The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  Murray had reservations about the script from the beginning. The film seemed episodic and unfocused. As shooting commenced, he grew increasingly anxious that he had a turkey on his hands. He managed to convince Linson to allow him to rewrite entire scenes on the set with help from Thompson. The duo continued to revise until three days before the film’s release, adding narration they hoped would fill the myriad holes in the plot, as well as the dada monologue that buttons up the final scene.

  None of their tweaks could render the movie’s slapdash plot coherent, however. When it opened in the spring of 1980, Where the Buffalo Roam was roasted by critics and shunned by audiences. Even Thompson disowned the film after seeing it. Writing about Where the Buffalo Roam for Rolling Stone, longtime Thompson associate David Felton called Murray’s portrayal “spooky and accurate.” But he dismissed the film as a hack job, “an embarrassing piece of hogwash utterly devoid of plot, form, movement, tension, humor, insight, logic, or purpose.”

  Rarely shown on television and never given a proper DVD release, Where the Buffalo Roam seems consigned to the cut-out bin of history. Its only lasting legacy is the plethora of Bill Murray/Hunter Thompson party stories that have been disseminated over the ensuing decades. In the most famous, Murray and Thompson spend a day drinking and carousing at the latter’s ranch in Aspen, Colorado. They get into an argument over who is the better escape artist. Thompson ties Murray to a chair and throws him into his swimming pool. Murray almost drowns before Thompson fishes him out.

  NEXT MOVIE: B.C. Rock (1980)

  WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?

  Director Robert Zemeckis tried to offer Murray the role of Eddie Valiant in this 1988 comedy mixing live action and animation. The elusive actor proved impossible to track down, however, and the part went to Bob Hoskins instead. Murray has admitted that he regrets missing out on the gig.

  WILD THINGS

  DIRECTED BY: John McNaughton

  WRITTEN BY: Stephen Peters

  RELEASE DATE: March 20, 1998

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: Two teenage sex kittens frame a high school guidance counselor for a crime he did not commit—or did he?

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Ken Bowden, sleazy South Florida lawyer

  After headlining two stinkers in a row—Larger Than Life and The Man Who Knew Too Little—Murray returned to the safe harbor of scene-stealing character work in this high-gloss erotic thriller from Mad Dog and Glory director John McNaughton.

  Like Cinemax softcore with a chewy Lifetime movie center, Wild Things sprays pheromones at the audience for nearly two hours to no discernible effect. It has garnered something of a cult following because of a steamy three-way sex scene featuring Matt Dillon, Denise Richards, and Neve Campbell—as well as a brief glimpse of Kevin Bacon’s schlong—but the film’s convoluted plot and some terrible performances undermine its effectiveness. Murray’s character, an ambulance-chasing lawyer who inexplicably wears a neck brace in half his scenes, was added by McNaughton to provide comic relief to the noir goings-on. It is one of many weird tonal shifts that do not serve the picture well.

  Despite mixed reviews and lackluster box office returns, Wild Things spawned three straight-to-video sequels—none of which included Murray. By 2013, director McNaughton was musing publicly about a possible fourth sequel, set at the same Miami high school, revolving around the offspring of the original characters. “Maybe there is a child and maybe Bill Murray’s character had a child and they’re exchange students and things get out of hand,” he told Hollywood.com.

  NEXT MOVIE: With Friends Like These … (1998)

  One night in the 1980s, Murray was having dinner in a New York City restaurant with a group of friends, including Nothing Lasts Forever director Tom Schiller and legendary spaghetti western auteur Sergio Leone. Toward the end of the meal, at Schiller’s suggestion, Murray passed the word to the other diners to get up and leave the table one by one, as if they were going to use the restrooms. Then they would all meet outside and leave Leone with the check. “We were just a bunch of wise guys,” Murray told author Michael Streeter. “It was such a novel idea to try and catch a real movie guy and stick him with the bill.” Tom Schiller remembers Leone’s expression when he caught on to the gag: “Kind of like Eli Wallach’s look as Tuco during the duel at the end of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Priceless.”

