Caddyshack
Page 10
Kenney lived for a time at the shabby-chic Chateau Marmont, which is nestled into a hilly elbow of the Sunset Strip. Eventually, in an attempt to feel less transient and to put down some roots with Kathryn Walker (who was shuttling back and forth to New York to work on the stage), he took over the lease of the bachelor pad on Betty Lane in Coldwater Canyon where Chevy Chase had been living before he got married. When Walker was away, which was often, Kenney and Chase began to spend more and more time together. They would eventually become as close as brothers. While the two had plenty in common (sudden fame, smartass sarcasm, better-than-average backhands on the tennis court, and a need to always stay up later and rage a little harder than everyone else), each saw something in the other that they lacked: Chase wanted Kenney’s Ivy League cachet and respectability; Kenney craved Chase’s self-confidence and matinee-idol magnetism.
Kenney’s new residence on Betty Lane quickly became the place to be—or at least the place to eventually wind up when everyplace else shut down. As he had back in New York, John Belushi would crash on Kenney’s sofa whenever he was in town. Rock stars, SNL cast members, rising agents, and under-thirty industry players all found themselves pulled into Kenney’s good-times orbit. One night, someone’s car ended up in the swimming pool. It was a freewheeling social scene with a liberal open-door policy—all were welcome any time of day or night. And ever-present on the mantel was a sugar bowl full of Peru’s finest marching powder supplied by the gracious host.
“We all grew up in the ’60s with the idea that, Oh, this is harmless,” says Kenney’s friend Alan Greisman. “The worst that’s going to happen is that you’re going to wake up with a really bad hangover. Nobody accepted that cocaine was a harmful thing that could really kill you. I remember someone looking around the room at one of Doug’s parties and saying, ‘This is either the New Hollywood for the next decade or the Old Hollywood in six months.’ It was a lot of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. I don’t remember ever having as much fun as we had back then.”
One person who was curiously absent from Betty Lane was Harold Ramis, who had taken on a quickie assignment for Ivan Reitman doing a late-in-the-game rewrite of Meatballs. Everyone agreed that the original script for the movie was dumb, formulaic, and hopelessly past the point of salvation. In fact, Bill Murray had taken one look at it and passed on the role of the film’s rebellious head counselor with a soft, chewy center, Tripper, even though he wasn’t exactly being deluged with movie offers at the time. He said he’d rather sit around and play golf during his SNL summer hiatus. But when Reitman went back to the noncommittal star and told him that Ramis had agreed to polish the screenplay, Murray reluctantly agreed.
At least, Reitman thought he had agreed. The director began to panic when Murray (who still hadn’t even signed a contract) didn’t show up on the remote Ontario wilderness location until four days after shooting started. When he finally did arrive, Murray clutched a rolled-up copy of the revised script in his hand and told Reitman, “This is crap.” In the margins, he’d written over and over again “S.O.T.” It stood for “Same Old Thing.” Rather than be embarrassed by serving up obvious, hackneyed bits that any stiff could deliver, Murray decided to rewrite his scenes himself. At night, he’d sit in his rental car and work until he fell asleep. For other scenes, he’d just ad-lib on the spot, as he did for the movie’s climactic “It just doesn’t matter” speech.
Reitman had been around the Lampoon long enough to know that he should just stand back and let the cameras keep rolling, capturing whatever inspired lunacy shot out of Murray’s howitzer brain. Meatballs would end up becoming the sleeper hit of the summer in 1979. Made for just $1.6 million, the shaggy and endearing coming-of-age story made $43 million at the box office. Bill Murray had arrived as a movie star, and Reitman had finally got the attention and respect he’d been looking for—even if it came a little later than he would have liked. He was now a force in an industry that was being upturned so rapidly and unpredictably that even hustlers and hairdressers could become the new power brokers.
