The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  SANDLER, ADAM

  Murray is not a fan of the comic actor whose imbecilic brand of humor defined Saturday Night Live in the 1990s. “Adam Sandler doesn’t make me laugh,” he once admitted. “I would enjoy driving in L.A. with the windows open more than I would enjoy watching The Waterboy.”

  SANTA CLAUSE, THE

  Family-friendly 1994 comedy about a shlubby Chicago dad who is contractually obligated to assume the role of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. The lead role of Scott Calvin was originally written for Murray, but after his unpleasant experience on Scrooged he had no interest in pursuing another holiday-themed project. The part went to Tim Allen, who milked it for two sequels.

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE

  Murray first achieved nationwide fame as a cast member on this late-night TV sketch comedy series from 1977 to 1980. He replaced the departing Chevy Chase, who quit the show midway through its second season to pursue a movie career in Hollywood. Murray remained with the program through its brilliant, erratic fifth season, when the departures of original cast members John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd left him with a virtual monopoly on “first white guy” parts in nearly every sketch. He has since returned to host the show four times. While many SNL alums have left feeling embittered by the experience, Murray has had nothing but nice things to say about the series that gave him his big break. “I’m not gonna bitch about Saturday Night Live,” he once declared. “Before Saturday Night Live, I was eating brown rice and cereal. It was so goofy, that show. You could say or do anything you like in the name of entertainment. I was water-skiing behind some very powerful animals.”

  See also Aykroyd, Dan; Belushi, John; Chase, Chevy; DiLaMuca, Todd; Eldini, Jerry; Honker, The; Michaels, Lorne; New Guy Speech; Nick the Lounge Singer; Niko; Radner, Gilda; “Shower Mike.”

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE WITH HOWARD COSELL

  After he was passed over for a spot in the original Saturday Night Live cast, Murray was personally selected by bewigged sportscaster Howard Cosell to join the repertory company for this freewheeling prime-time variety hour on ABC. Cosell had “discovered” Murray after seeing him perform off-Broadway in The National Lampoon Show. Murray’s brother Brian and fellow Lampoon alum Christopher Guest were also hired to impart some youth and hipness to the Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell cast, officially dubbed the Prime Time Players.

  The series, which a People magazine preview noted was “conceived by Cosell and his high-rolling boss at ABC Sports, Roone Arledge,” was intended to evoke the eclectic spirit of the old Ed Sullivan Show. But Cosell was incredibly uncomfortable on camera, the comedy players were seldom used, and the show quickly devolved into an ungainly mishmash of vaudeville schtick, video trickery, and circus acts. Guests included John Wayne, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Walters, Muhammad Ali, Evel Knievel, Frank Sinatra, John Denver, Paul Anka, Shirley Bassey, Jimmy Connors, Siegfried and Roy, and the cast of the Broadway musical The Wiz. Although the Cosell show aired at eight o’clock, critics couldn’t resist measuring it against the NBC Saturday Night program. As Murray also noted, it was not a flattering comparison: “Everybody else was on the other show. So we were on TV, and they were on TV. But they were the show, and we were on with the Chinese acrobats and elephants and all sorts of crazy acts, and we would get cut almost every other week.”

  Two months into its run, ABC abruptly canceled Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. Only fifteen live episodes ever aired, all of which remain buried deep within the network archives.

  SCROOGED

  DIRECTED BY: Richard Donner

  WRITTEN BY: Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue

  RELEASE DATE: November 23, 1988

  FILM RATING: *

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: A loathsome network television executive learns the true meaning of Christmas at the hands of three increasingly abusive ghosts.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Frank Cross, president of the IBC network

  After a four-year sabbatical from Hollywood, Murray returned to star in this loud, mirthless holiday comedy “inspired” by Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol. A special-effects-driven supernatural blockbuster in the manner of Ghostbusters, Scrooged marked a return to box office form for Murray after the disappointment of The Razor’s Edge. With the benefit of hindsight, that is hard to understand. This is easily the worst film of his career.

