The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  “It’s hard, it’s really hard to make a sequel, no matter how sincere you are,” Murray mused. “Somehow the directors take over from the writers and the comedians, and the thing ends up being a lot more action than comedy. Action is a lot easier to direct than comedy.” For his part, Reitman faulted the deficiencies of the script. “It didn’t all come together,” he told Vanity Fair in 2014. “We just sort of got off on the wrong foot story-wise on that film.” Rick Moranis cited unrealistic public expectations: “To have something as offbeat, unusual, and unpredictable [as] the first Ghostbusters, it’s next to impossible to create something better,” he said. “With sequels, it’s not that the audience wants more of something; they want better.”

  Ghostbusters II was definitely not better, although it’s not nearly so bad as its creators remember. It grossed more than $215 million and raised hopes for a third installment that have so far gone unrealized, thanks largely to Murray’s distaste for repeating himself—unless he’s making a Garfield sequel, in which case, all bets are off.

  NEXT MOVIE: Quick Change (1990)

  GHOSTBUSTERS III

  Over the decades, Murray has made it clear he has no interest in appearing in a proposed third Ghostbusters movie. He has gone out of his way to belittle the efforts of Harold Ramis and others to revive the franchise, dismissing various rumored storylines as “ridiculous,” “a crock,” and “not the way I would have gone.” He reportedly put down one Ghostbusters III script after reading just twenty pages. “It didn’t touch our stuff,” Murray groused. During a 2010 appearance on Late Show with David Letterman, Murray called the prospect of starring in a third Ghostbusters “my nightmare.” When Letterman asked if he’d participate in the film at all, Murray replied, “I told them if they killed me off in a first reel, I’d do it.” In 2014, Murray gave his blessing to a possible all-female reboot of the franchise, to be directed by Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig. “I’m fine with it,” he said. “I would go to that movie, and they’d probably have better outfits, too.”

  “NO ONE WANTS TO PAY MONEY TO SEE FAT, OLD MEN CHASING GHOSTS!”

  —MURRAY, in a handwritten note to Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis that accompanied a shredded copy of their latest Ghostbusters III script, according to a 2011 report in the National Enquirer

  GHOSTBUSTERS: HELLBENT

  See Ghostbusters III.

  GHOSTBUSTERS: THE VIDEO GAME

  Along with the other three original Ghostbusters, Murray did vocal work for this 2009 Atari video game based on the 1980s film franchise. Atari promoted the game as if it were the second sequel to the original film, hyping the supposed creative contributions of Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. But Ramis told the New York Times their input was minimal. “They were happy to have our involvement at all,” Ramis said. “The crassest way I can put it is that they couldn’t have paid us enough to give it the time and attention required to make it as funny as a feature film.” Murray reportedly had a ball donning the figurative jumpsuit for the first time in twenty years. “That was fun,” he said afterward. “I’m not really a game guy, but I enjoyed recording it. It was funny. I liked being the guy [Peter Venkman] again.” He had such a good time, in fact, that he admitted to sauntering out of the New York recording studio singing Ray Parker Jr.’s Ghostbusters theme song. According to Murray, one of the locals “gave me this really pathetic look and shouts over at me: ‘Hey man, get over it will you? That was a long time ago, okay?’”

  GILLIAM, TERRY

  Murray is an admirer of the brilliant, mercurial director of Time Bandits and Brazil. He was reportedly offered a part in Gilliam’s 2013 sci-fi dystopia The Zero Theorem but turned it down in order to finish work on The Grand Budapest Hotel. “Terry’s a fun guy to hang out with,” Murray told the Sunday Times. “His stuff doesn’t always work for me, but it’s not for lack of trying. He really throws it out there.”

  “IF I HAD A PINT OF TERRY’S BLOOD, I WOULD GET SOME SHIT DONE.”

  —MURRAY, on the cinematic brio of director Terry Gilliam

  GLAZER, MITCH

  Screenwriter and producer who has collaborated with Murray on numerous films, including Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, Scrooged, and Passion Play. A onetime music journalist, Glazer first met Murray in 1977 on the introduction of John Belushi, whom he’d recently profiled in Crawdaddy magazine. Glazer and Murray have remained friends ever since. Since the early 2000s, when Murray fired his agents and cut off most communication with the Hollywood film community, Glazer has also served as one of the actor’s informal conduits to the outside world. Producers often pester Glazer with calls to his home phone, asking him to pitch their projects to Murray. “I’m like an unpaid manager,” Glazer told Entertainment Weekly.

