The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  LABOUNTA, TODD

  See DiLaMuca, Todd.

  LA CROIX

  Faux French sparkling water brand preferred by Murray until the early 1990s because it was bottled in La Crosse, Wisconsin. According to a 1990 magazine profile, Murray “will drink anything made in Wisconsin.”

  LANSON

  Murray’s preferred brand of French Champagne.

  LARGER THAN LIFE

  DIRECTED BY: Howard Franklin

  WRITTEN BY: Roy Blount Jr.

  RELEASE DATE: November 1, 1996

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: A motivational speaker travels across America with an 8,000-pound elephant.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Jack Corcoran, self-help author turned elephant companion

  By 1996, Murray had not played the lead in a film since Groundhog Day three years earlier. “I really have to get more active,” he confessed to USA Today. “I’ve been lazy… . I don’t work as much as other people do.” His agent, Mike Ovitz, thought he had the perfect starring vehicle to lift Murray out of the doldrums. “You know, you and an elephant would be funny,” Ovitz told his client. Murray immediately smelled a rat. “When he says stuff, I always know there’s an agenda. Somebody he knows has got an elephant script.”

  That “elephant script” turned out to be Larger Than Life, an innocuous road movie about a Tony Robbins–type motivational guru who inherits custody of a four-ton pachyderm from his late father. Originally called Nickel & Dime, the project was briefly redubbed Elephant Man 2 before an on-set contest was launched to come up with a final title. Larger Than Life was selected, with Elephant Men and The Wackyderm among the runners-up. Humorist Roy Blount Jr. was brought in to revise the script to fit Murray’s comic persona. Howard Franklin, Murray’s erstwhile Quick Change collaborator, was hired to direct. Tai, an Asian elephant best known for her performance in the previous year’s Operation Dumbo Drop, took on the challenging role of Vera, the orphaned circus animal who teaches Murray how to care.

  From the first day of filming, Murray formed a deep and lasting bond with his elephantine leading lady. “She has probably spoiled me for all other elephants,” he declared on the eve of Larger Than Life’s release. “This was the only time I cried when I said goodbye to a costar.” Having worked opposite Andie MacDowell, Geena Davis, and Sigourney Weaver, among others, Murray boldly placed Tai in the top ranks of actresses with whom he’d shared the screen. “She’s the best,” he gushed. “She’s definitely the most talented—except for Gilda [Radner].”

  When he wasn’t cavorting with Tai, Murray was his usual Jekyll and Hyde self on the set. According to a published report, he demanded that a member of the crew be fired because he objected to the man’s cologne. During filming of a scene in which Murray and the elephant trek through the Rocky Mountains, traffic became so snarled that Murray had the entire cast and crew line the highway and perform the “YMCA” dance for the entertainment of enraged motorists.

  That wasn’t the only snafu that bedeviled the production. When studio executives were given a look at a rough cut, they were appalled. Murray appeared to be sleepwalking through his performance. Reshoots were ordered, with new scenes added for Matthew McConaughey as a methed-out truck driver who gives Murray and the elephant a ride. Larger Than Life’s opening was delayed and then hidden from the eyes of critics. When reviewers did get a look at it, they were not impressed. The Boston Globe called it “a thin, disjointed road comedy,” while Variety’s Todd McCarthy rated it “entirely mirthless” and railed: “Some talented people step in a rather large pile of elephant droppings.”

  Sensing that he had a turkey on his hands, Murray embarked on a frenetic one-man publicity campaign. He appeared on Larry King’s CNN talk show, submitted to several newspaper and magazine interviews, and even filmed a promotional featurette—in drag—as a Mary Hart–like entertainment reporter. USA Today described Murray in lipstick and a wig as resembling “RuPaul after a nuclear accident.” But the promo tour failed to have much of an effect. Larger Than Life came and went quickly, leaving Murray fans to console themselves with his two-scene cameo in Space Jam, which opened two weeks later.

