Caddyshack

by Chris Nashawaty

  The first day of shooting on any film is a time of frayed nerves and built-up anticipation. But by the first day on Caddyshack, the movie’s script had been changed so many times (at least five) that it resembled a fruit salad—a sheaf of rainbow pages bound together by brass fasteners. Since each new round of revisions gets printed on its own distinct color of paper, the screenplay the actors were working with was like a sorbet of white, blue, pink, yellow, and green pages. The first major acting sequence that would appear in the finished film revolves around the early-morning chaos of the crowded Noonan household. The following scene, where Danny rides his ten-speed across the train tracks (metaphor alert!) and past rows of mansions on his way to Bushwood, was filmed back in Pasadena. But the first scene that Ramis would actually shoot in Florida was one that would never even make it onto the screen: An earlier—and Carl Spackler-free—version of the Dalai Lama scene.

  The scene had been written as a brief exchange between an old caddie named Ray and Peter Berkrot’s Angie D’Annunzio, with the part of Ray given to an inexperienced local actor. “If I remember correctly, he had some sort of disability,” says Trevor Albert. “I don’t know if he was a veteran or something. But I think the appeal was that he seemed off. The problem was he couldn’t string two lines together. And that was such a brilliantly written speech, you didn’t want to fuck it up.” The local actor not only couldn’t act; he ended up being more off-putting than funny. He seemed like a shell-shocked vet dealing with PTSD. You were laughing at the character, not with him—and then you felt horrible and guilty for laughing at him.

  “The actor did a very poor job,” said Ramis. “As we were filming it I was thinking, I’m going to get fired. This guy’s horrible. They’re going to see this back in LA and I’m going to get canned.” When Ramis finally said cut, Brian Doyle-Murray walked over to the clearly rattled director and told him not to worry. Just move on to the next scene. When his brother Bill got there, they’d give the speech to him and reshoot it.

  Later on that first day, Ramis filmed a comic fight scene between two caddies in Lou Loomis’s caddie shack, where a gumball machine gets knocked over and shatters, spilling its contents across the floor. Ramis shot the scene over and over again. With each minor tweak and inner deliberation, valuable time was running out. The scene wasn’t nearly as important as the sweat he was pouring into it. A more experienced director would have simply said that’s good enough and moved on to the next setup. Soon, the cast began to gently rib Ramis about how unseasoned he was. Says Michael O’Keefe, “The joke we’d always make is we’d come on the set and say, ‘Harold, you’re looking into the wrong end of the camera. That’s actually the lens!’ We were just giving him shit.”

  Ever the good sport, Ramis laughed along. “I was so nervous that when we sent our first dailies off to the lab to be processed I was afraid it would come back and there wouldn’t be an image,” he said. “Anything beyond that was gravy.” Outwardly, Ramis was the picture of take-it-in-stride mellow composure. He’d later say that he had a mantra on the film that he kept repeating to himself in order to keep his sanity: “It’s not my money.” Sure, deep down, he knew he was an amateur slightly out of his depth. But that didn’t mean he wanted everyone else on the set to think that, too.

  Meanwhile, Donald MacDonald thought back to the list of directors that Peters had asked him to put together in case they needed to replace Ramis. He was praying that Peters had forgotten about it. Especially since he hadn’t even shot his scenes with the actor who undoubtedly had the least experience and the most neuroses.

  9

  Rappin’ Rodney

  FROM THE BEGINNING, Rodney Dangerfield had always been the wild card. At fifty-seven, the stand-up comic looked at least ten years older, and had been performing on and off since 1940. He’d logged some hard miles on the road. Hollywood, with its cushy movie-star pampering, might as well have been Mars to him. In a long, itinerant career that took him from the small-time “Jewish Alps” resorts of the Catskills to the three-shows-a-night Naugahyde pseudo-glitz venues off of the Las Vegas strip to, finally, the rarefied high altitude of The Tonight Show, Dangerfield had never really entertained the idea of a career in film. Who would pay to look at a mug like his writ large on the silver screen?

