The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

  When visiting big cities, Murray enjoys taking public transportation—especially buses. “It’s not crowded and you’re above everything so you can see the sights. You even get your own bus lane.” He likes taking subways as well. “People are always like, ‘What are you doing here?’ I go, ‘It’s the fastest way to get to Yankee Stadium.’ To get from the airport to his hotel, he often eschews taxis in favor of trains, which he calls “self-normalizing.”

  Despite his enthusiasm for public transport, Murray is invariably disappointed with the service he receives from bus and train operators. “I’ve been treated badly on various types of transportation in my life,” he says, “and I’ve always felt that inherent schoolteacher mentality where there are teachers that resent you because you’re going to graduate this class, and they’re going to be here next year. There are some that don’t belong in the transportation business and that’s why they stick out. They have the job and they have the position but they don’t have the grace.” Murray channeled his disappointment into his portrayal of a surly bus attendant in the 1984 film Nothing Lasts Forever.

  QUICK CHANGE

  DIRECTED BY: Howard Franklin and Bill Murray

  WRITTEN BY: Howard Franklin

  RELEASE DATE: July 13, 1990

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: Three bank robbers try to make their getaway through the nightmarish streets of “No Radio”-era New York City.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Grimm, a bank robber who dresses up as a clown

  Following the success of Scrooged and Ghostbusters II, Murray once again had the juice to call his own shots in Hollywood. But rather than roll the dice on another ambitious passion project like The Razor’s Edge, he opted to play it safe with this unconventional caper comedy based on a 1981 novel by newspaper columnist Jay Cronley. Quick Change had already been adapted once for the screen, as the 1985 French-Canadian feature Hold-Up starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, but Murray was excited enough about the prospects for a remake to hop on board as a producer. Howard Franklin wrote the script, the first of three collaborations with Murray during the 1990s. When both Jonathan Demme and Ron Howard turned down offers to direct, Franklin and Murray took the reins. To date, Quick Change remains Murray’s lone directorial effort.

  The film follows a trio of bank robbers as they make their escape from Manhattan through Brooklyn and Queens to John F. Kennedy International Airport. Murray plays Grimm, a dour city planner driven to a life of crime by New York City’s slide into decrepitude in the 1980s. Geena Davis plays Murray’s girlfriend. Randy Quaid plays the same hulking, dim-witted man-child he plays in every movie. The superb supporting cast includes Jason Robards, Phil Hartman, Stanley Tucci, and Tony Shalhoub. Murray spends the opening half hour of Quick Change in clown makeup, a plot element that was unwisely emphasized in posters and marketing materials for the film, making it look like a circus comedy. Murray voiced reservations about the get-up in an interview he did with Roger Ebert shortly before the movie opened: “You do kind of worry because you wonder if they’re going to know who you are. You could be so disguised they can’t recognize you. We tried to let the face come through, so I could use my facial expressions. We didn’t want to make it such a mask that I couldn’t react.”

  Once Murray’s character ditches the clown white, Quick Change does have a certain ramshackle charm. But it lacks the comic velocity of similar films like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and its central conceit—that New York is an open sewer overflowing with criminals and eccentrics—seems more quaint and dated with each passing year. Murray and Franklin shot on location in some of the city’s worst neighborhoods, a choice that may have sapped the spirit of some of the performers. “It’s very hard to be funny when you see how people are living,” Murray said later. One night while filming, the set was targeted in a drive-by shooting. A member of the crew narrowly escaped having his head blown off. “That’s good for morale; keeps the crew tight,” Murray quipped.

  Despite all the on-set tsouris, Murray called Quick Change “the most fun movie experience I’ve ever had—until the release.” Though he did everything he could to promote the film, he was disappointed by the efforts of the Warner Bros. marketing department. “They were doing everything but selling that movie,” Murray carped. Shortly before Quick Change was scheduled to hit theaters, Murray begged the studio to pull the plug. “The week before it came out I said, ‘Don’t even open the movie now. Let’s start over and I’ll do another round of press junkets. Don’t spend this money, it’s a waste of time.’ But they spent it anyway.” The proof was in the pudding. Quick Change tanked, grossing a paltry $15.2 million. Its codirector and star remains one the film’s staunchest supporters. “I think in ten years people are going to say, ‘That was a really good movie,’” Murray declared of Quick Change in 1993.

