He wasn’t alone. Executives at MGM had high hopes for Nothing Lasts Forever, which they thought would be a crowd-pleasing “Saturday Night Live movie” in the mold of The Blues Brothers. But they were mortified by the film that Schiller delivered. Producer Lorne Michaels, who had convinced the studio to bankroll the project, was quietly relieved of his authority. All plans to promote and distribute the film were shelved. Ultimately it was dumped into one theater in Seattle in the summer of 1984, in a halfhearted attempt to cash in on the success of Ghostbusters. Since then, it has been screened only rarely in the United States, though dubbed versions do occasionally air on European television.
“It just needs to be seen,” Murray told author Michael Streeter twenty years after Nothing Lasts Forever’s abortive release. “It should be on a midnight movie list on television so people can see it… . It’s the kind of movie where people would be taken by it if they saw it.” Anyone interested in testing the validity of Murray’s proposition can watch the film online, where it currently resides in perpetuity.
NEXT MOVIE: The Razor’s Edge (1984)
NUDITY
Murray has never done a nude scene in a film. In fact, it is one of his few inhibitions. Groundhog Day screenwriter Danny Rubin wrote a scene wherein Phil Connors sheds all of his clothes and walks into the teeth of an approaching snowstorm, but Murray nixed it. “I don’t do naked,” he told Rubin. And that was that.
Murray is a huge fan of the 1989 action film starring Patrick Swayze as a bouncer at a small-town Missouri bar. He is especially fond of the film’s celebrated love scene, in which Swayze and costar Kelly Lynch have sex against a rock wall. According to Lynch, Murray watches the film whenever it comes on TV and makes a point of calling her husband, screenwriter Mitch Glazer, during her sex scene with Swayze. “Kelly’s having sex with Patrick Swayze right now,” Murray reportedly exults in his Carl Spackler voice. “They’re doing it. He’s throwing her against the rocks.” If Murray is unavailable, one of his brothers will call instead. Glazer admitted to an interviewer that he is dismayed by the calls, which come in at all hours of the day or night from wherever Murray happens to be at the time—including at least one call from Russia. “It was funny the first dozen or so times,” Glazer said.
OKLAHOMA!
Murray is a big fan of this 1943 Broadway musical from the creative team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. He once told an interviewer that he rated Oklahoma! as “the best musical ever.”
See also Mame.
OLIVE KITTERIDGE
Continuing the transition into “sad old man” roles that began with St. Vincent, Murray plays a forlorn widower learning to love again in this 2014 HBO miniseries based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Elizabeth Strout. Frances McDormand stars as Olive Kitteridge, a crabby New England schoolteacher who enjoys an unlikely late-life romance with Murray’s character.
OSMOSIS JONES
DIRECTED BY: Tom Sito, Piet Kroon, and Peter and Robert Farrelly
WRITTEN BY: Marc Hyman
RELEASE DATE: August 10, 2001
FILM RATING: **½
MURRAY RATING: **
PLOT: A dyspeptic slob successfully fights off a bout of food poisoning.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Frank Detorri, gluttonous zookeeper
Murray reunited with the Farrelly brothers for this curious comedy mixing live-action with hand-drawn animation in the glorious tradition of Space Jam. Playing a slovenly widower who contracts a life-threatening virus after eating a tainted egg, Murray delivers the sweatiest, seediest, least appealing character turn of his career. Most of the action takes place inside his disease-ravaged body, where a cartoon buddy-cop duo voiced by Chris Rock and David Hyde-Pierce join forces to vanquish the killer germs trying to do him in. Bobby Farrelly called Osmosis Jones “the best script I’ve seen my whole time in the business,” and though that is more than a little hyperbolic, there are many clever moments here that evoke the golden age of Warner Bros. animation. As a twenty-minute educational short about the human digestive system, this film might have been a minor classic. At ninety-five minutes, the joke goes on far too long. The cartoon sequences are intermittently amusing, but the Farrelly-directed live-action inserts push the envelope of gross-out humor to its stomach-turning extreme. In two separate scenes, Murray disgorges himself all over the kindly schoolteacher played by Molly Shannon. Equally revolting is Chris Elliott, outfitted in an Edgar Winter fright wig, as Murray’s lackwit younger brother. This is not the Groundhog Day reunion moviegoers were expecting.
