Murray called the script for The Lost City, by legendary Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, “one of the most extraordinary pieces of material I’ve ever read”—a considerable overstatement if true. “No one’s gonna see this movie,” he told Garcia, “but I want to be in it.” According to the director, Murray faxed over his signature without ever reading his contract. When Garcia informed him he could only pay him scale, Murray paused, said “What’s that?” and never mentioned salary again.
Playing an ambiguously gay gag writer loosely based on Cabrera Infante, Murray supplies much-needed comic relief. He does a brief Jack Benny impression, rocks the short-pants-and-suit look made famous by Angus Young of AC/DC, and comments mordantly on the revolutionary goings-on. Much of his dialogue was improvised, including a scene in which Murray and Dustin Hoffman discuss the proper way to make an egg cream. In an interview conducted for the DVD release of The Lost City, Garcia likened Murray’s character to a “Cuban Groucho Marx” and “a satirical Greek chorus.”
NEXT MOVIE: Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006)
LOST IN AMERICA
Director Albert Brooks offered Murray the male lead in this 1985 comedy about a married couple who quit their jobs to drive across America in a Winnebago. Murray was living in Paris at the time, in the midst of his four-year sabbatical from Hollywood, and explained to Brooks that he wouldn’t be available for another two and a half years. Brooks ended up playing the part himself.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
DIRECTED BY: Sofia Coppola
WRITTEN BY: Sofia Coppola
RELEASE DATE: October 3, 2003
FILM RATING: ****
MURRAY RATING: ****
PLOT: A pair of unhappy hotel guests runs through the streets of Tokyo together.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Bob Harris, melancholic whiskey pitchman
“I had a wish that I could do a movie that was sort of romantic,” Murray said of his state of mind in 2003, when he accepted the lead role in writer/director Sofia Coppola’s bittersweet paean to emotional dislocation. Lost in Translation wound up being the crowning achievement of Murray’s career to that point, earning him multiple industry awards and his first Oscar nomination for best actor. “I knew I was going to nail that character,” he said of Bob Harris, the melancholy movie star who forges an intense bond with a sullen young woman in a Tokyo hotel. In fact, the project called out to him the first time he read Coppola’s 90-page screenplay. “It wasn’t overwritten, it wasn’t sentimental, it wasn’t maudlin,” he told PBS gabber Charlie Rose. “It was clean. It was really spare.”
Getting Murray interested in the script was easy. Getting him to take a look at it in the first place was the hard part. After writing the role of Bob Harris with Murray in mind (reportedly because she liked the idea of seeing him in a kimono), Coppola spent the better part of a year calling him on the phone and begging him to do the film. “I left him a lot of messages,” she said. “He probably got sick of it. I sent him pages, and then I would leave him messages about what I was thinking about it.” To seal the deal, she enlisted two Murrayland insiders: producer Mitch Glazer and director Wes Anderson. Glazer arranged a lunch with Murray in New York, where Coppola made her pitch. Anderson wooed him over dinner the following night. “It was one of those patented Bill evenings,” the Rushmore director told the New York Times. “He was driving. He went through a red light, reversed the car, and then ducked into this Japanese place that only he could see. By the time the sake came, I knew he would do the movie.”
Even after all that, Murray’s participation was far from assured. He wavered on committing to the project until the last possible moment. After a week of filming at Tokyo’s Park Hyatt Hotel, Murray still had not shown up on the set. In a panic, Coppola called Glazer looking for her wayward star. When Murray finally arrived, he was jet-lagged and grumpy—conditions he ended up incorporating into his performance. The four-week Tokyo shoot was arduous, and elements of Bob Harris’s plight hit uncomfortably close to home for a husband and father all too used to being separated from his family. “You are always away from home, as a film actor,” Murray told the Guardian after the film’s release. “You can be stuck in a hotel, several thousand miles away in a whole different time zone, and it is never glamorous. You can’t sleep, you put on the television in the middle of the night when you can’t understand a word, and you make phone calls back home which don’t really give you the comfort they should. I know what it’s like to be that stranger’s voice calling in.” For the record, Murray modeled Harris’s weary affect on Harrison Ford, whose glowering visage loomed over Tokyo in billboard ads for Asahi beer.
