The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  NEXT MOVIE: The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

  September 21, 1970, was Bill Murray’s twentieth birthday. It was also one of the worst days of his life. After a family birthday celebration in Chicago, Murray was all set to fly back to Denver to resume his pre-med studies at Regis College. As he was waiting in line to board his flight at O’Hare International Airport, he made the mistake of telling one of his fellow passengers that he was carrying two bombs in his suitcase. A ticket agent overheard Murray’s joke and immediately summoned a couple of U.S. marshals, who proceeded to root through Murray’s luggage. They didn’t find any explosives, but they did discover five two-pound “bricks” of marijuana. That much weed was worth $20,000 at the time (about six times as much today). In a panic, Murray tried to stash the pot-filled bags in a locker, but Chicago vice cops arrived on the scene and arrested him. He did manage to swallow a check from one of his “customers” before cops confiscated his suitcase. “That guy owes me his life and reputation,” Murray said later.

  Murray was charged with possession of marijuana and ordered to appear in narcotics court the next day. The bust made the front page of the Chicago Tribune. Because he was a first-time offender, Murray was spared jail time and placed on probation for five years. But his college career was over. After talking it over with his family, Murray opted to drop out of Regis before his criminal record got him kicked out.

  GAROFALO, JANEANE

  The stand-up comic, actress, and ’90s icon considers Murray her personal hero. In 1982, she wrote an entire essay about her admiration for him as part of her application packet to Providence College. The two first met on November 12, 1994, during Garofalo’s lone unhappy season on Saturday Night Live. Murray had dropped by to deliver a eulogy for the recently deceased SNL writer Michael O’Donoghue. “I saw him by the craft service table,” Garofalo told the UCLA Daily Bruin. “I was dressed as Dorothy for a horrendously bad Wizard of Oz sketch, and I went and pretended that I had something to do by the coffee machine… . I went up and stood extra near him and then conjured up some question to ask someone near him and said, ‘Hello,’ and shook his hand.” Four months later, in March 1995, Garofalo quit SNL midseason. “I think he was impressed when I quit,” Garofalo said. “He was impressed with the balls it took to quit the show.” In fact, Murray was so impressed that he lobbied hard for Garofalo to be cast opposite him as a kindly zookeeper in his 1996 film Larger Than Life.

  GET LOW

  DIRECTED BY: Aaron Schneider

  WRITTEN BY: Chris Provenzano, C. Gaby Mitchell, and Scott Seeke

  RELEASE DATE: July 30, 2010

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: A cantankerous old hermit plans his funeral.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Frank Quinn, Depression-era funeral director

  Refining a character he created for the classic 1998 Saturday Night Live sketch “Who’s More Grizzled?” Robert Duvall plays a backwoods curmudgeon harboring a dark secret in this Faulknerian period piece loosely based on a true story. Murray provides able support as the undertaker who helps Duvall’s character choreograph his own elaborate funeral service. A showcase for the performances of its two stars, Get Low was somewhat surprisingly snubbed by all the major award-granting entities.

  Murray came to the project via the usual circuitous route: entreaties to his attorney, scripts sent to mysterious post office boxes, weeks of radio silence followed by an out-of-the-blue phone call expressing his interest in joining the production. In the end, it took a personal plea from director Aaron Schneider to seal the deal. “I sat down and I wrote a letter,” Schneider told an interviewer. “Took me like two or three days to write it because it’s like, how do you write a letter to Bill Murray? Dear Bill, then what? I finally just decided to tell him, kind of put my heart on the page and said here’s why we want you and here’s what I think this could be.” Whatever Schneider wrote, it must have impressed Murray, who was recovering from the heartbreak of his second divorce at the time and thought he might never work again. He immediately said yes, though his superstitious insistence on not signing a contract nearly jeopardized the film’s tenuous financing.

