Caddyshack

by Chris Nashawaty

  After a week or so, Winters had to stop moonlighting on Caddyshack to start another job, but he suggested another editor who he thought would be able to pick up where he left off. David Bretherton had won an Oscar for 1972’s Cabaret, and seemed like an even better fit than Winters since he’d recently worked on Silver Streak, another improv-heavy comedy starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. Plus, he was a decade and a half younger than Winters. At fifty-five, he was inching closer to their target audience, albeit in baby steps. Bretherton looked at the film and told Peters, Ramis, and Kenney that the footage that they had was salvageable. He reassured Ramis that he didn’t screw it all up. It just needed to be finessed.

  The good news was, the film might be saved after all. The bad news was, Jon Peters was getting more actively involved, meaning that there wasn’t much need for Kenney to be around anymore. “I don’t think Doug and Jon Peters were necessarily the greatest combination in the world,” says Mark Canton. “But that’s not that unusual with movies. Different producers have the material first, then the financiers and the studio get involved, and everybody thinks they know better. That’s the toughest part of this business—it’s a team sport.” Adds Trevor Albert more bluntly, “It’s hard for me to imagine that Doug and Harold really respected anything that came out of Jon Peters’s mouth creatively.”

  As Kenney was losing his grip on his own picture, he began spending more time back at his production company, Three Wheel, on the Fox lot. While he’d been on location in Florida, his producing partners, Alan Greisman and Michael Shamberg, had put a number of movies into active development, including a comedy about a milquetoast with telekinetic powers that would reteam Kenney with his pal Chevy Chase, titled Modern Problems. Both Greisman and Shamberg were relieved to have their third wheel back. “Doug’s mind worked at an amazing capacity,” says Greisman. “Having him around just kicked things into a different gear. He was a whirlwind. At that time we had Modern Problems going with Chevy, Chris Miller’s Club Med comedy, and a project that Jules Pfeiffer was working on about a young city mayor that was inspired by Dennis Kucinich. We thought, OK, great, we have a project for every wheel now.” As happy as Kenney was to be busy and feel wanted, the escalating amount of cocaine he was taking only amped up his insecurity and paranoia. He wasn’t about to let go of Caddyshack without a fight.

  15

  Enter the Gopher

  BACK IN THE CUTTING ROOM, Caddyshack was beginning to come together thanks to new editor David Bretherton’s judicious scalpel. It was now a long way from the four-and-a-half-hour whale it started as. But it was still far from being tight, or even releasable. As Peters started to become more and more hands-on, he was freer and freer with his suggestions on how to make Caddyshack work. Ramis felt steamrolled, but he was in no position to fight back. With the teenage Danny-Maggie-Tony love triangle now basically chopped out, they needed to find some sort of connective string to hang all of their gemlike comedy beads on. Peters came up with what sounded like an insane idea.

  While they were in Florida, Ramis had shot several scenes of Bill Murray plotting against his nemesis, the golf-course-destroying gopher. But there was hardly any film that showed the actual gopher other than the one scene in which a crude sock puppet (on the hand of Trevor Albert) pops out of a hole and steals Rodney Dangerfield’s golf ball (“Hey, that kangaroo stole my ball!”). According to Ramis, Peters said, “What if we made the gopher the thing that tied the film together?” Kenney and Ramis thought Peters was kidding at first. Peters was the kind of person who floated a lot of dumb ideas before landing on a good one. But he wasn’t joking. Kenney’s heart sank, the metallic taste of anger rising in the back of his mouth. Their satire about class warfare was about to be hijacked by a goofy anthropomorphic rodent.

  Ramis tasked Rusty Lemorande with finding a real, live gopher. Everyone agreed that the puppet they had was simply too cheap and crappy-looking to work. They asked animal trainers about using groundhogs, woodchucks, beavers, and squirrels. They were told no dice across the board. If the gopher was going to be a bigger part of the movie now, their threadbare puppet wasn’t going to cut it. This being years before computer-generated effects would become commonplace, they were beginning to realize that they were going to have to hire a special-effects company to create an animatronic gopher. And that meant they would have to go ask Orion for more money. It was time to stop stonewalling and make the studio their partner in solving the problem. Jon Peters swallowed hard and went to go see Mike Medavoy.

