Caddyshack

by Chris Nashawaty

  Although Jon Peters hadn’t been in the room when Harold Ramis and Doug Kenney pitched what Mike Medavoy said sounded like “the ultimate spring-break movie,” the studio head brought him on as the film’s executive producer. He considered it a show of good faith. A sort of finder’s fee. Plus, it helped him justify some of the overhead costs of Peters’s production deal at the studio. Later, Medavoy would sing a slightly different tune. “To my regret, I brought Peters in,” Medavoy says. “I think it would have gone a lot smoother if I had put somebody in charge who was a little more responsible and not as crazy.”

  Peters wasn’t exactly overburdened with “Go Pictures” at the time. The only project that he’d brought the studio so far was a not-terribly-promising little comedy starring teen heartthrob Robby Benson (and a monkey) called Die Laughing. When Thom Mount heard about the Caddyshack deal back at his office at Universal, he felt a little hurt that the boys whom he believed he’d backed so fiercely on Animal House hadn’t come to him first. “I must say, I was totally jealous that we didn’t have that movie for the studio.”

  Signing two-thirds of the screenwriting brain trust behind Animal House was a coup for the newly formed Orion. They had somehow snagged the hottest young writers in town. On paper, the partnership made more sense for Orion than it did for Ramis, Kenney, and Doyle-Murray. Ivan Reitman, for one, says he was mystified when he heard that they’d gone into business with someone like Peters. “I thought it was dumb,” Reitman says. “I think Jon probably just convinced them that they were going to have more independence with him. That’s a real writers’ and directors’ desire. I think he probably convinced Harold and Doug that they would be the bosses.” It turns out that was exactly Peters’s salespitch.

  Peters told the boys that they would never have to deal directly with Medavoy or respond directly to Orion’s meddling notes and controlling demands, because he’d be running interference. He was their protector, their pit bull. Peters told them, “I’ll deal with them; you just make your movie.” It’s easy to understand how seductive that must have sounded to Kenney and Ramis. Both of them felt largely alienated from Animal House after John Landis came onboard. In his own crass, pugilistic way, Peters was the godfather they were looking for. He was as much of a Hollywood outsider as they were.

  Still, even early on in their collaboration, Peters would prove to be hard to trust fully. On the surface, he painted himself as the Caddyshack writers’ champion, willing to take on all corporate comers and smooth out any obstacles that lay in their way. Behind their backs, though, he could be manipulative and petty. Although Peters had told Ramis during their initial meeting that he “looked like a director” and wholeheartedly supported his ambition to be the one behind the camera, he tried to lowball Ramis on his directing fee. Later, Peters tasked one of his employees, Donald MacDonald, with drawing up a list of replacement directors in case he felt the sudden need, or just the vindictive whim, to take the film away from someone he’d sized up as weak. Ramis, of course, knew nothing of this.

  With the ink dry on the Orion deal, it was finally time, in the words of Doyle-Murray, to get to work. As with Animal House, the three writers got together for marathon bull sessions in New York diners and bars, where they swapped stories about their youthful experiences as sub-minimum-wage service-industry slaves catering to hoity-toity snobs. Doyle-Murray would be an encyclopedia of stranger-than-fiction tales from his and his brothers’ time as caddies at some of the finest country clubs on Chicago’s North Shore—not only about the members but the eccentric wack jobs he’d worked side by side with. Both Ramis and Kenney were surprised to learn not only that the Murray boys had been caddies starting as early as age eleven, but their father had also clocked time lugging golf bags to earn money in his youth. He’d even once caddied for US Open amateur champion Chick Evans.

  Kenney had his own deep well of stories. Over cocktails and more smokable refreshments, he unspooled countless anecdotes that his father had passed on to him about working as a tennis pro. Kenney himself had also worked in the pro shops of various bastions of blue-blood leisure entitlement, stringing tennis rackets and swallowing all of the clever, wiseass insults he wanted to fire back at the clubs’ condescending members. This was his chance for revenge, albeit fifteen years late. He and Doyle-Murray both knew, deeply, the smoldering resentment, insecurity, and jealousy of growing up and feeling excluded—what it was like to have your nose pressed up against the glass, wondering what life was like on the other side.