  WILLIS, BRUCE

  The Die Hard star worked with Murray on Moonrise Kingdom in 2012, but they had met much earlier. In the late 1970s, Willis worked as a page at NBC headquarters in New York City. His duties included refilling the M&M bowls in the dressing rooms of the Saturday Night Live cast members. Nearly thirty years later, Willis told Murray that he and Gilda Radner were the only two actors on the show who ever treated him “like a human being.”

  WILMETTE, ILLINOIS

  Suburban village fourteen miles north of Chicago where Murray grew up. Although Wilmette is often cited as his birthplace, in fact he was born in nearby Evanston. Incorporated in 1847, the village is home to the world’s oldest surviving Bahá’í House of Worship. Other notable Wilmettians include actor Charlton Heston, entertainer Ann-Margret, and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.

  “I REMEMBER SPENDING MY LAST DOLLAR ON SOME FRENCH FRIES, AND I JUST WANTED TO GET OUT OF WHERE I WAS.”

  —MURRAY, on his decision to leave his hometown of Wilmette, Illinois

  In his autobiography Cinderella Story, Murray described Wilmette as “a neighborhood of front lawns and sidewalks… . People had money there, but we weren’t among them.” Murray’s brother Andy once described it as “a fabulous place to be a kid.” The Murray home was located at 1930 Elmwood Avenue, a quiet, tree-lined street across from the Sisters of Christian Charity convent. “Our house was a wreck—a constant claustrophobic mess,” Murray once observed of the three-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home where he and his eight siblings jockeyed for space.

  WIRED IN

  Unaired TV documentary series about the tech trends of the 1980s for which Murray contributed a bizarre antitechnology monologue. In the presumably improvised rant-to-camera, Murray rails against digital watches (“People have hands. Watches should have hands”), decries the advent of worker robots, denounces “talking dashboards” in cars, and extols the virtues of Kenny Baker, the “fine actor” who played R2-D2 in the Star Wars movies. Lily Tomlin also appears in the program—excerpts of which live forever on YouTube—playing a Pac-Man-addicted housewife in a parody of antidrug public service announcements.

  WITCHES OF EASTWICK, THE

  Murray was director George Miller’s first choice for the role of Daryl Van Horne in this 1987 dark comedy based on John Updike’s novel. But Murray was in the midst of his four-year sabbatical from Hollywood at the time. Jack Nicholson got the part instead.

  WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE …

  DIRECTED BY: Philip Frank Messina

  WRITTEN BY: Philip Frank Messina

  RELEASE DATE: September 10, 1998

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: Four small-time actors vie for a part in a Martin Scorsese movie.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Maurice Melnick, cheese-hoarding Hollywood bigwig

  Murray has a one-scene cameo as a penurious TV producer who steals cheese from people’s party platters in this obscure late-’90s curiosity, also known as Mom’s on the Roof. An inside-Hollywood comedy about four friends who find themselves at odds when they all are up for the same part in a new Martin Scorsese movie, With Friends Like These … played briefly on the festival circuit and then moldered on a shelf for seven years before resurfacing in theaters in 2005. Scorsese, Garry Marshall, and Michael McKean also have cameos in the film.

  NEXT MOVIE: Rushmore (1998)

  WOODWARD, BOB

  Legendary journalist and coauthor of All the President’s Men. Murray despises Woodward for his depiction of John Belushi as a degenerate drug addict in the 1984 biography Wired. “I read that a
nd said, ‘Holy shit, this Bob Woodward is a total fraud,’ Murray once said. “The people he interviewed for his story were all in the outer circle, four degrees of separation removed from John’s life and the truth.” In an interview, Murray accused Woodward of having a vendetta against his old Saturday Night Live costar. “Woodward had a mean bent from the beginning, and I know why,” he said. “Bob Woodward is jealous: he is only the third most famous person from Wheaton, Illinois. The first is John Belushi, the second is Red Grange, and the third is Bob Woodward. And Woodward is a distant third and is never going to get any closer.”

