The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  ARMAGNAC

  Aromatic French brandy favored by Murray in his mid-twenties. He has referred to Armagnac as “truth serum.” Murray and his Stripes costar Warren Oates got falling-down drunk on Armagnac during a 1980 visit to the grave of character actor Strother Martin.

  ARTHUR, BEA

  The legendary star of Maude and The Golden Girls met Murray when she hosted the November 17, 1979, episode of Saturday Night Live. In a 2008 interview with film critic Elvis Mitchell, Murray confessed that he did not look forward to working with Arthur, considering her an “old dame” whose antiquated, declamatory acting style wouldn’t mesh with his more improvisational approach. “I wouldn’t have thought I’d give a hoot and holler about Bea Arthur,” he said. But she won him over with her commitment to her performance. “I was very impressed with her,” he admitted. “She was amazingly professional. She was game. She had all kinds of chops and could do anything.”

  ASSASSINATION

  In a 2014 interview, Murray revealed the reason he does not surround himself with an entourage as other celebrities do: fear of assassination. “The first time I was ever given a bodyguard, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to be assassinated,’ he told the Detroit Free Press. “It made me think I was going to be shot. So I never liked it. I never liked the sensation of it.”

  AUTOGRAPHS

  Murray hates signing autographs. Besieged by autograph seekers during dinner with a magazine interviewer in 1989, he reacted angrily, calling the imposition “an assault.” “Why do some people want your autograph when it’s plain that they don’t give a shit about you?” he complained. “At least let a guy finish his dinner. Sometimes I feel people think, ‘What the hell, this bum is getting all that dough—let’s make him earn it.’”

  When he does give in, Murray has been known to append slyly menacing notes for his fans. One six-year-old who requested his signature at the height of Ghostbusters mania was greeted with the message: “Sidney, run away from home tonight—Bill Murray.” At other times, Murray has made a point of signing Jim Belushi’s name instead of his own. During a vacation in Mexico in 1988, Murray was pestered by one “overdressed” female fan who “kept ordering me to give her autographs … like I was her personal trinket.” He responded by dumping the woman—“furs, designer clothes, and all”—into a swimming pool.

  AWAKENINGS

  Director Penny Marshall considered Murray for the role of catatonic Leonard Lowe in this 1990 film based on the casebook of neurologist Oliver Sacks. But with Robin Williams on board as a fictionalized version of Sacks, Marshall was reluctant to add another comic actor to the cast. Robert De Niro took the part and received an Academy Award nomination for best actor. Murray went on to play a bearded neurologist, loosely based on Oliver Sacks, in 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums.

  AWARDS

  Over his long career, Murray has amassed numerous acting prizes and nominations, including an Emmy for outstanding writing on Saturday Night Live and a Golden Globe for best actor in a musical orcomedy for Lost in Translation. In 2004, he was famously passed over for an Academy Award for best actor in favor of Sean Penn. He is one of only a handful of actors to be nominated for both the Oscar and its Canadian cousin, the Genie Award. Despite all the accolades he’s received, Murray has a professed aversion for the pursuit of awards, a desire he once likened to a “low-grade infection.”

  See also Academy Awards.

  “AWARDS ARE MEANINGLESS TO ME AND I HAVE NOTHING BUT DISDAIN FOR ANYONE WHO ACTIVELY CAMPAIGNS TO GET ONE.”

  —MURRAY, on awards fever

  AYKROYD, DAN

  Web-footed, heterochromic Canadian comic actor whom Murray credits with being one of the only people to write sketches for him during his difficult first season on Saturday Night Live. A gifted impressionist and character actor, Aykroyd collaborated with Murray on two Ghostbusters films and helped grease the wheels for the greenlighting of Murray’s magnum opus, The Razor’s Edge, in 1984. Both men also had small roles in Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, All You Need Is Cash, and Nothing Lasts Forever. Murray has called Aykroyd “a hell of a guy” and once claimed he was the only one of the ex-ghostbusters with whom he socialized regularly. Despite their longstanding friendship, Murray has resisted all of Aykroyd’s entreaties to join him in a proposed third Ghostbusters movie.