  In his four rocky decades in show business, Dangerfield had appeared in only one feature film—an obscure 1971 no-budget comedy called The Projectionist. In it, Dangerfield plays a tough-talking Brylcreemed cinema owner named Renaldi, who torments a daydreaming Walter Mitty–ish employee (Chuck McCann). The film opened and closed in New York and San Francisco without anyone’s noticing, which suited Dangerfield just fine. Years later he would joke that the film was so bad “they showed it on an airplane and people were walking out of the theater.”

  But now that he was experiencing a miraculous late-career surge, maybe it was time to leverage his newfound popularity and see what this acting racket was all about. Caddyshack seemed like an ideal showcase, made to order for his unique brand of off-the-cuff patter. Not only did the filmmakers make their fandom flatteringly plain to him, they seemed to understand his limitations and weren’t remotely put off by them. The character of Al Czervik, a superrich vulgarian blowhard condominium developer, didn’t have a lot of lines in the first draft of the script. But, if anything, that made Dangerfield more confident about accepting the part. It was a juicy, glorified cameo. He didn’t have to carry the movie; he could be carried by it, popping into the frame, dropping a couple of crass, rim-shot one-liners, and waltzing off as suddenly as he appeared. He thought, I can do this.

  Dangerfield’s first scene in Caddyshack comes midway through the first act, when he pulls up to Bushwood in a fire-engine-red Rolls Royce with custom CZERVIK Illinois plates and a horn that blares “We’re in the Money.” With his silent, Nikon-snapping stereotype sidekick Wang riding shotgun, he steps out of the convertible like a Tex Avery sight gag, wearing a white golf hat, red leisure slacks, a white belt fighting a losing battle with his gut, a lime-green shirt, and a rainbow cardigan sweater. He peels off a gaudy tip for the valet from an obscene knot of bills and instructs him to “park my car, get my bags, and gain some weight, will ya?” As the hard-charging bull walks into the Bushwood pro shop, Czervik turns to his pal and cracks, “I think this place is restricted, Wang, so don’t tell ’em you’re Jewish. Okay? Fine.”

  Ramis and his crew had spent the morning of Dangerfield’s first day of work dressing the set. Brian Doyle-Murray had become a stickler on making every aspect of Bushwood—even a place as incidental and unimportant as the pro shop—look as authentic as possible. Each set was like a diorama replicating his youth, like his own personal Rosebud. For Dangerfield’s first shot on the film, the comedian was supposed to wait behind a door until Ramis said “Action.” Then he would barrel in to the pro shop with Wang as if he owned the joint, introduce himself, and rattle off all of the pricey equipment he wanted to buy (ten of this, twenty of this, “the whole schmear”). Finally, out of the corner of his eye he would spot a mannequin wearing an ugly, pastel-striped golf hat and say, “This is the worst-looking hat I ever saw.” Meanwhile, just behind him, off to Dangerfield’s right, Knight’s Judge Smails, wearing the very hat, fumes a slow-burn for the ages. Dangerfield notices and says, “Oh, it looks good on you, though,” as he turns his head and rolls his big bug eyes.

  That’s it.

  On the first take, however, it didn’t go quite as planned. Not even close. When Ramis rolled the camera, hit the clappers, and called “Action,” Dangerfield just stood there like a redwood. Ramis got up from his chair and walked over to Rodney and asked if there was a problem. Was he ready to do the scene? “Sure,” Dangerfield replied. Ramis returned to his chair, sat down, and again called “Action.” Nothing. Ramis went back over to where Dangerfield was standing and said, “Rodney, when I call ‘Action,’ that’s your cue to come in and do the scene.”

  “You mean, do my bit?”

  “Yes, do you
r bit.”

  Ramis again went back to his chair and called “Action.” Crickets. Ramis laughed incredulously, and said, “OK, Rodney, now do your bit!” Dangerfield barged into the room and nailed it, even shoehorning in a hilarious line that he improvised on the spot: “You buy a hat like this, I bet you get a free bowl of soup.…” From that point on, Ramis stopped saying “Action” before all of Rodney’s scenes. He would just call out, “OK, Rodney, do your bit.” Ramis had finally found someone with less experience than himself.