  NEXT MOVIE: Space Jam (1996)

  “THEY SAY AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS, BUT WHAT THEY DON’T TELL YOU IS THAT YOU NEVER FORGET AN ELEPHANT.”

  —MURRAY, uttering perhaps the most wince-inducing line of his career, in 1996’s Larger Than Life

  LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN

  Murray was the first guest on the first episode of this iconic late-night comedy series on February 1, 1982. Adopting a mock combative tone throughout his conversation with Letterman, Murray played with the lint in his pockets, showed a video of a family of pandas purportedly living in his backyard, and performed an impromptu aerobics routine to Olivia Newton-John’s hit single “Physical.” Unbeknownst to the audience, Murray almost didn’t make the appearance. According to the recollections of crewmembers recounted in Brian Abrams’s Amazon Kindle Single AND NOW … An Oral History of “Late Night with David Letterman,” 1982–1993, Murray disappeared from the building shortly before taping began. A frantic search ensued. At the last minute, Murray returned to the studio, claiming he had gone home to feed his cat.

  LEGAL EAGLES

  Debra Winger supplanted Murray in the lead role of this 1986 romantic comedy from director Ivan Reitman. Legal Eagles was originally written as a buddy picture, with Murray and Dustin Hoffman slated to costar as bickering attorneys. The plot was based on the protracted lawsuit over the estate of Mark Rothko, the celebrated abstract expressionist painter who committed suicide in 1970. “The movie was supposed to be about the marriage of art and commerce,” Murray mused in an interview. “And the more I learned about Rothko, the more I wanted to make the movie.” Indeed, Murray was jazzed enough about Legal Eagles to cut short his Parisian sabbatical and return to the United States. When Hoffman backed out to make Ishtar with Warren Beatty, Murray lost interest in the project. Robert Redford stepped in, demanding that the script be retooled around a Tracy/Hepburn–style couple.

  LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, THE

  DIRECTED BY: Wes Anderson

  WRITTEN BY: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach

  RELEASE DATE: December 25, 2004

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: ***

  PLOT: A washed-up marine explorer pursues the man-eating “jaguar shark” that devoured his friend.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Steve Zissou, lugubrious pot-smoking oceanographer

  Murray had a miserable time making this, his third film for director Wes Anderson. Shot on location in Italy during the harsh winter of 2003–2004, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was “by far the hardest job I’ve ever had,” according to the actor. He called the five-month location shoot “absolute hell” and claimed he never would have taken the part had he known it would drag on that long—or that the weather would be so cold. “I got a bone chill so bad that Anjelica [Huston] came in and was rubbing my body trying to keep my blood moving,” Murray said. “They were covering me with cashmeres and all these kinds of crazy things they were getting from town. My bones got so cold. They were cold for months afterwards.” Adding insult to Murray’s agony was the fact that retakes for Garfield: The Movie forced him into an Italian recording studio to redub tiresome cat jokes during breaks in the Zissou shooting schedule.

  In the end, Murray’s loyalty to Wes Anderson won out over his desire for comfort. Despite the tsouris that attended the film’s making, he has called The Life Aquatic “the best film Wes has ever made” and placed it in the top ranks of his own work. “I’m proud of everything that’s on the screen,” he told an audience at a 2004 retrospective of his career at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Whatever one thinks of the film’s mannered style and hipper-than-thou deadpan humor, the part of Steve Zissou—an over-the-hill undersea explorer modeled on Jacques Cousteau—seems tailor-made for his mid-2000s persona. As a grown-up leadi
ng man role, it makes a worthy follow-up to Lost in Translation and rates as one of Murray’s most quietly commanding performances.

  “Every single scene of that movie was funny,” Murray told GQ. “But when Wes assembled it, he streamlined and excised the detonation point of the laughter. The idea is you keep it bouncing and never skim the energy off of it. You keep it building in the name of a big emotional payoff—which comes when they’re all in the submarine together and they see the jaguar shark.”

