Scott Colomby, who had appeared on the sitcom One Day at a Time and who would end up dating Morgan after Caddyshack wrapped, was quickly hired to play Danny Noonan’s Fonzie-like caddie adversary, Tony D’Annunzio. Hamilton Mitchell, a young, lanky aspiring LA actor came in and was so funny that they combined the roles of two caddies in the script and turned them into one for him named Motormouth. Dan Resin, a character actor best known for being the face of the toilet-freshening yachtsman the Ty-D-Bol Man, became the Porsche-driving Dr. Beeper. Veteran character actors Albert Salmi (Gunsmoke) and Elaine Aiken (The Spook Who Sat by the Door) were tapped to play Danny Noonan’s contraceptive-averse Irish-Catholic parents. And a nineteen-year-old theater performer named Peter Berkrot was recommended for the role of Angie D’Annunzio (the caddie at the other end of Bill Murray’s rusty pitchfork during the Dalai Lama speech) by Animal House’s Tom Hulce after they’d met at summer stock. “Wally Nicita called me and told me I was going to get $750 a week,” says Berkrot. “I remember saying, ‘I’ll take it!’ And she said, ‘Of course, you will.’”
John Barmon, who had never acted before (or since), got the part of “hamburger … no, cheeseburger”–craving brat grandson Spaulding Smails after his best friend’s agent remembered her client’s “fat friend.” Lois Kibbee, a longtime star of the soap opera The Edge of Night, became Judge Smails’s wife, who’s described in the script as looking like a “Wagnerian dowager.” Original Sha Na Na member (and future orthopedic surgeon to the LA Lakers) Scott Powell became a Bushwood club member named Gatsby. Jackie Davis, a jazz organist who played with Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, was cast as the golf-shoe-destroying Smoke Porterhouse (by now his name had been changed from “Westinghouse”). Dr. Dow, a soft-spoken philosophy professor at the University of Miami, became Al Czervik’s Wang. And Minerva Scelza, the granddaughter of the film’s Teamsters captain, was handed the role of pint-size, gender-bending tomboy Joey D’Annunzio.
Real-life husband and wife Kenneth and Rebecca Burritt became Bushwood’s elderly golfing couple, Mr. and Mrs. Havercamp (“That’s a peach, hon!”). Violet Ramis, the two-year-old daughter of the director, played the youngest Noonan child, imprisoned in a playpen. And at the opposite end of the age spectrum was seventy-four-year-old Henry Wilcoxon as Bishop Pickering, who gets struck by lightning during the greatest round of his life (even though “the heavy stuff isn’t gonna come down for quite a while”). Wilcoxon, who had been acting on screen since 1931, turned out to be the most delightful surprise to the other actors in the film. “I became very close to Henry and really miss him,” says Bill Murray. “We didn’t know who he was when we walked in the door. But he was one of the biggest deals in the world in the ’30s. He was the Laurence Olivier of the time. He was the original Marc Antony with Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra and he’s in The Ten Commandments. He was the one guy who I looked up to as an actor on the set.”
Since Ramis would be making his directorial debut on the film, he also wanted to fill out some of the more peripheral roles with friends—familiar and supportive faces that would make what was sure to be a stressful eleven weeks on set less isolating and lonely. Ann Ryerson, Ramis’s old Second City troupe colleague from back in Chicago in the early ’70s, played Grace, the female caddie whose Baby Ruth candy bar winds up in the Bushwood swimming pool, igniting the infamous “Doodie!” scene. And Brian McConnachie, a friend from the Lampoon days, along with his wife, Ann, played one the club’s so-called Fun Couples. When Ramis called him up to ask if he’d be interested in a small role in Caddyshack, McConnachie was just wrapping up his first season as a writer on Saturday Night Live. He was waiting to hear if he would be invited back for a second. “I finally got the call to come back to SNL and then I got the call from Harold asking if Ann and I wanted to be in this movie,” says McConnachie. “And I thought, This is the only time that this is ever going to happen to us. SNL will have to wait.” He adds, “We were supposed to do a scene where we go skinny-dipping in one of the water hazards on the golf course. It was our first movie and we had a nude scene. Not bad.”