  WORK

  Before committing full-time to a show business career in the mid-1970s, Murray performed numerous odd jobs. As a young man, he hauled concrete blocks, sold hot dogs from a cart, and caddied at the Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, Illinois. He worked as a rod man on a surveying crew, a pizzaiolo at a Little Caesars, a landscaper, and a marijuana dealer. “I had no idea what I was going to do,” he once observed of his checkered work history. “I had trouble holding jobs because they want you to be on time. That wasn’t going to work.” The life of the theater appealed to him, he said, because “you didn’t have to get to work until nine o’clock at night.”

  In many interviews, Murray has bemoaned his lack of a strong work ethic. As he has grown older, he claims, he has just gotten lazier. “Life interferes, you know. When you’re young and all you have is your career, some of your life can be in second place. And then you want your life to take first place, and other people don’t see it that way. They see it that your life has to take second place, and it’s hard. Life is really hard, and it’s the only one you have. I mean, I like doing what I do, and I know I’m supposed to do it, but I don’t have anything to bring to it if I don’t live my life.”

  “I DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I GO HOME AND STAY THERE. I WASH AND SCRUB UP EACH DAY, AND THAT’S IT. ONE MONTH I ACTUALLY GREW A MUSTACHE, JUST SO I COULD SAY THAT I’D DONE SOMETHING.”

  —MURRAY, on what he does when he’s not working

  YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, THE

  During a 2014 interview for Grantland, Murray revealed that this politically charged 1982 melodrama, set amid the tumult of 1960s Indonesia, was the one film he wishes he had gotten the chance to make. Murray was never offered a role in the film because, he said, he was not considered a serious actor at the time. Mel Gibson ended up playing the romantic lead opposite Murray’s future Ghostbusters costar Sigourney Weaver.

  On May 1, 2009, Murray visited the future home of Poets House, a 60,000-volume free poetry library in Lower Manhattan. While on-site, he took time out to do an impromptu poetry reading for the construction workers at work on the new building. To the general befuddlement of his audience, Murray read three poems aloud: “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House” by Billy Collins, “Poet’s Work” by Lorine Niedecker, and “I Dwell in Possibility” by Emily Dickinson. When he finished, he informed the assembled hard hats: “You have about three minutes left on this break, so smoke ’em if you got ’em.” Then he posed for some photos and left.

  In 2007, at a celebrity golf tournament in Utah, Murray decided to forgo the traditional cry of “Fore!” and instead throw a Coke bottle into the crowd. It ended up being his most unfortunate drive of the day. He hit a spectator in the face, shattering the man’s nose and causing him to bleed profusely. A mortified Murray ended up apologizing to the injured golf fan and autographing the offending soft drink container for posterity.

  ZIMMERLI OF SWITZERLAND

  This Swiss luxury underwear purveyor “makes the best undershirts,” according to Murray.

  ZOMBIELAND

  DIRECTED BY: Ruben Fleischer

  WRITTEN BY: Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick

  RELEASE DATE: October 2, 2009

  FILM RATING: **½

  MURRAY RATING: ***

  PLOT: Four survivors of a zombie apocalypse travel across America.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Himself

  In a career studded with memorable cameos, Zombieland might be Murray’s most impactful. Working in a full-on fright wig for the first time since Kingpin, lampooning his own off-screen persona with a zest not seen since Space Jam, he adds a welcome dash of surreal humor to this violent, meta zombie comedy. The quick-and-dirty performance provided a respite for Murray as well, coming on the heels of his second divorce and the long, cold, unpleasant Get Low shoot in rural Georgia. Murray later described his appearance in Zombieland as something of a blessing. “It was like putting on an old coat and finding a couple hundred dollars in it,” he told Esquire.