  The screenplay for Scrooged sprung from the pens of Murray pals Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue, though O’Donoghue would later claim that less than half of what he wrote ended up on the screen. “The finished film was a piece of unadulterated, unmitigated shit,” the dark-hearted genius known as Mr. Mike complained afterward. “The only good thing is that big checks came out of Scrooged, which allowed me to get a home in Ireland.”

  Murray’s big check for agreeing to appear in the film totaled $6 million, or more than the salaries paid to the producer, the director, and the rest of the cast combined. But Scrooged did not start out as a money play. Murray loved the original script, which combined sentimentality with biting satire. Desperate to escape the treadmill of cranking out crowd-pleasing comedies, he saw Scrooged as a chance to “give the public a little food for thought… . There are moments in the Dickensian morality of Scrooged where you have the creepy chance to contemplate your ruin—the bottom of your future.” To prepare for the role, Murray studied previous movie adaptations of A Christmas Carol. “I saw the Alastair Sim and the Albert Finney Scrooge. Mostly, I learned what not to do from them.”

  Unfortunately, not everyone on the Scrooged creative team shared Murray’s vision for the project. Sydney Pollack was replaced as director early on. Murray chafed under the goading of his old-school replacement, Richard Donner, who encouraged the cast to play their parts as broadly as possible. At Donner’s urging, Murray mugged and yelled through most of his scenes. Conceived as a devilish rogue who gains redemption through a glimpse at his wasted life, his Frank Cross comes off as a boorish jerk who gets what he deserves. There is little of the charm and none of the joy of Murray’s previous performances, and the film is larded with product placements for Tab, Stolichnaya, and Budweiser. As a result, watching Scrooged is like being hit on the head with a hammer for 101 minutes—a cinematic crucifixion instead of a yuletide miracle play.

  “That could have been a really, really great movie,” Murray later confessed to Roger Ebert. “The script was so good. There’s maybe one take in the final cut movie that is mine. We made it so fast, it was like doing a movie live. [Donner] kept telling me to do things louder, louder, louder. I think he was deaf.” Even Murray’s fabled powers of improvisation seemed to desert him on this one. He ad-libbed most of Cross’s climactic monologue, in which the reformed creep pleads the case for kindness and good cheer, but the speech plays more rambling than inspirational. O’Donoghue, who was on the set at the time, likened it to a rant by the suicidal cult leader Jim Jones.

  Whether it was creative fatigue or the pressure of headlining his first big-budget movie in four years, the Scrooged shoot turned out to be an arduous one for Murray. With no big-name costars, he was forced to carry the load by himself, on and off camera. He has described Scrooged as “a lonely movie for me to work on because I was really the only guy who was always there. I mean, there were all these people coming in, they drive in, then they drive out. And they’re gone. And I’m still there. Like a schnook, you know? So I didn’t get to have any developing fun with anybody.” Things perked up for a while when Murray’s brothers John, Brian, and Joel dropped by to film cameos, but most of the time Murray had no one to hang out with on the set. He spent much of the shoot in a blue funk, alternately restless, tired, and moody. Donner tried to lift his spirits by subjecting him to endless practical jokes, but they had limited effect. “Sometimes he was just wiped out,” the director admitted. “You hadda keep the happiness level up around him, too. Sometimes you’ve got to artificially generate it, do silly things like print up T-shirts saying ‘Where’s Billy?’ after he
had one of his few days off. It got him up again.”

  Even worse than Donner’s mind games was the physical abuse Murray suffered at the hands of actress Carol Kane, who played the Ghost of Christmas Present. The script called for Kane to buffet Murray repeatedly about the head and ears during their scenes together. It was a task she seemed to relish. “She hurt me a lot,” Murray later revealed. “She separated my teeth from my gums. She didn’t even know. But she’s such a time bomb. If you say, ‘You hurt me,’ she’d cry for six hours and break down. So you’d just put on protection, a catcher’s cup, so the family heirlooms were covered.”

