After the day wrapped, the producers took the cast out to dinner. There were maybe twenty or thirty people there. All through the meal, Doug Kenney kept needling Morgan for not having done the high dive. She couldn’t tell if he was joking or genuinely upset. She knew that Lacey wouldn’t have let it bother her, but it was making her feel self-conscious. Then, midway through the meal, some new actor came in and sat at the other end of the table. She couldn’t place him, nor was she particularly trying to. When dinner ended, everyone went back to the Rolling Hills lodge. Morgan was tired after a long, stressful day and retired to her room. Then, she says, “there was a knock at my door. I opened it and it was that new actor from the end of the table. He said, ‘Do you want to get out of here?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ I woke up the next morning on a nude beach in Jupiter, Florida. And that’s how I met Bill Murray.…”
11
Total Consciousness
LIKE ALL STORIES worth telling, this one begins with a stolen VW bug. Well, not stolen, exactly. Bill Murray had recently finished shooting his Hunter Thompson movie, Where the Buffalo Roam, in Los Angeles. He was tired and restless and felt the need to get off the grid. He knew that he had to report for duty on the Florida set of Caddyshack soon (although he’d purposely left his arrival date vague), and he also knew that his Saturday Night Live boss, Lorne Michaels, had a car in LA that he’d been talking about shipping to New York. Murray thought he’d save him the headache. He told Michaels that he would drive his Volkswagen Super Beetle to Manhattan when he came back for the show’s new season in the fall. It seemed so sensible. Problem was, Murray didn’t bother telling his boss about certain detours he’d planned on taking.
“Occasionally, I would hear from Bill on the road,” Michaels said later. “He’d be in Florida, and I’d say, ‘But Bill—is Florida on the way?’ Or a week later, he’d be in Aspen and I’d say, ‘But Bill.…’ It took all summer to get the Beetle, but Bill had installed a stereo.”
By the time Murray steered Michaels’s VW through the gates of Rolling Hills in October of 1979, about midway through production, Ramis had already been worrying for days. Where was Bill? Had anyone heard from Bill? It was simply the cost of doing business with such a magnificent flake. Ramis had known that this was a possibility going in. Murray brought an exciting air of imminent mischief wherever he went, regardless of whenever he arrived. He was a once-in-a-generation kind of talent to whom the rules simply didn’t seem to apply. Whenever he was onstage or in front of a camera, he didn’t know how to not be interesting. But still, where the hell was he?
After parking Michaels’s car, Murray spotted a Caddyshack production assistant sitting in a golf cart and asked if he could get a lift to the set. A few minutes later, the crew noticed something coming around a bunker. Ramis could finally breathe. As the golf cart pulled up with his MIA star, Murray leaned out of the shotgun side and announced, “Which way to the youth hostel?” Ramis and Murray hugged and slapped each other on the back. He was excited to catch up with his brother Brian and Doug Kenney. But that would have to wait. Ramis had Murray for only six short days.
Before Murray even arrived in Davie, there had been buzz around the set about what to expect from the mercurial comedian. Murray was known for his short, unpredictable fuse and stormy moods. “Any problems I’ve had with Bill over the years have nothing to do with the quality of his work,” said Ramis. “He’s just a moody guy, and sometimes it’s difficult to work around those moods.” Back at 30 Rock, Dan Aykroyd had even come up with a name for Bill’s rages: The Murricane.
For proof of just how violent The Murricane could be, all you had to do was flash back to February 18, 1978. Lorne Michaels had invited Chevy Chase to return and guest-host Saturday Night Live, the show he had turned his back on just two years earlier. Chase had just wrapped his first big Hollywood film, Foul Play, during which he’d briefly fallen for his costar, Goldie Hawn. Chase was nervous about returning to his old stomping grounds, but also completely oblivious to all of the ill will that had built up against him since he’d left. He didn’t know if he’d be treated as a traitor or hailed as a conquering hero.
