Caddyshack

by Chris Nashawaty

  In the early drafts of the script, the film ends right after the explosion with Danny at the airport, supposedly headed off to college but distracted at the last minute by a babe headed to Jamaica who makes him change his plans. He follows his bliss instead of the responsible path he’s supposed to take. Life lessons are learned, etc. There was also supposed to be a brief Casablanca-like scene in which Ty and Lacey walk off into the sunset with Chase saying: “Should we get together? We couldn’t respect each other less.” Ramis ended up going with something far more arbitrary. A bug-eyed Dangerfield looks at the camera and barks the one-liner: “Hey, everybody, we’re all going to get laid!”

  Why?

  At that point, the question had become: Why not?

  “It was a totally improvised line that I can’t even believe I left in the movie,” said Ramis. “It makes absolutely no sense, which at that point was pretty much par for the course.”

  * * *

  Located thirty-eight miles south of Fort Lauderdale, Biscayne Bay is a horseshoe-shaped lagoon nestled just below Miami on the Atlantic coast of Florida. The Caddyshack crew arrived there at the beginning of November to film what would end up being the most ambitious stunt scenes in the movie. The production designer Stan Jolley repurposed a slightly-down-on-its-heels waterfront restaurant called The Rusty Pelican to stand in for the ritzy site of Judge Smails’s yacht christening. Along with the Caddy Day pool scenes that were shot at Fort Lauderdale’s Plantation Club and the snooty “Dance of the living dead” party scenes shot at the Boca Raton Hotel and Club, it would be the film’s most important location after Rolling Hills. Ramis would shoot there for only four days, but constructing a collapsing hydraulic dock and bringing in stunt water-skiers from Busch Gardens added an extra week of work.

  The christening of Judge Smails’s sloop before its maiden voyage was in the first drafts of the Caddyshack script and appears in the finished film with only some minor tweaks. For example, Judge Smails’s “dinghy” is called The Bluebird instead of The Flying Wasp and Al Czervik’s enormous cabin cruiser is called Thunderball II instead of Seafood. There’s also no mention of the helter-skelter maritime stuntwork or Smails’s Thurston Howell III–style dedication to his new craft:

  JUDGE SMAILS

  I’ve got a little poem that I’d like to read in honor of this occasion, if I may? Spaulding, get your foot off the boat!

  It’s easy to grin/ When your ship comes in/ And you’ve got the stock market beat./ But the man worthwhile/ Is the man who can smile/ When his shorts aren’t too tight in the seat.

  Both Ramis and Kenney would later admit that the carefully choreographed chaos at Biscayne Bay was among the most anxiety-ridden moments of the shoot. But in the end, it would go off without a hitch. Ironically, the final day on set would be one of the few that actually traveled from script to celluloid without some last-minute overhaul. Now, on November 19, eleven weeks after cameras started rolling, Caddyshack had finally wrapped. The first-time director and novice producer were proud of how little they’d compromised so far. It was time to celebrate.

  At the wrap party, Ramis could finally stop worrying for the first time in three months—at least until they got back to LA to start editing. During their time in Florida, he’d been too busy and had been saddled with too many tiny responsibilities to join the nightly pageant of drug-fueled hedonism. So at the wrap party, he made up for lost time, getting so wasted that he had to be literally carried back to his hotel room.

  “We had wrap parties every night on that movie,” says Cindy Morgan. “But the mother of all wrap parties was that last night. Everybody was there. Doug was sitting next to me and he goes, ‘I want you to look around this room and tell me: Who do you respect the most?’ I said, “Me.” He went crazy. ‘What do you mean you?!’ And I just felt like after everything I had been through, I didn’t break under the pressure. I’d been bullied and threatened. I did what I had to do and I was proud. I think he just thought I was being arrogant. But I meant it. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.”

  During the last few weeks of filming, Kenney had grown especially close to Trevor Albert, who had begun the film as Peters’s assistant and ended it as Ramis’s assistant. Now that the movie was over, Albert wasn’t sure where that left him. All he knew was that he didn’t want to go back to driving Peters’s kids around and taking Barbra Streisand’s dog to the groomer.

