Caddyshack

by Chris Nashawaty

  While work on a second draft of the Caddyshack script began, Kenney found himself looking for a new home. Two of them, actually. He and Kathryn Walker had decided to look for a house together in the Hollywood Hills—somewhere that they could settle down and begin a grown-up life together. Kenney, who was revving fast on work, cocaine, and late nights, yearned for a sense of stability. He eventually purchased a home at 2761 Outpost Drive, just off Mulholland, near Runyon Canyon Park. The white stucco house sits atop a narrow, snaky road lined with eucalyptus trees and tucked-away houses. It was an adult purchase. A place to put down roots. Tellingly, he left it almost completely unfurnished for the next year and a half—minimalism taken to the extreme. He would throw parties there where famous guests such as James Taylor and Joni Mitchell could find no place to sit. Kenney was good at impulse decisions, less so at follow-through.

  The second home was a more professional and psychological one. Ever since Kenney had arrived on the West Coast, he had been adrift and unfocussed. He was the kind of person who walked around with a whirlwind of creative ideas in his head, but no outlet to channel them. His friend Lucy Fisher, who was still dating Kenney’s best friend from Harvard, Peter Ivers, was now a successful movie studio executive. She and Ivers had been overjoyed when Kenney told them he was leaving the Lampoon and moving to LA. And they enjoyed seeing him once he was there. But they were aware that they were only spending time with daylight Doug. There was also an after-hours Doug who ran with a druggier crowd. “He had another life that we weren’t aware of,” says Fisher. “We just thought, Oh, he’s being an asshole; he’s doing too much coke.”

  Lucy Fisher had climbed up the studio ladder rapidly, which was especially impressive since the glass ceiling in Hollywood was still suffocatingly low for women in the late ’70s. By the time Kenney arrived in LA, she had just moved from MGM to 20th Century Fox, where she was a VP whom the press had dubbed one of the town’s new “baby moguls.” Still flush with Star Wars riches, Fox was about to have an impressive year in 1979 with such films as Norma Rae, Alien, Breaking Away, and All That Jazz. Sensing that Kenney needed some discipline for all of his manic energy, Fisher encouraged him to set up a production company at her studio. She thought she could protect him there.

  Kenney’s agent, John Ptak, brokered a two-year deal that teamed Kenney with Alan Greisman and Michael Shamberg, two producers Kenney already knew socially. They weren’t excessive partiers like so many of the other people he had met in LA; they were well-read intellectuals. Kenney’s new partners had recently begun shooting a Nick Nolte–Sissy Spacek drama about Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady called Heart Beat. The marriage wasn’t particularly lucrative (according to the William Morris booking slip for the deal, the three split $117,000 annually, with more money to come with each green-lighted project), but it felt secure and safe. Plus, Kenney had always worked best when he had other people in the room to bounce his ideas off of, as he had at the Lampoon and on Animal House. When left alone with his own mad torrent of thoughts, as he was on Martha’s Vineyard while writing Teenage Commies from Outer Space, it didn’t go as well. He would become unmoored. Perhaps Greisman and Shamberg would be able to anchor Kenney. They might even persuade him to direct one of the films they developed. The new partners called their venture Three Wheel Productions. To celebrate, Kenney mocked up new company stationery whose logo showed a Tinseltown smoothie in gold chains leaning against a Jaguar sports car with the company’s unofficial motto underneath: “See You in Court!”

  Three Wheel Productions was given an office on the Fox lot just down the hallway from Lawrence Kasdan, Barry Levinson, and Mel Brooks, who was considered studio royalty at the time. “I remember one day bringing Doug to meet Mel Brooks,” says Lucy Fisher. “Mel said, ‘Oh, this is the new thing!’ Like, I’m the King and now these guys might be the kings.” Clearly, Brooks not only knew who Doug Kenney was; he was also aware that Animal House had just knocked Brooks’s Blazing Saddles from the record books. One of the earliest projects that Kenney put into motion at Three Wheel was a comedy set at a swinging Club Med–style resort in the Caribbean titled Club Sandwich. The idea had been generated by Kenney’s Animal House cowriter and old Lampoon friend, Chris Miller, who would be writing the screenplay with a former colleague of Harold Ramis’s from Playboy, David Standish.

