was certain they could pull off. “I wasn’t asking for the impossible,” Price said. He thought, worse case, Ghostbusters would break even.

  Columbia’s president and CEO, however, did not. Fay Vincent was so nervous about the budget, he sent his lawyer to Los Angeles to talk Price out of his decision.

  Price’s explanation was, simply, “I’ve got Bill Murray.”

  The ticking clock was loud in Ivan Reitman’s mind when he and Harold Ramis drove out to collect Murray, that day in October 1983, from LaGuardia Airport, where they found him sauntering through the terminal, brandishing a stadium horn and chatting up the locals. (“If I see someone who’s out cold on their feet,” he reflected, “I’m going to try to wake that person up. It’s what I’d want someone to do for me. Wake me the hell up and come back to the planet.”) Rushing Murray into wardrobe, Reitman still had no idea if he’d actually read the script. In truth, Bill Murray had barely even thought about his character; but supported by Aykroyd and Ramis, doing double duty as improvisers and screenwriters, he knew Ghostbusters, though closely scripted, would be treated as a work in progress. “Having your writers as actors means you have them on the set all the time,” Reit­man said. “We basically did our final draft while we filmed.” Wherever there wasn’t a line—if the script allowed it—“We just made stuff up,” Murray said.

  “We trusted each other so implicitly,” said Ramis, “because of our mutual training at Second City.” A similar dynamic united Reitman and Murray. “Because we’ve worked together,” Reitman said, “Bill trusts me. He’s willing to be lousy because he knows I’ll cut it out. That allows him to be spontaneous.”

  Trust curbed the impulse to deliberate every detail, allowing Reitman to work fast—“four writers, three directors, no waiting,” Aykroyd said—shooting sometimes as many as fifteen setups a day, which he moved along with a shorthand—potentially off-putting to an untrusting ensemble—his improvisers understood.

  “Be smarter . . .”

  “Be cheaper . . .”

  “Do it different . . .”

  “Shooting was precious,” Reitman said, “so you don’t want to waste it on bullshit.” To keep the pace, Reitman would restart scenes while the camera was rolling, and in twenty seconds the prop department would reset the props, the assistant director would get the background players back to first positions, and Reitman would call out to the principal actor, generally Murray, “the energy source,” he called him, a shorthand direction, the improvisation would begin, and Reitman, “in some unsaid musical way,” would feel, in his gut, the scene drawing to its natural ending point. Rhythm—he had it. When “Cut” finally came, Reitman would pull Murray to the camera. “You know where you said this instead of that?” he would say. “Let’s do it again, and this time, let’s try it with that.” Reitman would try to hold on to the strongest discoveries—not just improvised jokes, but improvised story or character turns. Before rolling film on one library scene, Reitman said, “Let’s just put a stack of books over here . . .”

  “I’m just going to knock this shelf over,” he warned before another library take, “so get ready . . .”

  Laughing—Reitman was an ace laugher—kept the improvisers hot. “There’s this Second City theory,” said costar Sigourney Weaver, new to ensemble improv, “that says if you’ll help the people around you to be good, you’ll also bring out the best in yourself. That philosophy was so powerful I think it had a lot to do with why the film was such a breeze—it was just so much fun to make.” Half the job, Murray knew, was maintaining that sense of fun; without it, that other half, spontaneity, wouldn’t occur, and moments like the one between Murray and Weaver, playing at hunting ghosts in her character’s apartment—Murray tinkling the living room piano and deadpanning, “They hate that”—would have never happened. Murray found the key to fun in looseness and relaxation, the blank, Zen mind from which his instinct could spring. On Ghostbusters, it was palpable. “Being on the set was one of the great experiences of all time,” said Michael Ovitz, then Murray’s and Aykroyd’s agent. “The looseness was crazily fantastic.”

  Looseness grounded in story, Reitman said, “was the key to Ghostbusters. There’s improv all over the place, but at the same time, we had a really great script.�
�� So successful was Reitman’s give-and-take, watching Ghostbusters, you can’t tell where the improvised scenes end and the closely scripted scenes begin. The net result, a structural integrity uncommon to the improvised film work of the 1980s, stamped Ghostbusters as the smoothest, most professional film of the post–Saturday Night comedies. “Ghostbusters,” Aykroyd said, “was really ten years in the making if you think of the formation of my career and Billy’s and Harold’s and Ivan’s. What we did was interlock and interweave the training we got from the three main comedy institutions in America—Second City, Saturday Night Live, and National Lampoon”—taming, in the process, the gross-out defiance of mid-’70s Lampoon humor with friendly goodwill. In Ghostbusters, it is the improvisational mood of pure fun enjoyed at City Hall’s expense that shows the punk spirit Ramis wrote into Animal House and Caddyshack—indeed, all his films of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

  “I feel that even as slight as films that I have worked on may seem to critics,” Ramis said, “each one has a buried message to the audience—and I consider that audience a very impressionable one.” Animal House delivered its message through tits and togas; Caddyshack, shit in the pool; but in Ghostbusters there is nothing to offend, no puerile attacks on power, no Belushi. Here Ramis and his cowriters, softened by years of success, channeled their 1960s radicalism into kinder terms, more palatable to mass audiences. Ivan Reitman, reaching his crest as an improvisational director, resolved the stylistic irregularities of their previous collaborations, Meatballs and Stripes—works beset by awkward shifts from scripted to improvised scenes—into polished, blockbuster form.

  When Ghostbusters hit screens in the summer of 1984, “the money,” Frank Price said, “was coming in in such huge amounts. It was like the movie Boomtown. The geyser kept pouring out. It kept gushing and gushing and . . .” This gusher was quickly followed by a sea change in Hollywood. Suddenly, Ovitz said, “everyone was clamoring for SNL people. Within a 12-month period, the entire attitude of people in the business regarding television personalities changed.”