  On Memorial Day weekend in 2014, Murray was dining with friends at Oak Steakhouse in Charleston, South Carolina, when a group of revelers from Washington, D.C., real estate developer E. J. Rumpke’s bachelor party asked if he would join them upstairs and say a few words to the groom-to-be. After initially declining, Murray ambled on up to the restaurant’s second floor and began dishing out relationship advice to the assembled partygoers. “You know how funerals are not for the dead, they’re for the living?” Murray told an astonished Rumpke and twenty of his Boston College buddies. “Bachelor parties are not for the groom, they’re for the unmarried.” He then shared his secret for finding your soul mate:

  “If you have someone that you think is the One, don’t just sort of think in your ordinary mind, ‘Okay, let’s make a date. Let’s plan this and make a party and get married.’ Take that person and travel around the world. Buy a plane ticket for the two of you to travel all around the world, and go to places that are hard to go to and hard to get out of. And if when you come back to JFK, when you land in JFK, and you’re still in love with that person, get married at the airport.”

  BAD SANTA

  Murray was the original choice to play Willie T. Stokes, a lowlife shopping-mall Santa Claus, in this 2003 comedy from director Terry Zwigoff. According to Zwigoff, Murray made a verbal agreement to do the film, but when the time came to sign his contract, he was incommunicado. “I was told by one of the producers that he really wanted to do it — just tell him where and when and he’d be there,” Zwigoff said. “I left several messages on his answering machine, but after a few weeks of hearing nothing, we eventually moved on.” Jack Nicholson was also under consideration for the role, which eventually went to Billy Bob Thornton.

  BALL, LUCILLE

  Despite a self-professed predilection for “funny females,” Murray is not a fan of the wailing red-headed comedian who starred in the eponymous 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. “Lucy never really made me laugh,” he told film critic Elvis Mitchell in a 2008 interview. “Lucy was never my girl.”

  BALLHAWKS

  DIRECTED BY: Mike Diedrich

  WRITTEN BY: Kyle McCarthy, Terry Cosgrove, and Joe Sciarrotta

  RELEASE DATE: April 27, 2010

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: A documentary filmmaker turns his camera on the rabid Chicago Cubs fans who chase home run balls as they fly out of Wrigley Field.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Your humble narrator

  Murray’s brother Joel served as executive producer for this reverent sports documentary, which was shot during the 2004 and 2005 baseball seasons. Murray recorded his deadpan narration track in 2009, inside his suite at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood.

  NEXT MOVIE: Get Low (2010)

  BANKS, ERNIE

  The Hall of Fame shortstop known as “Mr. Cub” is Murray’s all-time favorite baseball player. Murray gave his firstborn son the middle name Banks in his honor.

  BARK

  Rambunctious golden retriever owned by Murray in the mid-1980s.

  BASEBALL

  Murray is a lifelong baseball fan who grew up rooting for his hometown Chicago Cubs. “The saddest day of the year,” he once said, “is the last day of the baseball season.”

  As a child, Murray played Little League ball for his local Lions Club team—until he was kicked out for getting into a fight with an opposing player. He was also the ringleader of his neighborhood pickup league. “My childhood summers were all about baseball,” he said. “I played nearly every day. We’d ride an hour from home on bikes to find a ballpark with home run fences. I’d spend hours at night making phone calls to round up e
ighteen players. That was the ultimate—two full teams for a pickup game.”

  Each season, when the Cubs inevitably fell out of the National League pennant race, Murray transferred his allegiance to the Milwaukee Braves. In 1957, on the day the Braves clinched the National League pennant, Murray’s father drove the entire family up to Milwaukee to join in the celebration. Decades later, Murray could still recite from memory the entire starting lineup of the ’57 Braves.