  NEXT MOVIE: Broken Flowers (2005)

  LIMITS OF CONTROL, THE

  DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

  WRITTEN BY: Jim Jarmusch

  RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2009

  FILM RATING: *

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: A contract killer exchanges matchboxes with people at various Spanish cafés.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: The American, reclusive target of assassination

  “Sometimes I like it in films when people just sit there, not saying anything,” says a character in The Limits of Control. So does director Jim Jarmusch, who once again subjects his audience to two hours of characters sipping coffee, gazing blankly into the distance, and occasionally engaging in inane conversations. If that’s your cup of espresso, you will be mesmerized by this “thriller” starring Isaach De Bankolé as the world’s most inert hitman. Murray, in an instantly forgettable cameo, plays his latest victim, a mysterious American who lives in a heavily fortified compound in the Spanish countryside. In the film’s climactic scene, De Bankolé garrotes Murray with a guitar string.

  The Limits of Control was Murray’s third collaboration with Jarmusch and the last film he made before his rancorous divorce from second wife Jennifer Butler. If he seems to be phoning in his performance, it may be because he had personal matters on his mind. It took several months for Murray to emerge from the torpor of his broken marriage. In an interview conducted in October 2008, after shooting had concluded on The Limits of Control, Murray reflected on this unhappy period of his life and declared himself rejuvenated: “I’ve just come out of a sort of doldrums and I feel like I want to go,” he said. “I want to work. I want to get going. I want to do a few things at once. I really want to connect with other people that are going that way and ‘Let’s go’… I want to bounce off like a pinball. Like a pinball, I want to bounce off bumpers that are positive. I want to bounce off people that are positive and hope that’ll make me more positive and give me momentum.” A few months later, he pinballed his way to a much more successful cameo in the comedy-horror romp Zombieland.

  NEXT MOVIE: Zombieland (2009)

  LITTLE CAESARS

  After he dropped out of college in 1970, Murray worked part-time as a pizza maker in the Evanston, Illinois, branch of this national pizza chain. In 2014, during a speech at a charity event, Murray revealed that he was so poor at the time that he often ate raw pizza dough when no one was looking: “It has active yeast inside of it, so when you’re full of the raw dough, the yeast continues to expand until your body begins to explode. But those are the early days, when we went through some stuff, didn’t we all? Huh? So. Anyway.”

  LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE

  Oscar-nominated 2005 comedy about a dysfunctional family on a road trip to a beauty pageant. Screenwriter Michael Arndt wrote the part of Frank Ginsberg, the suicidal Marcel Proust scholar, with Murray in mind. The studio preferred Robin Williams. In the end, the two sides agreed to offer the part to Steve Carell. Murray later said he regretted missing out on the role.

  In March 2010, while attending the weeklong SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Murray rolled into the Shangri-La bar accompanied by RZA and GZA of the hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan. Taking over the bartending duties, Murray insisted on serving shots of tequila—and only shots of tequila—for the remainder of the evening. Over the course of the week, Murray was also spotted at various house parties in the Texas capital.

  In December 2010, a group of revelers at the New York City karaoke bar Karaoke One 7 were shocked when Murray accepted their half-joking invitation to join them in their private karaoke room. Murray rolled into the room with an entourage of female companions and proceeded to treat everyone to a round of “weird green drinks” made with Chartreuse liqueur. He stayed for four hours, performed a duet of the 1961 Elvis Presley hit “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame,” posed for photos with the partygoers, and then left.

  LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

  DIRECTED BY: Frank Oz

  WRITTEN BY: Howard Ashman

  RELEASE DATE: December 19, 1986

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: ***

  PLOT: A nebbish adopts a man-eating plant.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Arthur Denton, masochistic dental patient

  After two years of self-imposed exile from Hollywood, Murray returned to do a cameo in this musical adaptation of Roger Corman’s camp horror classic. In a brief scene that marks his first and only big-screen collaboration with Steve Martin, Murray plays Arthur Denton, a masochistic dental patient who flummoxes Martin’s best efforts to torture him. While Martin’s performance is showier—he wears a fright wig and huffs nitrous oxide in a madcap attempt to live up to Muppeteer Frank Oz’s stylized direction—Murray plays it low-key and ends up stealing the scene, much as Jack Nicholson did as an analogous loon in Corman’s original.

