The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  NATIONAL LAMPOON RADIO HOUR, THE

  Upon moving to New York in 1974, Murray joined the cast of this weekly radio comedy series from the creative brain trust behind National Lampoon magazine. He remained with the program through the end of its run. Murray’s brother Brian, Harold Ramis, and future Saturday Night Live cast members Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Christopher Guest, Gilda Radner, and Harry Shearer all appeared on the Radio Hour its 59-episode lifespan, from November 1973 to December 1974.

  NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE

  Murray was briefly considered for the role of Donald “Boone” Schoenstein in this classic 1978 comedy about bawdy hijinks at a fictional 1960s fraternity. Peter Riegert ended up playing Boone, although screenwriter Harold Ramis claimed to have written the part with himself in mind. In early stages of production, Murray’s brother Brian Doyle-Murray was envisioned for the part of Hoover, with Chevy Chase as Otter and Dan Aykroyd as D-Day—roles that eventually went to James Widdoes, Tim Matheson, and Bruce McGill, respectively. Murray and Aykroyd reportedly backed out because of their Saturday Night Live commitments; Chase elected to make the lightweight thriller Foul Play instead.

  NATIONAL LAMPOON SHOW, THE

  In late 1974, at the invitation of his brother Brian, Murray traveled to New York City by overnight bus from Chicago to join the cast of this theatrical comedy revue. When he arrived, Murray was so disheveled that one of the show’s writers, Sean Kelly, mistook him for a homeless person. But he soon earned a place in a company of up-and-comers that included, at one time or another, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Harold Ramis, Joe Flaherty, and Richard Belzer.

  After a brief, chaotic tour of American colleges and Canadian bars, The National Lampoon Show opened off-Broadway at the New Palladium Theatre on March 2, 1975. It ran for 180 performances over four months. Audiences were sparse but spirited. “The show was hostile and abusive to the audience, and it was a very rowdy crowd,” said Harold Ramis. Theatergoers often smuggled in bottles of whiskey, precipitating regular altercations with the cast. “It was like crowd-control theater,” Murray later recalled. “It was a brawl every single night, and they were going to take the stage, if you didn’t. It was really an ugly audience. It’s what biker bars are all about.”

  “THERE WAS ONLY ONE AUDIENCE’S WORTH OF PEOPLE IN THE WHOLE TOWN. AND THEY HATED US.”

  —MURRAY, after a raucous National Lampoon Show in London, Ontario

  Critics were revolted by the show’s irreverent, slash-and-burn style of comedy. “Lampoon sets new boundaries for impropriety,” wrote Mel Gussow in the New York Times. “But unlike its cousin-in-vulgarity, the Madhouse Company of London, it does not match its bad taste with good humor.” The reviewer for Cue magazine opined: “There’s obviously a large market for this sort of disrespectful slop-jar humor. If you can laugh at the physically handicapped, the mentally retarded, or—perhaps the single most odious moment in the show—[First Lady Betty] Ford’s mastectomy, you’ll enjoy it.”

  Although Murray would later grouse that “nobody saw it,” The National Lampoon Show did attract the attention of two men who would play important roles in the next stage of Murray’s career: Lorne Michaels and Howard Cosell.

  NATIVITY PLAY

  As a child, Murray took part in numerous nativity plays reenacting the events surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ. His brothers and sisters staged one such pageant in the family basement, with two blankets stretched across a clothesline serving as stage curtains. Murray played Joseph in that production, with his sister directing and starring as the Virgin Mary. A towel festooned with one of his father’s neckties made up his shepherd’s costume.

  When it came time to stage the Nativity for his grade school Christmas pageant, Murray had not nearly so happy an experience. He hoped to reprise his triumph as Joseph but was rejected for reasons that were not made clear to him. “I suppose I wasn’t holy at the time,” he later complained. Next, he was edged out by another student for the part of the innkeeper who turns the baby Jesus away at the door. Finally, Murray was placed in the choir and outfitted with a yellow cardboard halo. “I ended up on a riser, with all the other no-talents, singing carols between acts,” he carped. Murray gabbed with his fellow extras throughout the show. Decades later, he admitted that he was still bitter over the slight.

