Hamilton Mitchell, who played Motormouth, one of the film’s caddies, says that he was initially shocked to see that cocaine use on the set of Caddyshack was so brazen and public. And because of the shoot’s Florida location, the coke that was being delivered was of the highest quality. “I would never recommend drugs to anyone,” says Mitchell. “But this was really good cocaine. Pure, like they had just beaten it out of a leaf in Colombia and somebody had carried the leaf to us and turned it into powder in front of us just so we knew how pure it was.”
Michael O’Keefe calls his eleven weeks in Florida “a permanent party.” “Cocaine was everywhere,” he says. “It was driving everyone. People would come into your dressing room with salt shakers and it would be lunch and someone would say, ‘Do you want to do a line?’ ‘Yeah, sure!’ It was no big deal. This was the ’70s. No one thought anything was wrong about it. Those of us that did it got sucked into the whole bacchanalian rave of it, and believe me when I tell you we went as mad as any of the ancient Greeks.”
Chevy Chase, who has talked openly in the past about his own addiction and recovery, said that cocaine just always seemed to materialize on the set of Caddyshack. “At the time we didn’t know it was addictive. We just knew that we had money to spend and it was a great high,” Chase said later. “It always seemed that I could drink more and do more drugs than anybody else and still appear straight.… At that time, I was taking it and I didn’t feel that I had a problem. By the time you think you have a problem, you’re half dead.”
Brian McConnachie remembers how nervous certain people would get when their dealers didn’t arrive on time. And Cindy Morgan recalls one afternoon when she saw Doug Kenney running down the hallway of the motel yelling, “The eagle has landed; the eagle has landed! Get your per diems in cash, the dealer’s here!”
“Nobody was trying to rip off the studio and get high,” says O’Keefe. “People were trying to make a good movie, and that was just the culture at the time. And Ted Knight was not into it. That was not fun for him. If the call to show up on set was for 7 a.m., Ted was there at 6:45. And he would just seethe all day long.”
The surge in cocaine use had begun in the music business in the early ’70s. Back then, label A&R reps would wear little coke spoons around their necks, always ready to dig into a vial and share it with a potential client like a post-Woodstock sort of handshake. From there, it spread into the film business. With the rise of the New Hollywood generation in the wake of Easy Rider, studios were being inundated with younger and younger baby-boomer executives whose cachet hinged on seeming as hip as the filmmakers they were trying to get into business with. Soon, cocaine would become prevalent on movie sets, at Malibu and Laurel Canyon parties, and in the editing suites where impossible deadlines seemed significantly less impossible after a couple of reenergizing bumps. Caddyshack was hardly an anomaly.
By the late ’70s, a gram of cocaine could cost as much as $100, with a bulk discount when purchased by the ounce (twenty-eight grams). And those were LA prices. In Florida, where coke was cheaper due to its abundance, it seemed like a going-out-of-business sale. By the time Caddyshack started production, it had already become what was known in Hollywood circles as a “coke film.” Martin Scorsese, who grappled with cocaine addiction while making 1977’s New York, New York and 1978’s The Last Waltz, was merely one of the more high-profile abusers until the drug nearly derailed both his career and his life. Meanwhile, over at Saturday Night Live, drugs weren’t just informing the show’s topical humor; they were also ever-present backstage. Coke use got so bad at 30 Rock that Lorne Michaels reportedly posted a sentry outside of the elevators on the seventeenth floor to act as a lookout for curious law enforcement types. Cocaine simply seemed to be an accessory to show business wealth and fame.
After the Animal House gang split off to make Caddyshack and The Blues Brothers, there wasn’t just a sense of competition about which comedy would end up performing better at the box office in the summer of 1980. There was also an almost-perverse one-upmanship about which production was more wired. “Caddyshack and Blues Brothers were like two separate camps tattle-taling on the other,” says Brian McConnachie. “One would say, ‘They’re using more cocaine than we are!’”
John Landis, who was in Chicago directing John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers, had noticed a stark change in Belushi since Animal House. He’d become a junkie. The director insists that during Animal House, Belushi was totally clean. But when he arrived in Chicago just two years later, things had changed drastically. It was almost as if the more famous Belushi got, the larger his appetites became, the more coke he needed to function.