  After the pro shop scene was done, Scott Colomby, who played Tony D’Annunzio, remembers Dangerfield sitting off to the side alone, stewing. He looked sweaty and haunted. When Colomby asked him what was wrong, Dangerfield said, “Nobody’s laughing at me. I’m bombing out there!” Colomby assured him that he wasn’t bombing at all; it was just that the crew wasn’t allowed to laugh. They’d ruin the take. Dangerfield was so used to getting instant feedback from the two-drink-minimum crowds he held in the palm of his hand that he hadn’t even considered that as a possibility. “He was very, very nervous,” says Cindy Morgan. “I remember we had lunch together one day, just the two of us, and he was tugging at his collar just like he does in his act, saying, ‘How am I doin’? How am I doin’?’ And I said, ‘Rodney, you’re stealing it.’ He wasn’t getting that instant reaction and it was throwing him completely. Hearing people laugh was how he’d always gauged his timing. People who are funny are the most insecure people in the world.”

  Ramis began to set aside time on the nights before Dangerfield’s scene to cater to his star’s neuroses. Together, they’d comb over his lines trying to make them better, funnier. Dangerfield would later say that he’d stay up late every night coming up with twenty new jokes for the next day’s scenes. Because of his own Second City training, Ramis welcomed Dangerfield’s last-minute suggestions. His star may have seemed green in front of the camera, but he was a perfectionist. “Rodney needed every word, every syllable in place, every comma, every period,” said Ramis.

  “Rodney couldn’t act,” says Chevy Chase. “I remember we shot a master shot on the eighteenth green with five or six of us standing there, and you have to do your lines the same every time. And he had some joke he put in there and then when they did the close-up, he said something different. You can’t do that! It has to cut together. He was not familiar with how movies are made.”

  While Ramis was shooting each day, his editor, William Carruth, was cutting together the film’s dailies. Carruth was a third-generation editor who’d grown up on movie sets. He’d been a child actor in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and The Night of the Hunter. His father, Richard, had been the music editor on West Side Story and Marilyn Monroe’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Carruth had got his start as an editor assisting the legendary Verna Fields on Paper Moon and Jaws. His first credit as a chief editor was on Peter Bogdanovich’s 1976 comedy about the early days of Hollywood, Nickelodeon. Like Ramis, Kenney, and the rest of the film’s young, laid-back crew, Carruth was a bit of a hippie maverick who wasn’t immune to the joys of recreational marijuana use. He fit right into the rules-were-made-to-be-broken vibe on Ramis’s set.

  The Caddyshack production department had set up a small editing suite and screening room on the top floor of the motel next to Rolling Hills, where the celluloid that had already been processed hung like strands of spaghetti for Carruth to splice together. Dailies are the most obvious way to judge how well a movie shoot is going, but not an infallible one. They are simply the results of the previous day’s footage that have come back from the processing lab. They’re generally screened both on location by the director and his crew as well as back at the studio in LA, where nervous executives are trying to divine how things are coming along—or not coming along.

  In Florida, gathering to watch dailies was like a nightly party. Ramis, with his relaxed, egalitarian attitude, welcomed pretty much anyone who wanted to sit in. “There was an openness to it,” says Rusty Lemorande. “With Harold and Doug’s personalities, anyone who was interested could come and watch. Nothing was hidden.” And nothing was discouraged, either. The air in the screening room during dailies would get so hazy with pot smoke that some of the older crew members stopped attending. Everyone who stuck around would end up laughing their asses off, usually at Dangerfield’s scenes. Every time he opened his mouth it was like a tommy-gun blast of outrageous, ad-libbed shtick. Shrapnel and spent shell casings seemed to fly from the screen. Three thousand miles away, both Jon Peters and Mike Medavoy, who rarely agreed about anything, told Ramis that he needed to give Dangerfield more scenes right away.

  * * *

  Ramis and Kenney were still waiting on both Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, so it made sense to front-load the scenes with the young actors playing the slack-doofus caddies on the early part of the schedule. Joining them on the set was a new and not entirely welcome face. Despite Mike Medavoy’s laissez-faire philosophy about policing his studio’s filmmakers, the Orion head wasn’t irresponsible. You don’t just write $6 million checks without keeping some sort of eye on your investment. So the studio sent one of its veteran production managers down to Florida to see how things were going and report back.

