The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  NEXT MOVIE: Scrooged (1988)

  SHOTGUN GOLF

  Madcap amalgam of golf and skeet shooting invented by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson at his “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, in the summer of 2004. In the final column he ever wrote, for ESPN’s Page Two website, Thompson described pitching the idea for Shotgun Golf to Murray in a late-night telephone call. According to Thompson: “The game consists of one golfer, one shooter, and a field judge. The purpose of the game is to shoot your opponent’s high-flying golf ball out of the air with a finely tuned 12-gauge shotgun.” Thompson listed Murray as a “founding consultant” on his Shotgun Golf enterprise and credited the actor with teaching him “how to mortify your opponents in any sporting contest, honest or otherwise.”

  “SHOWER MIKE”

  Seminal Saturday Night Live sketch, written and performed by Murray and Gilda Radner with guest host Buck Henry for the show’s second season finale on May 21, 1977. In the sketch, Murray plays Richard Herkiman, a cuckolded husband who cajoles his cheating wife and her lover to join him in the shower as part of an impromptu nightclub act. “Shower Mike” was the crowning achievement of Murray’s first season on SNL, capping a turnaround in his fortunes that began with the New Guy Speech two months earlier. Once relegated to playing the “second cop” in skits that featured the other cast members more prominently, Murray was now a force to be reckoned with on the show. “In the beginning of SNL I was angry a lot,” he later admitted. “The writers weren’t interested in writing for me… . If I hadn’t written the Shower Mike sketch, I might have been off the show.” The genesis of the skit came the week of the season’s final episode, when Murray picked up a microphone-shaped bar of soap-on-a-rope given to him by John Belushi’s wife the previous Christmas. After hitting on the idea of transplanting his sleazy nightclub singer character to a shower setting, he and Gilda Radner went off and wrote the sketch together in twenty minutes. Murray reprised the role of Richard Herkiman in a sketch with guest host Jill Clayburgh the following season.

  SHREK

  In 1991, after Steven Spielberg acquired the rights to adapt William Steig’s popular children’s book as a hand-drawn animated film, he selected Murray for the role of the titular green ogre. Steve Martin was slated to play Shrek’s companion, Donkey. By the time the movie was reimagined for CGI ten years later, Murray and Martin had moved on. Their parts went to Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, respectively.

  SIMON, KERRY

  Murray is a longtime friend of this celebrity chef and restaurateur, widely known as the “Rock ’n’ Roll Chef.” Simon grew up in Evanston, Illinois, not far from Murray’s hometown of Wilmette. The pair worked together at a Chicago-area Little Caesars pizza franchise in the early 1970s. Murray has often appeared as an emcee at charity events organized by Simon. In 1995, when Simon appeared on the Food Network cooking competition show Iron Chef, Murray and his wife cheered him on from a VIP box high above “Kitchen Stadium.”

  SIRENS OF TITAN, THE

  In 1984, Murray was in talks to play the lead in a big-screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1959 novel about a wealthy industrialist who gets caught up in a Martian invasion of Earth. For various reasons, the project never got off the ground.

  A year earlier, Vonnegut had sold the rights to his trippy sci-fi opus to Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia. Garcia then hired former Saturday Night Live writer Tom Davis to collaborate on a screenplay, which they pitched to Murray in June 1984, at the height of Ghostbusters mania. In author Robert Greenfield’s oral biography of Jerry Garcia, Dark Star, filmmaker Gary Gutierrez—who created storyboards for the abortive film—recounts a meeting in Hollywood to discuss the project:

  “It was Tom Davis and Bill Murray, and Jerry and me, and a bunch of attorneys and this guy from Universal [Mike Ovitz] sitting around this huge table, and during this very serious discussion about the deal, there was Bill Murray making his mouth like a billiard pocket at the edge of the table and Tom Davis was rolling gum balls across the table, trying to get them in Bill Murray’s mouth.”