“On Blues Brothers, John got very addicted to cocaine,” Landis says. “It was terrible.” The delays caused by Belushi’s binges, unexplained absences, and downward spiral into drug addiction would help send Landis’s budget on the film soaring from $17.5 million to $27 million.
As tales of hard partying and rumors of drug use on the set of Caddyshack began to filter back to Los Angeles, they ended up making their way over the transom into Mike Medavoy’s office at Orion. It was nearing the end of the shoot, but the executive was worried that “recreation money” was being siphoned from the budget.
“Listen, anyone would have been concerned about it,” says Medavoy. “And I think anybody would have wanted to do something about it.” Medavoy picked up the phone and called Jon Peters. It was time for a come-to-Jesus talk. “We got a call from Mike Medavoy,” says Peters. “He said, ‘I got a problem.’ I was like, ‘Now what?’ He said, ‘I hear there’s drugs on the set.’ And we all started pissing our pants. He wasn’t wrong. It was a huge party, but we worked.”
Peters called down to Florida and said that he was coming right away. “It turns out there was some concern from the studio,” said Ramis. “Someone in the accounting department leaked that everyone on Caddyshack was taking their per diems in cash, which is … unusual. So I think Medavoy called Jon Peters and said, ‘What is going on down there?’ And Jon said, ‘Fuck off! Who are you to tell them what to do?’ Jon defended everybody. And no one got arrested or anything. It never got in the way of work … I don’t think. What got in the way of work was the way we worked.”
When Peters arrived on the set, he called a meeting with Ramis and Kenney. He laid into them about the pace of shooting, the loose atmosphere, and the lack of professionalism, not to mention the drug chatter that had made its way back to Medavoy. In a sense, Peters was merely the messenger, but to Kenney he looked a lot like the enemy. Never one to bend to authority when it was easier to snap, Kenney began arguing with Peters, reportedly saying, “What I think is if you come back here again, you’d better come back with a different attitude or not come back at all.” If Kenney was in a calmer, less paranoid state of mind and had paused to really give Peters a full hearing, he might have learned that Peters had been backing them against Orion for some time. Any freedom they’d enjoyed from the studio during the shoot was because of Peters and his acting as the firewall. But few Hollywood figures have ever presented a more convenient target than Jon Peters. It was much easier for Kenney to feel under siege and paint him as a spineless Tinseltown stooge. But sometimes people are more complex than a National Lampoon cartoon.
When things finally cooled off, Peters pulled Ramis aside and told him that he had one other thing he wanted to talk to him about. He’d been looking at the dailies back in LA and was knocked out by what both Chevy Chase and Bill Murray were doing on camera. He didn’t understand why they didn’t have a scene together. It seemed so obvious. “We had two of the biggest stars in the world of comedy, and they didn’t talk to each other,” says Peters.
That was going to have to change fast.
* * *
Unfortunately, Bill Murray was already back in New York.
“My part just kept growing like a mushroom,” says Murray. “I’d go back to New York and work on SNL, and they’d call me up and ask if I wanted to come back
down and do some more. And I thought, Hey, go to Florida in the winter, that doesn’t sound too bad. So I’d turn around and go back, and there’d be another scene for me to do. They just kept adding more and more to the part and then they said, ‘We’d love to have a scene between you and Chevy.’”
Murray was happy that everyone had been so pleased with what he’d done during his whirlwind week in Florida that they wanted to beef up his role even more, but he hadn’t signed up for doing a scene with Chase, which was, of course, fraught with hostility and history. With Lorne Michaels’s blessing, Murray got a few days off from the show to fly back down. When he arrived, he wasn’t particularly shocked to learn that nothing had been written yet for him and Chevy. That seemed to be standard operating procedure on the film. Once again, they’d have to wing it.
During lunch, Ramis, Kenney, and Doyle-Murray, along with Murray and Chase, sat down to brainstorm not only what might happen in a scene between Carl Spackler and Ty Webb, but why it would happen in the broader context of the story, and where it might fit into the film that they’d already shot. In the end, they shrugged and decided that it didn’t really have to make sense in the larger framework of the narrative. The film was so slapdash already, what difference would one more random encounter make? “It has nothing to do with the movie,” said Ramis, “but actually, no scene has anything to do with the movie.”