  The opportunity to work with one of his acting idols may have also factored into Murray’s decision to accept the part. “I’ve always liked [Duvall’s] stuff,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I think he’s incredibly real and a certain kind of actor that all actors go, ‘Okay, I give. That guy, he’s better than I am.’ You can’t really pass up that opportunity to work with someone who has more stuff than you, because it’s part of your education. It was amazing to see how accessible all his emotions are and how he was able to touch all these things in an instant. You realize you have a long ways to go.” The chance to observe Duvall in his natural thespian habitat, playing a crusty old hermit who might as well be Boo Radley’s grandfather, was too good to pass up. Or, as Murray put it in another interview: “[Duvall] can coot with the best of them.”

  For his own part, which Murray somewhat unfairly described as “a bozo on the side,” the actor drew on the experience of his grandfather, who once worked as a greeter in a funeral home. “He was such an amazing person,” Murray told the New York Post. “He would just be there as if he were a friend to the deceased, and people would talk to him about the deceased. When he died himself, there was an enormous turnout for him, because all these people had become friends with him at their own family’s funerals.” On the challenge of holding his own on-screen alongside Duvall, he said: “You’re playing behind the beat, because he’s set in this crazy rhythm, and you’re sort of chasing a meat wagon that’s rolling down the street. It’s either challenging or nervous, but you know that he can do anything you can do, so you don’t wanna aim low. You don’t wanna throw a softball out there. You gotta just open a can of beans on him every time, because that’s your job. I’m gonna push him as hard as I can to get the best out of him. It’s like testing spaghetti. You throw it on the wall and see what happens.”

  Financial backing for Get Low came, in part, from investors in Poland. That compelled Murray and the rest of the cast and crew to spend Thanksgiving 2009 promoting the film at the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography in Lodz, Poland. Murray described the junket as “a total blast … much cooler than Cannes.” Asked to present an award at the festival, Murray regaled the crowd by opening with “I love you, may I borrow some money?” in fluent Polish. He and producer Dean Zanuck followed that up with a road trip to Warsaw, where they crashed a stranger’s house party and sat in the front row at a Polish fashion show. “With Bill, you never know where you are going to end up,” Zanuck later confided. “You come to expect the unexpected.”

  NEXT MOVIE: Passion Play (2010)

  GET SMART

  DIRECTED BY: Peter Segal

  WRITTEN BY: Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember

  RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2008

  FILM RATING: *½

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: After being passed over for a promotion, an aspiring spy infiltrates a terrorist organization to prove his mettle.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Agent 13

  Murray has a brief cameo in this ghastly unnecessary reboot of the classic TV sitcom about an inept secret agent. In a scene that seems to have no relation to the rest of the film, he plays Agent 13, an operative for CONTROL who inexplicably plies his trade from inside a hollowed-out tree on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

  NEXT MOVIE: City of Ember (2008)

  GHOSTBUSTERS

  DIRECTED BY: Ivan Reitman

  WRITTEN BY: Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis

  RELEASE DATE: June 7, 1984

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: ****

  PLOT: A trio of paranormal investigators (plus Ernie Hudson) thwarts a ghost invasion of New York City.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Peter Venkman, leader of the Ghostbusters

  In the summer of 1984, three goliaths bestrode the American cult
ural landscape: Bruce Springsteen, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Murray—star of the season’s highest-grossing film, Ghostbusters. Saturday Night Live may have made Murray a household name, but this crowd-pleasing, special-effects-driven supernatural action comedy put his smirking puss on every school lunchbox from coast to coast. Depending on your taste—and the age you were when you first saw it—Ghostbusters may not be the best film of Bill Murray’s career, but it’s unquestionably the most important.

