The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  Murray won the part thanks to a fortuitous encounter with Tootsie star Dustin Hoffman at a birthday celebration for the wife of Columbia Pictures chairman Frank Price. Hoffman was so impressed with Murray’s party banter that he recommended him to Pollack for the role of the main character’s roommate. Pollack was reluctant at first, his impressions fixed from Murray’s days as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. “My initial opinion was that Billy was just a strong sketch player,” Pollack said. “It wasn’t until I screened his films at Dustin’s urging that I saw what a satisfying actor he could be. Even when those around him are merely filling their parts, Billy always gives a very sustained characterization. There’s reality and candor, plus scene-to-scene growth… . He’s got a complex and original range that puts him in a special category—a completely believable comic illuminator.”

  That skill set would be put to the test on Tootsie. Murray’s character, playwright Jeff Slater—author of the soon-to-be-produced Return to the Love Canal—was a late addition to the Tootsie screenplay, courtesy of uncredited script doctor Elaine May. Intended as a stand-in for the audience’s point of view, Slater would have to be substantially improvised. That might have daunted another actor, but Murray relished the opportunity to put his personal stamp on the part. He accepted the role on one condition: that his name be excluded from the opening credits and all advertising for the film. He didn’t want audiences to go see Tootsie expecting another Meatballs or Caddyshack. In another bold but ultimately shrewd move, Murray turned down a salary on the picture, opting instead for one of Dustin Hoffman’s percentage points on the profits. Tootsie ended up grossing over $170 million.

  Now regarded as a classic, Tootsie was in fact a very troubled production. When Murray arrived on the set, shooting was already a week behind schedule. Pollack and Hoffman were at each other’s throats. “Dustin would throw a fit, and the crew just stood back and watched,” Murray remembered later. “Sydney would have a go back and they’d be like these two prize fighters, with veins bulging in their foreheads. I still felt like the junior guy in movies, so I tried to lighten the mood.” To break the tension, Murray threw his own on-set tantrum. “Everyone knew I was kidding,” he said, “but it helped defuse one or two situations.” He also needled Pollack about his predilection for cowboy boots, calling him “Tex.”

  As expected, Murray found his part totally underwritten, forcing him to ad-lib his way through scenes. “They kept on saying, ‘Just react.’ So I would come up with lines like ‘That is one nutty hospital’ or ‘I’m just afraid you are going to burn in hell for all this.’ Then they would write these down as scenes and say, after a few days, ‘Come up with something else.’ It was like that through the movie.” Among Murray’s signature contributions are a priceless monologue in which Slater pines for a theater that is “only open when it rains” and a strange scene in which he inexplicably munches on lemon slices while talking to Dustin Hoffman’s character. “He was so good, we kept adding scenes for him,” said Pollack. “I not only wanted to see more of him, but it was a fight to keep the cameras from jiggling when he was on because we were all laughing.”

  The second highest grossing film of 1982, Tootsie proved an enormous hit with audiences and critics alike, earning ten Academy Award nominations. Although it didn’t propel Murray to the front ranks of “serious” actors just yet, it did serve notice on Hollywood that there was more to him than Carl Spackler and John Winger.

  NEXT MOVIE: Ghostbusters (1984)

  TOY STORY

  Murray turned down an offer to provide the voice of Buzz Lightyear in this 2005 film from Pixar Animation Studios. Chevy Chase and Billy Crystal also passed on the role, which eventually went to Tim Allen.

  TVTV (TOP VALUE TELEVISION)

  San Francisco–based “guerrilla video” collective with which Murray was briefly associated in the mid-1970s. A pioneer in the field of “countercultural journalism,” TVTV was known for sending correspondents equipped with handheld video systems (then called “portapaks”) to cover live events such as political conventions. Correspondents were often recruited for their ability to improvise on camera. Christopher Guest, John Belushi, Harold Ramis, and Murray’s brother Brian were all affiliated with TVTV at one time or another. The low-budget video films, which bear a formal resemblance to the fictional “mockumentaries” for which Guest later became famous, typically aired on public television.