  “Of everybody there, it was Doug and Harold that I wanted to work with again despite the chaos,” says Albert. “I told Doug that I didn’t want to go back to working for Jon and he said, ‘Why don’t you come be my assistant now?’”

  At the wrap party, Kenney was full of naïve optimism and not just because he was stoned out of his gourd. He and Ramis wouldn’t know what they had until they got into the editing room back in LA, but he felt the same confidence he’d always had at the end of big projects, and those had always turned out to be charmed. Why should this time be any different? This Hollywood thing seemed so easy. You write a movie with your friends, you fly off with someone else’s money and have a blast, and then people kiss your ass and throw money at you when it’s a hit. That night, Kenney walked around the party, thanking everyone and predicting that Caddyshack would not only be a huge box-office success; it would be even bigger than Animal House.

  It was the last time he’d ever feel that bullish about anything.

  14

  The Unkindest Cut

  IN DECEMBER OF 1979, Harold Ramis and Doug Kenney returned to Los Angeles to begin the arduous process of editing Caddyshack. It was a task that neither of them had ever undertaken, never mind remotely understood. Editing may be the least glamorous part of an otherwise glamorous art form. But it’s arguably the most important to its outcome. It’s where you find the film.

  To those who don’t splice film for a living, editing can seem as mysterious as alchemy—a cross between hard science and ethereal sorcery, where celluloid is either transformed into gold or into just a pile of flammable confetti. In his classic 1979 Hollywood memoir, When the Shooting Stops … The Cutting Begins, veteran Hollywood editor Ralph Rosenblum (Annie Hall) writes, “‘Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in the cutting room,’ is a prayer that’s been uttered in every language, on every location, in every country where films have been made.… The cutting room becomes the last-stand corral for everyone’s hopes that the unrealized dreams, the dead moments, the inevitable blah sequences from weeks of shooting will finally be brought to life.”

  There was a lot of “Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in the cutting room” prayers on the set of Caddyshack. From looking at the dailies, anyone could tell that Ramis’s tendency to crumple up the blueprint and embrace improvisation had produced a handful of scenes that were way funnier than they ever were on the page. But by tossing out the skeleton that a script provides, he would end up making things a million times more complicated for himself when it was time to cut it all together. It would be like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle that’s missing half of its pieces.

  “For better or worse, Harold had no experience as a director,” says Trevor Albert. “So the script wasn’t a bible to him at all. Someone who was more seasoned might think: I need these guideposts along the way to make sure the whole thing holds together. Harold didn’t feel that way. The whole premise of improv is you’re creating it on its feet, but that isn’t how editing works. I’d studied enough about how movies got made to look at how the script was changing and think, Jesus, this is insane! There’s no way this is going to end well.”

  The work began in a small suite of three connecting offices in the editorial building on the Warner Bros. lot. Along with the editor Bill Carruth, the original team consisted of two assistant editors, Robert Barrere and Rachel Igel, as well as Albert, who served as an apprentice. With Brian Doyle-Murray mostly back in New York, now working as a writer on SNL, Ramis and Kenney were in the editing room virtually every day for ten to twelve hours, dutifully overseeing the gruel
ing shovel-and-spade work and smoking pot. More than one person who was there compared the Caddyshack editing headquarters to working inside of a bong. As they did while writing the original treatment of the film, they would begin each day by sealing the gaps around the door with gaffer’s tape to keep the funky fog inside.

  “They were really fun guys,” says Rachel Igel, a nonsmoker who had just returned from London where she’d been working for the staid BBC. “I lived in England through most of the ’70s, so I missed all of the popular culture like Saturday Night Live. Their brand of humor was completely new to me. Harold was incredibly nice and easy to be around, and Doug I really liked, but he was a little crazy. You go from working for a magazine like the National Lampoon to coming to Hollywood and suddenly having a lot of money, a lot of women, and a lot of drugs—I think he was just overwhelmed.”