As the week’s writing and rehearsal periods went on, Chase began to throw his weight around behind the scenes, wielding his fame like a cudgel and big-footing other performers. Tensions had been simmering just under the surface all week. All of the unsaid feelings and unfinished business finally came to a head right before the dress rehearsal on Saturday. Chase was sitting in the office of writers Al Franken and Tom Davis when Murray stormed in and confronted him about all of the ugly stories he’d heard about Chase. He told Murray to get lost.
After dress, Murray picked up where he left off, only this time hitting Chase well below the belt. Gossip had begun to spread that Chase and his wife at the time were having marital difficulties. While sitting in adjacent makeup chairs, Murray reportedly said to Chase, “Go fuck your wife … she needs it!” Chase responded with an insult about Murray’s acne-scarred face, saying that it looked like Neil Armstrong landed on it. Finally, five minutes before airtime, Murray called Chase out of John Belushi’s dressing room for what has become an infamous backstage brawl. Chase would later say that he suspected it was Belushi who had put Murray up to it, whispering poison in his ear. Either way, Murray was ready to escalate from verbal blows to physical ones.
Animal House director John Landis was backstage that night visiting Dan Aykroyd when he heard the fight break out. “I heard this tremendous noise and I looked down the hall and there was this crowd of people holding them back from one another. They had just come to blows and they were being pulled apart. As Chevy was screaming obscenities at him, Bill pointed his finger at Chevy and said, ‘Medium talent!’ I had never seen Bill Murray before, but to come up with an insult like ‘Medium talent’ in the heat of anger … I was impressed. I was like, Who is that guy?!”
The fight didn’t last long. Belushi and Brian Doyle-Murray broke it up quickly, absorbing some body blows themselves. Still, the altercation was more symbolic than anything else. Murray would later say, “It was really a Hollywood fight. A ‘Don’t touch my face!’ kind of thing … a kind of non-event. It was just the significance of it. It was an Oedipal thing, a rupture. Because we all felt mad he had left us, and somehow I was anointed avenging angel who had to speak for everyone.”
Now, on the set of Caddyshack, Murray and Chase were going to have to either get along or keep their distance. It would be the first time that they would be in close proximity to each other since that fateful evening at Studio 8H. The fight wasn’t known by everyone on the set. Jon Peters says that he had no idea about the pair’s history of bad blood when he cast them in the film. But there were enough people in the overlapping worlds of SNL and Caddyshack that everyone was soon brought up to speed and sat back waiting for the potential second round of fireworks. “I was never told that they shouldn’t be on the set at the same time,” says Mark Canton. “But I think they chose not to be on the set at the same time. They were not the best of friends. Everyone seemed to know it.”
The walking-on-eggshells atmosphere around the two was fragile enough that Brian McConnachie, who had known them both back at the Lampoon and also had a small role in the film, recalls being in his room at the Rolling Hills motel talking to Murray one night when Chevy walked by. McConnachie didn’t know whether to stay or go or hide the cutlery. “I felt like I was caught cheating with one of them.” But in the end, all of the anticipation of WWIII ended up being for naught. “To me it was all hearsay and rumor,” said Ramis. “They were determined to get along from the beginning. As soon as Bill arrived, it wasn’t like they embraced each other, but they were respectful and cooperative.” According to several people on the set, it probably helped that, unlike so many others on Caddyshack, Murray wasn’t a coke user, and thus less likely to fly off the handle at the slightest paranoia-produced provocation. Another reason that Murray may have been a Boy Scout is that he was working for Kenney, Ramis,
and his older brother—three people he’d always looked up to.
Murray’s first scene to be shot was the Dalai Lama monologue that had been abandoned after the inexperienced, slightly-off local actor who was first hired to deliver it whiffed. Back then, Murray’s character, Carl Spackler, was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him footnote in the script. They needed to create the character out of whole cloth on the spot. That might have intimidated most actors, walking into a situation where almost nothing is defined. Not Murray. That was the stage on which he thrived. Murray had had a chance to let Carl marinate in his head during his cross-country trip in Lorne’s VW. So when he arrived, he arrived fully committed to a handful of half-baked ideas. None of which he shared with Ramis before the cameras rolled.