  George Justin was a no-nonsense sixty-three-year-old Hollywood lifer who’d served as a cameraman on Army training films during WWII. In his long and storied behind-the-scenes career, Justin had been a test director for George Cukor during the endless casting of Gone With the Wind. He’d been a production manager on classic films such as On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd, and The Graduate. And he had been the vice president of production management at Paramount during its heyday in the early and mid-’70s. He was the definition of a hard-bitten Tinseltown troubleshooter—a battle-ax who made sure that his films stayed on schedule and on budget.

  It had quickly become clear to everyone that Ramis was a collaborative sort of director. If someone had an idea how to make a scene better, a suggestion that might make a mediocre joke funnier, or even an inspired notion for something that wasn’t in the script, he wanted to hear it. It was the sort of “Yes, and…” thinking that had served him well back at Second City. During the filming of a sequence that would later be cut from the film, where a bunch of caddies arrive for work by bus at Bushwood, Jon Peters’s executive in charge of production, Rusty Lemorande, had the idea of having them all try to push their way out of the bus door at the same time, causing a Three Stooges sort of bottleneck. Ramis liked the juvenile absurdity of the idea and shot the scene just as Lemorande had described it. “It was a total whim and Harold did it,” says Lemorande. “That was the kind of process that happened on that film. Without that process, it wouldn’t be that film.”

  George Justin, however, had overheard the conversation between Lemorande and Ramis—and he wasn’t pleased. Soon, Lemorande found himself being chewed out by Justin. Lemorande was a lowly associate producer, and it wasn’t his place to collaborate with the director as he had. It was simply unprofessional.

  “Normally when you make a movie, once you lock the script, you shoot the script like the blueprint of a building,” Lemorande says. “You don’t start messing around with the blueprint. Well, we were messing with the blueprint all through shooting. If you had a good idea—or even a bad idea—you could bring it to Harold right on the set, and if he liked it, he’d use it. It was an open forum of ideas.” Two days later, Justin was satisfied enough with what he’d seen and the pace of the film’s progress that he went back to Los Angeles. Lemorande went back to offering more suggestions.

  Like the rest of the cast, the young actors playing the caddies would see most of their scenes completely rewritten at the last minute or just scrapped all together. Most of them were so inexperienced they just assumed that this was how movies were made: You spend weeks learning the script and then it gets tossed out. “A lot of us caddies had much bigger parts in the script,” says Ann Ryerson. “Especially Scott Colomby. I thought going in that the movie would be much more about the s
taff than those that they served. It shifted because Rodney was turning out to be so great. You have to follow the funny.”

  John Barmon, who played Ted Knight’s spoiled louse grandson, Spaulding, recalls getting script revisions so frequently that they ran out of new colors for the pages. “I think after a while they just gave up on it,” he says. But he and the other young novice actors were having too much fun to complain. “We had cars at our disposal and money in our pockets; we’d drive around Broward County and hit on local girls and bring them back to the set. Well, Scott Colomby didn’t so much; he was dating Valerie Bertinelli at the time, and she came down.” Barmon says that the Spaulding character was entirely a Doug Kenney creation. “Doug would kind of get upset with me when I didn’t understand the lines he wrote for me,” he says. “I had no idea what ‘Ahoy Polloi’ meant. He kept telling me, ‘Spaulding wouldn’t do that!’ But Harold was the one who fed me one of my best lines. We were shooting the dinner dance scene, and he told me right before the camera started rolling to lean over and ask one of the diners, ‘Are you going to eat your fat?’ He loved to just set off these little unscripted firecrackers in every scene.”

  The caddies quickly discovered that Dangerfield, the very man who was in the process of elbowing them out of the movie, was more comfortable hanging out with them than his more age-appropriate costars. They had certain recreational habits in common.

  “I’ll tell you a story about Rodney,” says Peter Berkrot, who played Angie D’Annunzio, one of the caddies. “I was on my way back from someone’s room; it must have been around eleven at night. Back in 1979, there were basically only three kinds of pot. If you had enough money you got Thai stick, but we mostly got stuck with the stuff where you had to break it apart and clean out the seeds. And I had a tray with my weed walking through the lobby and saw Rodney and quickly went and hid my weed in my room. When I came back, he said, ‘Was that weed? You don’t have to hide that. I love weed. You know what I love more than weed? Coke.’ I thought he was doing a bit, but we found out he wasn’t. The only person who didn’t take drugs on the movie was Ted Knight,” he quipped.