Murray took home nearly every major acting award for Lost in Translation, although the most coveted prize of all—the Oscar for best actor—eluded him. Few people remember Mystic River today, or Sean Penn’s rather pedestrian performance in it, whereas Murray’s portrayal of the morose Suntory whiskey spokesman has only grown in stature as the years have passed. In part that’s due to the enduring mystery of Lost in Translation’s final scene. The question of what Bob Harris whispers to Scarlett Johansson’s Charlotte comes up nearly every time Murray discusses the film. Digital enhancement of the soundtrack has narrowed the field to two possibilities (“I have to be leaving, but I won’t let that come between us, okay?” or “Go to that man and tell him the truth, okay?”), but Murray is characteristically cagey about what he actually said. “I told the truth once and they didn’t believe me,” he told Charlie Rose in 2014. “So I just said, ‘To hell with it, I’m not telling anyone.’ I whispered in her ear, but the moment happened, and I was wired—they had microphones—and Sofia and Ava Cabrera, the script supervisor, had this moment where they just looked at her and said, ‘He doesn’t have to say anything. You don’t have to hear anything.’ And I had the same feeling from sixty yards away. I went, ‘It doesn’t matter what the hell I say in her ear. This will be a wonderful mystery.’”
Elsewhere, Murray told a story about a time he was getting on a ferry at Martha’s Vineyard when someone in the line asked him to reveal the secret. Murray waited a beat before he started to speak, letting the sound of a bellowing foghorn drown out his answer. “I acted it out like I was saying something really sincere, and the crowd laughed so hard,” he said. “It was great. I couldn’t have bought that moment.”
NEXT MOVIE: Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
“THE MOVIE IS THE PRIZE. IN TIME, NOBODY REMEMBERS WHO WON THE DAMN OSCAR. THEY JUST REMEMBER THE MOVIE IF IT WAS GOOD. IF YOU HAD SAID TO ME, ‘YOU COULD BE IN MYSTIC RIVER AND WIN THE OSCAR OR YOU COULD BE IN YOUR MOVIE AND NOT WIN’—NOT A FUCKIN’ CHANCE. NO CONTEST. I LOVED THE WHOLE EXPERIENCE. IT’S A GREAT, GREAT MOVIE.”
—MURRAY, on not winning the best actor Oscar for Lost in Translation
LOVE
“I had girlfriends from the time I was in kindergarten,” Murray once confessed. He fell in love for the first time at the age of twelve but was devastated when he discovered that the object of his affection didn’t share his feelings. “She was in love with another guy at school,” he said. “It baffled me that you could love someone so much and not get it back. That changed me in certain ways, which I’ve never been able to plumb. I stopped reading, and I used to read all day long. I just stopped and something changed in me, and I don’t know how, but it’s affected what I’ve become.”
Since then, Murray has been through two marriages, at least one extramarital affair, and two bitter divorces—as well as a tempestuous relationship with his Saturday Night Live cast mate Gilda Radner. But he remains a proponent of old-fashioned romance, which, he says, “basically starts with respect.” In an interview, Murray claimed that he took romantic inspiration from Stephen Stills’s 1970 free-love anthem “Love the One You’re With”:“There is something to that. It’s not just make love to whomever you’re with, it’s just love whomever you’re with. And love can be seeing that here we are and there’s this world here. If I go to my room a
nd I watch TV, I didn’t really live. If I stay in my hotel room and watch TV, I didn’t live today.”
LOYOLA ACADEMY
Murray attended this private Jesuit high school in Wilmette, Illinois, from 1964 to 1968. He paid his own tuition with money saved up from caddying. Murray has described Loyola Academy as a “preppie Catholic school” and dubbed it his “caddy money repository.” Murray caught the acting bug at Loyola, appearing in school productions of The Music Man and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.