* * *
From its earliest days, Hollywood has been portrayed as a promised land where anything is possible. It’s a place where self-made dreamers can come and rewrite their pasts, turning them into origin stories that take on the power of myth. It’s a town of endless reinvention. The earliest movie tycoons knew this better than anyone. Jack Warner was the streetwise son of a Polish cobbler who grew up in the rough, Mafia-controlled steel town of Youngstown, Ohio, before luckily falling into the nascent moving-pictures business and heading West. Louis B. Mayer was born in Minsk and grew up poor in New Brunswick, Canada, where he dropped out of school at the age of twelve; he would end up purchasing a small vaudeville theater in Massachusetts before expanding his way to California. Harry Cohn was the working-class son of Jewish immigrants, and he worked as a New York streetcar conductor and sheet-music promoter before he would spin celluloid into gold.
Jon Peters was a man who saw his future in equally grandiose terms. He dreamed in CinemaScope. Born on the less glamorous side of the Hollywood Hills, in the San Fernando Valley town of Sherman Oaks, Peters was the son of a part-Cherokee former Marine who owned a truck-stop café. He died of a heart attack when Peters was ten. His mother was an Italian-American beauty whose family owned a hair salon where she sometimes worked. Short-tempered and quick to use his fists after his father’s death, Peters left school behind in the seventh grade and was sent to juvenile hall by his mother after clashing with her second husband. Peters had become obsessed with the movies ever since he appeared as a child extra in the legendary parting of the Red Sea scene in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Or so he claimed. He was so enthralled by the magic of cinema that he refused to wash his makeup off when he went home from the set at night. In his teens, his mother put him on a plane to New York with $120 in his pocket. There he found a job in a beauty salon dying the pubic hair of prostitutes.
After a failed marriage at sixteen, Peters returned to California and began working as a hairstylist. He would soon have his own chain of salons, where he charged $100 a pop to style the locks of fading and second-tier stars such as Jayne Mansfield, Sonja Henie, and Barbara Eden, and, soon enough, more promising ones such as Lesley Ann Warren, whom he would wind up marrying. For years, Peters claimed to be the inspiration for Warren Beatty’s swinging, motorcycle-riding lothario stylist in Shampoo, but Beatty denies this. Driven by insatiable ambition, unrelenting chutzpah, and a dangerous air of macho swagger, Peters began dating Barbra Streisand after doing her hair for the 1974 comedy For Pete’s Sake. His pickup line to the actress was as crass and bluntly to the point as nearly everything else that came out of his mouth. He told her that she had a great ass.
Peters and Streisand quickly moved in together and ended up buying a house in Malibu. Her inner circle of friends and handlers considered Peters a cocky and talentless wannabe, a thug who had parlayed his high-profile relationship with the A-list actress and singer into an entrée to the movie business. As her new manager, Peters was also making 15 percent of whatever Streisand earned. Streisand’s friends thought that Peters exploited their romantic association and leveraged it into a role as the producer of her 1976 update of A Star Is Born, when, in truth, it had been Streisand’s idea. The couple even flirted with the crazy idea of casting Peters as the male lead in the film. That production had been a notoriously tumultuous one, cycling through countless screenwriters and enduring on-set tirades by Peters. During one such flare-up, Peters was mouthing off to the film’s line producer until the man couldn’t take the abuse anymore and turned around and cold-cocked Peters. Crew members applauded. Afterward, that line producer never had a problem finding a job on a film again—Peters’s enemies were only too happy to throw work his way. Peters’s easily triggered jealousy concerning Streisand’s costar, Kris Kristofferson, led to heated arguments on the set. At one point, after Peters yelled at Kristofferson, the actor fired back: “If I need any more shit fr
om you, I’ll squeeze your head.”
Constantly underestimated and all-too-easily dismissed as a social-climbing dilettante, Peters may have gained admission to the film business through the side door of nepotism, but he quickly earned his keep once he was inside. Even his critics conceded that he had an innate street genius for marketing. A Star Is Born made $90 million at the box office, making it the biggest hit of Streisand’s career at that point. The film’s soundtrack, which Peters also produced, sold 8 million copies. It would no longer be possible to shrug Peters off as a ’70s Sammy Glick, a gigolo hairdresser acting above his station—not that people didn’t try.