Ramis had left large gaps throughout the shooting script for Murray to fill in later with the insane passages of spontaneous genius that he seemed to pull out of the ether. Ramis had envisioned the Carl character as a whacked-out contemporary Harpo Marx, popping up here and there to do silent bits of bizarre slapstick (according to Ramis, he saw Dangerfield as Groucho and Chevy as Chico). As they prepared to shoot the Dalai Lama scene, the crew set up outside the red, barnlike caddie shack. Murray and his costar in the scene, Peter Berkrot, were introduced, but Murray was already in character with a funny, thousand-yard stare in his eyes. He was working without a script—and without a net. “I remember Bill was standing there with this scythe, like Death,” says Berkrot. “A huge rusty scythe. And he points it at me and I said, ‘Absolutely not! Are you crazy?’ I was terrified because this thing was really nasty-looking. It looked like it would have taken off my head by accident. So Bill goes, OK, and picks up a pitchfork. And that’s what he held at my neck during the whole scene. It was sharp.”
Murray had already been told the basic premise of the Dalai Lama scene. Before they shot it, Ramis handed him the script pages of the original speech, more as a springboard than something to stick to. Murray took a few minutes to read it, then he nodded. He was ready to go. When Ramis called “Action,” Murray stuck out his jaw and curled his lower lip in a strange way that Ramis had seen many times before over the years. Murray was going to play Carl as the Honker.
Ramis was laughing even before a twisted line came out of Murray’s twisted mouth.
CARL SPACKLER:
So I jump ship in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet. And I get on as a looper at a course over there in the Himalayas.
ANGIE D’ANNUNZIO
A looper?
CARL SPACKLER
A looper. You know, a caddie. Looper. Jock. So I tell them I’m a pro jock and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama himself. The twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald … striking. So I’m on the first tee with him, I give him the driver, he hauls off and whacks one … Big hitter, the Lama. Long. Into a 10,000 foot crevice right at the base of this glacier. You know what the Lama says?
ANGIE D’ANNUNZIO
No.
CARL SPACKLER
Gunga galunga … Gunga Lagunga. So we finish eighteen and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, ‘Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.’ And he says, ‘Oh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’ … So I got that going for me … which is nice.
The miracle of the Dalai Lama scene on screen is that it feels completely tossed off and spontaneous. But Berkrot says they shot it for seven hours. During each take, Murray would toss in new things trying to keep it fresh and unpredictable. And each time, he would press the rusty tines of his pitchfork a little harder on Berkrot’s neck. “I remember at one point, I said to him, ‘Can you take it easy with the pitchfork? It really hurts.’ And he said, ‘Quit whining, Berkrot!’ He was totally in character between takes.”
Trevor Albert remembers watching the scene being shot and thinking that Murray was going to murder this poor kid. “I remember watching that pitchfork go into his skin and there was this feeling of, One slip too much and he could stab him because Bill was so intense about it and so in that moment. He’s like a wild animal and you don’t know what he’s going to do. I’d never seen anyone with that sort of unpredictable power. He made me nervous. That’s part of the thrill of his performance.”
When Ramis finally called “Cut and print!” he couldn’t have been happier. Murray had been worth waiting for all along. He knew that he and Kenney and Doyle-Murray would have to figure out a lot more places to squeeze Carl into the story. “The Dalai Lama thing was really a fun one to do,” says Murray. “I took it and ran away with it. But the basic premise where I jumped a ship in Hong Kong and looped for the Dalai Lama, that was all Brian’s. Given that setup, anyone with any chops at all could make it good. I guess they thought it was funny because they started saying, Why not just have this guy all over the place?”
* * *
Ad-libbing wasn’t invented on Caddyshack. It’s been an integral part of the filmmaking process since the birth of cinema. Some of the most memorable movie lines during the past fifty years have been the result of on-the-fly moments of inspiration. Robert De Niro’s “You talkin’ to me?” scene in Taxi Driver, Clemenza’s “Leave the gun, take the cannoli” line from The Godfather, Roy Scheider’s deadpan “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” button from Jaws, even John Belushi’s zit-popping spray of mashed potatoes in Animal House—they were all spontaneous moments of magic. They’re proof of film as a living, breathing medium.
