The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  What makes The Razor’s Edge so fascinating is the window it opens onto Murray’s mind-set at this stage of his life. Having turned thirty, and newly minted as one of the rising stars in Hollywood, he was struggling with the demands of fame and family. Shortly before he started work on the project, his friend John Belushi died of a drug overdose; Caddyshack screenwriter Doug Kenney had lost his life just two years earlier. Razor’s Edge executive producer Rob Cohen attributed Murray’s obsession with making the film to the changes going on in his personal life: “He got married. He had a child. There were the deaths of some friends. All these things came up on him, and I believe he began to think a little more deeply about life.”

  Murray explained the project’s appeal in similar terms: “The story I got was of a guy who sees that there’s more to life than just making a buck and having a romantic fling. I’d experienced that, and I knew what that was, so I had my own ideas about how it played… . There are things in it that came from our own lives or that were happening to us while we were doing the movie.” Indeed, some of the lines Murray wrote for Larry Darrell seem like they could have come out of his own mouth circa 1984. “This isn’t the old Mr. Sunshine,” Larry declares at one point, in what could have been a warning to moviegoers expecting another Stripes or Caddyshack. Speaking about the hollowness of material success, Larry says: “I’ve got a second chance, and I’m not gonna waste it on a big house, and a new car every year, and a bunch of friends who want a big house and a new car every year!”

  When The Razor’s Edge tanked, Murray was left to pick up the pieces. In interviews conducted after the film’s release, he conceded that it had been a mistake to do it as a period piece, suggesting that a Larry Darrell story set in the aftermath of Vietnam might have had more appeal for modern audiences. “I kind of deluded myself that there would be a lot of interest” in the film, he said. “I made a big mistake.” With the passage of time, he came to see it as a noble error: “People say that was a flop of a movie. They don’t know what a flop is. A flop is where nothing is good. I loved the process of making it. The fact that it wasn’t a commercial hit … I’m a half-smart guy. I can see where a movie about a man’s spiritual search might not do as well as Home Alone.” But he also bristled at the pasting he had taken from critics, accusing them of bias against comedians taking on dramatic roles: “It angers people, like you’re taking something away from them. That’s the response I got. I thought, ‘Well, aren’t we all bigger than that?’ I wasn’t shocked by it, but I thought that the professional critics would be able to say, ‘Okay, we shouldn’t rule this out, because the guy normally does other stuff.’”

  Murray was able to recover from the disappointment of The Razor’s Edge, though friends report that he did not react well at the time. “I think Bill was completely trashed by the film’s failure,” said John Byrum. “It was his first serious film and he wanted to extend himself as an actor. The critics and audiences wanted him to be the guy in Meatballs for the rest of his life.” In fact, Murray was so mortified by the burden of public expectations that he closed up shop, moved to Paris, and did not star in a Hollywood film for the next four years.

  NEXT MOVIE: Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

  REGIS COLLEGE

  Jesuit college in Denver, Colorado, that Murray attended from 1968 to 1970. He later admitted that he chose the school because a couple friends were going there. Murray took only one acting class at Regis (now known as Regis University). “I thought it’d be a piece of cake and there were a lot of girls in it,” he said. “I knew I could act as good as these girls could, just by seeing them around the coffee shop.” His acting teacher was even more of a horndog than he was. “So long as you never looked funny at him while he was staring at a girl, you got a good grade. But I only hung in there for one semester. That was that.” Murray then enrolled in the premed program but was forced to drop out of school after he was arrested for marijuana possession while flying back to Denver from Chicago in September 1970. “I was not really college material,” he once confessed to an interviewer. “I didn’t know how to study, but I liked the lifestyle. You could dress any way you wanted. I was wearing pajamas and a sports coat to school and pajamas and loafers to formal events. College was terrible. I didn’t get it at all, but it got me out of the house.” Despite his misgivings, Murray returned to Regis for what would have been his twentieth class reunion, in 1992. He was spotted at the reception wearing a badge bearing the legend “Hi! I’m Bill Murray.” In July 2007, Regis awarded Murray an honorary doctorate in humanities. He accepted the degree wearing a suit jacket over a pair of pajama shorts.

