The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  The list of people who have Murray’s 800 number is short. According to published reports, it includes directors Wes Anderson and Ted Melfi, longtime Murray compadre Mitch Glazer, producer Fred Roos, Murray’s attorney David Nochimson, and actors George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, and Naomi Watts. Murray’s friend Dan Aykroyd undoubtedly has the digits, though he has described the process of getting written communications into Murray’s hands as akin to serving someone a subpoena: “You gotta look him in the eye [and say], ‘You did receive this.’” Rob Burnett, the executive producer of Late Show with David Letterman, has said the time frame for a response from Murray “can be anywhere from twenty-four hours to six months.”

  “I CAN’T ACCUMULATE MORE STUFF AND MORE RELATIONSHIPS. PEOPLE SAY, ‘JUST GIVE ME YOUR NUMBER, I’LL GIVE YOU A CALL.’ HA. NO. I’LL NEVER CALL YOU BACK AND I WON’T ANSWER THE PHONE EITHER.”

  —MURRAY, on why he uses an 800 number to communicate with the outside world

  ELDINI, JERRY

  Unctuous, cocaine-dispensing record company employee played by Murray in a series of Saturday Night Live sketches beginning in 1978. The satin-jacketed sleazebag, an A&R rep for the fictional Polysutra Records, routinely administers mood-elevating “tootskis” to his rock star clients. Murray has called Eldini “one of my favorite characters from the show.” Murray’s Tripper Harrison character briefly impersonates Eldini in the opening minutes of Meatballs.

  E-MAIL

  Murray is not an avid e-mailer. He prefers to exchange texts with his children whenever possible. “I have no interest in it,” he once declared. “But the kids’ school stuff is all e-mail, and they send thousands of e-mails. It’s complete overload.”

  EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

  Murray’s place of birth. He was born in Evanston Hospital on September 21, 1950. He grew up in nearby Wilmette, Illinois.

  Anyone who has ever spent time behind a movie camera has experienced ocular fatigue—that special agony reserved for those who squint through the same lens all day. If Murray had had his way, he might have gotten rich off the cure. In the 1990s, he came up with the idea for a new kind of eyepiece that could be flipped from side to side, allowing cinematographers to toggle between their left and right eyes. “I knew a great cameraman and his eyes would become very fatigued,” Murray told Minnesota Business magazine. “I said, ‘Why don’t they invent an eye piece that just flips over to the other side?’” When he tried pitching the invention to a camera manufacturer, however, he was laughed out of the office. “And damned if some guy didn’t make this thing fifteen years later!”

  FACT CHECKERS UNIT

  Murray plays himself in this 2008 short film from director Dan Beers, who had previously worked as an associate producer on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca star as a pair of hypervigilant magazine fact checkers on a mission to verify whether Murray drinks warm milk at bedtime. (Spoiler alert: he does.) Murray donated eight hours of his time to the $12,000 production and reportedly helped the crew lug equipment around the set. In lieu of payment, he asked Beers to buy him a gun. When the director refused, Murray requested a knife instead—“a really big knife, like something I can tie around my leg.” After shooting wrapped, Beers and the crew presented their star with a brand-new twelve-inch hunting knife. “Thanks for this,” Murray said, and promptly vanished.

  FANS

  As much as he enjoys crashing the occasional kickball game or dropping in on someone’s house party, Murray has little patience for fans who approach him in public. “Half the time they confuse me with someone else,” he said. “‘That one where you were in Vietnam? God, you were funny in that!’”

  As for fan mail, don’t bother sending any. He won’t answer it. “I don’t have time for that,” he says. “It’s like there are hundreds of thousands of people that think they’re going to become millionaires getting autographs from movie actors. I don’t have time for those idiots. I got stuff to do. Spelling my name? I did that a long time ago. When I run into someone on the street that’s one thing, but answering mail for a living? Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay … I like a job where you sleep late, get kind of goofy and have some fun.”