Although the arts intrigued him, Murray was not nearly as committed to his studies. He was notorious for his indifference to classwork. In a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone, he referred to himself as “an underachiever and a screw-off” as a high school student. “I just didn’t care for school much,” he said. “Studying was boring. I was lazy … and I had no interest in getting good grades.” He was bright enough to score highly on the National Merit Scholarship test but was disqualified because of his poor grades. He later called the rejection “devastating, really bad news, ’cause my father would have loved to have heard somebody was going to come up with the money for college.”
Murray often misbehaved in class. “He was always a rebel,” said one of his high school friends, Lena Zanzucchi. “If there was one thing you knew, it’s that he was going to do what he wanted.” Another student remembered him as “a kid who liked to sit and observe people in the hallways. He’d select a spot where he could avoid the wrath of the Jesuit priests for loitering, then just sit and take it all in. If someone stared back at him, he just made a face at them, a consummate goof-off.” Around campus, Murray was known as “the man least likely to succeed.” His high school English teacher, Father Lawrence Reuter, called him “brilliant, but a terrible student.” Instead of making Murray sit at the head of the class with the other unruly pupils, Reuter often put him in the back so he would not act out in front of his classmates.
Shortly after arriving at Loyola, Murray fell under the influence of a group of nonconformist “troublemakers.” “These guys were really smart—with 148 IQs,” he told Rolling Stone, “and really nuts, the first guys that got kicked out of our school for grass.” Although long hair was officially banned at the school, “these guys would let their hair grow long and grease it down so it looked like it was short, and you’d see them on the weekends, and you couldn’t believe how much hair they had, ’cause they’d washed it. They put up with all the grief that the preppie crowd gave them for being greasers, and they didn’t care. Because come the weekend, they were doing a completely different thing than the guys from Wilmette who were trying to drink beer and get high. They didn’t have any interest in being part of the social scene… . They were downtown, stoned, listening to blues.”
Murray would have liked to join them, but he lacked the necessary funds—and, more important, the means of transportation—to do so. “I didn’t have enough money to really have a lot of fun,” he said. “I didn’t have a car; I didn’t have a driver’s license until God knows when. So I basically relied on friends; they were my wheels. Or I’d take a bus or hitchhike. And in the suburbs, that’s really lowballing it. Everybody else’s parents drove them, or they had their own car. My parents just looked at me: ‘Your brother hitchhiked to school, and you’ll hitchhike to school.’”
When Murray graduated from Loyola Academy in 1968, as a final kiss-off to the school he made a point of wearing a Nehru jacket and tennis shoes to the graduation ceremony.
On Halloween night in 2008, Murray attended a concert by the Brooklyn-based electro-pop duo MGMT at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. After the show, he went party-hopping with the band and eventually ended up in the apartment of twenty-nine-year-old graduate student Dave Summers at three thirty in the morning. Summers’s costume party was just winding down, but the unexpected arrival of Murray immediately energized the remaining revelers—one of whom was dressed as Carl Spackler from Caddyshack. Murray guzzled Modelo Especial beer, boogied down on the dance floor, and rhapsodized about his fondness for sweet potato casserole with marshmallows before departing into the Billburg night. The prevailing good vibes were interrupted only briefly when a party guest brought down the room by informing Murray—who had just gone through an acrimonious divorce—that he was “making bad life choices.”
MAD DOG AND GLORY
DIRECTED BY: John McNaughton
WRITTEN BY: Richard Price
RELEASE DATE: March 5, 1993
FILM RATING: **½
MURRAY RATING: ***
PLOT: A ruthless mobster gives a timid CSI photographer a week of Uma Thurman’s services as a reward for saving his life.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Frank “the Money Store” Milo, loan shark and stand-up comic
After successfully playing against type in What about Bob?, Murray took another chance with this dark comedy written by acclaimed crime novelist Richard Price. It was the first of his three collaborations with Chicago-based independent filmmaker John McNaughton, director of the cult hit Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Robert De Niro was the original choice to play Murray’s character, Frank Milo, a sinister loan shark with a sideline in stand-up comedy. But De Niro passed on that role in favor of the lead, Wayne “Mad Dog” Dobie, a milquetoast Chicagoland crime scene photographer. That left an opening for Murray to do some of his finest character work since Tootsie, in a performance he credits with forcing Hollywood to take a second look at him as a dramatic actor. Uma Thurman rounds out the main cast as Glory, the beautiful barmaid who comes between Frank and Mad Dog.