  “WHY SHOULD I SPEND MORE TIME ON YOUR COLLEGE GRADUATION THAN I SPENT ON MY OWN? I HAVE A DEGREE, FROM HIGH SCHOOL, BUT I’M A FUCKING MILLIONAIRE.”

  —MURRAY, in a commencement address to graduating seniors at Columbia University in 2000

  REITMAN, IVAN

  Slovak Canadian filmmaker who directed Murray in Meatballs, Stripes, and both Ghostbusters movies. In the early 1970s, Reitman worked as a theatrical producer in Toronto. In that capacity, he was instrumental in bringing The National Lampoon Show off-Broadway in 1975. He later likened the experience of working with Murray, John Belushi, Harold Ramis, and other Lampoon Show cast members to taking “an inspirational shower.” “I immediately knew I would have to make movies with them, that they would all be famous, that this was where comedy was going.” Of his subsequent collaborations with Murray, Reitman has said: “One thing I’ve tried to do as a director is show Bill as a human being. On Saturday Night Live, all you saw was this wacky sort of side, but he has a very warm, genuine quality. I think I brought out some glimpses of that.”

  RELIGION

  Murray was raised Roman Catholic and educated by nuns at St. Joseph School in Wilmette, Illinois. In early childhood, he developed his own personal form of spirituality. “When I was little, and alone, I used to sing songs to God,” he once said.

  Although he maintains a nominal affiliation with the church, he no longer identifies as Catholic. In a 1984 interview, Murray talked about his faith: “I’m definitely a religious person, but it doesn’t have much to do with Catholicism anymore. I don’t think about Catholicism much.” He attributes his drift away from organized religion to the harsh discipline imposed by the nuns in his grade school: “You really get, you know, the fear of hell and confession and Mass and the sacraments. You get it real hard, but because it’s sort of by rote, sometimes the feeling of it is sort of lost to you.”

  ROMANCE OF HAPPY VALLEY, A

  Murray credits this 1919 silent film from director D. W. Griffith with convincing him to make better career choices. The story follows a young man who leaves his Kentucky farm to make his fortune in New York City. After several years, he returns home a wealthy man. But his father no longer recognizes him and hatches a plan to murder him and steal his money. The film ends on a happy note, with the family members reconciled and their imperiled farm saved from bankruptcy.

  Murray first saw A Romance of Happy Valley at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris during his sabbatical from Hollywood in the mid-1980s. The film was presented with Russian subtitles, which Murray couldn’t understand, but it still managed to move him to tears. “This movie just destroyed me,” he told an interviewer. “And I thought ‘How the hell can you go make The Love Bug if you’ve seen this.’” In addition to inspiring him to seek out more meaningful projects, Happy Valley also prompted Murray to muse on what his life would have been like had he been born in the silent film era. “What would a guy like me do at that time? I wouldn’t be working in the movies. Without a tongue, who am I?”

  ROMANTIC COMEDIES

  Although he has been offered numerous plum parts, Murray has avoided making romantic comedies since Groundhog Day. “The romantic figure has to behave romantically even after acting like a total swine,” he has said. “It’s, ‘I’m so gorgeous, you’re going to have to go through all kinds of hell for me,’ and that isn’t inte
resting to me. Romance, like comedy, is very particular. There’s something about romance that if you don’t have to have someone, you’re more desirable.”