NEXT MOVIE: Speaking of Sex (2001)
OVITZ, MIKE
This legendary Hollywood talent agent represented Murray from the early 1980s until the mid-’90s. “He was my monster,” Murray once remarked of the Creative Artists Agency founder. “He was great. He’s a famous character, but he was my character. And when he’s on your side, he’s a weapon. He’s really something.” Murray has Ovitz to thank for the big-money studio deals that defined his career in the 1980s. “He did things that no one did before and made things happen,” Murray has said. In 1995, Ovitz left CAA to become president of the Walt Disney Company. Murray remained with the agency for another five years before firing his agents in 2000.
PALIN, SARAH
In an interview conducted during the 2008 presidential campaign, Murray expressed reservations about several candidates, including this Alaska governor turned Republican vice presidential nominee. “I don’t know where that voice comes from,” he said of Palin. “It sounds like northern Wisconsin or Minnesota or something; not what I imagine Alaskans sound like. It’s a disturbing pitch.”
PARKS AND RECREATION
In November 2014, Murray filmed a surprise cameo for the penultimate episode of this popular TV sitcom about a midlevel parks department bureaucrat and her friends and coworkers in Pawnee, Indiana. In the episode “Two Funerals,” which aired on February 17, 2015, Murray plays Walter Gunderson, the oft-mentioned, never-before-seen, and recently deceased mayor of Pawnee. He appears briefly as a corpse lying in an open casket and in a prerecorded video message played at his funeral service. According to published reports, Murray improvised much of his monologue.
PASSION PLAY
DIRECTED BY: Mitch Glazer
WRITTEN BY: Mitch Glazer
RELEASE DATE: September 10, 2010
FILM RATING: *½
MURRAY RATING: *
PLOT: A burned-out jazzman falls in love with a winged sideshow oddity.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Michael “Happy”Shannon, bewigged, bespectacled gangster
Twenty years in the making, this directorial debut of Murray pal Mitch Glazer is an over-the-top gonzo fable about a smack-addicted jazz musician (Mickey Rourke) who becomes emotionally and erotically transfixed by a woman with angel wings (Megan Fox). Watching it, one gets the sense Glazer started his script with a sex scene between a man and a bird woman, then worked backward from there. The whole thing plays like someone’s twisted bestiality fantasy captured on film.
If Murray’s performance seems phoned in, as if he was doing the movie as a favor to a friend, it’s because he was. Glazer’s first choice for the role of mobster Happy Shannon, Toby Kebbell, quit after three days of filming. (According to reports, he was terrified at having to share the screen with Rourke.) Murray volunteered to take the part, the latest in a long line of doomed passion projects to which he has lent his imprimatur. “The movie is such a long shot. So impossible,” he said shortly after Passion Play’s release. “But I live to go down with those guys that have no fuckin’ chance.”
Glazer later admitted he “fell to his knees” when Murray agreed to come on board—oddly enough, on Christmas Day. But if he was expecting another gift in the form of a fully committed performance, he was sorely mistaken. Outfitted with Glazer’s eyeglasses and one of the worst toupees of his career, Murray brings little or nothing to the hazily written role of the underworld boss who competes with Rourke for Fox’s affection. Te
llingly, the actor originally tapped to play Happy was more than thirty years younger than Murray, suggesting that even Glazer had no fixed idea of who the character was supposed to be.
Passion Play opened to widespread derision at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival and then was shelved for several months as Glazer performed meatball surgery on his original cut. He needn’t have bothered. By the time it hit theaters in the fall, the film had been disowned by its star, Mickey Rourke, who branded it the latest “terrible movie” in his less-than-stellar canon. After a brief theatrical run, Passion Play was consigned to the direct-to-DVD birdcage, never to fly in public again.