Says Murray, “Basically they asked me if I wanted to do a scene with Chevy. And I was like, well, we had to try to figure out how these two people would collide. And part of it was dictated by the fact that it was an extra scene that wasn’t written in the shooting schedule and it had to be accommodated. They didn’t really have much of an idea.” Adds Chase, “We decided that I would be playing night golf and the premise was going to be ‘Do you mind if I play through?’ after I hit a ball into Carl’s shack and it landed on his special grass you could play on and also smoke. Bill was very careful with that character, and he set up the shack. I remember he filled the wall above the couch with Hustler magazine centerfolds.”
The X-rated pinups weren’t Murray’s only contribution to the decor of Carl’s shack. He also thought that he might repurpose a ripped-out car seat with a blanket over it as a ratty couch and use an old wooden wire spool as a coffee table. Skid row chic. By the time lunch was over, the five writers had worked out the beats of the scene, but hadn’t bothered to write anything down. This would be pure improv. They were given a premise; the rest was up to them.
“We shot it that same night,” says Chase. “And the idea was that when I came into Carl’s shack, it looked like I had an ax in my hand and I’m going to kill him. You just see the shadow; it doesn’t look like a golf club. So he sees me and goes, ‘Oh, hi, Ty!’”
Says Murray, “Chevy came in sideways, hitting a golf ball. And then we just sort of did a take and we said, ‘OK, we got that.’ And then it was like, let’s take it again. And we kept building it a little bit at a time. We didn’t do many takes. Just two or three. And I’d never really done anything with Chevy. We’d always had sort of a … funny relationship. But it was like, ‘OK, I liked that when you did that. Let’s just keep going.’ And we kept going and it was funny because Ty Webb’s not far from who Chevy is. So he was pretty comfortable in his space. And I was comfortable as Carl. So he could be free to laugh at me. And if Ty laughed, Carl thought it meant, ‘Hey, he’s my friend!’ It’s a really fun, self-aware example of whatever the heck Harold maintains the movie is about—status.”
“Bill is aggressive; he likes to push you in a scene,” says Chase. “Carl started going with the pot and the wine and we had to put my ball on that little square of grass and he started talking about chinch bugs. It just came from him. He was fucking hilarious. I had to do whatever I could to keep from laughing. And I tried to get him to laugh, so when he asked if I had a swimming pool, I said, ‘A pool and a pond, the pond would be good for you.’ That’s all winging it. As I said it, I could see Bill give a little look like he might crack, but he didn’t. He’s too professional. The scene really defined our characters. Carl clearly wanted more than he had in life and was happy to see me because I had a pool and a big house. And I clearly wanted less of him. Harold had to stop me and Billy at some point, because we could have gone on all night.”
Chase and Murray shot one other scene together that never made it into the film. Ty and Michael O’Keefe’s Danny Noonan are playing golf, and Carl pulls up on a huge riding lawnmower and gives Ty a mush-mouthed tutorial about his backswing, hitting a few balls belonging to some other golfers playing behind them. As the furious golfers come running toward them, Carl and Ty speed off on the mower (Chase narrowly escaped getting shredded by the mower’s blades when Murray floored it a little too hard). It’s easy to see why the scene didn’t make the cut. It’s not very good. Certainly not a fraction as inspired as the pool-or-the-pond scene, where you can see two men rooting up years of bruised egos and wounded pride. It isn’t just two SNL stars ad-libbing about grass you can smoke, chinch bugs, and “getting weird”; they’re exorcising years of perceived slights. It’s a therapy session disguised as a two-handed comedy jag. This one, four-minute moment would finally be the thing to thaw the off-screen iciness between them.
“We got over everything,” says Chase. “The tension was short-lived. I have nothing but admiration and affection for Bill. He still can be a surly character, to say the least. But ultimately, he’s a good guy. Even though I’m the number one star in the movie under the title, I’ll always think of Caddyshack as Billy’s movie.”