  “Brian and Doug both had lots of characters from their real-life experiences,” said Ramis. “But I came to it as a total outsider. I was a Jewish kid with no money who was standing outside the gates of the country club. No one I knew even played golf.” Ramis would end up being Doyle-Murray and Kenney’s sounding board, scribbling their wild stories down on yellow legal pads, juicing them with his own satirical topspin.

  With reams of raw material assembled, the three writers were given a small, nondescript bungalow on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, directly behind Peters’s office. When they came in each day, a towel would be stuffed under the door, a joint or three would be sparked up, and the script pounded out. “It was the three of us in a room every day for three months,” said Ramis. “It was like The Dick Van Dyke Show: One types, one paces, and one lies on the sofa. We switched off, although I don’t remember Brian typing very much.” As the most grounded member of the group, Ramis said he was usually the one stuck behind the typewriter—the Rose Marie of the trio.

  “I’d come in in the middle of their writing sessions and the room was just filled with smoke,” says Trevor Albert, Jon Peters’s young assistant at the time. “I couldn’t believe they were smoking pot when they were working. I’d just left college and thought I was in the working world, and here these guys were getting high. They acted like college friends playing together. They were a bit like kids in a candy store. I thought, This is how I would like to work in the movie business.”

  Albert had been a film major at UC San Diego and was twenty-two when he was hired as Peters’s assistant. Which essentially meant that he was a not-so-glorified errand boy. “I got the job on the promise that I would work on a movie, and I spent the first year taking Barbra Streisand’s poodle to the dog groomer and driving Jon’s kids to basketball games,” he says. Any film-related task, no matter how menial, would have felt like a gift to him. He was making $100 a week, driving his own car to run Peters’s errands without even being reimbursed for gas. “Even though I respected Barbra Streisand, I had no interest in the kind of movies she was doing,” he says. “But I was on a studio lot, and it was a good way to begin my career despite Jon’s sadistic management skills.” Albert recalls that the first time the Caddyshack writers showed up at Warner Bros., he fetched their coffee. “I immediately thought I’d much rather be working for these guys. They were smart and funny. I wasn’t sure how smart or funny Jon Peters was.”

  In addition to Trevor Albert and Donald MacDonald, the key personnel at the Jon Peters Organization who would become instrumental in the making of Caddyshack included an eager young production executive named Rusty Lemorande, and Peters’s top lieutenant and head of development, Mark Canton. Canton was twenty-nine, ambitious, and a bit tightly wound, with a frizzy nimbus of corkscrew curls on top of his head. He had gotten his initial break working for Mike Medavoy during his tenure at United Artists. Peters had met Canton when the two were working on a never-made remake of the all-female 1939 MGM classic, The Women, for Barbra Streisand and Faye Dunaway to star in. Peters eventually lured him away from Medavoy to develop material for both him and his famous girlfriend. Caddyshack would end up becoming Canton’s baptism into the junior producer ranks.

  The first draft of the Caddyshack script would wind up being very different from the movie it eventually became. Set at an upper-crust Illinois country club called Bushwood, the story revolved around a recent high school graduate named Danny Noonan. Born on the wrong side of the trac
ks into a working-class Irish-Catholic family with too many kids to count, Danny is a good kid who spends his summer caddying for the stuffed shirts at Bushwood while he figures out how he’s going to pay for college. He competes for a caddie scholarship—and for the love of an Irish club employee named Maggie O’Hooligan against a cocky fellow caddie named Tony D’Annunzio. Swirling around the love triangle, which is undoubtedly the main focus of the early script, are a bunch of young slacker caddies and some colorful club members making drive-by cameo appearances. “Doug always described it as a bildungsroman,” said Ramis, “which is a fancy, Harvard way of saying a coming-of-age story. I always suspected that it would evolve more toward the adults, but it didn’t start out that way.”

  The Danny Noonan character was based on Brian Doyle-Murray’s oldest brother, Ed, who won the annual Chick Evans Caddie Scholarship to attend Northwestern University. It was one of the Murray family’s proudest moments. The Evans scholarship was created to help outstanding caddies with financial need. When the writers were first hashing out the Caddyshack script, Kenney met with Ed Murray and interviewed him to help flesh out the Danny Noonan character. Doyle-Murray filled in the rest with his own personal observations gleaned from hauling clubs at $3.50 per eighteen holes. “A caddie comes into contact with different role models,” said Doyle-Murray. “Doctors, lawyers, captains of industry, social climbers, horny young ladies, horny old ladies. It’s its own subculture.”