  It almost did not happen at all. Murray was the tenth choice for the role of the movie star who plays host to four zombie hunters in his Los Angeles mansion. He got the offer only after Patrick Swayze, Sylvester Stallone, the Rock, Matthew McConaughey, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Joe Pesci, Mark Hamill, Kevin Bacon, and Dustin Hoffman all turned it down. With shooting on the scene scheduled to begin in just forty-eight hours, director Ruben Fleischer enlisted Zombieland costar Woody Harrelson to approach the notoriously reclusive Murray. “Pal, would you ever like to play a zombie?” Harrelson asked upon reaching Murray on his 800 number. Murray asked to have pages faxed to him at a Kinko’s near his home in New York.

  After reading the script, Murray decided he was not too keen on playing a zombie after all. But he did want to be in the movie. He asked that the part be rewritten so that his “character”—a bewigged, heightened version of himself—was only pretending to be a flesh-eating creature. That set up the scene’s unforgettable conclusion, in which Murray is shotgunned in the chest by a jittery Jesse Eisenberg. Most of Murray’s dialogue was improvised on the set, including his final quip about Garfield being his biggest regret. Test audiences loved Murray’s surprise appearance, although some were disappointed at seeing him come to such a gruesome end. “In the feedback on the film, people were actually sad that Bill Murray dies,” Fleischer told Entertainment Weekly. “They felt such a strong connection to him, and they were so glad he was in it that they didn’t want to see him go.”

  NEXT MOVIE: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

  ALCOHOL

  “I like alcohol but I don’t have a favorite drink, which is probably why I’m not an alcoholic. If I had a favorite I’d probably be a drunk.”

  ART

  “It’s hard to be an artist. It’s hard to be anything. It’s hard to be.”

  CHICAGO

  “Chicago actors are more hard-nosed. They’re tough on themselves and their fellow actors. They’re self-demand ing.”

  CHILD ACTORS

  “Most kid actors should be taken out and shot, let’s face it. And their parents too.”

  COMEDY

  “When Clint Eastwood teaches the girl how to shoot a gun, he says: ‘Just squeeze it. Don’t pull it. Squeeze it.’ It’s like that with comedy. You don’t have to push it. You squeeze it. And it goes off. And it kills.”

  DRAMA

  “I’ve always maintained that it’s easier to make people cry than to make them laugh. Sadness is always so much easier to evoke in people because they’re closer to it most of the time.”

  FAILURE

  “I made a lot of mistakes and realized I had to let them go. Don’t think about your errors or failures. Otherwise you’ll never do a thing.”

  FAME

  “I think everyone becomes a jerk for about two years when they become famous. So I give people two years to figure it out and pull it together. But you end up behaving poorly because there’s just no training for it. There’s nothing your parents ever did no matter what kind of people they are because everything just gets different. The information coming to you becomes differently—comes differently, and people treat you differently sort of and everything changes for us. So it takes you a little while to figure it out.”

  FAMILY

  “I was kind of formed early on. People go, ‘Oh, you act like that because you’re a big shot.’ No, I always acted like a jerk. I came
from a big family.”

  GHOSTS

  “I believe there are ghosts, but most of them are just waiters in restaurants. They take your order and then they vanish.”

  GOALS

  “The first thing that happens when you announce your goals is that these demons start spilling out of manholes to thwart you. I mean, if I say I want to do a movie about the Shroud of Turin, some guy in Ohio who doesn’t like my movies will set fire to the Shroud of Turin.”

  HIMSELF

  “People say I’m difficult and sometimes that’s a badge of honor.”

  HIS DAILY ROUTINE

  “It would be too embarrassing to tell you a typical day in my life. I don’t do a fucking thing. I couldn’t tell you that I scrub my teeth every day. I mean, I probably do, but I couldn’t swear to it.”

  HOTELS

  “It’s nice to have a date in a hotel but being alone in a hotel is kind of a sad kind of thing, isn’t it? You feel like a traveling salesman or something like that. It’s kind of sad to be in a hotel by yourself.”