  NEXT MOVIE: What about Bob?

  ¿QUIÉN ES MÁS MACHO?

  With Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi increasingly absorbed by their movie careers, Murray did some of his finest character work during his final two seasons on Saturday Night Live. In this classic February 17, 1979, sketch, he plays Paco Valenzuela, the debonair host of a Spanish-language game show on which contestants must decide which of two male celebrities is more macho. Gilda Radner and guest host Ricky Nelson compete to assess the manliness of such ’70s-era stars as Fernando Lamas and Ricardo Montalbán. Oddly enough, Murray had previously performed an impression of Lamas (opposite Aykroyd as Montalbán) in a sketch on the May 14, 1977, SNL episode, which was hosted by Shelley Duvall.

  During production on Stripes in 1980, Murray and Warren “Sergeant Hulka” Oates took a break from filming to visit the grave of recently deceased character actor Strother Martin at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. Murray had bonded with Martin when the latter hosted Saturday Night Live a few months before his death. Oates had worked with him on Gunsmoke and The Wild Bunch. Determined to show their friend out in style, Murray and Oates got drunk on Armagnac, poured some for Strother, passed out on his grave, and woke up several hours later covered in cuts and bruises. “We figured Strother took us somewhere and beat us up,” Murray said.

  RADNER, GILDA

  Murray had a tumultuous on-again, off-again romantic relationship with his National Lampoon Radio Hour and Saturday Night Live castmate, with whom he collaborated on the popular Nerds sketches. “I’ve always had a thing for funny girls,” he once declared. “Gilda was the greatest laugher and she was funny herself. To me that was incredibly attractive.” By all accounts, their liaison had ended by the early 1980s, when Radner married guitarist G. E. Smith and Murray wedded Mickey Kelly. The creator of such breakout characters as Baba Wawa, Emily Litella, and Roseanne Roseannadanna, Radner was known as the heartbreaker among the early SNL cast. “Anyone that knew Gilda fell in love with her,” Murray once said. “She was really something.” In interviews, he has credited Radner—the daughter of a prominent Detroit hotelier—with teaching him the importance of saying no to people. “Gilda had money from her family, and when she went in to talk about a job, she didn’t need it. And there’s something about work, just like there’s something about romance, that if you don’t have to have someone, you’re more desirable.”

  RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

  Murray was one of several actors considered for the role of Indiana Jones in this 1981 blockbuster. Tom Selleck, Nick Nolte, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Tim Matheson, Jack Nicholson, and Jeff Bridges were also up for the part, which eventually went to Harrison Ford.

  RAIN MAN

  Dustin Hoffman won an Oscar for his portrayal of autistic savant Raymond Babbitt in this 1988 film. But according to screenwriter Barry Morrow, Murray was offered the role first. In the original casting configuration, Hoffman would have played Raymond’s brother Charlie, the role played by Tom Cruise in the finished film.

  RAMIS, HAROLD

  Curly-haired comic writer, actor, and director who collabo
rated with Murray on numerous projects over a twenty-year period beginning in the mid-1970s. A native of Chicago, Ramis attended college at Washington University in St. Louis. After graduation, he worked for seven months as an orderly in a mental institution. There he learned “how to speak to schizophrenics, catatonics, paranoids, and suicidal people,” an experience, he often said, that was perfect training for working with actors.

  “HE JUST PUNISHES PEOPLE, FOR REASONS THEY CAN’T FIGURE OUT.”

  —HAROLD RAMIS, on why Murray chose to cut off all contact with him in the 1990s

  Ramis first met Murray in 1968 at the introduction of Murray’s brother Brian. “Brian and I were in Second City together and he said, ‘Why don’t you come up and have dinner at my mother’s house?’” Ramis recalled in a 2010 interview. Along the way, they stopped off at the golf course where Murray operated a ninth-hole hot dog stand. Their paths would cross again a few years later in New York, when Murray joined the casts of The National Lampoon Radio Hour and the Off-Broadway revue The National Lampoon Show. Ramis was immediately struck by Murray’s electrifying stage presence. He repeatedly called Murray the best verbal improviser he had ever seen. The two eventually struck up a creative partnership that lasted through six feature films. “I always tell students to identify the most talented person in the room and, if it isn’t you, go stand next to him,” Ramis once said. “That’s what I did with Bill.”