  ROYAL TENENBAUMS, THE

  DIRECTED BY: Wes Anderson

  WRITTEN BY: Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson

  RELEASE DATE: December 14, 2001

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: A family of eccentrics reconciles with its vagabond patriarch.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Raleigh St. Clair, cuckolded neurologist

  Wes Anderson to the rescue once again. After a year in which his talents were largely wasted in the sick-making Osmosis Jones and the slapdash Speaking of Sex, Murray filled his tank with hipster cred by appearing in Anderson’s twee family fable. The Royal Tenenbaums is not quite as good as Rushmore, and Murray’s role is not nearly as meaty. But he took the part sight unseen, without even reading the script, on the strength of his affinity for the young director. Proximity also had something to do with it. “We filmed in New York,” Anderson told Rolling Stone, “and as he didn’t live that far away, Bill thought that it would be fun to do it.” Another important consideration: Murray’s uncanny ability to grow a beard quickly, which allowed him to disappear into his role as the lugubrious neurologist Raleigh St. Clair. On the set, Murray became fast friends with Royal Tenenbaum himself, the seventy-year-old acting legend whose old New York City apartment he had once sublet. “Gene Hackman took a real liking to him during that shoot,” Anderson said. “They got along very well.”

  NEXT MOVIE: Lost in Translation (2003)

  RUSHMORE

  DIRECTED BY: Wes Anderson

  WRITTEN BY: Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson

  RELEASE DATE: October 9, 1998

  FILM RATING: ****

  MURRAY RATING: ****

  PLOT: A twee übermensch competes with a depressed millionaire for the affections of a morose widow.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Herman Blume, sad-sack steel magnate

  After failing to cast Murray in his debut feature, Bottle Rocket, director Wes Anderson finally snagged the White Whale for his sophomore effort. The delightfully idiosyncratic Rushmore marked a critical turning point in Murray’s career, as the dark, forlorn, yearning quality that had existed as an undertone in his characters finally came roaring to the surface. The era of “Sad Bill Murray” had officially begun.

  To his credit, Anderson was among the first filmmakers to spot the potential for pathos in Murray. He and coscreenwriter Owen Wilson wrote the part of Herman Blume specifically for him. “I thought he’d be funny, and real,” Anderson explained. “And also there was a sort of a sadness about him.” As he had with Bottle Rocket, he sent the script for Rushmore to Murray with little expectation that he would even read it. But Murray was impressed by the precision of the writing and called Anderson to talk about the role. “Anybody that writes it that way knows exactly what they want to show,” he told the New York Times.

  At the time, Murray was still reeling from a series of personal and professional setbacks—including his first divorce and the critical and commercial failure of The Man Who Knew Too Little—and was eager to tap that vein of disappointment in his work. “A lot of Rushmore is about the struggle to retain civility and kindness in the face of extraordinary pain,” he explained. “And I’ve felt a lot of that in my life. Movies don’t usually show the failure of relationships; they want to give the audience a final, happy resolution. In Rushmore, I play a guy who’s aware that his life is not working, but he’s still holding on, hoping something will happen, and that’s what’s most interesting.” Elsewhere, Murray admitted that he drew inspiration for his performance from the breakup of his marriage: “You’ve had to have really suffered to realize how badly someone can feel, not just for an act or an incident, but a wave, a time period of bad feeling, of low self-esteem.”

  Murray agreed to work on the film for scale, or $9,000, plus a percentage of the profits. His standard salary at the time was a thousand times that amount, or $9 million a picture.

  In his book The Wes Anderson Collection, Matt Zoller Seitz reveals that Murray might have taken a loss on Rushmore if Anderson had cashed the blank check Murray gave him to cover the cost of a $25,000 helicopter scene that the studio refused to pay for. Anderson ended up cutting the sequence from the film, but he was so touched by Murray’s gesture that he saved the uncashed check as a memento.

  Anderson’s other memories of working with Murray all involve eating, drinking, and general merriment: an evening in a hotel bar in Los Angeles when “Bill took the place over and started dancing,” and the happy aftermath of a disastrous table read with the film’s inexperienced star Jason Schwartzman. “It didn’t go well at all,” Anderson told Rolling Stone. “We beat ourselves up over whether we should change the dialogue, but Bill said that the dialogue is why he signed on. A day later, Bill took us out to a restaurant where we ate chicken-fried steak. After that, everything was fine. I like to think that he was great in the role—but beyond that, he was the godfather of that film.”