  The first hurdle in editing a movie is assembling a so-called rough cut, which is like a slab of raw marble yet to be chiseled. Then the director has a certain number of weeks to cobble together his or her initial pass at the film. Rough cuts obviously run longer than what eventually ends up in theaters. Still, even by that standard, the first assemblage of Caddyshack made Lawrence of Arabia look like a movie trailer. It was four and a half hours long. In the meantime, as Carruth, Ramis, and Kenney tried to make sense out of their highlight reel of hilarious ad-libbed odds and ends, the stench of weed coming out of their office was so powerful, the other editors in the building complained. They weren’t lectured or warned; they were simply moved to an office in Jon Peters’s bungalow.

  “It was such a different time,” says Igel. “The kind of thing that people did normally back then would be impossible today. You’d get fired. But back then, it was like, ‘Oh, these guys must be geniuses. Let’s let them do what they want and see what we get.’ In Hollywood, when a movie makes a lot of money, on the next one they think these people must know something, so they give them a pretty wide berth.”

  That wide berth gave them the latitude to feel as if they could leave in a raunchier version of Bill Murray’s ball-washer masturbation gag that stretched on for thirty minutes—self-indulgent even for a roomful of stoners. Ramis and Kenney were either so in love with their material or so zonked that everything they’d filmed in Florida seemed indispensable. When Peters finally got his first look at Ramis’s cut after a couple of weeks, he was stunned. “We didn’t have a movie,” says Peters. “We had a bunch of scenes that didn’t play together.”

  The original narrative through line of Caddyshack—the love triangle between Danny, Maggie, and Tony—turned out to be a snooze. It just wasn’t working. At least compared with Rodney Dangerfield’s in-your-face one-liners and Bill Murray’s bonkers monologues. “The story that was there to congeal everything together didn’t work,” says Rusty Lemorande. “The story of Danny needing the scholarship but he may have impregnated a girl and that meant he would have to marry her as a good Catholic boy and give up his college dreams, the actress who played his girlfriend [Sarah Holcomb] did it with an Irish accent that was not particularly workable. All of those scenes played flat and dull. And through the process of editing, those scenes started ending up on the cutting room floor. That first cut was a true disaster.”

  Ramis and Kenney didn’t have enough experience to know how to fix what they were looking at. Peters was freaking out, throwing fits at top volume. And Carruth didn’t know whom he was supposed to be taking his marching orders from. “He listened to everything we said, which was a mistake,” said Ramis. Something had to be done quickly. Something drastic.

  The only good news was that no one from Orion, especially Mike Medavoy, had been in the room during that calamitous first screening. Orion was still in the dark. For now, the notoriously hands-off studio would remain hands off. But even its patience would end up having limits.

  * * *

  While Ramis was scrambling to put together his first bloated cut of Caddyshack, Kenney left the Warner lot early one night to attend the premiere of 1941. The WWII comedy was Steven Spielberg’s shoot-the-works, spare-no-expense follow-up to Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’d become Hollywood’s newest Boy Midas. And for some bizarre reason, he’d chosen to spend that creative capital on a shrill, laughless comedy about the Japanese invading Los Angeles, starring Tim Matheson, Treat Williams, and John Belushi in his first big-screen role since Animal House. The early buzz on the film was deadly. In a town where schadenfreude is the emotional default setting, the knives were out for Spielberg’s folly.

  Kenney hadn’t seen Belushi in a while. Both had been wrapped up with the endless demands of newly minted fame, but he was eager to see his old friend notch another triumph. But as the audience squirmed in silence, it was clear that it was not to be. It was a film with too many characters, too many gags that were designed to be fizzy but turned out to be flat, too much … everything. In one of his typical displays of sick gallows humor, Michael O’Donoghue had buttons printed up for the occasion that read: “John Belushi: Born 1949, Died 1941.”

  After the premiere was over, Kenney ran into his old Lampoon boss, Matty Simmons, in the lobby. They were both trying to tiptoe out of the theater as quickly as possible so that they wouldn’t run into anyone connected with the movie and have to put on a happy face and spin congratulatory lies. According to Simmons, Kenney pulled him aside and said, “We gotta talk about this turkey.” Simmons replied, “Hey, at least it’s not our turkey.”