  Michael Shamberg recalls marveling at Kenney’s seemingly effortless ability to pull fully formed ideas out of the air. “It just came to him like jazz,” he says. But Shamberg also could see that there was a dangerous side to Kenney, too. “I had people over at my apartment in West Hollywood one time, and Doug just laid out this serpentine line of coke on the table. They were doing just as much illicit substances after SNL shows as they were in Hollywood. I think every generation thinks they discovered drugs for the first time. But this drug was cocaine. And he was doing a lot of it.”

  Still, Shamberg insists that Kenney’s coke habit never affected his work at Three Wheel. “He wasn’t doing it at the office,” he says. “Plus, Greisman and I were doing it occasionally too. So it wasn’t like our hands were clean. It was just a drug to fuel his creativity. It was more in social situations, you know, Young Hollywood. For people of a certain generation out here it was very pervasive at the time. It wasn’t like taking OxyContin where you just nod out. The thinking was, I’m going to get more done and be more creative. No one had died yet. And there was no one to say stop.”

  * * *

  By mid-May 1979, Kenney, Ramis, and Doyle-Murray had turned in their third draft of the Caddyshack script. It was certainly shorter—now a svelte 135 pages instead of a bloated two hundred—but even though the story was beginning to come into focus, it was still fuzzy around the edges. For example, there are several characters with speaking parts who would end up never appearing in the film at all. There’s a scene between a pair of caddies named Feeb (who’s described as “twitchy” and “with a hint of mental deficiency”) and Injun Joe (“a big silent Indian of indeterminate age” and clearly a nod to the mute Native American character that Will Sampson played in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

  There’s also Ray, “an old, professional caddie wearing a dirty golf cap with an emblem from the 1946 Buick Open,” who has a conversation early on in the script with Goofy, “a gawky bespectacled sixteen year old” caddie. Ray tells a truncated and less than memorable version of the infamous Dalai Lama story that would later be given to Caddyshack’s demented assistant greenskeeper, Carl Spackler, who is still nowhere to be found in the third draft:

  RAY

  I jumped a ship in Hong Kong and made my way to Tibet where I got on as a looper at this golf club up there in the Himalayan Mountains.

  GOOFY

  A looper?

  RAY

  A caddie—a jock! So I tell ‘em I’m a pro, so who do they give me? The Dalai Lama himself—flowin’ white robes and everything. So I give him his driver and he tees off—right into this glacier and his ball goes down this 10,000 foot crevice. And you know what the Dalai Lama says?

  GOOFY

  No.

  RAY

  ‘Shit.’ Yeah—‘Shit!’ And you know what else. I’m full of shit. Yeah.

  The May 1979 script is just as undercooked in other sections. The seduction scene between Danny Noonan and Lacey Underall is, at this point, a trippy, psychedelic sequence where she gives him a hit of the drug MDA before they have sex, leading to a silly fantasia of hallucinations. The African-American Bushwood employee Smoke Porterhouse who power-sands the wax buildup off of Judge Smails’s golf shoes has the less evocative name Westinghouse. There’s a totally out-of-place and pointlessly lengthy action sequence in which three of the caddies attempt to steal a shipment of television sets at the harbor. And the Scottish greenskeeper, Sandy McFiddish (who’s barely a walk-on cameo in the finished film), is the one who battles the nefarious Bushwood gopher. But it’s not even a gopher. At this point, it’s a mole.

  Danny, Maggie, and Tony D’Annunzio ar
e still the central characters in the film. Al Czervik’s name is still Czernak. On the plus side, however, the caddies do bet on whether or not Spaulding will eat his own boogers (“Fifty dollars the Smails kid picks his nose”). A showering Mrs. Smails unwittingly asks Danny: “Will you loofah my stretchmarks?” The caddies break into an impromptu water ballet in the club’s swimming pool. And the Baby Ruth “Doodie!” scene is still intact, which makes sense, since the incident was actually based on something that happened at Brian Doyle-Murray’s Catholic high school. By the end, Ty Webb and Lacey Underall end up together. Danny wins enough money to go to college. And the last scene of the film has him saying goodbye to his family at the airport on his way to college … until he sees a gorgeous girl getting on an Air Jamaica flight with a golf bag, and he follows her instead.