  As an adult, Murray continues to follow the Cubs, although most of his passion is channeled into the minors. “Minor league baseball is very seductive,” he has observed. “The magic is that this is how you remember baseball from when you were young.” He called the atmosphere at minor league games “a calming, relaxing, soothing environment” and praised it for its restorative powers. “They should definitely close the state hospitals and make more minor league baseball,” he once remarked. “It’s very good for the brain.”

  It also appeals to Murray’s love of showmanship—and underdogs: “I like rejects, and I like the carny part of minor league baseball.” Murray has at times been a part owner of the Texas City Stars, Grays Harbor Loggers, Utica Blue Sox, Salt Lake City Trappers, St. Paul Saints, Charleston RiverDogs, Hudson Valley Renegades, Brockton Rox, Miami Miracle, Catskill Cougars, Charleston Rainbows, and Williamsport Bills. The common thread uniting all of Murray’s teams is a lack of success. “I’ve always owned teams of players nobody wants,” he said. “There’s a lot of good will that comes from being the mutt.” Murray has called his yen for owning bush league franchises “a fun way to disappear,” likening it to Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi’s desire to form a blues band in the 1970s. In 2012, Murray was inducted into the South Atlantic League Hall of Fame in recognition of his efforts to promote minor league baseball.

  In 1993, New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte tried to sell Murray on the idea of becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball. “I will accept the job,” Murray told Lipsyte, “if you give me unlimited powers.”

  BATMAN

  Murray was briefly considered for the title role in director Tim Burton’s 1989 big-screen adaptation of the long-running DC Comics series. Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, and Pierce Brosnan were among a who’s who of ’80s icons in contention for the part, which went to Michael Keaton. Playing the Dark Knight would have been a major career coup for Murray, who had only recently returned to Hollywood after a four-year sabbatical from moviemaking.

  B.C. ROCK

  DIRECTED BY: Picha

  WRITTEN BY: Jonathan Schmock, James Vallely, Joseph Plewa, and Christine Neubaur

  RELEASE DATE: May 21, 1980 (as The Missing Link)

  FILM RATING: *

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: The story of human evolution as told from the perspective of a sex-crazed caveman.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: A gassy dragon

  Murray did uncredited vocal work on the English-language dub of this 1980 animated feature from Belgian cartoonist Jean-Paul “Picha” Walravens. A raunchy comedy in the spirit of Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat, B.C. Rock was originally released in France as Le chainon manquant (The Missing Link). The film was redubbed twice in English: once in 1980 with a script from National Lampoon contributor Tony Hendra; and again in 1984 in a more sophomoric American version retitled B.C. Rock, with new dialogue by the comedy duo Jim Vallely and Jonathan Schmock. Murray supplies the voice of a flying dragon who farts fire. In a scene that is sadly representative of the level of comedy on display in the film, the hero “cures” the dragon of his explosive flatulence by stopping his anus with a cork. As bad as B.C. Rock is, it is a marked improvement over Murray’s previous collaboration with Picha, 1979’s Shame of the Jungle.

  NEXT MOVIE: Caddyshack (1980)

  BEAT

  Abortive Murray movie project of the mid-1990s that was meant to be the actor’s second directorial effort. Cowritten by Murray and his Scrooged collaborator Mitch Glazer, Beat was an Americanized re-do of a 1994 French feature, Grosse fatigue. (Oddly enough, Murray’s directorial debut, 1990’s Quick Change, was also a remake of a French film.) The surreal black comedy would have chronicled the travails of a world-famous actor bedeviled by a lookalike whose outrageous behavior threatens to ruin his reputation. Enthused about the prospect of playing a dual role, Murray was very high on the project. But the studio mysteriously bailed on him. “Disney was gonna do it,” he said, “and they said it was the best script they’d read in five years. And then, two days later, some guy said, ‘We don’t make this kind of movie anymore.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ It just took the wind out of my sails for working. I was just so disappointed.” Eleven years later, in 2008, Murray was still gushing about the screenplay to the Chicago Tribune. “It spoke very much to the celebrity culture we have now,” he said. “Everything we wrote has come true. I think it still plays. I do want to direct it… . I’m confident I can do it. But if there was somebody who was really funny and wanted to haul off and do it very quickly, I’d let them do it.”