With the cast coming together, what they now needed was a country club where they could be set loose.
8
Rolling Hills … and Action!
IN THE SUMMER OF 1979, while casting on Caddyshack was in full swing on the Warner Bros. lot, Harold Ramis began the needle-in-a-haystack process of finding a country club that would willingly swing its iron gates open to a Hollywood film crew. They knew it wouldn’t be easy, since the climax of the movie hinged on a massive, fairway-annihilating explosion that would seem more fitting in Apocalypse Now. But it was nothing that a little old-school Hollywood deceit wouldn’t be able to take care of. Both Ramis and Brian Doyle-Murray had always taken it as a given that they would find their Bushwood in their home state of Illinois, since the Indian Hill Club in Winnetka had been both the model and muse for their story from its inception. The studio had other ideas.
Orion was staring at an understocked cupboard of releases for the following summer, and if Mike Medavoy was going to get Caddyshack into theaters during that make-or-break season (as he desperately wanted to), Caddyshack would need to shoot in the fall—not exactly the ideal time to be making a sunny, short-sleeved golf comedy by Lake Michigan. Medavoy encouraged Ramis to look for a location in Southern California. That was a nonstarter for Ramis. Nervous enough already, the last thing he wanted on his first outing as a director was to have the studio swinging by and second-guessing every take and camera setup. It’s hard to make a comedy when you’re looking over your shoulder. The further they were from Hollywood, the more they would be able to make the movie they wanted to make. But it wasn’t only a matter of self-protection. Being so close to the nosey suits would also cut in on the fun. The search refocused to Florida. The biggest problem there, however, would be finding a golf course without palm trees and flamingos. If they weren’t going to shoot Caddyshack in the Midwest, they at least wanted it to look like the Midwest.
Rolling Hills would end up being an almost made-to-order compromise. Carved out of a 140-acre swamp in Davie, Florida, the eighteen-hole semi-private club seemed to be built with Caddyshack’s specific, idiosyncratic requirements in mind. Designed by renowned landscape architect William Mitchell in the late ’60s, Rolling Hills (now Grande Oaks Golf Club) was dreamed up as an antidote to the rash of identical golf courses that had been sprouting up like toadstools across southern Florida at the time. Mitchell had become bored by all of the samey subtropical flora found in the area. Instead, he planted tall oaks and Australian pines.
“We kind of picked Rolling Hills by default,” said Ramis. “We visited a lot of really nice country clubs and of course they didn’t want us because what good country club wants to shut down for a movie and have trucks and hundreds of people trampling the golf course? But this place agreed to let us shut down four holes at a time and the players could play around us.” As for the matter of the giant fireballs they were going to set off, Ramis told the Rolling Hills board not to worry, the script would be changing. That was a half-truth at best. Yes, the script would be changing, but not that part of it. What Ramis didn’t notice when he was walking the course, making certain there were no palm trees, was that Rolling Hills was directly under the final-approach flight path to the nearby Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and also that there was noisy condo construction going on nearby.
With their location locked in and their cast finally coming together, the producers recruited the last remaining members of their key crew. Ted Swanson had already been hired by Orion as Caddyshack’s production manager. Swanson’s previous job had been working on a two-hour Hawaii Five-O movie in Singapore. Before that, his biggest credit was on 1976’s Best Picture winner, Rocky, which he magically pulled off on a penny-pinching $1 million budget. Swanson was a pro, and a thrifty one at that. Since he was already based in Florida, he knew all of the local film and television crews and ended up hiring most of the below
-the-line technicians who had been left hanging after Jerry Lewis’s aborted comedy, That’s Life, was shut down nearby. Lewis’s financiers had simply run out of money just as cameras were to start rolling. Swanson would end up wearing two other hats on Caddyshack—as the film’s number-crunching line producer and as an uncredited golfer in the Bushwood pro shop when Rodney Dangerfield comes charging in and asks if customers get a free bowl of soup with an especially ugly hat.