  Murray was first approached by TVTV cofounder Michael Shamberg in late 1975, shortly after the cancelation of Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. Shamberg was looking for correspondents for a documentary about the upcoming Super Bowl game in Miami, Florida. In the ensuing film, TVTV: Super Bowl, Murray and Guest pose as sportscasters and tailgaters in order to infiltrate the media horde surrounding Super Bowl X on January 18, 1976. Murray—billed as “Billy Murray”—provides color commentary for an impromptu touch football game featuring CBS Sports personnel and NFL legends Johnny Unitas, Sonny Jurgensen, and Paul Hornung. Harold Ramis served as a writer and producer on the film.

  Buoyed by the success of Super Bowl, and with no permanent job prospects on the horizon, Murray decided to join the TVTV repertory company on a long-term basis. He moved to Los Angeles and spent the next nine months working on a variety of TVTV projects. In TVTV Looks at the Oscars, a backstairs glimpse at the 1976 Academy Awards ceremony, Murray appears briefly as a movie fan cheering Elizabeth Taylor on the red carpet. In The TVTV Show, the group’s first pilot for network television, he plays a cameraman for the fictional WKTO Action News team.

  In January 1977, Murray left Los Angeles to join the cast of Saturday Night Live in New York. He never worked for TVTV again. At the request of NBC, his part was largely edited out of The TVTV Show, which aired on the network in the SNL time slot on April 29, 1977.

  TWAIN, MARK

  This Missouri-born humorist and teller of tall tales is Murray’s favorite author. “He’s smart and funny,” Murray observed of Twain. “Huckleberry Finn, especially the chapter all the purists hate, in which Tom Sawyer stages an elaborate rescue of Jim, is a writer having as much fun as possible.” Murray performed a dramatic reading of a scene from Huckleberry Finn at a panel discussion marking the publication of a new “comprehensive edition” of Twain’s masterpiece in 1996.

  VAN DER POST, LAURENS

  This South African storyteller, self-styled Jungian mystic, and confidant of the British royal family wrote Murray’s two favorite novels. A Story Like the Wind and A Far Off Place tell the tale of a pair of European children who make a perilous journey across the Kalahari Desert with the help of an African bushman and his wife.

  VEECK AS IN WRECK

  In 1995, Murray was briefly attached to play the title role in this abortive biopic about flamboyant Major League Baseball owner Bill Veeck. NYPD Blue writer Ted Mann wrote the script for the film based on Veeck’s 1962 autobiography. Chicago native John McNaughton, who had previously worked with Murray on Mad Dog and Glory, was slated to direct. Sigourney Weaver, Murray’s Ghostbusters costar, was in line to play Veeck’s wife, Mary Frances. The project never got out of the development stage.

  Veeck as in Wreck might have been a tour de force for Murray, a lifelong baseball fan and Chicago sports aficionado. The peg-legged son of a former Chicago Cubs executive, Veeck specialized in devising outrageous publicity stunts. Among his many brainstorms: hiring a dwarf, Eddie Gaedel, to make a single plate appearance during a meaningless late-summer game; installing baseball’s first exploding scoreboard; outfitting his players in short pants; and staging the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” promotion, during which a pyrotechnic protest against the then-popular form of dance music devolved into a riot. “Everything that I love about baseball is embodied in Bill Veeck,” Murray once observed. “I met him the way everyone met him—he’d sit in the bleachers, take off his wooden leg and shirt, drink beer, and flick his cigarettes into the ashtray he’d built into his wooden leg. He’d just lay there in the sun, alm
ost naked, talking to fans. That’s how I’m going to play Bill Veeck … as the naked fan.”

  Murray was encouraged to take the part by Veeck’s son Mike, his personal friend and co-owner of the Saint Paul Saints minor league team. “He thinks I’m similar in so many ways to his father,” Murray remarked, “though he won’t tell me how.”