  Initially, the Caddyshack script was basically about Danny Noonan’s extraordinary education, his passage into adulthood. Less fleshed out were the adult characters who would do the educating. Among the still-evolving cast of Bushwood members were: the uptight WASP Judge Elihu Smails and his promiscuous niece, Lacey Underall (who’s only seventeen in the early script); the obnoxious developer Al Czernak (described as “a stocky, balding cement block in a flaming leisure suit”; his name would later be changed to Czervik) and his Asian sidekick, Yamamoto (later Wang); and Ty Webb (“a handsome, thirty-ish bachelor with clear eyes and an air of relaxed self-control,” who, it must be said, wasn’t a barrel of laughs by the time the first draft was completed). Doug Kenney had modeled Ty after himself—or how he liked to imagine himself: someone who sails through life without a care and a fondness for quoting Zen philosophers such as Basho, who famously did not say, “A flute with no holes is not a flute. A donut with no hole is a Danish.”

  When Kenney, Ramis, and Doyle-Murray were writing the character of Ty, they were tailoring the part specifically for Chevy Chase, as if it were a bespoke suit he could slide right into. Mike Medavoy had only green-lighted their pitch on the condition that they could deliver a star. And Chase, whose first post-SNL film, Foul Play, had just come out and been a hit in July, was definitely the kind of star Orion was looking to get into business with. Kenney and Ramis had even gone so far as dropping Chase’s name as someone they had an in with during the Caddyshack pitch meeting. Still, if you squint hard enough, what leaps out most from the first draft of Caddyshack isn’t the few memorable scenes that are already there (the Baby Ruth in the pool, Smails’s Billy Baroo putter, the “Be the ball” and “Did someone step on a duck?” lines); it’s the sheer number of ones that aren’t there yet.

  After three months, Ramis, Kenney, and Doyle-Murray handed in the first draft to an eager Jon Peters. He’d been talking up the project around town since day one, and he was itching to finally get a peek at what he’d been hyping. A typical Hollywood screenplay usually runs about 120 tightly formatted pages. Comedies tend to be even shorter. The first draft of the Caddyshack script was two hundred pages long. Peters was aghast. “It looked like the Bible,” says Mark Canton. “I didn’t know what it was.”

  Not once in those two hundred pages did the name Carl Spackler appear.

  * * *

  As the holidays neared, the writers gave themselves a sorely needed vacation from working—and from Peters. Animal House was still in theaters chugging toward the $100 million mark at the box office. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s first Blues Brothers album, Briefcase Full of Blues, had just been released and would soon give Billy Joel the boot from the top spot on the Billboard 200. And Saturday Night Live had just kicked off its fourth season to record ratings. Seventeen million people were watching the show each week. The world, at least in terms of pop culture, was all of a sudden looking much more promising than it had just a couple of years earlier, largely due to the people who had worked in the hothouse of National Lampoon.

  Feeling good about all he’d done so far on Caddyshack, Doug Kenney decided to return to New York and spend Christmas and New Year’s with his long-distance girlfriend, Kathryn Walker. He wasn’t the only one who was looking to spend the holidays with her. According to John Ptak, who was Kenney’s agent then at the William Morris Agency, Christopher Walken was also taken with Walker at the time. Kenney wasn’t sure how much had transpired between the two, but his jealousy (no doubt exacerbated by his increasing intake of drugs) led to a very strange evening at the Plaza around Christmastime, when Ptak, Kenney, Walker, and producer Alan Greisman met for drinks at the hotel’s Palm Court.

  Seemingly uninvited, Walken showed up and approached the table to join them. Curious looks were exchanged. Kenney became uneasy. He could sense something. Always a fool for the grand, scene-making gesture, Kenney decided that he had to prove his love to Walker and extinguish the threat of any rival. “Like a rather wasted Lancelot, Doug started in around midnight about how he would do anything to prove his love for Kathryn,” says Ptak. “So he ran out of the bar and into the center of 59th Street, where he stood firm, cars flying by, waving his arms about and letting everyone in the neighborhood know how he felt.” Not sure that he’d made his point clearly enough, Kenney then lay down in the middle of the busy Manhattan street. Ptak and Greisman eventually pulled him off the asphalt and led him back into the bar. Angry and maybe a little scared by Kenney’s display, Kathryn Walker left.