  An evolutionary leap forward in the chain of comedy blockbusters that began with The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters likewise sprang from the fertile mind of one man: Dan Aykroyd. Murray’s former SNL cast mate and a lifelong believer in the supernatural (several of his relatives were professed spiritual mediums), Aykroyd modeled his script on the ghost-hunting comedies of Bob Hope and Abbott and Costello. He wrote it for himself and John Belushi, but Belushi’s tragic death in March 1982 compelled him to rethink the entire project. Aykroyd showed his screenplay-in-progress to director Ivan Reitman, who suggested a repeat of the successful Stripes formula: entice Harold Ramis to join the cast and then have him do a rewrite tailored to the strengths of Murray in the Belushi role. Thus Dr. Peter Venkman, libidinous parapsychologist and nominal leader of the Ghostbusters team, was born. Aykroyd and Ramis rounded out the trio as Raymond Stantz and Egon Spengler, “the Lion and the Tin Man” to Murray’s Scarecrow. Or as Murray put it: “They figured out that I would be the mouth, Dan would be the heart, and Harold would be the brains.”

  When Aykroyd sent him the finished screenplay, Murray was impressed. In fact, he saw no need to improve it with his trademark improvisations. “I’d never worked on a movie where the script was good,” he said later. “Stripes and Meatballs, we rewrote the script every single day.” There was just one hang-up. Murray was gung-ho to get his passion project, The Razor’s Edge, green-lit by a major studio. Dan Aykroyd counseled him to say yes to Ghostbusters on the condition that Columbia Pictures bankroll The Razor’s Edge as well. “Forty-five minutes later, we had a caterer and a producer and a director for The Razor’s Edge,” Murray said.

  Filming of Ghostbusters was scheduled to begin in the fall of 1983, immediately after Murray finished work on the exhausting Razor’s Edge shoot in India. With Aykroyd and Ramis all set to go before the camera, studio executives went into a full-blown panic over Murray’s whereabouts. They bombarded him with international telegrams demanding that he show up on the Ghostbusters set in New York in time for the first day of shooting. At one point, Murray made the mistake of calling in from a phone booth at the Taj Mahal, only to be ordered home by a Columbia suit with little regard for the difficulties involved in adapting Somerset Maugham’s classic novel.

  After a brief stopover in London, Murray finally made it home on the Concorde. Ramis and Reitman personally met him at John F. Kennedy International Airport for an impromptu “story conference.” Murray “came through the terminal with a stadium horn—one of those bullhorns that plays eighty different fight songs,” Ramis later recalled. “He was addressing everyone in sight with this thing and then playing a song. We dragged him out of there and went to a restaurant in Queens. I’ve never seen him in higher spirits. We spent an hour together, and he said maybe two words about the whole script. Then he took off again.”

  The boisterous behavior continued on the location set in midtown Manhattan. On the first day of shooting, Reitman squired the dazed and jet-lagged Murray over to the wardrobe department. (“I still had no idea if he’d actually read the script,” the director said later.) After trying on his costume, Murray realized he’d lost a significant amount of weight in India. “So I started eating right away. A production assistant said, ‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, and I want a couple of doughnuts, too.’” On being introduced to costar Sigourney Weaver for the first time, outside the New York Public Library, Murray greeted her with a hearty “Hello, Susan.” Then he picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, and carried her down the street. “It was a great metaphor for what happened to me in the movie,” Weaver said later. “I was just turned upside down and I think I became a much better actress for it.”

  Once the initial adrenaline rush wore off, Murray found the first month of the Ghostbusters shoot an enervating slog. “For the first few weeks, I was getting beaten to go to work,” he said. “It was like, ‘Where’s Bill?’ ‘Oh, he’s asleep.’ Then they’d send three sets of people to knock on the door and say, ‘They really want you.’ I’d stumble out and do something and then go back to sleep. I kept thinking to myself: ‘Ten days ago I was up there working with the high lamas in a gompa, and here I am removing ghosts from drugstores and painting slime on my body.’” As autumn wore on, however, he caught his second wind. The cast’s spirits were buoyed by the tremendous response they received from ordinary New Yorkers, who quickly learned to identify the ’Busters by their distinctive beige jumpsuits. “It was tremendous fun running around New York City in those suits,” Harold Ramis said. “People would cheer; restaurants would stay open after hours for us. And even if they couldn’t see who we were, they were seeing this ambulance with the logo on it.”