  There was one lighter moment on the set, courtesy of comedian Buddy Hackett. Playing Ebenezer Scrooge in a film-within-the-film production of A Christmas Carol, Hackett brought shooting to a screeching halt one day with a blasphemous tirade about the mother of Jesus. As Murray told the story in a 1998 interview with Esquire: “We’re shooting in this Victorian set for weeks, and Hackett is pissed all the time, angry that he’s not the center of attention, and finally we get to the scene where we’ve gotta shoot him at the window, saying, ‘Go get my boots,’ or whatever. The set is stocked with Victorian extras and little children in Oliver kind of outfits, and the director says, ‘All right, Bud—just give it whatever you want.’ And Hackett goes off on a rant. Unbelievably obscene. He’s talking—this is Hackett, not me—about the Virgin Mary, a limerick sort of thing, and all these children and families… the look of absolute horror. He’s going on and on and on, and finally he stops. It’s just total horror, and the camera’s still rolling. You can hear it, sort of a grinding noise. And the director says, ‘Anything else, Bud?’”

  NEXT MOVIE: Ghostbusters II (1989)

  Scrooged may not be Murray’s best film, but it does have its supporters. No less a cinema geek than Quentin Tarantino has pronounced himself a fan of Murray’s performance. “He’s like W. C. Fields in Scrooged!” Tarantino once proclaimed. For the record, here are the Pulp Fiction auteur’s five favorite Bill Murray movies:

  1. Lost in Translation

  2. Groundhog Day

  3. Stripes

  4. Kingpin

  5. Tie between Caddyshack and Scrooged

  SCTV

  Murray was the special guest star on the 1982 season finale of this Canadian sketch comedy show. He impersonated Joe DiMaggio in a parody commercial for DiMaggio’s on the Wharf Italian Restaurant, appeared as an out-of-breath wedding guest in an installment of the ongoing soap opera spoof The Days of the Week, and played a ne’er-do-well who insinuates himself into the inner circle of TV host Johnny LaRue (played by Murray’s old Second City cohort John Candy).

  SECOND CITY

  Vaunted improvisational theater troupe based in Old Town Chicago, famed for churning out North American comedy talent since 1959. In 1973, Murray joined Second City at the invitation of his brother Brian. “Brian lived in Old Town, where all the hippies were, and I started hanging out at his place,” he explained to Rolling Stone. “That’s where I met Harold Ramis and John Belushi and Joe Flaherty and Del Close, who directed the show, and Bernie Sahlins, who ran Second City. They thought I was a riot—weekend hippie, you know, going back to my straight life in the ’burbs every night.”

  Sometime earlier, Murray had auditioned for one of the troupe’s vaunted improv workshops—with disastrous results. “I was so bad I couldn’t believe it,” he confessed to Cosmopolitan magazine. “I was really depressed. I walked off the stage and just never went back.” After time away, Murray had a fortuitous run-in on a street in downtown Chicago. “It was Christmastime,” he later recalled. “Bells were ringing. There under the clock at Marshall Field, I met the head of the workshop, and he said, ‘We’d like to offer you a scholarship, if you want to come back.’ The bells were going bong, bong, bong, and I figured it was a miracle. I said ‘Thanks, I will. Merry Christmas.’” He returned to find his skills as an improv performer markedly improved. “Somehow in the time I’d been away, I’d learned how to do it,” he said. “All of a sudden, I seemed to have an aptitude for it.”

  Murray quickly worked his way up from the improv workshops to the main stage, where he spent a year honing his craft alongside the likes of John Candy, Betty Thomas, and Tino Insana (the future voice of Disney’s Darkwing Duck). Murray developed a reputation as one of the troupe’s most fearless and unpredictable performers. “You couldn’t keep your eyes off Bill on stage,” observed Second City director Sheldon Patinkin, “because there was so much going on inside the guy that you knew something would come popping out sooner rather than later. He emitted a true sense of danger.”

  Murray left Second City in 1974 to join the cast of The National Lampoon Show in New York. In interviews, he has often cited the guiding principle he learned at Second City as his surefire formula for show business success: “The reason so many Second City people have been successful is really fairly simple. At the heart of it is the idea that if you make the other actors look good, you’ll look good. It works sort of like the idea of life after death. If you live an exemplary life, trying to make someone else look good, you’ll look good, too. It’s true. It really does work. It braces you up, when you’re out there with that fear of death, which is really the difference between the Second City actors and the others.”