  NEXT MOVIE: She’s Having a Baby (1988)

  LOOSE SHOES

  DIRECTED BY: Ira Miller

  WRITTEN BY: Royce D. Applegate, Ira Miller, Dan Praiser, and Charley Smith

  RELEASE DATE: August 1, 1980

  FILM RATING: *

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: A collection of mock trailers for coming movie attractions.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Lefty Schwartz, condemned prisoner and gastronome

  Murray has a small role in this agonizingly unfunny film spoofing movie trailers in the manner of the then-popular satirical anthologies The Groove Tube and The Kentucky Fried Movie. Also known as Coming Attractions and Quackers, Loose Shoes was shot in 1977 but released in 1980 to capitalize on Murray’s Saturday Night Live fame. (The film’s puzzling title is a riff on an infamous, now forgotten quote from former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz: “The only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.”) Of the eighteen sketches that make up the 84-minute feature—many of which trade in crude racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic stereotypes—Murray’s segment is by far the funniest. In “Three Chairs for Lefty!” he plays the title character, Lefty Schwartz, a death row inmate who starts a riot in the prison mess after he is served insufficiently flavorful quiche. Wearing a bald cap and mascara, Murray does what he can with the sophomoric material—the punch line involves Lefty “cooking” a roast for the warden in the electric chair—but the skit sinks under the weight of its own stupidity. Although Murray is on-screen for all of five minutes, he was featured prominently in promotional materials for the film.

  NEXT MOVIE: Stripes

  LOS ANGELES

  Like most successful movie actors, Murray has spent a considerable amount of time in southern California. But he remains largely immune to its charms. Of his periodic residencies in L.A., he once remarked: “It just never took. It’s like the first day you check into a hotel in L.A. there’s a message under your door. The second day, there’s eleven messages under your door. The third day, there’s thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy messages. And I realized that they just want fresh blood. They. Just. Want. Fresh. Blood. You gotta get the hell out of there. And you really feel, if you live in New York, that you’re three hours ahead of them—I mean that literally. It’s like, Oh man, we gotta help these people! And the longer you stay there, the less ahead of them you get, and then you’re one of them. No way, man. Not for me.”

  Murray spent much of 1976 living full-time in Los Angeles following the demise of the New York–based Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. It was not a happy sojourn. In a 1
984 interview, Murray described his rented home in L.A. as “the most disgusting house in California. It was like a den of evil. There were statues of embracing nudes all over, the library was The Joy of Sex, Good Sex, Better Sex, that kind of thing. There was an electronic bed. It was basically built to spend seventy-two hours in with a runaway teenage girl. Or boy, if that’s your taste. Scampering from the sauna to the Jacuzzi to the pool to the mechanical bed. The walls were velour, the rocks were velour, it was sleazy and amazing.”

  LOST CITY, THE

  DIRECTED BY: Andy Garcia

  WRITTEN BY: Guillermo Cabrera Infante

  RELEASE DATE: April 28, 2006

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: A Havana nightclub owner is caught up in the tumult of the Cuban Revolution.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: “The Writer,” mysterious unnamed wag

  Fittingly, for a deal that was sealed on the golf course, Murray delivers a workmanlike supporting performance in this ponderous period piece from actor/director Andy Garcia. A sweeping family drama set in the last days before Castro took power in Cuba, The Lost City was Garcia’s passion project, sixteen years in the making. He first pitched the film to Murray on the back nine at the 2004 Pebble Beach Pro-Am and then pestered him with phone calls begging him to join the cast. Fresh off the grueling shoot for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Murray was not sure he ever wanted to work again. But his wife convinced him to give in to Garcia’s entreaties. “What made the Andy movie happen is my wife likes Andy,” Murray told Cigar Aficionado magazine. “‘That’s okay. Go work with him. He’s a gentleman.’”