  As December was drawing to a close, Peters wasn’t sure how much longer he would be able to hold Medavoy off. The executive was eager to see his studio’s hot new comedy from the geniuses behind Animal House. Peters was stalling for time until he could figure out how to save the film. He believed that the best thing to do would be to edit around the funniest scenes. In other words, keep the name-brand stars such as Dangerfield, Knight, Chase, and Murray and lose the no-name caddies and their storyline.

  Said Ramis, “When the movie started to transition from the caddies’ story to this kind of madcap Marx brothers movie, it became a free-for-all. Rodney had funny things, and Chevy had funny things, and Ted had funny things, and Bill had funny things, but they didn’t necessarily add up to anything.” It wasn’t a movie; it was a scattershot Greatest Hits compilation.

  Ramis seemed to accept that he was out of his depth and that some sort of triage needed to be done. But Kenney dug in his heels and insisted that they could fix it if they were left on their own. The last thing he wanted was to hand over control to someone like Peters. What did he know about comedy? It was a fight that, deep down, Kenney would soon realize that he couldn’t win. The film was about to slip through his fingers, sending him into a tailspin of black moods and self-destructive behavior. How had it come to this, he asked his friends? This time, he was supposed to be the one in charge.

  “Jon Peters and Mike Medavoy were kind of Doug’s bosses,” says assistant editor Rachel Igel. “And I know that he felt the film was being taken away from him. I don’t know if that’s true, but I think he felt that way. He was used to working in a situation where he could do whatever he wanted. At the Lampoon, he had creative freedom. And nobody has that on a movie, even if you’re Martin Scorsese.”

  During those initial disastrous days in the editing room, Sean Kelly, Kenney’s old pal from the Lampoon, ran into Doug and Harold at a bar in LA. Kelly had come out to Hollywood for a few days trying to sell a movie, as so many staffers at the magazine had in the heady gold-rush days after the success of Animal House. “They walked in and they were in a state of misery that was astonishing,” he recalls. Kelly asked them what was the matter. They had just seen the first cut of Caddyshack.

  “They said it was horrible; they couldn’t believe that this had happened to them. Everything about it seemed to be sophomoric and didn’t work and the jokes weren’t timed. I think Doug realized it was the first time he’d been a part of something that he thought wasn’t great. He was like, ‘Oh, my God, I guess I’m out of
gas.’ They were really kicking themselves.”

  On Peters’s orders, Rusty Lemorande put together a list of experienced editors who might be able to come in and play the role of white knight on the film. They screened what they had for a number of candidates. One of them sat down with Peters, Lemorande, and Mark Canton after watching the mess of a film and bluntly told them that he would fix it if they gave him six weeks and $200,000. “That was a huge amount of money back then,” says Lemorande. “And he made it clear that he wasn’t going to be showing it to us piecemeal as a work in progress. It was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.” When he left, the three looked at each other and said, Is it really that bad?!

  Knowing that there was no way they could go back to Orion and ask for that kind of money (certainly not without showing them the fiasco they had on their hands), Lemorande proposed another idea. Before joining the Jon Peters Organization, he had worked at CAA, one of Hollywood’s biggest and most high-powered talent agencies. His boss there had represented Breakfast at Tiffany’s director Blake Edwards. Lemorande had got to know Edwards’s longtime editor, Ralph Winters. Maybe he’d be willing to take a turn with the scissors? At seventy, Winters might not get Caddyshack, but he might just be able to save it.

  Winters was a disciplined, seasoned pro whose credits reached back to early ’40s. He’d earned six Oscar nominations for editing and won twice, for 1950’s King Solomon’s Mines and 1959’s Ben-Hur. He wasn’t as square as his résumé and driver’s license suggested. He’d worked on a number of Peter Sellers comedies, including The Pink Panther and The Party. He had the delicately trained eye of an artisan—he could look at that slab of marble and see what shape it should take. Even though Winters was well past retirement age, he had other jobs lined up. But he agreed to come in at nights and free of charge as a favor and make some suggestions. “Ralph only worked on a couple of reels of the film, but the improvement was gigantic,” says Lemorande. “It showed us what editing could do. He was our savior.”