  NBC’S SATURDAY NIGHT

  See Saturday Night Live.

  NERDS, THE

  See DiLaMuca, Todd.

  NEW {FAKE} TRAILER

  This 2011 web video inspired by the work of Wes Anderson features Murray taking a slow-motion walk through the halls of a South Carolina elementary school. Murray was visiting Trident Academy, his son’s school, to film a promotional video when director of photography David Walton Smith came up with the idea to shoot an impromptu homage to Murray’s perambulation at the end of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Set to the tune of “Powerman” by the Kinks, New {fake} Trailer depicts a glowering Murray strolling through the school corridors, accompanied by Smith and three of his friends (one of whom, camera assistant Crynma Jang, had no idea who Murray was). When the camera stopped rolling, the star kept on walking, right out to his car and into viral video history. The one-minute short has garnered more than two million views during its lifespan on Vimeo and YouTube.

  “NEW GUY” SPEECH

  Direct-to-camera oration delivered by Murray on the March 19, 1977, episode of Saturday Night Live, often credited with turning around his sagging fortunes on the show. Murray had been on SNL for two months at that point, but after a first episode in which he’d been prominently featured in multiple sketches he languished in nondescript supporting parts. Writers were reluctant to write for him after he flubbed his lines on several early shows. After weeks of being relegated to playing “the second cop, the second FBI guy,” as he put it, Murray approached SNL producer Lorne Michaels with the idea of addressing his struggles on the air. The result was a heartfelt, self-penned plea for support that incorporated elements of Murray’s personal biography. It played well in the studio and earned him a second chance with viewers who still looked at him as Chevy Chase’s ungainly replacement. Murray continued to fight for air time for the rest of his first season, but after the “New Guy” speech, he was no longer in danger of being dropped from the show.

  NEWLEY, ANTHONY

  British singer and songwriter, best known for cowriting the lyrics to the classic James Bond theme “Goldfinger” and his Oscar-nominated score for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. In a 1999 New York Times profile, Murray confessed his admiration for Newley, whom he considers underrated.

  “NEW MURRAY”

  Nickname bestowed on Murray by legendary Indian Hill Club caddy master Lou Janis, to distinguish Bill from his older brothers Ed and Brian.

  NEW YORK CITY

  Murray first moved to Manhattan in 1974, when he joined the cast of The National Lampoon Show and The National Lampoon Radio Hour. He arrived in the Big Apple, he later told GQ, “just as everything went to shit… . Subways were insanely cold in the winter and insanely hot in the summer. The windows were all open, so you’d get metal filings and dust in your face. It was like being on a prison train, or working in a mine. I used to run all the time. I would get off that train and just start running.” He rented an apartment formerly occupied by actor Gene Hackman and has maintained an almost continual presence in the city and its environs ever since.

  “NEW YORK CITY AT ITS MOST HEARTWARMING IS A DEATH DANCE TWIXT VEHICLES AND PEDESTRIANS.”

  —MURRAY, on New York traffic

  “My favorite thing about New York is the people,” Murray once said, “because I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t think people realize how kind New York people are. The drivers are far more considerate, they’re just very aggressive.” He has also spoken admiringly of New York as a “crucible” where talented newcomers go to test their mettle. “Every year you see a new crop of people thinking they got it coming into town. You see them. They come in in the
fall and you can see it and it’s amazing to walk down the street, you go, ‘New, new, new, new.’ You can spot ’em… . It’s exciting. It’s a cycle of life and this is the place where it happens.”

  On one of his first car rides into the city, Murray passed by one of the enormous cemeteries that line the route from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Manhattan. “I always say to people, those are the people that didn’t make it. They just threw them over here and then buried them.”

  NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE

  DIRECTED BY: Paul Mazursky

  WRITTEN BY: Paul Mazursky

  RELEASE DATE: February 4, 1976

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: A Brooklyn nebbish pursues a show business career in 1950s Greenwich Village.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Nick Kessler, mustachioed bohemian

  Murray made his feature film debut with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in this semi-autobiographical drama from director Paul Mazursky. Sporting an anachronistic 1970s porn ’stache, he appears in the background as a reveler in the film’s rent party sequence. Stuart Pankin, Vincent Schiavelli, and Jeff Goldblum also have small roles in the film.

  NEXT MOVIE: Meatballs (1979)

  NICK THE LOUNGE SINGER

  Nightclub performer known for his bombastic renditions of movie themes and popular songs whom Murray played onstage at Second City and in twelve Saturday Night Live sketches spanning three decades. Nick, whose last name changes with each appearance, made his SNL debut on April 16, 1977. Murray brought him back eight times over the course of his four seasons in the show’s main cast. Nick’s most notable appearance may have been his second, on the January 28, 1978, show hosted by Robert Klein, during which he sang his version of John Williams’s Star Wars theme:

  Star Wars

  Nothing but Star Wars

  Gimme those Star Wars

  Don’t let them end

  Star Wars

  If they should bar wars

  Please let these Star Wars stay

  Murray based the character of Nick on Chicago nightclub fixture Jimmy Damon, whose act he had caught during his early days at Second City. Like Nick, Damon was famous for wearing tight leather pants and an unbuttoned shirt on stage—the better to show off his copious chest hair. “I wasn’t upset,” Damon told an interviewer regarding Murray’s homage. “I just wish he’d sent me a check. He owes me a lot of money.”

  Although he has generally avoided commenting on the Damon connection—possibly out of fear of being sued—Murray has opined about his overall approach to parodying lounge singers: “You have to see what the original center of the song was and how they destroyed it. It’s the ruining of a good song that you want to recreate. You have to like the stuff and you have to, I guess, know that when you have the microphone you have the opportunity to touch somebody. And when you don’t do it with the lyric of it, and your own excuse for technique comes in and steps on top of it, that’s, I guess, what I object to when I’m mimicking something.”

  Murray has brought Nick out of the mothballs each of the four times he’s hosted Saturday Night Live. He performed a Nickified rendition of the “Love Theme from Jaws” on the SNL fortieth-anniversary special in February 2015. He’s also been known to break into the character on movie sets. In a 2014 interview with the Onion’s A.V. Club, actor Kurtwood Smith recalled the time Murray “did” Nick during the filming of the climactic scene in 1990’s Quick Change:

  “We had a scene in the first-class section of this airliner… . The plane was full. Jason [Robards] was in the scene. I think Randy [Quaid] and Geena [Davis] were, too. So there were just tons of people. And we got ready for Bill to call, ‘Action!’ So he said, ‘Okay, everybody ready? Sound? Everybody … ?’ And then he starts singing. You know the song ‘Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)’? He starts singing it kind of like the lounge guy he used to do on Saturday Night Live … and he sings the entire song. All the verses. The entire song. Then he says, ‘Action!’ It had nothing to do with anything. But we were all quite entertained. It was great!”

  NIKO

  Dim-witted fry cook played by Murray in six Olympia Café sketches on Saturday Night Live.

  NINETEEN EIGHTY-FIVE

  Stillborn sci-fi comedy that would have paired Murray and Dan Aykroyd several years before Ghostbusters. A parody of George Orwell’s 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Five is set in a dystopian future society ruled by a pair of scientists known as the Big Brothers. Murray and Aykroyd were tapped to play “thoughtcops” who enforce the edicts of the state—including strict regulations on when and where citizens can masturbate. Saturday Night Live writers Al Franken, Tom Davis, and Jim Downey collaborated on the script for Nineteen Eighty-Five, which MGM hoped would be the first big “SNL movie” following the success of National Lampoon’s Animal House. However, budget problems and financial dysfunction at the ailing studio ultimately torpedoed the project.

