by Mike Sacks
John Belushi left to do Saturday Night Live in 1975. Were you ever asked to join that show?
Lorne Michaels offered me a job after the first year, but I was already writing and performing on SCTV. Lorne didn't offer me a guarantee to perform on SNL — only to write. But I was happily doing both at SCTV. And in a way, and this sounds odd to say, I didn't like Saturday Night Live that much.
Really? Why?
The people I knew on the show, I'd seen them all do better work. I also thought the writing was a little weak and gratuitous in a lot of ways. I thought the notion of just repeating scenes over and over, week after week, was not a good thing. It could have just been me preserving my outsider posture, but it felt like Lorne Michaels took something that was underground and made it mainstream.
A lot of comedy writers prefer SCTV to Saturday Night Live. I wonder if SCTV will be remembered more fondly than SNL in the long run?
People say that, but it never turned into dollars for anybody. Lorne Michaels is filthy rich and successful. And Andrew Alexander, the creator of SCTV, well … you know.
I'm not talking money so much as the show being an influence.
There were really bright people on both shows. But SCTV was allowed to be much more obscure. We didn't have to worry about sponsors and networks. We were not mainstream. Even when NBC bought SCTV in 1981, it didn't seem like the executives imposed their will on the show.
One of the great elements of SCTV is that it took place in its own little universe. And it had that show within a show. It must have been wonderful to have that format to write for.
You know, that format was a direct reaction to SNL. Since SNL had already launched, we thought, How do we go up against that? They had all the money in the world. They had a network. They had major sponsorship. They had a good time slot. So we said, “We might as well just be the poor cousin. Why not embrace our obscurity — become the underdogs.”
We became a low-budget station out of some tiny town in North America. So that was a good conceit, and that kind of worked.
Besides Belushi and Chevy Chase and later Bill Murray, another Lampoon-er who made the leap to Saturday Night Live was Michael O'Donoghue. Did you ever work with him?
He wasn't involved with the stage show that I was in, but I did know him, and I did like him. I actually talked to him in the early stages of Animal House about co-writing the script with me, but he didn't think college was his thing. Years later, there was talk of him co-writing the screenplay to the book, A Confederacy of Dunces, which I was going to direct. I thought Michael would have a great take on that. If anyone could have pulled it off, Michael could have. But that Confederacy story has defeated every writer who's ever tried it over the years.
Why do you think that is? The project is notorious in Hollywood. The book is almost cursed for never having successfully made the transition to the screen.
My final analysis of it is that Confederacy violated one of the basic by-laws of movie comedy, which the producer [Ghost World and Pulp Fiction] Michael Shamberg articulated. He said, “Comedy works two ways. Either you have a normal person in an extraordinary situation or an extraordinary person in a normal situation.” And Confederacy was about an extraordinary person in a series of extraordinary situations.
So there was nothing to bounce off of?
Right. There was no kind of contextual edge to it. It was one weird person after another, which creates the overall effect of whimsy. And whimsy is not really powerful. You need some sort of center.
In each of your movies, there's a center. You in Ghostbusters, the Chris Makepeace character in Meatballs, Warren Oates in Stripes.
You need the formality and the rules and the rigid social system. For example, the Ted Knight character in Caddyshack represented the country club values. The movie wouldn't have worked as well without that character.
As far as Confederacy, the only way to have successfully made that movie would have been to have the main character of Ignatius Reilly work as an air-traffic controller or some such job. Just to put him in a really straight, normal situation and let this guy's sensibility bounce off the walls.
Did you ever work with Michael O'Donoghue after that, and before he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1994?
No. We would just meet occasionally. He was not a terrifying presence for me. I actually had an affection for him.
Was that terrifying presence an act?
Michael was a lot of posture. I don't want to say “poseur.” That's a little too strong. But he had an image that he had cultivated. In his New York apartment, he had a fur pelt on the floor. And, of course, it didn't take long to recognize it as the skin of a collie.
Where does one buy a collie pelt?
I'm not sure. It's hard to come by these days. It was hard to come by then. Michael's stance was a theater of cruelty. It was like the Brando character in The Wild One. “What are you rebelling against?” And the answer was, “What do you got?” Anything you cherished or held safe, Michael would go after. That was the soul of the Lampoon style. It was every sick joke you ever heard, whether it was Nazism, death itself, or religion. If it was something you cherished or held safe, Michael would attack it with an axe. Not to mention a sword and a sledgehammer.
How was Doug Kenney — your co-writer on Animal House — different? His humor was more nostalgic and seemed a bit gentler that Michael O'Donoghue's.
Doug was a really loving person, and that expressed itself in his humor, even though it could also turn really acidic.
How did you end up co-writing Animal House with Doug and with Chris Miller, another Lampoon writer?
I was first hired to write a treatment for a movie project to take place at a college. The plan was to use some of the material from our Lampoon stage show, and I tried to use the best material from that show, along with some other stories. My title was Freshman Year, and it was about a guy pledging a fraternity that his older brother and his father and uncles had also been in. But, in the end, he chooses not to rush, because the fraternity traditions were kind of odious. They were about privilege and class status and racism and that sort of thing. That was the arc of the treatment that I wrote, but it didn't feel very Lampoon-ish.