  That “no ghost” logo became one of the most recognizable icons in movie history. When Ghostbusters opened in June 1984 it burned through box office records, disproving the prevailing wisdom that a big-budget comedy headlined by television actors could not compete with the likes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The film went on to gross more than $230 million in the United States alone, easily earning back its $30 million budget. When summer turned to fall, the film continued to pick up steam as millions of American children donned Ghostbusters costumes for Halloween. By Christmas, Venkman-, Stantz-, and Spengler-themed toys were all the rage—much to the delight of the stars’ accountants. “I remember during The Blues Brothers Dan had been down on doing a lot of merchandising,” Harold Ramis later remarked. “He would say, ‘I don’t want to be on every lunchbox in America.’ Well, when it came time for Ghostbusters his tune had changed, and he said, ‘Now I do want to be on every lunchbox in America.’ And we were.”

  For Murray, the phantasmagoric success of Ghostbusters was a somewhat mixed blessing. He was now the most popular comic actor in Hollywood (at least until Beverly Hills Cop dropped later that year). But the film’s box office prowess did little to boost the fortunes of his true labor of love, The Razor’s Edge. It opened to harshly negative reviews and a mostly puzzled audience reaction in the fall of 1984. And while Murray the performer was now at peak demand, Murray the private citizen found himself melting under the glare of an exponentially higher level of fame. Tired of being stopped on the street by fans, he holed up in his New York apartment, didn’t cut his fingernails for ten weeks, and grew a salt-and-pepper beard that made him “look like a malamute/husky cross.” The mountain man look lasted only about a month, but by the end of the year Murray had fled to France to escape the spotlight and consider the next phase of his career. He would not star in another film for four years.

  NEXT MOVIE: Nothing Lasts Forever (1984)

  GHOSTBUSTERS II

  DIRECTED BY: Ivan Reitman

  WRITTEN BY: Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis

  RELEASE DATE: June 16, 1989

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: The Ghostbusters reunite to stop a seventeenth-century sorcerer from returning to life and resuming his reign of evil.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Peter Venkman, ’Busters frontman

  “Why did I make that movie?” Murray wondered aloud just seven months after the release of this unnecessary sequel to the 1984 hit. After five years of saying no to Ghostbusters II (“I don’t think there’s enough money to make me do it,” he declared in a 1984 interview), he finally acquiesced after a two-hour powwow with director Ivan Reitman, costars Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis—and their representation.

  “The clever agents got us all together in a room,” Murray said afterward, “and we reall
y are funny together. I mean they are funny people—Harold and Danny and myself… . And we were just blindingly funny for about an hour or so. And the agents, there was just foam coming off of them. And so they had this pitch and Danny and Harold had already concocted some sort of story idea, and it was a story, it was a good story. I think I had even already read one or two that Danny rolled out before that, but this one was a good one. I said, ‘Okay, we can do that one.’ It was just kind of fun to have all of us together.”

  At first, that sense of fun seemed to translate to the screenplay, which Aykroyd and Ramis once again cowrote. “It returns the story to a human scale,” Murray told an interviewer before shooting began, “with subtlety and no silly explosions at the end. Like Scrooged, it’s a story about innocence restored, and good values, and the power of faith in ordinary people.” Like Scrooged, however, Ghostbusters II was fatally undermined by a director—Reitman—who preferred “silly explosions” and special effects to the character-driven comedy that attracted Murray to the project.

  “It didn’t end up the way it was presented,” Murray explained after Ghostbusters II opened to decidedly mixed reviews. “The special effects guys took over. I had something like two scenes—and they’re the only funny ones in the movie.” To be fair, Murray’s Peter Venkman character has more than two scenes, although he doesn’t dominate the action the way he did in the original. The attempt to give more screen time to Aykroyd, Ramis, and Rick Moranis did prove somewhat successful. Ghostbusters II is more an ensemble piece and less a showcase for Murray’s talents. But the long, loud, enervating sequel doesn’t do nearly enough to distinguish itself from the first movie. For that, Murray placed the blame squarely on Reitman’s shoulders.