  Ramis has often been credited with helping to cultivate Murray’s 1980s big-screen persona—the sardonic slacker-trickster who charms his way out of precarious situations. “I had Bill’s voice down,” he told GQ. “When people would read something I’d written for him, they’d say, ‘That is so perfectly Bill Murray.’ Of course, the irony is that he’d read it and say, ‘Bullshit, I can’t say this.’” In a 2009 interview with the Onion’s A.V. Club, Ramis likened his creative bond with Murray to an alliance between great powers: “I could help him be the best funny Bill Murray he could be, and I think he appreciated that then.”

  In time, however, Murray may have come to resent Ramis’s outsize role in his career. “Bill owes everything to Harold,” a mutual friend, producer Michael Shamberg, told the New Yorker, “and he probably has a thimbleful of gratitude.” The rift between the two men came to a head on the set of Groundhog Day in 1992. Creative differences centered on Ramis’s rewrites to Danny Rubin’s screenplay, as well as Murray’s belief that Ramis was becoming too much of a “mogul,” led to a more or less permanent cold war between the two men that lasted until Ramis fell mortally ill with autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis in late 2013.

  Over the last two decades of his life, Ramis made repeated efforts to patch things up with Murray. But except for brief exchanges at a wake and a bar mitzvah, the two men never spoke to each other. Ramis remained puzzled by his former friend’s refusal to engage. “I have no clue” why Murray cut him off, he once said. “And because it’s unstated, it sends me to my worst fears. Did he think I was weak? Or untrue? Did I betray him in some way? With no clue or feedback from him, it’s this kind of tantalizing mystery. And that may be the point.”

  Only in Ramis’s final hours did Murray make the decision to reconcile with him. “He became ill and I thought, ‘Well, this is stupid,’” Murray told an interviewer for Grantland. Shortly before Ramis passed away, Murray visited him unexpectedly at his home in the Chicago suburbs to say goodbye. After his death, Murray issued a statement to the press through his lawyer, David Nochimson. It read in full: “Harold Ramis and I together did The National Lampoon Show off-Broadway, Meatballs, Stripes, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, and Groundhog Day. He earned his keep on this planet. God bless him.”

  RASCALS, THE

  Blue-eyed soul quartet of the 1960s, best known for their hits “Good Lovin’” and “Groovin’.” In 2010, Murray attended a reunion concert by the band, which he called “maybe the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

  RAZOR’S EDGE, THE

  DIRECTED BY: John Byrum

  WRITTEN BY: John Byrum and Bill Murray

  RELEASE DATE: October 19, 1984

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: A battle-scarred World War I veteran abandons his comfortable life in America to go on a vision quest through Paris and India.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Larry Darrell, burned-out World War I ambulance driver

  According to Hollywood legend, actor Tyrone Power was so transfixed by W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel The Razor’s Edge that he pulled an audacious power play in order to get a movie version made. Burned out after years of cranking out Zorro movies, Power agreed to play the masked swordsman one last time if Twentieth Century Fox would let him star as Larry Darrell, Maugham’s idealistic hero, in a big-screen adaptation of the novel. The story is apocryphal—Power played Zorro only once, and that was in 1940—but it illustrates the powerful hold a prestige project like The Razor’s Edge can exert over a young star wary of being typecast. Nearly forty years after Larry Darrell breathed new life into Tyrone Power’s career, Bill Murray successfully maneuvered Columbia Pictures into giving him a crack at the role, one he hoped would establish him once and for all as a bankable dramatic actor.