I could see that the Lampoon wasn't really excited about it, but I knew they still sort of trusted me to some extent. So I said, “Well, maybe I should work with a Lampoon editor.” They said, “Yeah, yeah, that's good.”
I got together with Doug, whom I really liked and with whom I shared a sensibility. We went off and we first wrote a high-school movie sort of based on his 1964 High School Yearbook. We shaped that script into something pretty funny, but we were told that college was a better setting for a Lampoon movie. We brought another Lampoon writer, Chris Miller, on board, and that proved to be great. The whole project was a nice collaboration in every sense. It took about three months, working eight hours a day or so.
I've heard that many of the scenes from Animal House were based on real-life events.
It was probably worse in real life, believe me. All three of us were involved in situations that ended with cars being wrecked and girls being abandoned and people leaving all sorts of bodily substances all over the place. There were all forms of abuse, both physical and psychological. That movie came from a very real experience of college life in the early 1960s.
I wasn't as bad as some of the others, though. I had a whole different kind of persona. I was legendary for having a kind of slacker mentality: falling asleep on the sofa watching TV in the fraternity house, with a note pinned to my chest:“Wake Me at Noon.”
That you placed on yourself?
Yes, of course.
Like a deaf mute from the 19th century.
I'd hate for my kids to read this, but I never went to class. I was famous for never going to class and still doing well in school.
Were you pleased with the result of Animal House?
I have to say, as broad as my movies can be, certain elements in Animal House
struck me as broader than they needed to be. When I saw Animal House, my initial reaction was that we, the writers, didn't intend for it to be quite that broad, especially in the way the villains were portrayed. I thought the portrayal of Dean Wormer was over the top. And the mayor too. I like my villains a little more textured. But I thought John Landis did a very good job of nailing the look of it. It's also very well-paced.
Do you remember any specific jokes and scenes that you wrote?
I wrote a good portion of the “Germans bombed Pearl Harbor” speech that Belushi gave. And the speech that Tim Matheson gave before the disciplinary council that went something like: “You can't hold a fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few individuals. If you indict us, shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system?”
Also, the scene that took place in the Dexter Lake Club with Otis Day & the Nights. The “Do you mind if we dance with your dates?” scene. That was taken from a real-life experience.
What happened?
There was a club on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis, a blues club called the Blue Note. There was a very good B. B. King — style guitar player called Benny Sharp, who used to perform there. His band was called Benny Sharp & the Sharpees. We used to go there all the time. But, actually, there was also a different club on that boulevard that was similar. We had some girls with us one night at this other club, and a guy came over and asked if he could dance with our dates. We said, “Sure, no problem. Go right ahead! Dance with our dates!”
It didn't end badly. But it wasn't long after that that racial politics in America soured to a point where kids like us were no longer going to blues clubs.
I wonder if you could even include a scene like that in a comedy these days.
Maybe not. But I think that scene was honest — not offensive. I'm always more offended by dishonesty and hypocrisy than by an honest portrayal of the real world.
There was an infamous article written about Doug Kenney in the October 1981 issue of Esquire. It implied that Doug was so unhappy with the result of your next collaboration, Caddyshack, that his death while hiking on a mountain in Hawaii in August of 1980 was most likely the result of a suicide. Do you agree with that theory?
Doug was not a happy person for many reasons. And Caddyshack was a big part of his life at the end. He was very disappointed with the movie, but I'd hate to spend the rest of my life thinking that I directed and co-wrote the movie that killed Doug Kenney. Ironically, since his death, Caddyshack has become a movie that people have embraced and cherished.
We were so arrogant and so deluded and maybe deranged that we thought everything we would do would be as successful as Animal House. And Doug knew only success. Maybe his career success was his greatest and most promising avenue to happiness or self-acceptance. And failing that, there wasn't much else to go on. But he had a miserable kind of psychological legacy from his family — not to blame them. Every family has its own kind of horrible dysfunction. There was a great tragic aspect with his situation. His brother died young, and Doug always felt that he was a disappointment to his family. Maybe that theme of disappointment, coupled with Caddyshack's failure to launch, culminated in his whole humiliating sense of failure.
What's your opinion on the specifics of his death? Do you think he slipped or fell off that mountain?
I don't know. In a way, it doesn't matter. I never saw it as a perplexing mystery. Doug was sufficiently depressed. And, you know, having worked in a psych ward, I knew people who'd killed themselves. I've watched people process emotions on that level. About one-third of them succeed in getting better, one-third stay the same, and one-third get worse. Not everyone who feels suicidal kills himself. So I don't know how he died, but I've made a sick joke about this before: that Doug probably fell while he was looking for a place to jump. He was depressed, and he was intoxicated a lot of the time. And by that point in his life, he had cut himself off from the possibility of happiness.
How did Caddyshack come about?