  SLEEPY

  Murray’s childhood nickname. “When I was a little kid playing baseball, my manager called me Sleepy. And only a few people, who know me from way, way back, call me that still. I used to drift off and that’s why they made me the catcher, so I wouldn’t fall asleep. That gift I have still.”

  SLICK CITY TRIO, THE

  Murray was a member of this three-man folk music combo while a student at Loyola Academy in the late 1960s. The group covered material by singer-songwriter Bob Gibson, the Mamas and the Papas, and other folk-rock artists of the era. Murray’s classmates John Heller and Larry Basil rounded out the trio, which re-formed in 2005 as a duo (without Murray’s participation) under the name Basil and Heller.

  SLOVENIA VODKA

  In 2013, Murray lent his name and a chunk of investment capital to this high-end vodka made from “crystal clear water sourced at the foot of the Julian Alps in Slovenia.” Ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov is a fellow investor in the company, which was cofounded by chef Peter X. Kelly of the Xaviar’s Restaurant Group in New York’s Hudson Valley. Kelly and his team created Slovenia to be “the culinary vodka, the perfect vodka for pairing with exquisite dishes; for use in the creation of these dishes; and for the creation of the most dramatic cocktails by chef mixologists.”

  A longtime vodka enthusiast, Murray rhapsodized about the charms of Slovenia in a 2013 interview with Esquire magazine: “Different vodkas have different effects. Some make you feel a little … poly-lingual. Some make you feel like you want to talk back to someone who’s giving you a hard time. Some make you feel like lifting kettle bells. There’s something about the taste of this vodka that takes the bad taste out of your mouth. I don’t mean like a mouthwash, but if something bad is on your mind, this makes it go away. I have a quieter voice when I drink it. I drink gin, and once, when drinking gin, I made a large man cry. Not with this. This makes you kind of sweet.”

  SONG OF THE LARK, THE

  Nineteenth-century oil painting by French realist Jules Breton that Murray has credited in interviews with saving him from suicide. At a 2014 press event for The Monuments Men, Murray revealed that he was so despondent after his disastrous Chicago stage debut that he contemplated walking directly into Lake Michigan. “I was ready to die,” he admitted. “I thought, ‘If I’m going to die, I might as well go over toward the lake and float a bit.’” On his way over, however, Murray took a detour to the Art Institute of Chicago, where Breton’s 1884 oil on canvas was on display. The painting depicts a young peasant woman at daybreak holding a scythe. “I thought, ‘Well there’s a girl who doesn’t have a whole lot of prospects,’” Murray said. “‘But the sun’s coming up anyway and she’s got another chance at it.’ So I think that gave me some sort of feeling that I too am a person and I get another chance every day the sun comes up.”

  SOUTH CAROLINA

  Murray has lived part-time in Charleston, South Carolina, since the mid-1990s. “I didn’t choose to go there,” Murray told PBS gabber Charlie Rose in 2014. “Life took me there. That’s where my sons are and that’s where I am.” As part of his divorce settlement with Jennifer Butler in 2008, Murray’s ex-wife was granted ownership of the Murray family home on South Carolina’s Sullivan Island. Murray continued to maintain a residence in Charleston to be near his children.

  SOUTH PACIFIC

  Murray played Luther Billis, a conniving Seabee, in a staged concert version of this classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, presented on May 22, 2000, at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.

  SPACE JAM

  DIRECTED BY: Joe Pytka

  WRITTEN BY: Leo Benvenuti, Steve Rudnick, Timothy Harris, and Herschel Weingrod

  RELEASE DATE: November 15, 1996

  FILM RATING: **½

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: It’s Bugs Bunny and friends to the rescue when a group of evil space aliens suck the life energy out of a motley asse
mblage of 1990s NBA stars.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Himself