  BELUSHI, JOHN

  Falstaffian Albanian American comic actor who served as Murray’s role model during the early stages of his career. Murray has called Belushi “the best actor I’ve ever seen” and “a powerful powerboat” paving the way for his own ascent to stardom. In interviews, he repeatedly praised Belushi’s improv technique, likening it to “a martial art.” “He was really free on the stage,” Murray once said. “Belushi always made active choices rather than word game choices,” he told MTV.

  “HE WAS A BIG, BIG HUMAN BEING. HE HAD EXTRAORDINARY APPETITES AND EXTRAORDINARY TALENTS. HE WAS LIKE BABE RUTH. HE COULD EAT FIFTY HOT DOGS AND HE COULD HIT SIXTY HOME RUNS. HE COULD DO IT ALL. YOU NEVER THOUGHT ANYTHING COULD REALLY STOP JOHN.”

  —MURRAY, on John Belushi’s larger-than-life persona

  The two men first met at Second City in Chicago and began working regularly together on The National Lampoon Radio Hour in New York. Murray and Belushi roomed together on the road when The National Lampoon Show went on tour in 1975. “We drank a lot of Rolling Rock in those days,” Murray said. They also perfected their recipe for the Champa Tampa cocktail, an inexpensive alternative to the hard drugs they couldn’t afford at the time. In 1977, after Chevy Chase left Saturday Night Live, Belushi lobbied for Murray’s addition to the cast. Belushi and Murray both appeared in the films Shame of the Jungle and All You Need Is Cash, though they never shared any scenes together. After Belushi’s tragic death from a drug overdose in 1982, Murray delivered a memorable eulogy at his memorial service. He later incorporated his funeral remarks verbatim into a scene in The Razor’s Edge. In 1984, Murray replaced Belushi in the lead role in Ghostbusters.

  BILL MURRAY’S CELEBRITY CORNER

  Recurring Saturday Night Live segment that served as a showcase for Murray’s smarmy, stargazing movie-critic character. Murray first performed Celebrity Corner on the October 14, 1978, show hosted by Fred Willard. The character was rumored to be modeled on TV entertainment reporter David Sheehan, although Murray has always denied it. “A lot of people talk like the Celebrity Corner guy,” Murray said in a 1979 interview. “I can do him for hours. He’s the reviewer who puts himself on a first-name basis with the stars, who don’t know him from Adam… . He’s the guy who’ll say, ‘You’re fabulous, you’re the greatest.’ The guy who goes on a talk show and interrupts when another guest is introduced, ‘Excuse me for a second … can I say something about this man right here, he is so terrific.’ In the meantime he’s taken up a whole segment.” One of Murray’s most popular SNL characters, the Celebrity Corner host provided a vehicle for the actor to vent his hatred of critics.

  BOOGIE NIGHTS

  Murray turned down the role of adult film director Jack Horner in this 1997 movie about a well-endowed porn star. Sydney Pollack, Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, and Warren Beatty also passed on the part, which earned Burt Reynolds an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

  BOTTLE ROCKET

  Murray w
as director Wes Anderson’s first choice for the role of small-time crook/landscaper Abe Henry in this idiosyncratic 1996 caper film starring Luke and Owen Wilson. But Murray was traveling the country in a Winnebago at the time the film was being cast and never saw the screenplay. “I had agents then who had never heard of [Anderson],” Murray said, “so that script never got to me, because as far as they were concerned I was a movie star and this was some kid from Texas.” The part eventually went to James Caan instead.

  After Bottle Rocket became an indie sensation, Murray found himself bombarded with VHS copies of the film from associates imploring him to work with Anderson. “I have the largest single collection of Bottle Rocket videotapes in the world,” Murray later claimed. Though he never watched them, the buzz was enough to persuade him to read Anderson’s next script, Rushmore, and take the part that ushered in his late-’90s career renaissance.