13
The Dynamite Caper
AFTER TWO MONTHS of hard partying and filming on the fly at Rolling Hills, the time to say goodbye to their home away from home was fast approaching. In a couple of days, the cast and crew would load up and head due south on I-95 to Key Biscayne, near Miami, where they would shoot the final unshot pages in the script—the yacht club scenes, including the stunt-heavy water sequences in which Rodney Dangerfield’s gaudy cabin cruiser, Seafood, turns Ted Knight’s The Flying Wasp into driftwood. Some were sad to leave the nonstop bender behind; others couldn’t pack up and get the hell out of the dorm of debauchery soon enough. Before they left, though, there was still one last scene to get in the can, and it would require stealth, diversions, outright lies, and wanton mayhem and destruction.
By that point in the production, almost every page of the Caddyshack script had been tweaked, revised, or simply ignored and thrown into the garbage. One of the few scenes that never changed at all was the one that the governing board at Rolling Hills was under the impression would be changed first—the climactic explosion at the end of the film that accidentally sinks Danny’s putt and unsuccessfully attempts to send Carl’s nemesis to gopher heaven, all scored to the “1812 Overture.” In what can only be described as a classic feat of old-fashioned, bareknuckle Hollywood producing, Jon Peters hatched a brilliantly devious campaign of subterfuge.
Rigging and setting off the film’s big explosion wasn’t cheap. By some accounts, the pyrotechnics alone would end up adding as much as $150,000 to the film’s budget. Others say the number was much lower. Either way, it could only be done once. There were no second takes or do-overs. The crew had constructed a fake elevated green off to the side of the Rolling Hills course, which would act as ground zero. Several of the club’s stately oaks were wired to blow. A giant fuel truck was backed up onto the course. “I’ve got pictures of that truck pumping gasoline directly into the ground,” says Cindy Morgan.
While preparation for the big bang was underway, including the hiring of dozens of extras, Peters says, he extended an invitation to the Rolling Hills VIPs. He asked them if they would be so good as to accompany him for dinner and a scenic boat ride. It was his way of saying thank you for all of their hospitality and cooperation. “Jon was going to take these guys for a ride and by the time they got back, it would just be too late to do anything. What balls!” says Michael O’Keefe.
&nbs
p; As soon as Peters and his party passed through the gates of Rolling Hills, Ramis sprung into action. All of the principal cast and extras were gathered around. Ramis held up a megaphone and announced, “We only have one chance to get this right.” He made sure that everyone knew where he or she should be looking when the blast went off. “Harold was anxious that no one get hurt,” says Trevor Albert. “Whenever there’s a stunt of any sort, if you’re a responsible human being it flashes through your head: I hope we’ve done everything we can to make sure this goes right. With all of the unpredictable stuff that had gone on on the movie and the total lack of discipline, I was just like, I hope this goes well. There’s no improvisation in this.”
There are several separate explosions as Danny’s ball hangs on the lip of the cup and Carl plunges the detonator. Ramis said that he made sure to set up multiple cameras so that his one-shot deal was covered by every possible angle as an insurance policy. “The reactions when that thing went off were absolutely genuine because no one knew what to expect,” says Peter Berkrot. “We were expecting fireworks and we got Guadalcanal. You could feel the heat and the shock waves of hot air. You couldn’t fake the response.”
While Peters and his hoodwinked guests were finishing up their meal, they caught a news report on the restaurant’s television. It said that there had been a huge explosion at Rolling Hills. It’s easy to picture jaws dropping into laps, forks clanking on bone-china plates, monocles plopping into bowls of lobster bisque. The magnitude of the blast had been so severe and the fireballs and curling plumes of thick black smoke so extreme that an incoming commercial pilot radioed into the control tower at the Fort Lauderdale airport reporting a plane crash. Peters did his best to calm down his guests. Still, when the Caddyshack crew left Rolling Hills the next morning, some said it had the charged air of a bunch of gangsters making a quick getaway, fleeing the scene of the crime one step ahead of the authorities. Surprisingly, the damage to the course itself was minor. Some downed tree limbs, a couple of craters in the grass that needed to be filled in and resodded. Still, no one expected to be invited back to Rolling Hills anytime soon.
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