  A mere fortnight after Larger Than Life blighted multiplexes, Murray wiped the bad taste from moviegoers’ mouths with a spirited cameo in this highly successful basketball comedy mixing live action, cel animation, and CGI. One might think he would have leapt at the chance to share the screen with Bugs Bunny and NBA legend Michael Jordan, but Murray had to be talked into making Space Jam by producer Ivan Reitman. “I always have to convince him to work,” Reitman told USA Today. In the end, Reitman was able to cajole Murray into doing two scenes for the film. In one, set on a golf course, Murray spoofs his Caddyshack persona; in the other, he takes the court alongside the Looney Tunes “Tune Squad” for the climactic face-off against the evil “Monstars” basketball team. Murray’s ad-libbing enlivens an otherwise lackluster cartoon feature weighed down by Michael Jordan’s somnambulant lead performance. Space Jam also marks the first instance where Murray went “full meta” on the audience, riffing on his public image as a golf-loving eccentric. In another sign that Murray was now as much a personal brand as an actor, he insisted on wearing the cap of the St. Paul Saints—the minor league baseball he co-owned at the time—throughout his performance.

  NEXT MOVIE: The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997)

  SPACKLER, CARL

  Demented assistant greenskeeper played by Murray in the 1980 film Caddyshack. A close cousin to the Honker, the sideways-talking drunk Murray dreamed up at Second City, Spackler is arguably the actor’s most iconic creation. He does not appear in early drafts of the Caddyshack script, although an older caddy named Ray may be something of a proto-Spackler. Murray’s role in the film was originally supposed to be a cameo—he was scheduled to be on set for only six days—and his character was virtually mute. “It was written like Harpo Marx, just not talking at all,” director Harold Ramis later recalled. But according to Murray, the part “just kept growing like a mushroom. I’d go back to New York and work on SNL, and they’d call me up and ask if I wanted to come back down and do some more. I was good back in those days. Improvising about golf was easy for me.”

  While the Honker is almost certainly schizophrenic, and clearly an alcoholic, Spackler—who aspires to become head greenskeeper one day—is the more self-actualized character. “He’s clearly damaged in some way, but he’s not dumb,” Ramis once observed. “His dialogue is as clever and inventive as any in the movie, really. To write even dumb or crude characters in a smart way, that’s the goal.” “He had a vision of himself as holding a place of real importance in life,” Murray told the New York Post. “It was just plugging into that desire to fall asleep to your own dream, as if you were slowly fading into the sunset at the top of the mountain. It was a beautiful thing.”

  During a 2006 visit to St. Andrews, Scotland, for a celebrity golf tournament, Murray accompanied twenty-two-year-old Norwegian social anthropology student Lykke Stavnef—whom he had just met in a local pub—to a house party full of Scandinavian college students. “Nobody could believe it when I arrived at the party with Bill Murray,” Stavnef said afterward. “He was just like the character in Lost in Translation.”

  Stavnef’s Georgian townhouse was reportedly “overflowing” with chesty blonde coeds. Clad in a checkered shirt and brown vest, Murray drank vodka from a coffee cup and marveled at how drunk everyone was. “He seemed to be in his element, cracking lots of jokes,” observed fellow partygoer Tom Wright. When the party was over, Murray personally washed all the dirty dishes in the students’ sink. “The pasta was probably quite hard to get off the dishes because they had been sitting around,” said one of the students.

  SPEAKING OF SEX

  DIRECTED BY: John McNaughton

  WRITTEN BY: Gary Tieche

  RELEASE DATE: October 5, 2001

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: Farcical complications ensue when a bumbling marriage counselor sleeps with one of his clients.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Ezri Stovall, bewigged Boise malpractice attorney

  Undaunted by the law of diminishing returns, Murray re-upped for a third feature with Chicago-born director John McNaughton. In Speaking of Sex, he plays a sleazy lawyer virtually indistinguishable from the one he played in McNaughton’s previous film, Wild Things. This time he wears a cowboy hat and a terrible toupee. The frenetic sex comedy languished in development hell at Fox for more than a year until French cable TV channel Canal Plus purchased the rights and gave McNaughton $11 million on the condition that he film it in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Costars James Spader, Catherine O’Hara, Lara Flynn Boyle, Jay Mohr, Melora Walters, and Megan Mullally make the most of the subpar script, but any film that ends with a sped-up Benny Hill–style chase sequence is probably beyond repair.