  NEXT MOVIE: Cradle Will Rock (1999)

  RUTLES, THE

  See All You Need Is Cash.

  In August 2008, Murray helped kick off the annual Chicago Air and Water Show by jumping out of a plane two and a half miles above the city with skydivers from the U.S. Army Golden Knights parachute team. Murray managed to play air guitar and perform a brief hand jive before his chute deployed.

  At the time, the fifty-seven-year-old actor was in the depths of a depressive spiral precipitated by his recent bitter divorce from his second wife, Jennifer Butler. “I was just dead, just broken,” he said of his mind-set that summer. Friends thought a bracing skydive might be good therapy for him. “They asked me on a day I didn’t care,” said Murray. “I didn’t even care if there was a parachute. Of course, by the time I got there I had had a few good days and I thought, ‘What am I doing?’” In a postdive interview with the Chicago Tribune, Murray described the experience as a mix of terror and exhilaration:

  “Once you go, and you hit the air, all that’s gone. The physical sensation overwhelms your body. Overwhelms your mind. You can’t think anymore. You’re just in a washing machine of air. You’re trying to move your arms and move your hands. Meanwhile, you’ve got this guy on your back. And then he starts steering you. And they’re filming you, so you feel like, ‘Oh, I’m supposed to be funny now.’ When the chute opens, it’s not that ka-kunk thing you see in the movies. It’s just that the people you’re talking to or looking at just sort of drop through the bottom of the floor. Then it became extremely peaceful and really dreamy. I was like, ‘Hey, there’s Wrigley Field, can we go over there?’”

  SABBATICAL

  In late 1984, following the success of Ghostbusters and the critical and commercial implosion of The Razor’s Edge, Murray fled Hollywood for Paris, France. He remained there for six months, studying philosophy and history at the celebrated French university La Sorbonne. Murray has called his hiatus from moviemaking “the best thing I ever did.”

  “I thought that Ghostbusters was the biggest thing that would ever happen to me,” he told film critic Roger Ebert. “It was such a big phenomenon that I felt slightly radioactive. So I just moved away for a while.” While at the Sorbonne, Murray immersed himself in the writings of the Greco-Armenian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. His second son, Luke François Murray, was born in Paris during his time away from home.

  Years later, Murray described his Parisian daily routine to the Times of London: “I spent the morning in a class of other idiots learning French, and then in the afternoon I went to the Cinémathèque, and that was a fantastic life. At lunchtime I stopped by at a chocolatier, and I was always walking around with 150 grams of chocolate in my pocket, and offering a piece was a great way to start a conversation.”

  At the famed Cinémathèque Française, Murray took a self-taught course in film studies with an emphasis on the silent era. He devoured
the works of Buster Keaton, watched a print of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation with Russian subtitles, and discovered the 1919 melodrama A Romance of Happy Valley. Murray later credited that film with changing the way he thought about picking his own projects.

  According to Murray, the half year he spent in France had little effect on his viability in Hollywood. “It took everyone a long time to stop counting the Ghostbusters money,” he once said. “They were distracted, and they left me alone for a while. There were times when they wanted me to make movies that were part of packages, and I would never bite. I knew certain movies—like Airplane!—were going to be successful, but I didn’t want to do it. It’s just not my thing. I don’t lie awake and think, ‘If only I’d done Revenge of the Nerds.’”

  Although Murray returned to the United States in the spring of 1985, he remained disinclined to get back on the superstar treadmill. He canceled the one project he had agreed to do and declined another lead in a film for three years. He spent most of his time with his wife and sons at their renovated farmhouse in New York’s Hudson River valley, reading historical novels about Ireland.

  “I would get twenty phone calls a day from people wanting to do a movie,” he told Roger Ebert, “and there would be this incredible amount of pressure. On Friday I’d get like thirty phone calls, and then on Monday no one would call, and I’d look in the paper, and someone else was doing the movie because I didn’t say yes.”