One of Swanson’s most important hires on Caddyshack was Stan Jolley, the film’s production designer. Responsible for the overall look of the movie, Jolley had to design all of the sets, turn a run-down maintenance shed into the film’s caddie shack, and turn the main Rolling Hills clubhouse into an almost-exact replica of the one at Indian Hill back in Illinois. In the end, Rolling Hills would wind up essentially getting a free cosmetic facelift worth $175,000. Jolley, the son of Hollywood B-Western heavy I. Stanford Jolley, had got his start as a set designer at Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox in the early ’50s before being hired away by Walt Disney to help draft the original sketches for Disneyland in Anaheim—something that particularly impressed the nostalgia-obsessed Kenney. In the ’60s, he worked as an art director on such TV shows as Mister Ed, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Get Smart with its groovy opening-credits gauntlet of labyrinthine, 007-style doors.
The last piece of the puzzle, but the most important for an inexperienced director such as Ramis, was the film’s cinematographer. At forty-nine, Stevan Larner was a good fifteen to twenty years older than most of the cast and crew on the set of Caddyshack. His most impressive credit was that he had been one of the directors of photography on Terrence Malick’s 1973 outlaw road-movie masterpiece, Badlands. That, and the fact that he’d had a pre-Doors Jim Morrison as a student while teaching at UCLA film school. Michael O’Keefe had worked with Larner on 1978’s Gray Lady Down and says, “He was an old pro who’d been around forever; he was going to make sure someone like Harold got all of the shots he needed, especially the ones he didn’t know he needed.” That was all well and good, but Kenney would later confess that the real reason they hired Larner was that he was a connoisseur of fine wines. He reasoned that Larner’s highbrow tastes would give the film’s look a touch of class. Specious logic, at best. But in Doug Kenney’s mind, it somehow made perfect sense.
Though Kenney was the lead producer on the film, it was the first time he’d had any responsibilities on a movie set besides leading a marching band into a blind alley as he had on Animal House. Associate producer Donald MacDonald would end up becoming Caddyshack’s day-to-day problem solver, the person you went to not only when you had a question, but also needed an answer. When MacDonald had been hired by the Jon Peters Organization, he was given the option of working on either Caddyshack or the Robby Benson monkey movie—which was, of course, no choice at all.
MacDonald took an immediate shine to Kenney and Ramis (after all, he was the one who collared them in Jon Peters’s name after an early Animal House preview), and he seemed to go out of his way trying to protect them from his hard-charging, bombastic boss, who would mostly stay back in LA during the shoot. “Don was the only one at the company who had a real strong sense of story and a sense of film,” says Peters’s assistant Trevor Albert. “Everyone else was more of a hustler dealmaker. He was probably as important as anyone on Caddyshack.”
MacDonald and Albert joined Ramis and Kenney in Florida roughly eight weeks before shooting began on Caddyshack, supervising the construction of sets and juggling last-minute logistics. The first thing they did was set up a production office on the top floor of a low-rise, two-story brick motel adjacent to the Rolling Hills golf course, replete with rooms for editing, wardrobe, and makeup. The entire cast (except for Ted Knight, who was an early-to-bed-early-to-rise type and was given a rental home nearby) would live in the dormlike Rolling Hills lodge for the length of the shoot, turning the outdated digs into an unholy cross between a frat house, a love shack, and a twenty-four-hour drugstore. You could literally roll out of your bed (or someone else’s) and be in the makeup chair within five minutes.
Rusty Lemorande was MacDonald’s second in command on the set—the more senior Peters executive, Mark Canton, would come and go throughout filming. Relatively new to the nuts and bolts of on-location moviemaking, Lemorande looked around and became concerned by what he saw. “I was looking for all of the old mentors one would hire to assist an inexperienced director, and there were none,” he says. “But I just kept my mouth shut because the crew had already been hired and there was no changing it. I mean, if you were building a house with a first-time contractor because you like him or he’s a family member, you’d make sure that you had the best painters and the best carpenters just to be safe.”
With a script that still wasn’t finished as late as two weeks before filming started, a studio that was famous for its hands-off approach, a first-time director, and a less-than-detail-oriented first-time producer with a drug habit, what could possibly go wrong?