  In 2014, McNaughton announced plans for a fourth collaboration with Murray. Entitled Counterfeit, the new film would once again cast Murray as a disreputable attorney who comes to the aid of two young criminals.

  NEXT MOVIE: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

  SPLASH

  Murray passed on an offer to play the lead in director Ron Howard’s 1984 comedy about a man who falls in love with a mermaid. According to actress P. J. Soles, when she presented Murray with the script, he proceeded to fling it across the room in disgust. Michael Keaton and John Travolta were also considered for the role, which wound up going to Tom Hanks.

  “I’VE PROVIDED WHOLE CAREERS FOR OTHER PEOPLE BY REJECTING MOVIES.”

  —MURRAY, on the parts he let get away

  SQUARE PEGS

  Murray did a one-shot guest appearance on the February 14, 1983, episode of this high school sitcom created by erstwhile Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts. In the episode, entitled “No Substitutions,” Murray plays Jack McNulty, a downtown New York City actor (founding member of the Greenwich Village Theater of Mime and Anger) who doubles as a substitute teacher. Sporting his unkempt Ghostbusters-era hairdo and wearing a billowy pajama top for much of the episode, Murray’s character briefly upends the social order at suburban Weemawee High with a classroom experiment in which he pairs the students in mock marriages. Like most episodes of Square Pegs, “No Substitutions” plays best today as a time capsule of life in the early 1980s. In the episode’s most memorable scene, Murray gets to boogie awkwardly with a young Sarah Jessica Parker to the tune of “Dancing with Myself” by Billy Idol.

  SQUID AND THE WHALE, THE

  Murray was director Noah Baumbach’s first choice for the role of Bernard Berkman, a washed-up novelist going through a bitter divorce, in this 2005 indie comedy-drama. When Murray proved impossible to reach by phone, Baumbach gave up on him and offered the part to Jeff Daniels, who scored a Golden Globe nomination for his performance.

  STALAG 17

  This 1953 drama about a group of American airmen being held captive in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II is one of Murray’s favorite films. “When Stalag 17 comes on, I can’t turn it off,” he told film critic Elvis Mitchell. “I have to watch it. I have to go all the way with that movie. It’s a Swiss watch. It’s just a gorgeous movie.” Murray is particularly enamored of William Holden’s Oscar-winning performance as Sergeant J. J. Sefton, the film’s jaded, conniving antihero. “Even though I’ve seen it many times,” he said, “I’m still fascinated at watching him turn the worm.”

  STAND-UP COMEDY

  Murray has performed stand-up comedy only one time. “I did it once and it was fun,” he said. “But I only had to do it once to realize I could do it, but I don’t want to do it.” In numerous interviews, Murray has pointed out that close observation of stand-ups early in his career left him with a bad impression of their mental health. “I saw them work, and they seemed so unhappy. If an audience didn’t like them, they’d get so miserable about it. It looked too miserable.”

  STAR WARS

  Legend has it that Murray was one among the legion of actors who auditioned for the part of Han Solo in George Lucas’s 1977 spac
e opera. Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Perry King, Kurt Russell, Al Pacino, and Christopher Walken were all reportedly under consideration for the role, which helped make Harrison Ford a star.

  STEWART, JIMMY

  Murray had a brief, awkward encounter with this legendary actor at the thirty-eighth annual Cannes Film Festival in 1985. Murray was living in France at the time, and Stewart was in Cannes to be feted by the French government and watch a restored version of his 1954 film The Glenn Miller Story. “He had no fuckin’ idea who I was,” Murray said of the then-seventy-six-year-old screen icon. “Of course, I’m not sure he knew who his wife was. But I figured, well, shit, I’ll walk up to him and say hello—‘I’m so-and-so, I’m an actor, and I like your stuff.’ And sometimes when you say you’re an actor, they at least fake it—‘Oh, sure, sure.’ He couldn’t even swing that.”