NEXT MOVIE: Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Murray took a break from filming Scrooged to enjoy a little R & R at Rancho La Puerta, a vegetarian health spa in Baja California. Joining him at the tony desert resort were Scrooged screenwriters Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue. They were the only three men in a spa full of wealthy Beverly Hills housewives. Murray spent the weekend hiking, swimming, and signing autographs for guests. By his final day, he was weary from all the unwanted attention. When a middle-aged woman in a fur coat approached him and requested yet another autograph, Murray complied on one condition. “I’ll have to have something in return,” he told her. “I get to throw you in the pool.” “Sure, you do that,” the woman replied with a laugh, sticking a pen in his hand. With that, Murray scooped her up, carried her over to the deep end of the pool, and dropped her—fur coat and all—into the water. As Glazer summed up: “He’d made the deal and that was it.”
PEANUT BUTTER, LETTUCE, AND MAYONNAISE ON PUMPERNICKEL
Ingredients of Murray’s favorite sandwich.
PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, THE
Murray was up for the role of pornographer Larry Flynt in this 2006 biopic from Ed Wood screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. But director Milos Forman claims Murray never returned his phone calls. Tom Hanks was also considered for the part, which earned Woody Harrelson an Oscar nomination for best actor.
PERCHANCE TO DREAM
Black-and-white short film from director Tom Schiller that aired during the March 10, 1979, telecast of Saturday Night Live. Murray plays the Honker, a homeless drunk who takes a swig from an enchanted liquor bottle and dreams he is an actor performing Shakespeare on stage.
PETTY CASH
Murray prefers to carry cash in denominations of fifty and ten, reasoning that “people like fifties, twenties are too big for most things, and hundreds are hard to break.”
PHILADELPHIA
Director Jonathan Demme considered Murray for the role of Joe Miller, the homophobic lawyer who helps an AIDS-afflicted colleague wage a wrongful termination lawsuit, in this Oscar-winning 1993 drama. At the time, Daniel Day-Lewis was slated to headline the film. When Tom Hanks replaced Day-Lewis as the lead, Demme opted to go with a dramatic actor for the second banana. Murray gave way to Denzel Washington.
PICKLES
During his 2014 Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session, Murray confessed his fondness for pickles. “I like pickles. I put pickles in lots of sandwiches. I’m big on pickles, but I’ve never had them with peanut butter. I really like peanut butter though. I’m kind of surprised because I like them both so much that I haven’t combined them.”
PLAYER PIANOS
Murray became fascinated by player pianos after buying one from Saturday Night Live short filmmaker Tom Schiller in the 1990s. “There was a period after leaving the show when I was kind of down on my heels,” Schiller says. “I had this magnificent player piano and I told Bill I was strapped for money. He generously offered to buy it and said I could buy it back later on. He kept it for a few years and when I had the cash, he made good on his promise and I was able to buy it back.” “I was really torn,” Murray told author Michael Streeter. “I was happy that he bought it back, but I really loved that piano.”
POLITICS
Murray has rarely spoken publicly about his political affiliation. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune conducted shortly before the 2008 presidential election, he declared then-candidate Barack Obama “interesting to watch” but expressed disinterest in vice presidential nominees Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. In a 2012 appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Murray espoused a personal weltanschauung that emphasized the virtues of self-reliance:
“I think we ought to be personally responsible,” he said. “I think if you can take care of yourself and then maybe try to take care of someone else, that’s sort of how you’re supposed to live… . I think we’ve sort of gotten used to someone looking out for us and I don’t think any other person is necessarily going to be counted on to look out for us. I think there’s only so many people that can take care of themselves and can take care of other people. The rest of the people—they’re useful in terms of compost for the whole planet.” Speaking about the taming of the frontier, he lauded the heroism of the early settlers: “This country is really a pioneer country, the people that came here. We forget the kind of discipline they had to have… . They came in wagons and the wheels broke… . There was no option but to do it yourself, to have your own responsibility. There is no turning back.”