  It’s a funny-enough script, but not Caddyshack funny. It’s 50 percent of the way there at best. Ramis, Kenney, and Doyle-Murray knew it, too. But they weren’t particularly concerned about it. All three of the writers planned to be on the set every day once they started shooting. And two of them—Ramis and Doyle-Murray—had years of improv training at Second City under their belts. If worse came to worst, they could always write and rewrite on the spot.

  With shooting slated to start around Labor Day, it was time to forget about it and move on to the next obstacle: casting.

  7

  Finally, Some Respect

  ALTHOUGH THE CREATIVE TEAM behind Caddyshack had already been working on the script for half a year, the project became official on June 25, 1979. That’s the day when Caddyshack was first publicly announced in the industry trade paper Variety. If you read between the lines, there seemed to be something a bit calculated about the timing. Surely Jon Peters could have placed the item with the press sooner. But perhaps by waiting as long as he did, he was in some small way trying to steal some of the thunder surrounding another high-profile project that was about to start shooting on July 1—John Landis’s The Blues Brothers.

  As both films were being pushed through the Hollywood development pipeline, a friendly rivalry had begun to form. In the wake of Animal House, it suddenly felt as if the main players of that movie had split into two distinct camps: Caddyshack versus The Blues Brothers. John Landis, John Belushi, and the Animal House executive team at Universal (Thom Mount and Sean Daniel) were about to head to Chicago to tell the musical, mission-from-God odyssey of Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues, while Doug Kenney and Harold Ramis had their little class-warfare country club comedy. Both were tentatively slated to hit theaters sometime in the summer of 1980. As far as the Caddyshack team was concerned, though, they were the underdogs. It was a position that, frankly, they preferred. After all, Universal had opened its vault and given Landis a staggeringly large budget of $17 million (it would grow quite a bit larger), while Orion had tightly capped the Caddyshack budget at $6 million. Despite the film’s enviable Animal House provenance and pedigree, Orion still very much considered Caddyshack a B movie.

  Most big studio pictures are cast about three months ahead of shooting. And in June, Kenney reached out to his casting-director friend, Wallis Nicita, to see if she would be interested in coming on board and assembling the actors for his new film.

  “I knew Doug socially very well because his girlfriend, Kathryn Walker, was a good friend of mine,” says Nicita. “My then-husband, Rick Nicita, was her agent. We all socialized together.” In fact, the Nicitas had been present during the infamous New Year’s Eve inferno at the Sherry-Netherland in New York six months earlier. Nicita was five months pregnant when she began working on the film. She did it not only as a favor to Kenney but also because she’d read the script and thought it was hilarious, even if, Nicita says, “It wasn’t Paddy Chayefsky and I wasn’t thrilled about the way women were portrayed in it.”

  Nicita was given a vacant office on the Warner Bros. lot adjacent to Kenney, Ramis, and Doyle-Murray’s writing bungalow. Thirty-two at the time, Nicita had made a name for herself by training under the best in her business, working in the office of Hollywood star makers Marion Dougherty and Juliet Taylor—two giants in the world of casting. In their own way, they had been as responsible as anyone for the rise of the New Hollywood in the late ’60s and early ’70s, redefining what movie stars could look like. Dougherty had more or less discovered Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, and Warren Beatty, plucking them out of New York’s off-Broadway theaters and giving them their earliest flashes on celluloid. Taylor, her protégée, would cast more than thirty Woody Allen movies. Nicita was one of their most eagle-eyed disciples. She knew that a film like Caddyshack required fresh faces and out-of-the-box thinking, especially given its relatively small budget.

  Nicita broke down the script, identified all the main parts, and sent it out to all of the top agents and managers in her bicoastal network and waited for submissions. She then culled the candidates down to just a handful for each role and set up meetings with the hopefuls. Thanks to Kenney and Ramis’s recent triumph with Animal House, she had an added bit of leverage when it came to attracting the most in-demand actors. “Doug and Harold had a lot of clout at that moment,” she says. “They were the darlings of the town. We had all come out from New York and it really felt a little like Camelot.”

  Both Ramis and Kenney were learning about the mysterious art of casting as they went. Neither had been through this Byzantine process before. With its intangible factors of charisma, chemistry, and box-office clout, it felt a bit like going on a series of blind dates. Still, Ramis knew that their top priority was pinning down the bankable A-list star that Orion had insisted upon from day one. “With any big movie, you need a million-dollar player, a headliner,” said Ramis. They needed Chevy.