  In July 1994, Murray made a surprise appearance at the International Conference on Sturgeon Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The two-day confab, organized by the Hudson River Foundation, brought together more than two hundred scientists and scholars to discuss solutions to the problem of overfishing. Murray was living in the Hudson Valley at the time and had been sensitized to the plight of Atlantic sturgeon. According to newspaper accounts, Murray cracked up the conference with an off-the-cuff speech playing off his purported ignorance of ichthyology. “How many of you are marine biologists?” he asked the audience. “How many are ichthyologists? How many are systematists? How many believe that the sturgeon is kosher?” He also remarked that he had to look up the word sturgeon in a dictionary from 1954, a time when “men were men, women were chicks or babes, and sturgeon were sturgeon.” At the end of the evening, Murray crumpled up a signed blank check and tossed it to Kathryn Birstein, the wife of molecular geneticist Dr. Vadim Birstein, one of the world’s leading authorities on endangered sturgeon. He then exited the building.

  WAR OF THE INSECT GODS, THE

  Unmade 1978 film project in which Murray was slated to star as Deadly Ed, an exterminator defending New York City from an invasion by giant cockroaches. War of the Insect Gods was the brainchild of maverick Saturday Night Live writer Michael O’Donoghue, who envisioned it as his directorial debut. O’Donoghue coauthored the screenplay with National Lampoon Radio Hour veteran Emily Prager, journalist and Murray pal Mitch Glazer, and novelist Dirk Wittenborn. From the start, O’Donoghue zeroed in on Murray for the lead role of Deadly Ed, the remorseless bug killer who figures out how to destroy the mutant bone-crushing roaches using bottles of ether. “Billy is who I want to play Deadly Ed,” O’Donoghue gushed. “He’s both a romantic lead and he’s a little sleazy. He looks like that exterminator kind of guy. And yet he’s a guy who can take on heroic proportions and look like an attractive American hero.” Unfortunately for Murray, this proto-Ghostbusters star turn was not to be. NBC passed on O’Donoghue’s pitch for a War of the Insect Gods TV movie. “Mr. Mike” then tried to raise money for a proposed theatrical version, but investors were put off by his demand that the film be shot in black and white and mortified by his habit of photocopying the corpses of squashed roaches into the pages of his script. When the film failed to acquire backing, O’Donoghue turned his attention to a new project, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video.

  “JOHN’S HUMOR WAS NOT DOOFUSY LIKE BILL MURRAY’S.”

  —John Waters collaborator ROBERT MAIER, on why the two men didn’t get along

  WATERS, JOHN

  Mustachioed gay cult filmmaker who reluctantly allowed Murray to sing the “love theme” to his 1981 comedy Polyester. Murray’s friend Chris Stein of Blondie recommended him for the gig, a suggestion the film’s producers were eager to accept in the wake of Caddyshack’s success the previous year. Murray agreed to perform for free on the track, “The Best Thing,” which was cowritten by Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry. According to Polyester line producer Robert Maier in his book Low Budget Hell: Making Underground Movies with John Waters, Murray came into the studio in a T-shirt and baseball cap and nailed the song in two takes, with Harry supplying backup vocals. The only person who was not pleased with Murray’s performance was the notoriously prickly Waters. The outrageous auteur loathed Murray, whom he considered insufficiently edgy for his brand of envelope-pushing independent cinema. “He hated Bill Murray. He hated Saturday Night Live. He hated Caddyshack,” Maier wrote. “Murray was a mass-audience TV phenomenon, while John was an underground and dangerous artist… . John was angry, gay, and shocking, and he didn’t want it diluted.” Studio bosses overruled Waters, insisting on Murray’s participation as a way to generate buzz for a project with uncertain commercial prospects. (Polyester was presented in “Odorama,” an evolutionary form of Smell-O-Vision that allowed moviegoers to use scratch-and-sniff cards to huff the flatulence of the on-screen characters.) Waters never got over having Murray foisted upon him and refused to thank the actor for his contribution. In the end, Murray’s presence on the soundtrack did not generate the publicity producers had hoped it would. Polyester bombed at the box office and failed to launch Waters into the mainstream.

  WEATHER CHANNEL, THE

  This twenty-four-hour meteorological TV network is one of Murray’s destination cable channels. “I’ve been a weather watcher for years,” he told one interviewer. To a radio host, he confessed: “I was one of the first people to really devote my entire life to the Weather Channel.” He boasts that he watches the channel “all the time. There’s this guy from Wisconsin who’s almost my personal savior.” Murray prepared for his role as a TV weatherman in 1993’s Groundhog Day by watching the Weather Channel almost nonstop.