  FANTASTIC FOUR RADIO SHOW, THE

  Murray supplied the voice of Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, in this nationally syndicated 1975 radio series narrated by Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee. Producer Bob Michelson recruited Murray for the part after working with him on The National Lampoon Radio Hour. John Belushi and Gilda Radner were also invited to join the cast, but both declined. Murray, who did not have a lot of voice-acting experience at this point, agreed to work for scale. Veteran performers Cynthia Adler, Bob Maxwell, and Jim Pappas played the other three members of the superhero team. “Bill was a relative rookie, a wild card and a risk,” said Fantastic Four scriptwriter Peter B. Lewis. “At the time, he was not the strongest of actors.” He often arrived late to recording sessions and routinely flubbed his line readings. He may have been hampered by his unfamiliarity with the Marvel milieu. “To my knowledge, Bill hadn’t heard of the Fantastic Four” when he started work on the series, Lewis admits. Beset by budget problems, The Fantastic Four Radio Show was canceled after a brief thirteen-week run.

  FANTASTIC MR. FOX

  DIRECTED BY: Wes Anderson

  WRITTEN BY: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach

  RELEASE DATE: November 13, 2009

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: A vulpine rascal makes mischief for the local landed gentry.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Clive Badger, attorney and demolitions expert

  By all accounts, Murray had the time of his life lending his vocal talents to this endearing stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel. “We really did have a chunky good time for the amount of work we did on this movie,” he remarked of the less-than-arduous recording process, which saw the cast and crew decamp to a country estate in Connecticut to commune with the farm animals they were bringing to life. Much of the dialogue for Fantastic Mr. Fox was recorded “live” on location, rather than in a studio. The actors spent their working hours galloping through fields and squatting in the dirt to simulate frantic digging while boom mike operators shadowed their every move. At night, the bacchanal began. “We recorded during the day and then at night we would have these magnificent meals and we would all tell stories,” Murray told a gathering of Reddit inquisitors in 2014 during an “Ask Me Anything” session. “We had a lot of great food, a lot of great wine, and great stories. It went on until people started literally falling from their chairs and being taken away.”

  Playing a more sympathetic lawyer than the sleazebags he portrayed in Wild Things and Speaking of Sex, Murray brought his trademark improvisational brio to his performance as Clive Badger—though the final characterization was somewhat muted by director Wes Anderson. Murray had intended to give Badger a “beatific” Wisconsin accent, but Anderson nixed it. “It was beautiful but no one really cared or noticed,” Murray said. “They just went ‘No, maybe not.’ That was the most serious acting work I’ve done in a long time.” One of Murray’s contributions that did make the cut was the epic wolf impersonation he filmed for Mr. Fox’s denouement, where a lone wolf gives a Black Power salute to the assembled animals. “We didn’t use his voice at all, but Bill ran up a hill and gave his best ‘wolf stare’ down on us,” Anderson told Rolling Stone. “We filmed it and the artists used it for inspiration to what ended up on the screen.”

  Fantastic Mr. Fox also gave Murray a chance to work with George Clooney for the first time. The two men bonded during the Connecticut recording sessions and ended up taking an impromptu holiday together in northern Italy after the picture wrapped. They would reunite professionally five years later for Clooney’s World War II adventure The Monuments Men. Cementing their unlikely friendship, Murray was one of the invited guests at Clooney’s September 2014 wedding to Amal Alamuddin at the Ca’ Farsetti palace in Venice.


  NEXT MOVIE: Ballhawks (2010)

  FATHERHOOD

  Between 1982 and 1997, Murray sired six sons by two women. His public remarks on the subject of fatherhood often seem to echo the sentiments of Bob Harris from Lost in Translation. “People only talk about what a joyous experience it is, but there is terror,” he said. “Your life, as you know it, is over. It’s over the day that child is born. It’s over, and something completely new starts.” Murray has discussed the importance of ignoring your kids. “If you bite on everything they throw at you, they will grind you down,” he told Esquire magazine. “When my kids ask what I want for my birthday or Christmas or whatever, I use the same answer my father did: ‘Peace and quiet.’ That was never a satisfactory answer to me as a kid—I wanted an answer like ‘A pipe.’ But now I see the wisdom of it: All I want is you at your best—you making this an easier home to live in, you thinking of others.”