  In the early 1980s, Murray became friends with John Byrum, a young director who had grown up about a mile from Murray’s hometown. In March 1982, shortly after Murray’s wife gave birth to their first child, Byrum sent Murray a copy of The Razor’s Edge to keep him occupied during her recovery. After reading the first fifty pages, Murray had an epiphany: he was Maugham’s disillusioned seeker and he wanted to make the character his first great dramatic role. The next night, he called Byrum at four in the morning. “This is Larry, Larry Darrell,” Murray said when the director picked up the phone. The two friends began spitballing plans to bring The Razor’s Edge back to the screen.

  Murray and Byrum spent the next year working on the script. At Murray’s suggestion, they set off on a Darrell-like road trip across America, writing up scenes in bars, bus stations, and restaurants they stopped in along the way. “We went to northern California ashrams and nudist colonies, visited strange religious cults with aerobic classes,” Byrum later told Film Journal. “We did a lot of our best writing in a car driving across Nebraska.”

  Securing studio backing for the unusual venture proved surprisingly easy, once Murray realized he could leverage his participation in the new paranormal comedy that Dan Aykroyd was writing for him. “As soon as people heard about Ghostbusters, every studio wanted it,” Murray said. “But I still wanted to do The Razor’s Edge. Finally Dan said, ‘Tell whoever wants Ghostbusters that they have to take The Razor’s Edge, too.’ We didn’t have to tell them. They figured it out real quick. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what the deal was going to be. Finally the people at Columbia said, ‘We’re really nuts about that Razor’s Edge. Now about this other movie …’”

  “PEOPLE SAID I WAS VERY COURAGEOUS MAKING THAT MOVIE. SURE. SO’S SETTING YOURSELF ON FIRE. AFTER THAT MOVIE, I FELT RADIOACTIVE.”

  —MURRAY, on the negative public response to his labor of love, The Razor’s Edge

  Filming took place on location in France and India in the summer of 1983. Murray’s wife Mickey and infant son Homer joined him for the first leg of the shoot. “Nobody wanted to come to India,” he said. “They all thought it was pretty good to be in Paris spending money, but when we said, ‘Well, now we’re going to go eat dried dog and yogurt,’ they said ‘No, we think we’ll go home.’” Consistent with his view that Razor’s Edge was a film he had been called to make, Murray took no salary for acting in it (though he did get $12,000 for cowriting the script). Principal photography wrapped up in early October, just in time for Murray to report to the Ghostbusters set in New York City.

  After viewing a rough cut of The Razor’s Edge that fall, Murray waited nervously for the audience’s verdict. Originally scheduled to come out before Ghostbusters, the film was held back until the following autumn, allowing th
e negative buzz to build. “I don’t know what my fans are going to think,” Murray told an interviewer in anticipation of the release. “It’s definitely not what they’re used to from me.”

  He was right to be worried. The Razor’s Edge opened in October 1984 to harshly negative reviews. The New York Times called it “slow, overlong, and ridiculously overproduced.” “Huge chunks of hackneyed drama are interspersed with Murray doing Murray,” carped the reviewer for the New York Daily News. J. Hoberman of the Village Voice called Murray’s Larry Darrell “a leering goofball, even in deepest Tibet.” Murray’s earnest attempt to portray a spiritual seeker was fatally burdened by his past life as a clown, Hoberman wrote. “When he finally dons the saffron robes, he’s like a conehead who’s lost his cone.” The public wasn’t convinced either. “I remember arriving a few minutes late on the opening day,” John Byrum recalled. “They were streaming out of the theater and shouting to people waiting in line for the next show: ‘Don’t waste your money, it isn’t funny!’”

  Watching The Razor’s Edge today, it is hard to justify such an angry response. True, the movie is excruciatingly slow and ponderous—but no more so than such “masterpieces” of the era as Chariots of Fire or Gandhi. It deserves props for its ambition, though it is weighed down by a number of terrible performances (the two female leads, Catherine Hicks and Theresa Russell, are especially dreadful) and by Murray, who thrives in the early comedic scenes but seems totally out of his element moping around World War I–era Paris. His attempts to convey Larry Darrell’s spiritual detachment come off as mere blankness—an affect he would perfect later in his career but had not mastered at this point in his development as an actor.