Brian [Doyle-] Murray, Bill's brother and a writer and performer for Lampoon, had caddied when he was growing up, in and around Wilmette, Illinois. Brian would talk to Doug Kenney about his country club experiences, and Doug could relate, because he had worked in a tennis shop, in a country club in Ohio. His father was the tennis pro. Doug came to the project from sort of the snobby member's point of view, although he was not from that ruling class himself. Brian understood it from the point of view of a poor Catholic kid in WASP territory. And I understood it from the Rodney Dangerfield point of view, which was the Jewish outsider. I was on the outside looking in — the unwelcome guest.
Brian and Doug started talking about this idea, but they were not the most focused people in the world, or the most disciplined. When they told me about the idea, I said, “What if we write it together? And I'll direct it?” We took it to Mike Medavoy at Orion and it got launched. It was the first movie I directed.
How did the shooting script differ from what eventually appeared on-screen? Was it much different?
It started off as being about a Catholic kid from a large family, aspiring to join the fancy Bushwood Country Club. That was going to be the emphasis: this young, poor caddie who wanted desperately to join this high-end club. But once Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, and Bill Murray came on board, the emphasis shift ed. Beefing up their parts was irresistible.
I would assume that's an advantage to being both a director and a writer. If you were just a writer of Caddyshack, you wouldn't have been able to flesh out those characters on the set. The direction becomes a continuation of the writing process.
True. And I probably felt more comfortable creating those characters than I did with the other characters in the movie. I understood how those three actors could be funny. The material with the young kid was not inherently funny, in and of itself. I've never seen a great comedy without a great comic performance. The actors playing the caddies were good, but none of them was a comedy star. So to count on them to carry the comedy could have been a little problematic — this all became apparent pretty early into the shoot.
Chevy and Bill were obviously adept at improvisation, which they did throughout the film, but how was Rodney as an improviser?
Terrible. Just awful. We were originally going to use Don Rickles, but at the time Rodney had just done a run of Tonight Show appearances that were hysterical. He was brilliant. Rodney was a joke comedian, and every joke he told was based on very precise wording and timing. His act had a specific rhythm that could not be violated. Every word and syllable was important. So there was no improvising with Rodney, unless it was him coming up with a line he had used somewhere in a past act of his. Or he would want to sit down every night and hammer out the jokes he would use the next day.
Often, he thought he was bombing on the set, because no one was laughing. He just didn't know from that world. He really knew nothing about the process of filmmaking.
How much of Bill Murray's performance was improvised?
Pretty much everything he did in the movie was improvised, except for the one big speech he gave on the Dalai Lama. But almost everything else — I would say 95 percent of his work — was improvised. The speech he performs as he cuts off the heads of the flowers with a garden tool was completely improvised. Only the action is indicated in the script: “The greenskeeper, Carl, lops the heads off tulips as he practices his golf swing …”
With that particular speech, the “Cinderella story” speech, I had been out jogging one day, and one way I kept up my spirits was to be the announcer at the Olympics: “It's the end of the last lap of the marathon, let's see who's entering the stadium … oh, it's Harold Ramis!” So I said to Bill on the set, “You know when you're pretending that you're a sports announcer and calling the play-by-play —” He said, “Don't say anymore. I got it.” He started talking and improvising, and that speech was the result.
I had worked with Bill at Second City and then at Lampoon, and then we did Meatballs together, and I kn
ew him to be the best verbal improviser I'd ever seen. He and Chris Guest were really two of the best at that. So I thought, Well, if I've got Bill, why not let him just talk? I would feed him motivation. I could think in all his character modes, having worked with him so much.
Improv is a tool for a director. But with any tool, I suppose, you have to know how to use it properly. Too much of it can be a bad thing.
Yes, that's true. And, also, it's the editing room that saves your ass. If you took all the improv from Caddyshack and did it on onstage, you'd bomb half the time. One thing I learned to do was to shoot enough improv so I could actually shape it in the editing room.
There are some Platonic and Aristotelian kinds of perfections out there. Waiting for the punch line or delivering a line too quickly won't work. There is a perfect amount of time you need to wait. You need a good ear. In fact, because my movies are largely talk, I do a lot of listening. I can practically edit with my eyes closed, at least as far as timing goes: when is the movement going on too long and when is it just enough? If you're cutting away on a joke, you're probably doing it because you can't top that joke. If the scene is still building and is still rich, you keep going.
How much footage was shot for the scene with Bill Murray and Chevy Chase in Carl's garage apartment?
It's hard to say. But because those guys are so good, it wasn't endless hours of it. I mean, we didn't shoot one thousand hours to get five minutes. They're very good.
Some reviewers at the time were critical of Caddyshack. They felt that it seemed too improvised, and that maybe it wasn't as tight as it could have been.
There was a New York Times review of Caddyshack, and I think I'm quoting accurately, that said it was “an amiable mess.” And that's fine. I knew it had some very messy elements. But that was the trade-off. The only way to get all that Bill Murray content into the movie was to settle for the fact that it was off-story and that it had nothing to do with the plot. Whatever arc there was to Bill's story was crafted later, when we shot the gopher material and everything else.