  “I HAVE TO LOVE YOU, BUT I HAVE THE RIGHT TO IGNORE YOU.”

  —Murray’s personal motto for raising children

  FIELDS, TOTIE

  Morbidly obese comedian and nightclub performer of the 1960s and ’70s. Murray has called her the “benchmark” by which he measures show business professionalism. In 1976, Fields’s left leg was amputated above the knee following unsuccessful surgery to remove a blood clot. Fitted with an artificial limb and confined to a wheelchair, she continued to perform her Las Vegas nightclub act. Murray attended one of her shows in the late 1970s and was blown away by her ability to persevere in spite of her disability. “Her act was rough,” he recalled in a 2009 interview. “It was a blues act. Pickled with quarts of schmaltz. Her finale was, she’d sing this song, some piece of original material written for her. She was working on a stool: ‘Any fields that Totie Fields can land on/Long as I’ve got a leg to stand on.’ and she’d try to get up on her one leg and the one wooden one. Oh, she staggered. There was one more line, but it was designed to be drowned out in the applause. She had a wheelchair pusher, but when she’s finished, he doesn’t push her out. He backs her out. He’s backing her into the wings, and she’s waving thank you and goodnight. Kept me awake for hours.”

  FORREST GUMP

  Murray was one of several A-list actors to turn down the title role in this 1994 best picture winner. Chevy Chase and John Travolta also passed on the part of the dim-witted eyewitness to history. Tom Hanks said yes and earned his second Academy Award for best actor. In a 2014 interview with radio host Howard Stern, Murray admitted that he still hasn’t seen Forrest Gump.

  FUNERALS

  “I find funerals to be rewarding,” Murray has said. He once described the family funerals he attended as a child as “times of great hilarity, even in times of deepest sadness.” When Murray’s father died in 1967, he and his siblings used the occasion as an opportunity to bust on their fellow mourners. “There were all of us, nine kids in a limousine, just laughing about all the cousins and relatives outside the window going, ‘Get a load of that.’ People are looking at the car going, ‘Oh, it must be so sad in there,’ and we’re just roaring on the inside.”

  Murray has attended memorial services for such high-profile celebrities as Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Hunter S. Thompson, and Saturday Night Live costar John Belushi.

  GARFIELD: THE MOVIE

  DIRECTED BY: Peter Hewitt

  WRITTEN BY: Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow

  RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2004

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: A morbidly obese cat must cope with the arrival of his owner’s new puppy.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Garfield the Cat

  Murray gives vocal life to the lasagna-loving feline in this enervating big-screen adaptation of Jim Davis’s popular comic strip. (Oddly enough, the television voice of Garfield, Lorenzo Music, was also the voice of Peter Venkman in the Ghostbusters cartoon series.) Though savaged by critics and derided by most of Murray’s fans, Garfield: The Movie was an enormous box office hit and spawned the superior 2006 sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties. “I wasn’t thinking clearly,” Murray said of his participation in the Garfield enterprise. He once called Garfield: The Movie “more than I’d bargained for” and “sort of like Fantastic Mr. Fox without the joy or the fun.”

  In interviews conducted after Garfield: The Movie’s release, Murray admitted he accepted the role only because he was under the mistaken impression that Academy Award–winning screenwriter Joel Coen had written the script. The screenplay for Garfield was in fact written by Joel Cohen, a journeyman best known for his work on the family comedies Cheaper by the Dozen and Daddy Day Camp. “I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I’d never done that,” Murray told New York magazine’s Vulture blog (apparently forgetting about his work in Shame of the Jungle and B.C. Rock). “Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, ‘So-and-so and Joel Coen.’ And I thought: ‘Christ, well, I love those Coens! They’re funny.’ So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, ‘Yeah, I’d like to do that.’”