  WHAT ABOUT BOB?

  DIRECTED BY: Frank Oz

  WRITTEN BY: Tom Schulman

  RELEASE DATE: May 17, 1991

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: ***

  PLOT: A multiphobic loon enrages his psychiatrist.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Bob Wiley, needy psychiatric patient

  Playing against type as a man with no self-confidence and precious little charm, Murray delivers one of the finest performances of his career in this delightfully dark comedy directed by legendary Muppeteer Frank Oz. As Bob Wiley, a neurotic shut-in with staggering emotional needs, Murray persistently bedevils a pompous psychiatrist played by Richard Dreyfuss.

  According to Murray, the oil-and-water rapport he developed with Dreyfuss had its basis in their off-camera relationship. “[Dreyfuss and I] didn’t get along on the movie,” he once admitted. “But it worked for the movie. I mean, I drove him nuts, and he encouraged me to drive him nuts.” Murray attributed the personality conflict to Dreyfuss’s disciplined, theatrical acting style, which clashed with Murray’s more freewheeling, improvisational approach. “He drove me nuts with his stage precision, so I returned the favor with anarchy,” Murray said. “That’s cinema verité you see up there.”

  “IT’S ENTERTAINING—EVERYBODY KNOWS SOMEBODY LIKE THAT BOB GUY.”

  —MURRAY, on the enduring appeal of What about Bob?

  Considering that the film climaxes with Dreyfuss’s character attempting to murder Bob by strapping dynamite to his chest, it is fortunate that the two actors managed to survive the experience. Apparently violent behavior was not unheard of on the What about Bob? set. When he wasn’t driving Richard Dreyfuss to distraction, Murray was picking fights with the film’s producer, Laura Ziskin. According to Ziskin, Murray “threatened to throw me across the parking lot and then broke my sunglasses and threw them across the parking lot.” When those love taps failed to elicit the desired response, Murray reportedly picked up Ziskin and tossed her into a lake in full view of the crew. “I was furious and outraged at the time,” Ziskin later recalled, “but having produced a dozen movies, I can safely say it is not common behavior.”

  NEXT MOVIE: Groundhog Day (1993)

  WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM

  DIRECTED BY: Art Linson

  WRITTEN BY: John Kaye

  RELEASE DATE: April 25, 1980

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: ***

  PLOT: Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson drinks, smokes, and snorts his way through a series of magazine assignments in the 1970s.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Hunter S. Thompson

  Murray scored his first flop with this aimless 1980 comedy chronicling the exploits of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Peter Boyle headlines the cast—inexplicably, considering he is in only a handful of scenes—as Carl Lazlo, a fictionalized ve
rsion of Thompson’s lawyer and drug buddy Oscar Zeta Acosta (known to his intimates as the Brown Buffalo). As the hard-partying Thompson, Murray mumbles and shuffles and does a lot of actorly gesturing with his cigarette holder. If it were a three-minute Saturday Night Live impression, his performance would have been top-notch. Unfortunately the film goes on for an hour and a half.

  Loosely based on Thompson’s 1977 magazine article “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat,” Where the Buffalo Roam marks the directorial debut of Art Linson, producer of the lowbrow late-’70s hits Car Wash and American Hot Wax. The film was shot in and around Los Angeles over two months in the summer of 1979, just as Meatballs was blowing up at the box office. During filming, Thompson lived in a guest house underneath the swimming pool in Murray’s rented home in North Hollywood. “I’d work all day and stay up all night with him,” Murray remembered. “I was strong in those days.” To give him something to occupy his time, Thompson was kept on retainer as an “executive consultant” to the production—a gig he later said consisted of wandering around the set firing a machine gun.

  “I WANTED TO DO SOME ESCAPE WORK. IT WAS SUMMERTIME. IT WAS HOT.”

  —MURRAY, explaining his decision to play Houdini games with Hunter S. Thompson