* * *
Most of the Caddyshack ensemble arrived in Davie, Florida, over Labor Day weekend, 1979—a week before cameras were slated to roll. Chevy Chase was scheduled to head down several weeks later because he was still up in Canada rolling his eyes and biting his tongue through the making of Oh! Heavenly Dog. As for Murray, it was more or less accepted that he would simply show up when he showed up. No one had a clue when that might be. When Ted Knight first arrived at Rolling Hills, he took one look at the place (with its manicured fairways and buildings having been tarted up with a fresh coat of paint from Stan Jolley’s crew) and exclaimed, “Gee, it’s so pretty … too bad we have to destroy it.” Rodney Dangerfield was less upbeat, calling Florida in late August “a sauna with gnats.”
While the actors were settling in, the production brought in PGA Tour pro John Cusano to try to make the actors’ collection of terrible golf swings look passable on film. “Aside from Michael O’Keefe and Bill Murray, they were all horrible,” said Ramis. “Ted had no swing, Dr. Beeper had no swing, Chevy didn’t have a real attractive swing. And Rodney, I don’t even know if you’d call what he was doing ‘golf’ in the literal sense. He took one lesson and said, ‘That’s it!’ and never went back.”
When Peter Berkrot arrived to play wiseass caddie Angie D’Annunzio on the Friday of the long Labor Day weekend, he remembers heading up to the business office on the second floor of the Rolling Hills lodge to let them know he was there. He stepped off the elevator and bumped into Knight. Knight smiled and introduced himself. The Mary Tyler Moore Show star was there to pick up a plane ticket back to LA. After a few minutes of small talk with Berkrot, Knight turned around and said goodbye to the business-office staff with the booming farewell, “Have a nice hurricane, guys!” Berkrot thought that Knight’s words were a bit cryptic. Maybe it was some sort of Old Hollywood saying to wish everyone good luck on the movie, like “Break a leg!” It wasn’t. Berkrot quickly learned that a Category 5 storm was rampaging their way, swirling up from the Dominican Republic with winds of up to 175 miles per hour. Tens of thousands of people were evacuating from the Florida Keys.
Everyone taped up the windows in their rooms to prevent them from shattering, filled their bathtubs with water, and stocked up on batteries and booze. Lots and lots of booze. “We all went out to dinner that night, and that’s when I fell in love with Doug Kenney,” recalls Berkrot. “I was sitting right opposite from him and he was so good at making you feel like you were the only one there. Our table was next to a lobster tank and he said, ‘In Korea, they have puppies in tanks.’” When they got back to the motel, some of them continued drinking and passing joints early into the next morning. “You couldn’t find a more fun group to party with,” says Ann Ryerson, who played Grace, one of the film’s caddies.
Hurricane David would end up causing more than $1.5 billion in damage, but it had been downgraded to a Category 2 storm by the time it reached the Fort Lauderdale area. A few of the Rolling H
ills sets were turned into kindling and the first floor of the motel had been flooded, leaving a plague of earthworms wriggling in the carpets of the ground-floor rooms. But all in all, they’d been spared David’s wrath. The hurricane party, however, was a roaring success. It would keep rolling for the next three months. Occasionally, a movie would break out.
“It was 1979,” said Ramis. “It was a pretty debauched country at the time. The cocaine business in South Florida was mammoth at the time and everyone was doing everything. I never judged it myself.”
* * *
Principal photography for Caddyshack began on the morning of Wednesday, September 5, 1979. Hurricane David had passed and was now running out of steam as it slowly made its way up the Eastern seaboard. It was a clear, sunny day in Davie, with temperatures that would reach a high of ninety-two degrees. For his first day on the job as a Hollywood director, Ramis showed up on set in a short-sleeved Lacoste shirt, tinted aviator glasses, and with little or no clue which way to point the camera. When first assistant director David Whorf asked about the initial setup, Ramis, feigning a confidence he didn’t yet possess, suggested shooting in a direction that would have resulted in hours of resetting, repositioning, and equipment-lugging. He’d just learned his first lesson as a director: When asked a question you don’t know the answer to, pretend to be collaborative, and respond: What do you think we should do? “They told me I had eleven weeks to shoot the film,” said Ramis. “I had no idea what that meant because I’d never directed before. If they told me I had eight weeks, I would have done it in eight weeks. If they said fifteen, I would have done fifteen. I didn’t know the difference.”
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