  NORTH BY NORTHWEST

  This 1959 spy thriller is one of Murray’s favorite movies. He was particularly enamored of the film’s two romantic leads. “I always just thought Cary Grant was the coolest,” he told Empire magazine. “His chops were so crisp and so clean. And then you throw in Hitchcock and you’ve pretty much got his ticket.” In another interview, Murray noted, “I’m crazy about that Eva Marie Saint.”

  NOTHING LASTS FOREVER

  DIRECTED BY: Tom Schiller

  WRITTEN BY: Tom Schiller

  RELEASE DATE: September 1984

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: An aspiring artist seeks his métier in a dystopian future New York City run by the Port Authority.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Ted Breughel, moon bus flight steward

  While filming Tootsie in the spring of 1982, Murray took time out from his schedule to appear in this black-and-white art house curiosity from writer/director Tom Schiller. Murray took on the extra project as a personal favor to Schiller, the impish auteur behind numerous classic Saturday Night Live short films—including the Honker showcase Perchance to Dream. Murray has called Schiller “one of the few people I think of as being truly brilliant.” The director’s feature debut, alas, is more baffling than brilliant, though it has attained a modest cult following.

  A plaintive cinematic reverie that combines elements of classic science fiction and old MGM musicals, Nothing Lasts Forever plays like one of Schiller’s dreamlike SNL shorts stretched out to eighty-two minutes. Twenty-year-old Zach Galligan, soon to hit it big in the Steven Spielberg–produced blockbuster Gremlins, stars as Adam Beckett, a naive young classical pianist struggling to find his place in a Brazil-like future Manhattan. The decidedly nonlinear plot has Adam falling in with a group of pretentious downtown scenesters—the film’s most effective scenes parody the SoHo art milieu of the 1980s—and taking a trip to the moon at the urging of a magical homeless man played by geriatric Oscar nominee Sam Jaffe. The supporting cast is a curious mix of Schiller’s SNL pals (Murray, Dan Aykroyd), Old Hollywood fossils (Imogene Coca, Eddie Fisher), and Mort Sahl. Murray plays Ted Breughel, a belligerent flight attendant on a lunar-bound space bus. “At that time Bill hadn’t played many mean characters and I always thought it would be fun to portray those airline stewards as sort of secretly hostile,” says Schiller. The part started out as a cameo but expanded during filming as Murray improvised new scenes.

  Murray spent about a week on the set, cramming in his scenes whenever he wasn’t needed on Tootsie. According to author Michael Streeter’s biography of Tom Schiller, Nothing Lost Forever, Murray was tired and cranky during much of the shoot, which led to some conflicts with his costars. “There were times when he was very nice to me—very generous and funny,” Zach Galligan told Streeter. “And then there were times that he was sullen and unhappy and kind of moody. You didn’t really know which Bill Murray was going to show up on the set that day. My whole relationship with him left me very confused.” Actress Lauren Tom, who played Ga
lligan’s love interest, Eloy, was less diplomatic. “Bill Murray liked to tease me about being the ‘young starlet’ or something like that,” she said. “It bothered me a bit. Actually, I thought he was sort of an ass.” But Tom Schiller dismisses the complaints: “Bill was a perfect gentleman. He was always so focused that any ‘tension’ around him was due to his pinpoint attentiveness and enlightened consciousness.”

  Murray worked for scale on the condition that his name and likeness not be used in the marketing of the film. As a result, though Murray has one of the meatier supporting roles in Nothing Lasts Forever, he doesn’t appear in the film’s trailer, and his name is completely absent from the official poster. Perhaps he didn’t want to mislead audiences into expecting another Caddyshack-style comedy. Or perhaps he sensed the movie’s uncertain commercial prospects. Murray admitted that the script for Schiller’s black-and-white fantasia left him somewhat perplexed. “I didn’t quite understand what it was,” he said.