Later in that same Squawk Box appearance, Murray decried the sad state of partisan politics in America. Politicians, he said, “spend all their time just trying to destroy the other guy, not to work together but to humble and humiliate the other so that they can’t have success. It’s not working to serve anyone anymore. If you’re not serving some sort of common good, and you’re only serving your sort of partisan alliance, you’re part of what’s destructive. You’re destroying something.”
In a 2014 profile for the Guardian, Murray doubled down on his criticism of political partisanship: “Political parties work to cripple their opponents,” he railed. “They spend all their time in office trying to paralyze the work of the others. They try to stifle. It’s cruel, cruel… . I wish you could hold all of Congress prisoner and they’d get Stockholm syndrome and have to go along with their captors. And their captors would be people who were real true American citizens.” He also issued a vague premonition about an upcoming national apocalypse: “Eventually something horrible will happen, something dynamic and powerful. It’s going to have to be cataclysmic for people to wake up and say: ‘Okay, is anyone gonna do this?’ There’s going to have to be a shock of another kind. I think something’s gonna have to change. Usually it’s something like war or 9/11 that makes people come together.”
POLYESTER
Murray sang the “love theme” for this 1981 film from cult auteur John Waters. For more details, see Waters, John.
POPE JOHN XXIII
This Roman Catholic pontiff, who reigned from 1958 to 1963 and presided over the historic Second Vatican Council, is one of Murray’s all-time favorite popes. “He’s my guy,” the actor told the Guardian newspaper. “An extraordinary joyous Florentine who changed the order.” Not all of John XXIII’s reforms met with Murray’s approval, however. The elimination of the traditional Latin mass in particular sticks in Murray’s craw. “I tend to disagree with what they call the new mass,” he has said. “I think we lost something by losing the Latin. Now if you go to a Catholic mass even just in Harlem it can be in Spanish, it can be in Ethiopian, it can be in any number of languages. The shape of it, the pictures, are the same but the words aren’t the same. There’s a vibration to those words. If you’ve been in the business long enough you know what they mean anyway. And I really miss the music—the power of it, y’know? Yikes! Sacred music has an effect on your brain.”
PRESLEY, ELVIS
Murray is fascinated by the life of this rock ’n’ roll legend. He famously crashed Presley’s funeral in 1977. “He was an extraordinary guy,” Murray once observed of the King. “He could have really been good. I mean his movies, some of them were absolutely terrible, but I don’t think people know how hard it is to be as natural as he came off in his movies.” He went on to rhapsodize about the hip-swiveler’s romant
ic mystique. “The amazing thing about Elvis, or another amazing thing, was the guy did some dating in his life, and not one woman that he dated will say a bad thing about Elvis—they were all nuts about him. I mean none of them really ended up with him, but we knew a girl in Illinois who met Elvis once and he bought her a car! And we’d ask her, ‘So what’s the deal with the King?’ He was still alive at that point. And she wouldn’t tell us a thing. She was crazy about him. She thought he was just, you know, the cat’s meow.”
“WHEN ELVIS DIED, I THOUGHT, ‘IF ELVIS CAN DIE, WHAT IS GOING TO BECOME OF ME?’”
—MURRAY, on the 1977 demise of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll
PRESS YOUR LUCK
In 2000, Murray signed on to star in this film based on the true story of Michael Larsen, an unemployed ice cream truck driver who won more than $100,000 on the TV game show Press Your Luck by memorizing the patterns on its vaunted “big board.” Frequent Murray collaborator Howard Franklin would have directed the comedy, which never made it past the development stage.
PRIMARY COLORS
Murray walked out on this 1998 big-screen adaptation of political journalist Joe Klein’s novel. In an interview, he disparaged the film for its unflattering portrayal of a thinly veiled President Bill Clinton. “I despised it,” he said.
The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray Page 18