In 1977, Peters launched his own production company, the Jon Peters Organization (JPO). He took over a ground-floor suite on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank and decked it out with mirrored walls, rattan furniture, and palm-frond wallpaper inspired by the Beverly Hills Hotel. It looked more like a Rodeo Drive beauty salon than an office where actual work got done. JPO’s first film would be the slick 1978 thriller Eyes of Laura Mars starring Faye Dunaway, who had recently won an Oscar for Network. He followed it up with The Main Event, an absurd (and absurdly bad) Streisand comedy about a perfume magnate turned boxing promoter that reteamed her with her What’s Up, Doc? costar, Ryan O’Neal. Somehow the movie made $54 million. In April 1978, before The Main Event was released, Peters signed an exclusive three-year deal with the newly formed mini-studio Orion Pictures.
Orion was Hollywood’s newest player. It had risen out of the ashes of United Artists, which had seen its five top executives simultaneously resign rather than answer to its bullying new corporate parent, Transamerica. United Artists had been a hot studio in the ’70s. Led on the creative side by Mike Medavoy, UA had a hands-off philosophy that attracted artistically ambitious directors, of which there were many in the post–Easy Rider era. It had been rewarded for that laissez-faire attitude with an impressive run of critical and box-office hits, including a string of Best Picture winners: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, and Annie Hall. At Orion, Medavoy was essentially starting from scratch again. The studio quickly forged a joint partnership with Warner Bros. to have them market and distribute Orion’s slate of movies. Then, to signal to the town that they were a major new force, Orion signed up a laundry list of established talent such as John Travolta, Burt Reynolds, and Jane Fonda to nonexclusive deals. As for his pact with Jon Peters, Medavoy admitted that he had an ulterior motive: “We made our producing deal with him at Orion primarily to get us instant access to his then-girlfriend, Barbra Streisand.” Still, Medavoy conceded, “Jon seemed to have some kind of force field around him that sucked movie ideas and movie people in. He was a likable huckster who went on his instincts.”
As a new shop, Orion was not only hungry for hits; it was starved for movies, period. In the summer of 1978, one of Peters’s employees, a story editor and UCLA film school graduate named Donald MacDonald, attended a pre-release industry screening of Animal House. As a boss, Peters was especially dependent on his small staff of underlings to scout material and assess scripts for him because he simply lacked the concentration to read them himself. Peters preferred to have screenplays read aloud to him while he sat with his eyes closed imagining the movie to life in his mind. Words were so small; Jon Peters thought big.
On that summer evening, as the end credits rolled on Animal House, MacDonald rushed from his seat before the lights came up and hustled into the lobby to grab Harold Ramis and Doug Kenney before they left the theater. “He kind of intercepted us,” said Ramis. “He literally snagged us walking out the door. He said Jon Peters would like to meet you guys and hear your ideas. It was very validating, obviously. Everyone was asking us, ‘What do you want to do next?’ Peters just happened to be the first one.” Ramis knew that whatever he ended up doing next, he wanted to be the one to direct it. Part of him was still frustrated by how little say he’d had on Animal House, regardless of how successful it became. After years of work, John Landis just came in and took ownership of the movie and got his name above the title. Ramis wanted to make sure that that didn’t happen again.
Ramis and Kenney met with Peters at his bungalow on the Warner Bros. lot. Peters’s Ferrari was parked out front. Inside, the writers were greeted by a backslapping man in jeans and cowboy boots with longish hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He gave off the odd, dueling impressions of deferential humility and musky, alpha-male testosterone. After the introductions, Peters took his place behind his desk and sat down. He closed his eyes signaling that it was story time. Ramis and Kenney looked at each other curiously, thinking, Is this guy for real? Can this really be how it’s done? Neither of them had been through this particular dog-and-pony show before. Kenney nodded to Ramis, urging him to go first. Ramis cleared his throat and launched into an idea for a dark comedy about the American Nazi Party marching in Skokie. It was based on actual events from the previous summer, which stirred national headlines due to the large number of Holocaust survivors who lived in the Illinois town. When he was done, he noticed that Peters’s eyes were pressed tightly shut. He had a grin on his face.