  GLIMPSE INSIDE THE MIND OF CHARLES SWAN III, A

  DIRECTED BY: Roman Coppola

  WRITTEN BY: Roman Coppola

  RELEASE DATE: February 8, 2013

  FILM RATING: *½

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: Fantasy sequences illuminate the inner life of a loathsome graphic designer.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Saul, business manager and would-be libertine

  Murray has a small, underwritten supporting role as the boon companion of a scuzzy 1970s album cover designer in this self-indulgent admixture of Boogie Nights and All That Jazz. If Federico Fellini and Wes Anderson had a baby, and that baby had no talent, the movie he produced might have been A Glimpse inside the Mind of Charles Swan III.

  A vile, misogynistic car wreck of a film “directed” (it might be more accurate to say “perpetrated”) by Francis Ford scion and frequent Anderson collaborator Roman Coppola, Swan was constructed as a showcase for a post-meltdown Charlie Sheen. But all it does is showcase how far he has fallen. Outfitted in tinted aviator glasses and a shaggy ’70s toupee, Sheen gives an abysmal performance as a character so irredeemably dickish he can only have been painted from real life. The rest of the cast consists of called-in favors by the well-connected writer/director. Anderson regular Jason Schwarztman debases his personal brand as Swan’s reprehensible Jewfro’d best friend. Murray, who worked with Coppola on Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Limited, showed his passionate commitment to the screenwriter’s sophomore directorial effort by arriving on set at the last possible minute. “Bill gave me the impression he was interested,” Coppola told the Times of London. “So I thought it was going to work out, but there was no sign of him and we needed to get him a costume and a hotel. Then he just showed up the day before.”

  NEXT MOVIE: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

  GOLF

  “Golf has been really kind to me,” Murray once said. “I’ve met a lot of extraordinary people through golf.” He has described the sport’s appeal as rooted in the unwritten rules by which players score themselves. Golf, he said, is “a game of self-report [with] codes of behavior and honor about it.”

  “EVERY YEAR I SAY I’M GONNA PLAY MORE. BUT THEN A MOVIE COMES ALONG, AND I CAN’T GET SERIOUS ABOUT GOLF.”

  —MURRAY, on his links obsession

  Murray developed his love of golf as a child on the streets of Wilmette, Illinois. He and his brothers fashioned a makeshift golf course along a twenty-foot-wide parkway near their house. The “holes” were trees and telephone poles. When the boys’ shots went awry, they could count on the nuns at the nearby Sisters of Christian Charity convent to retrieve them. “They would just show up at the door every once in a while with a bag of golf balls,” said Murray’s brother Ed.

  In interviews, Murray has blamed his poor performance in school on his passion for golf. “I was on the golf course rather than being in lessons,” he once admitted. “I couldn’t really think of anything that interested me.” When he was fourteen, Murray worked as a standard-bearer—a scoreboard carrier—at the Western Open, held at the Tam O’Shanter Golf Course, just outside Chicago. He had an up-close view of a thrilling fight to the finish between Arnold Palmer and the eventual tournament winner, Chi-Chi Rodriguez.

&n
bsp; GOODBYE POP 1952–1976

  National Lampoon comedy album from 1975 on which Murray appears. The record features musical parodies of such pop and rock artists as Elton John, the Beatles, Helen Reddy, and Neil Young. Performers on the vinyl LP include Christopher Guest, Paul Shaffer, and Gilda Radner. Murray’s most memorable contribution is the soul spoof “Kung Fu Christmas.”

  In August 2007, Murray was pulled over by Swedish police for driving a golf cart through the streets of Stockholm while under the influence of alcohol. The actor was in town attending the Scandinavian Masters golf tournament when he commandeered the cart, which was parked outside his hotel, and drove it to the Café Opera nightclub about a mile away. “I don’t hold any grudge against Bill Murray for borrowing our cart for a while,” said tournament organizer Fredrik Nilsmark. Although he refused to take a Breathalyzer test, Murray allowed police to draw a blood sample and signed a document admitting that he was driving under the influence. He later paid a fine and avoided jail time.

  GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, THE

  DIRECTED BY: Wes Anderson

  WRITTEN BY: Wes Anderson

  RELEASE DATE: February 6, 2014

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: ***

  PLOT: A fey concierge maintains his dignity while contesting a bogus murder charge in a fictitious Alpine country.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Monsieur Ivan, crisply efficient hotel concierge

  “I didn’t have much to do with it,” Murray declared of his seventh feature for director Wes Anderson. “I just showed up and did what I was told.” An elegy to a vanished age of Old World refinement, The Grand Budapest Hotel is chock full of cameos from Anderson regulars, including Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Bob Balaban. Although Murray appears in only a couple short scenes, he manages to leave a mark nonetheless. Playing the hirsute leader of the Society of the Crossed Keys, a secret intelligence-gathering agency made up of fastidious European hotel concierges, he takes the concept of customer service to a whole new level.

  “Bill’s role is a small part—but it’s very important,” Anderson told Rolling Stone. “He’s the head man of this secret society that is immensely important to the story. It was one of those moments that I decided I wanted to save Bill for this very quick but critical secret mission at the climax of the story. Even with just a few minutes of screen time, he truly steps right up to it and is someone that I can always rely on.”

  As usual, it was Anderson’s idiosyncratic writing that attracted Murray to the project. “When I first read the script, I went ‘Holy cow, this is crazy!’” the actor told the Independent. Elsewhere, he likened The Grand Budapest Hotel to “a Times Square billboard dropped on your head. It’s amazing.” While perhaps not quite as mind-altering as Murray made it seem, this dapper little jewel box of a movie is one of Anderson’s more engaging efforts. That is thanks largely to the winning performance of Ralph Fiennes in the lead role and the lavish production design, including some of the most formidable facial hair committed to film since the 1970s.

  Murray sports an elegant walrus mustache in the film, a far cry from the bushy look he showed up with to the set. “[Wes] wanted me to ask everybody in the cast who could to grow anything they could,” said hair and makeup designer Frances Hannon, Murray’s personal stylist dating back to 1997’s The Man Who Knew Too Little. “So I asked them to grow full beards and moustaches so that I could cut the shape in that Wes would want. Then Wes and I would get together with the actor—usually the night before they were to be on camera—and the three of us would discuss the references and inspirations and then we’d start cutting it and adjusting it. Bill, for example, came in and he had grown a full beard and this wonderful mustache that didn’t look anything like he did in the film. We went for the biggest one—you have to start big and then scale back.”

  NEXT MOVIE: The Monuments Men (2014)

  GRAND HOTEL ET DE MILAN

  This five-star luxury hotel in Milan, Italy, is one of Murray’s favorite hotels in the world.

  GRANT, CARY

  Murray is a big fan of this effortlessly elegant Old Hollywood leading man, whom he impersonated in a 1977 Saturday Night Live sketch. “He was able to make being suave and debonair seem so natural,” Murray once said. “He moved so elegantly. He moved so gracefully. Everything he did. He gets a suit out of the closet in North by Northwest, you’re like ‘Wow, look at that man get that suit out of the closet.’ It’s breathtaking.”

  Murray had a brief encounter with Grant while having dinner with his agent in the 1980s. “I was a movie star, a big shot, in my mind,” Murray remembered later. “There across the restaurant was Cary Grant. I was gobsmacked. It was everything I could do to not get up and walk over to his table. But I didn’t. I just held it together. And as he left the restaurant, he gave me a look that said, ‘That was cool. I know what you were doing. I know what you felt. And you sat here and didn’t do it. And that was cool.’ I thought, ‘I did the right thing.’ Later I met someone who told me, ‘Yeah, he knew you and he liked you. He thought your movies were good.’”