  SEINFELD

  Though his brother Brian appeared in one of the show’s best-loved episodes (“The Bubble Boy”), Murray admitted in a 2010 interview with GQ magazine that he had watched only one episode of comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s 1990s sitcom. “I never saw Seinfeld until the final episode, and that’s the only one I saw. And it was terrible. I’m watching, thinking, ‘This isn’t funny at all. It’s terrible!’” In 2014, Murray told radio host Howard Stern that he had subsequently caught up on the series: “I’ve since seen some of it and I see what people like about it.”

  During a New York City performance of The National Lampoon Show in 1974, comic actor Martin Mull sat up front near the edge of the stage. He drank heavily and yakked loudly with his companion, actor Peter Boyle, throughout the show. After the final curtain, Mull went backstage to pay his respects to the cast. When Murray saw him, he flew into a frothing rage, grabbing Mull by the throat and attempting to strangle him. “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill that fucker!” Murray screamed. “He talked through the whole thing! I hate him!” John Belushi ended up having to pull Murray off Mull, who escaped the dressing room to accusatory cries of “Medium talent! Medium talent!”—a favorite Murray insult he would later use on his Saturday Night Live nemesis Chevy Chase. “I confess to having been extremely rude, though not quite as rude as Bill Murray trying to strangle me afterward,” Mull remarked of his ill-fated evening at the theater.

  SHAME OF THE JUNGLE

  DIRECTED BY: Picha and Boris Szulzinger

  WRITTEN BY: Pierre Bartier, Picha, Anne Beatts, and Michael O’Donoghue

  RELEASE DATE: September 14, 1979

  FILM RATING: *

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: A henpecked he-man must rescue his sexually frustrated wife from the clutches of an evil jungle queen.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: An announcer reading the news on the radio

  Murray supplies the voice of an unseen radio announcer in this mildly pornographic animated feature directed by Belgian cartoonist Jean-Paul “Picha” Walravens. Originally released in Europe under the title Tarzoon, Shame of the Jungle (and also known as Jungle Burger), the raunchy comedy parodies Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan adventures. The film was completed in 1975 and then moldered on a shelf in France for four years before being redubbed by American actors and released stateside. In the meantime, the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs sued, demanding that the title be changed and all references to Tarzan be removed. John Belushi, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Christopher Guest joined Murray in supplying voices for the redubbed Shame of the Jungle, which received a dreaded X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. Johnny Weismuller Jr., son and namesake of the longtime b
ig-screen Tarzan, plays Shame. In one representative scene, Shame’s pet chimpanzee relentlessly masturbates while his wife is orally serviced by two penis-shaped creatures. Radio ads touting the film promised “You’ll laugh your X off.”

  An unpleasant, unfunny film rife with sexist and racist stereotypes, Shame of the Jungle received mostly negative reviews and almost immediately disappeared into the cinematic memory hole. Writing in the Village Voice, critic Tam Allen called it “an uncomfortably accurate reflection of that civic eyesore known as toilet art.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby derided the film’s humor as “bland and exhausting.” Playboy’s reviewer was more kind, dubbing Shame of the Jungle “the most literate, prurient, and amusing challenge to community standards since Fritz the Cat.”

  The following year, Murray lent his vocal talents to Picha’s next feature, the slightly less dreadful prehistoric cartoon B.C. Rock.

  NEXT MOVIE: Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video (1979)

  SHE’S HAVING A BABY

  DIRECTED BY: John Hughes

  WRITTEN BY: John Hughes

  RELEASE DATE: February 5, 1988

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: Cutesy-pie newlyweds deal with the vicissitudes of marriage in the 1980s.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Himself

  Murray is one of several Reagan-era celebrities who do cornball cameos in the end credit sequence of this 1988 family comedy from director (and Illinois native) John Hughes. Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Wil Wheaton, Matthew Broderick, and the cast of the TV sitcom Cheers also appear. The special guests, who were all friends of the director and/or working on the Paramount lot at the time, suggest names for the titular infant. Murray’s contribution is: “Schwuk. I don’t know what it is—I heard it on a bus.”