It was now Kenney’s turn to pitch. He began to describe a New Agey comedy adventure about an American hippie backpacking in the Tibetan Himalayas who got swept up fighting against a Chinese invasion with a bunch of Buddhist monks using magic and LSD. Kenney seemed to be making his pitch up more or less on the spot, mixing far-out druggie asides with plot points cribbed from the novel he never finished during his time at the Lampoon, Teenage Commies from Outer Space. Again, Peters continued to smile with his eyes closed.
Not sure whether to keep going or quit while they seemed to be ahead, Ramis launched into a third idea: a sort of Marxist revisionist Western about the class conflict between a heroic cowboy and his proletarian sidekick. Peters’s smile morphed into an expression of utter bafflement. Said Ramis, “So I explained how when I would watch Westerns as a kid, I would think, Who’s that Gabby Hayes character? Does he work for the other guy? Are they just friends? Why does he have a mule with all the pots and pans and the other guy just has a blanket? I wanted to look at that relationship. I called it The Sidekick.”
Peters told Ramis and Kenney that he loved everything he’d heard. To them, it sounded like a Hollywood grease job which they weren’t particularly buying. Still, Peters was serious enough that he wanted to take them to Mike Medavoy’s office at Orion to see if the three parties could get a movie going together. Before the two writers shook hands and agreed, though, Ramis brought up one last bit of housekeeping that he wanted to address. Something Peters needed to know if they were going to move forward together. Ramis said that whatever idea they ended up doing, he wanted to direct it. Peters looked Ramis up and down, noticing his aviator glasses and safari jacket with lots of pockets, and said, “Why not? You look like a director.”
Mike Medavoy was in a buyer’s frame of mind by the time he met with Kenney and Ramis in the summer of 1978. At United Artists, he’d had his pick of prestige projects to choose from thanks to the studio’s impressive track record. But Orion was a new company playing catch-up. By the end of its first year, the studio would race to put fifteen films into production. Still, it wouldn’t have its first real hit until October 1979, when the Dudley Moore–Bo Derek sex comedy, 10, raked in $74 million. Medavoy knew that the writers of Animal House could go to any of the deeper-pocketed majors, so he was thrilled that they were coming to him. Maybe that deal with Peters had been worth it after all.
When Peters arrived at Medavoy’s office with Ramis and Kenney in tow, the writers were struck by a sense of déjà vu. Peters had been so high on their ideas that they assumed the meeting with Medavoy was just a formality before they walked out with a green-lighted movie. As they sat down, they realized that they were expected to wind up and start pitching again. “Harold spoke and Doug didn’t really say a lot,” recalls Medavoy. “Harold pitched his idea for a comedy about the Nazis marching in Skokie, and I thought, Oh, God, I don’t think
I find this as funny as you guys do.” Ramis was taken aback.
“Jon Peters had led me to believe that Medavoy would do the Skokie idea,” Ramis said. “But Medavoy argued that if they got one bomb threat on a theater it would shut the movie down. So he said come up with something else. And I’ll never forget this; he said: ‘Think urban and contemporary.’” Ramis and Kenney walked out of Medavoy’s office feeling like they’d had the wind knocked out of them.
Two weeks later, they returned to Medavoy’s office—this time without Peters—with an idea that Kenney had once heard Brian Doyle-Murray talking about. It had been tickling at the back of his brain ever since. A comedy at a country club based on all of the Murray boys’ teenage memories as caddies outside Chicago. It hit all the same snobs-versus-slobs class-warfare notes that Animal House had. Doyle-Murray had even thought up a name for it: Caddyshack. Kenney knew that he probably shouldn’t be pitching the idea without Doyle-Murray in the room. But he figured, Fuck it, Medavoy might not even bite anyway.…
An hour later, there was a surprise knock at the door of Brian Doyle-Murray’s hotel room in LA. Doug Kenney and Harold Ramis barged in with the good news. “They told me that they had taken the liberty of pitching my idea,” says Doyle-Murray. “Doug was going to produce it, Harold was going to direct it, and they wanted me to write it with them. I said, ‘Fine, let’s go to work!’”
6
Like The Dick Van Dyke Show
IT WAS NOW OFFICIAL: Caddyshack had been given the go-ahead by Orion.