  GROUNDHOG DAY

  DIRECTED BY: Harold Ramis

  WRITTEN BY: Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis

  RELEASE DATE: February 12, 1993

  FILM RATING: ****

  MURRAY RATING: ****

  PLOT: A misanthropic TV weatherman must relive the same day over and over until he learns how to cultivate benevolence toward others.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Phil Connors, meteorologist for WPBH-TV 9 in Pittsburgh

  In the annals of high-concept cinema, Groundhog Day stands alone. Its very title has entered the popular lexicon, invoked by hack writers everywhere as universal shorthand for “that thing that repeats itself over and over.” It is also one of the principal rune texts in the Murray canon. Murray has called his performance in this movie “probably the best work I’ve done” and Danny Rubin’s original screenplay “one of the greatest conceptual scripts I’ve ever seen.” Although the film was denied a single major award nomination, it is now regularly included on lists of the best fantasy and romantic comedy films of all time. Groundhog Day is “romantic without being nauseating,” Murray once said, “which is what we’re all looking for—romance without nausea.”

  Yet it almost never came to be—at least, not with Bill Murray in the lead role. Director Harold Ramis was reluctant to cast his old friend after an unpleasant experience working with him on their previous film together. “Bill Murray was not at the top of my list,” Ramis told GQ. “He’d been getting crankier and crankier. By the end of Ghostbusters II, he was pretty cranky. I thought: Do I want to put up with this for twelve weeks?” The part of Phil Connors was originally offered to Michael Keaton, who turned it down because he “didn’t get it.” Tom Hanks was also considered, but he considered himself too nice for the role of the glib, womanizing weatherman. In retrospect, it seems almost blasphemous to imagine anyone else playing Connors, so fully committed was Murray to what would be a career-defining performance.

  Before shooting began, Murray and Danny Rubin collaborated closely on improvements to the latter’s screenplay. They spent several weeks holed up in an office in New York City fine-tuning story elements between pick-up basketball games. At one point, at the insistence of the studio, a gypsy curse sequence was inserted at the beginning of the film to set the time loop plot in motion. But Murray preferred Rubin’s original scenario, which offered no explanation for the supernatural premise.

  The star and the screenwriter also made a Groundhog Day 1992 road trip to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the setting of the film, where they sought inspiration from the locals. “We got to the only hotel in the town,” Murray told the Guardian. “I woke up at five a.m. and took a shower. The water was freezing cold. I went downstairs and said that there was no hot water. And the woman behind the counter said, ‘Oh, of course, there wouldn’t be any hot water today. Today is the only day in the year that the hotel is even close to full.’” That
scene wound up going in the finished film.

  In the end, Punxsutawney was abandoned as a location in favor of Woodstock, Illinois, a town close to the Chicago homes of Ramis and Murray. The shoot took place during one of the coldest winters anyone there could remember. On his first day on the set, Murray bought coffee and danish for the freezing crew. From then on, Murray prepared for his performance by watching the Weather Channel and trying to predict the bone-chilling climatic conditions on the set. “I went outside every day and guessed what was going to happen when I got there,” he said.

  “I’M NOT JUST GONNA LOSE WEIGHT AND FLOSS, I’M GONNA LIVE.”

  —MURRAY, when asked what he would do if he had one day of his life to live over and over

  Complicating the already arduous winter shoot was Ramis’s insistence on shooting and reshooting the same scenes in different weather conditions, so that he could assemble the footage in the proper sequence in the editing room. This led to some inspired moments of improvisation, as in the scene where Murray’s character bear-hugs his nemesis, Ned Ryerson, played by Stephen Tobolowksy. Reshoots were also a consequence of nearly continuous rewrites. According to Tobolowksy, Ramis and Rubin threw out nearly half of Rubin’s original script while on the set: “We were getting pages just hot off the press while we were shooting this,” Tobolowsky told the website Epoch Times. “The way the movie was originally … Bill had a series of odd events, and then at the end he got bored and killed himself and then woke up and time started again. [Instead] they cut out the last third of the movie, moved the suicide up, and added the whole last part of the movie where he’s taking piano lessons, and he saves the woman with the flat tire and saves the boy from the tree.” Excised from the movie at various points were a scene in which Phil Connors destroys his hotel room with a chainsaw and several scenes involving the groundhog (which reportedly bit Murray a couple times during filming). As a result of the changes, Groundhog Day went from being what Tobolowsky called “a mediocre Bill Murray movie … a rowdy comedy with Bill being rowdy” to “a great film … about healing and making the choice to survive and to heal.”