  The eventful week was just getting started. Ptak had managed to finagle an invitation to Orion chairman Arthur Krim’s star-studded annual New Year’s Eve party. Ptak was staying in room 1009 at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, tucked against the southeast corner of Central Park. Before heading over to Krim’s party, the agent had some friends up to his room, including Kenney; Walker; Greisman; Lorimar development exec Sug Villa; Ptak’s William Morris colleague Rick Nicita; and Rick’s wife, casting director Wallis Nicita. At 10:15, they all left the room to swing by a party being thrown in the Universal suite upstairs by legendary film editor Verna Fields, whose guests included Roy Scheider and Oliver Stone. About an hour later, they returned to Ptak’s room to get their coats and race over to Krim’s party before the ball dropped. When the elevator doors opened on the tenth floor, the hallway was filled with thick black smoke. It was coming from Ptak’s room.

  Firemen blocked off the area outside the hotel and seemed to think that the blaze had started on a couch in the living room of Ptak’s suite, most likely the result of a stray cigarette or joint. In the end, the fire in Room 1009 would cause more than $20,000 in property damage. Sometime shortly after 1 a.m., Ptak, Kenney, and the rest finally arrived at Krim’s, looking shaken and slightly crispy. Some of the revelers there were curious about the blackened area around Kenney’s nostrils. They were more used to seeing white there. Perhaps Doug had discovered an exotic new high they weren’t yet familiar with.

  After the chaos of the holidays that ushered in 1979, Doug Kenney returned to Los Angeles less relaxed than he’d hoped, but eager to get back to work. Shortly after Animal House opened, Matty Simmons rushed the spin-off TV series Delta House into production for ABC. Although Kenney was only minimally involved with it, he wanted everything that bore his name to be first rate—or, at the very least, not embarrassing. When Delta House debuted at 8 p.m. on January 19, it was obvious that it was nothing more than a shameless and feeble attempt to cash in on a hit movie. Though some of the film’s cast returned for the series, the bigge
st stars (John Belushi, Donald Sutherland, Tim Matheson) were missing. So, too, were the film’s signature moments of blackout drunkenness, pot smoking, and gratuitous nudity thanks to strict network standards and the show’s odd, early-bird time slot. The only encouraging signs were the casting of a then-unknown Michelle Pfeiffer in the role of The Bombshell and the name of a recently hired Lampoon staffer in the show’s writing credits: John Hughes. Delta House was unceremoniously canceled after thirteen weeks.

  The show’s flameout, though, didn’t lessen Universal’s desire to get moving on an Animal House sequel. While John Landis and the film’s original trio of writers all had their hands full with other Hollywood projects, Matty Simmons was as determined as a junkyard dog with a bone. Chris Miller recalls an idea for a follow-up that he had knocked around with Ramis and Kenney. “The concept was, it was five years later, 1967,” says Miller. “And all of the Deltas get together in San Francisco in the Haight for Pinto’s wedding. Flounder is no longer called Flounder; he’s called Pisces. We would do for the Summer of Love what we did for college and fraternities.”

  Kenney and Ramis already had enough to keep them busy with Caddyshack. Their new film wasn’t just another writing job that would end when the script was completed; they were now also filmmakers—Kenney would be the producer, Ramis the director. It was a full-time commitment for at least the next year and a half. Still, they were intrigued by just how financially motivated Universal might be to get their hands on an Animal House sequel.

  In the February 26, 1979 issue of New York magazine, Kenney cockily tested their market value through the press. In a brief news article titled “Frat Brats Stand Pat,” Kenney says that he, Harold Ramis, and Chris Miller would be willing to work an Animal House sequel but only if they received significant raises: “Universal paid us $30,000 for the first script, which went through ten drafts,” he said. “We made the studio an offer for this one, but it only came back with one third.” According to the article, Kenney, Ramis, and Miller had requested $750,000. Kenney didn’t confirm that number, but he didn’t deny it either. “I won’t say what the figure is, but we’d do it for less than a million with point equity. Still, it’s not as much as we’re worth.”