Shot on location in Chicago over the summer of 1991, Mad Dog and Glory was scheduled to come out in the spring of 1992. But it remained in limbo for nearly a year as Universal Studios demanded reshoots. “We had an agreement with the writer, Richard Price, to shoot every single word as it was written,” said producer Steven A. Jones. “We delivered the movie to Universal. They watched it and said: ‘You did exactly what he wrote. You did exactly what we expected you to do. Now let’s figure out how to fix it.’” Test screenings revealed that audiences were not buying the film’s ending, a fight scene in which Murray’s character beats De Niro to a pulp. Studio executives refused to release the film until the scene was reshot to show Mad Dog landing a few haymakers on his rival. In the interim, De Niro had his hair buzz cut for This Boy’s Life and Murray put on twenty-five pounds. Continuity demanded the filmmakers wait until De Niro’s hair grew back and Murray got himself into reasonable shape to resume filming.
When the climactic fight scene was finally restaged in July 1992, De Niro got his licks in. But it was Murray who landed the killing blow. According to legend, he broke De Niro’s nose with one of his punches. But Murray disputes that claim. “No, I actually shattered his pancreas with a blow to the body,” he told a British newspaper. “I don’t think I broke his nose but I did hit him on the nose. If you see it, it’s a very realistic looking fight but all I could think was ‘This is the Raging Bull.’”
After a year’s worth of bad press about the reshoots, Mad Dog and Glory finally opened in March 1993, just a few weeks after Groundhog Day hit theaters. Audiences were misled by the film’s marketing—posters inexplicably positioned it as a zany comedy—and most moviegoers elected to go see Murray chase Andie MacDowell around a time loop rather than pummel Robert De Niro on a Chicago sidewalk. Mad Dog bombed at the box office, although critics were more favorably disposed. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called it “a small gem of deadpan humor and yearning hearts.” Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Dave Kehr raved that “there are moments [in Mad Dog and Glory] as gripping and inventive as anything American movies have offered in years.” He singled out Murray for achieving “a striking, immediate menace” reminiscent of Jackie Gleason in The Hustler.
NEXT MOVIE: Ed Wood (1994)
MAGNETS
In the 2000s, Murray lost a sizable chunk of money investing in a failed magnet business. “I helped a fellow who was making beautiful magnet
s,” he explained to Minnesota Business magazine. “Instead of cutting the magnets by hand, he wanted to get a [water cutter]. He said if he had one he could do some crazy numbers more. I was in New York and he was in California, but I liked what he was making so I said okay. It was a fair amount of money, and the inventor had to get a new place for the machine because it took up a lot of room. I went to visit and when I walked in there was the machine, but there were also thirteen carpenters building a monument to the executive in charge. I said, ‘Oh no!’”
MAKEUP
Murray is wary of stage makeup, believing it causes melanoma. “They put plastic on your face, and then they put stuff on that dissolves the plastic,” he once told an interviewer. “All entertainers end up with skin cancer. That’s how Emmett Kelly died. Did you know that?” In fact, Kelly—the midcentury hobo clown best known for his sad-sack “Weary Willie” character—died of a heart attack at age eighty.
MAKING OUT IN JAPANESE
Phrasebook, published in 1988, that Murray used to teach himself how to speak Japanese. The 104-page paperback promises to instruct English speakers in the “language of love” by supplying Japanese equivalents for such common English phrases as “I’m crazy about you,” “You have a beautiful body,” and “Are you on the pill?” When he visited Japan in the early 1990s, Murray would take the book into sushi bars, where he would pepper the staff with rude questions. “I would say to the sushi chef, ‘Do you have a curfew? Do your parents know about us? And can we get into the back seat?’ And I would always have a lot of fun with that.”
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