  When Kenney approached his friend about being in Caddyshack, Chase told him that he was interested, but that there might be a scheduling problem. When Caddyshack was scheduled to begin shooting, he would probably still be working on his next movie, Oh! Heavenly Dog. The soft-boiled canine caper was an odd career choice for someone who was trying to establish himself as a serious actor (and who was well on his way after earning a Golden Globe nomination for Foul Play, which had made $45 million at the box office). Chase seemed to already know that his dog movie would most likely turn out to be unwatchable crap, but he was human. They’d hooked him with an insanely large paycheck.

  Somewhat desperate, Kenney told Chase that they could probably shoot around him for the first two weeks if that’s what it would take to get him to sign on. Plus, it wasn’t like they were exactly paying him scale. It would be another fat payday for Chase. After working with a dog on a film that would, no doubt, be a dog, Chase liked the idea of spending some time on a movie set with friendly faces and kindred spirits who could make him laugh. Plus, he liked the idea of mocking the sport.

  “I’d never gone for golf; I was more of a tennis player,” says Chase. “My father told me to stay away from Republicans on golf courses, because they just wasted the day so they could stay away from their families. And I felt the same way. I mean, what the hell was that? Walking around like it was some kind of an aerobic sport!”

  * * *

  Once Chase signed on, the Caddyshack team moved on to the next high-profile role to be filled: Al Czervik. For the flashy part of the film’s superwealthy, insult-spewing bull in a china shop, Ramis had originally been thinking of reaching out to Don Rickles, who could turn anyone unlucky enough to fall into his trash-talking crosshairs into trembling, sobbing jelly. “He had the right obnoxiousness,” said Ramis. But by the summer of 1979, Rodney Dangerfield was in the midst of an incredible run of volcanic guest appearances on The Tonight Show, often reducing Johnny Carson to a slumped, convulsive fool behind his desk, wiping tears from his eyes because he was laughing so hard. “He was just killing it every time he went on,” said Ramis.

  Dangerfield would bring his bug-eyed, collar-tugging, “No Respect” loser act to The Tonight Show thirty-six times. “I remember going in to see Doug and
Harold when they were working on the script and saying, ‘Dangerfield was on The Tonight Show last night and he was hysterical,’” says Nicita. “And I remember Doug saying, ‘You know, I think he could do it.’ The idea of Rodney rolling in there and doing his Rodney thing, they liked.”

  Dangerfield’s renaissance during the ’70s was one of those quirky show-business flukes. At the time, unconventional stand-ups such as Steve Martin, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Andy Kaufman were the new flavor—the ones who were connecting with baby boomers who’d grown sick of the safe-as-kittens, hardy-har-har Bob Hope comedy they’d been force-fed growing up. With his self-deprecating, quick-hit one-liners and sweaty, high-strung delivery, Dangerfield was reminiscent of that same bygone era that belonged to the Borscht Belt comedians who prowled the smoky stages of seedy third-rate rooms in Las Vegas and the Catskills. But Dangerfield’s style was more subversive than he ever let on. He was an old-school comic slyly commenting on old-school comics, turning them upside down. That meta approach would resonate with young college students.

  Born Jacob Cohen in Babylon, Long Island, Dangerfield was the son of a comic and juggler who used the stage name Phil Roy as he toured the vaudeville circuit. He abandoned the family when Dangerfield was just a child, leaving him to deliver groceries and sell ice cream on the beach to help out his single mother. The hard-luck tales in his act cut deeper than he’d ever acknowledge. Dangerfield began working as a comedian at seventeen under the name Jack Roy—a nod of respect to a father who didn’t deserve any. Soon, he was performing onstage at Jewish resorts in upstate New York for twelve dollars a week. In 1951, after meeting his first wife, Joyce, he gave up show business and started a family, supporting them as an aluminum-siding salesman. In the early ’60s, he decided to give stand-up comedy one last stab and took on the name Rodney Dangerfield, thinking that if he failed again under a pseudonym the rejection might sting less. After booking a slot on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967, Dangerfield was such a hit that he became a regular guest. The audience that had ignored him the first time around had caught up. He finally became a star at forty-four.