  After some haggling, the price was right as well. “I had these agents at the time, and I said, ‘What do they give you to do one of these things?’ And they said, ‘Oh, they give you $50,000.’ So I said, ‘Okay, well, I don’t even leave the fuckin’ driveway for that kind of money.’ Then this studio guy calls me up out of nowhere, and I had a nice conversation with him. No bullshit, no schmooze, none of that stuff. We just talked for a long time about the movie. And my agents called on Monday and said, ‘Well, they came back with another offer, and it was nowhere near $50,000.’ And I said, ‘That’s more befitting of the work I expect to do!’”

  “GARFIELD, MAYBE.”

  —MURRAY, in Zombieland, when asked if he had any regrets

  Murray’s enthusiasm for the project waned once he got in the recording studio. He spent several eight-hour days in a cramped booth guzzling coffee and perspiring through his shirt, desperately trying to ad-lib his way out of the hackneyed fat jokes that had been written for him. “I worked all day and kept going, ‘That’s the line? Well, I can’t say that.’ And you sit there and go, ‘What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense?’ And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, ‘Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we’re dealing with.’ So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, ‘Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the fuck was Coen thinking?’ And then they explained it to me: It wasn’t written by that Joel Coen.”

  Retakes were ordered and continued in Italy, where Murray was on location shooting his next film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. He later credited his improvisations with salvaging the film: “We managed to fix it, sort of. It was a big financial success. And I said, ‘Just promise me you’ll never do that again.’” The promises must have been persuasive, because Murray signed on for the follow-up two years later.

  NEXT MOVIE: This Old Cub (2004)

  GARFIELD: A TAIL OF TWO KITTIES

  DIRECTED BY: Tim Hill

  WRITTEN BY: Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow

  RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2006

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: ***

  PLOT: The tubby tabby trades places with an English royal.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Garfield, again

  To the astonishment of the nation’s critics (except Roger Ebert, who gave Garfield: The Movie three stars out of four), Murray returned for a second helping of lasagna in this inevitable sequel to the 2004 smash. If anything, he had an even worse experience. In interviews, he has all but disowned A Tail of Two Kitties, labeling it a “miscarriage” that was “beyond rescue” and “even more trouble” than the original. Having already played the “I thought it was a Coen Brothers movie” card, Murray pinned the blame for Tail’s creative deficiencies on meddling by the suits. “The first one had so much success,” he said. “Success has many fathers—so by
the time the second one rolled around there were, like, nine people having lots of input, including the studio head.” Director Tim Hill was also singled out for Murray’s ire. “There were too many crazy people involved with it,” the actor told a group of Reddit “Ask Me Anything” inquisitors in 2014. “I thought I fixed the movie, but the insane director who had formerly done some SpongeBob, he would leave me and say ‘I gotta go, I have a meeting’ and he was going to the studio where someone was telling him what it should be, countermanding what I was doing.”

  Perhaps the voice of Garfield doth protest too much. While it will never be mistaken for Fantasia, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is a vast improvement over its predecessor and represents Murray’s finest vocal work to date. The plot, lifted from Mark Twain’s novel The Prince and the Pauper, relies less on the hackneyed dog-versus-cat humor that bogged down the first movie. Delightful verbal and visual jokes abound. Though his public utterances belie it, Murray seems to be having more fun despite having to share screen time with Tim Curry as the voice of Garfield’s English “cousin.” Best of all, the characters of Garfield’s owner and his girlfriend (played by the insipid Breckin Meyer and Jennifer Love-Hewitt) are deemphasized in favor of a brilliant supporting cast headlined by Billy Connolly as the scheming Lord Dargis. If this was a “miscarriage,” fewer animated movies should go to term.