“We always trusted improvisation,” said Ramis. “It never felt like we were ad-libbing and winging it. It’s an actual technique and a method that allows you to create material instantly. It’s not grabbed out of thin air.”
For some actors, that sort of freedom can be paralyzing. For others, like Bill Murray, it’s liberating. Murray’s longest scene in Caddyshack was his famous “Cinderella Story” monologue. And it’s a scene for which no lines were ever actually written. It sprung sui generis from Murray’s head. “All it said in the script is: Carl is outside of the clubhouse practicing his golf swing, cutting the tops off flowers with a grass whip,” said Ramis.
Actually, this is how it appeared in the shooting script on the day in October, 1979, when it was filmed:
SCENE 244: EXT. CLUBHOUSE (SAME DAY—LATE AFTERNOON) The sky is beginning to darken. CARL, THE GREENSKEEPER, is absently lopping the heads off bedded tulips as he practices his golf swing with a grass whip.
That was all Murray was given. Before rolling the camera, Ramis huddled with Murray and gave the actor some motivation. “When I used to jog during a brief period of physical fitness in my life, I would encourage myself by pretending I was the announcer at the Olympics,” said Ramis. “Like, they’re coming into the stadium. Ramis is in the lead! So I said to Bill, ‘Did you ever do imaginary golf commentary in your head?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, don’t say anymore. I got it!’”
Murray’s only request before Ramis yelled “Action” was to have the flowers changed from tulips to mums. In the scene, Carl stands outside of the clubhouse dressed in a grass-stained shirt buttoned up to his Adam’s apple, his camo hat, tan workpants, and big clunky unlaced boots. An insert shot of the sky reveals ominous storm clouds gathering. Carl chokes up on the grass whip like a golf club, steps up to the flower bed, waggles his hips, and then …
CARL SPACKLER
What an incredible Cinderella story. This unknown, comes outta nowhere to lead the pack at Augusta. He’s at the final hole. He’s about 455 yards away, he’s gonna hit about a two iron, I think … (Carl reels back and swats the head off of a mum. Petals fly like confetti) Boy, he got all of that. The crowd is standing on its feet here at Augusta. The normally reserved Augusta crowd is going wild … (he pauses as he notices some golfers coming) for this young Cinderella who’s come out of nowhere. He’s got about 350 yards left. He’s going to hit about a five iron, it looks like, don’t you think? (Carl pulls the grass whip back to demolish
the next mum) He’s got a beautiful backswing … That’s … Oh! He got all of that one! He’s gotta be pleased with that. The crowd is just on its feet here. He’s a Cinderella boy, tears in his eyes, I guess, as he lines up this last shot. And he’s got about 195 yards left, and he’s got a, it looks like he’s got about an eight iron. This crowd has gone deadly silent. Cinderella story, out of nowhere, former greenskeeper, now about to become the Masters champion. (Carl reels back one last time and, Swat!, blasts the third mum to smithereens) It looks like a mirac … It’s in the hole! IT’S IN THE HOLE!!!
Murray says that he did the entire sequence in one unbroken take. “I was good back in those days,” he says. “I could do something when they turned the camera on. I was wired into what I was talking about. Improvising about golf was easy for me. And it was fun. It wasn’t difficult to come up with stuff. And there was a great crowd of people there to entertain. If you made Doug or Brian or Harold laugh, you sort of earned your keep. You made your bones.”
Just as Carl watches his third shot at Augusta go in the hole, his reverie is broken by Henry Wilcoxon’s Bishop, eager to get in a quick nine holes before the storm rolls in. He deputizes Carl as his caddie. As the Bishop hits one miraculous shot after another, buffeted by hurricane winds and rain coming in sideways, he asks Carl’s advice about whether he should keep playing. Carl responds, “I’d keep playing, I don’t think the heavy stuff’s gonna come down for quite a while.” When the Bishop misses a putt and looks to the heavens and exclaims, “Rat farts!”, the music playing underneath it is from The Ten Commandments—an insider’s nod to one of Wilcoxon’s iconic early films.
Caddyshack Page 17