  It wasn’t just a matter of begging for gopher money; there were also a number of smaller special-effects shots that still needed to be completed, such as the point-of-view crosshairs insert when Rodney Dangerfield looks through his high-tech, radar-equipped putter and the lightning that strikes the Bishop while he’s playing the round of his life. Peters was going to need $500,000 all in. He knew Medavoy wouldn’t cough it up easily. Then again, he prided himself on being a natural-born hustler. Even when you saw through his bullshit, it was hard to say no to him.

  “The way he explained it was ‘It’s gonna be really funny! It’s gonna be really funny!’ Typical salesman,” says Medavoy. “I was like, ‘OK, tell me how it’s going to be funny.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, but it’s gonna be really funny! Trust me!’ And in Hollywood, ‘Trust me’ means ‘I’m about to fuck you.’”

  Before cutting Peters a check for half a million dollars, Medavoy said that he needed to see how desperate the situation actually was. Peters set up a screening for him on the Warner Bros. lot. “At that point, you could tell it was funny,” says Trevor Albert. “But the characters were sort of all over the place. I think it was hard to figure out what the fuck it was.” When the lights came up inside the theater two hours later, Medavoy grimly told Peters that he had his money. He looked like he needed a drink. Now they just had to find someone who could bring their gopher to life.

  By 1980, John Dykstra had become a special-effects legend. He’d been mentored in the late ’60s and early ’70s by f/x wizard Douglas Trumbull on such films as Silent Running, and he had gone on to become an integral early part of the pioneering effects company Industrial Light & Magic. Dykstra had won an Oscar at ILM for his work on Star Wars (he was the brain behind George Lucas’s gee-whiz lightsabers and X-wing tie-fighter battles), but he clashed with Lucas and split off to form his own effects house, Apogee. The Van Nuys–based company had been hip-deep in work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture when Peters, who had already been turned down by The Henson Company, called. Dykstra agreed to look at Caddyshack to see if he could come up with a solution.

  “They were using this really rudimentary sock puppet thing for the gopher at the time,” says Dykstra. “None of these guys knew anything about animatronics. It was a real seat-of-your-pants movie. For us, it was a pretty small assignment.”

  Rusty Lemorande tells a slightly different story. According to him, Dykstra didn’t actually create Caddyshack’s gopher from scratch. Lemorande, a former puppeteer, says that during postproduction, as soon as it became clear that they would need a new-and-improved gopher (something with more polish and personality than a hand puppet), he reached out to a friend of a friend named Jeff Burke, who worked at Walt Disney’s Imagineering department building animatronic creatures for the studio’s theme parks. Burke said he would build their gopher on his off hours as long as Lemorande didn’t tell anyone, otherwise he’d be fired. He asked for $5,000. When Burke was finished with the assignment, Lemorande went to his house and handed him five grand in exchange for the gopher, as if it were some sort of film noir kidnap exchange. According to Lemorande, Dykstra then added the ability for the gopher to move its ears, dance, and cough smoke from its mouth with a range of expressions using hydraulics. “They wanted a cute character,” says Dykstra, “but to be honest, gophers aren’t very cute. He ended up looking more like a chipmunk.” The dolphin-like sounds the gopher makes were recycled from the 1960s TV show Flipper.

  What bot
h parties agree on is that Dykstra and his team at Apogee created the gopher’s world—a network of underground tunnels that the animal would move through as it was toying with Bill Murray’s psychotic assistant greenskeeper. Dykstra and his team (including puppeteer Joe Garlington, who actually manned the gopher) created their subterranean sets on a flatbed trailer covered with dirt and contoured sod and brought it out to a golf course in Encino to shoot the gopher sequences. They shot scenes on the course’s practice green, where they created vinyl-tube “runnels” in the ground showing the gopher’s burrowing wake of destruction. They also finished all of the film’s other effects sequences as part of a carefully negotiated and tightly budgeted overall package deal. Ramis, who was still mired in the editing room, would occasionally stop by to supervise, but according to Dykstra, the day-to-day work was overseen by Peters’s lieutenant, Donald MacDonald. “We had a great time,” says Dykstra. “There was a lot of ‘Wait a minute, what if we did this?!’ Just a bunch of crazy ideas. There were no limitations. We were just trying stuff.”

  Now Peters and Ramis just had to figure out which music their new hydraulically boogying gopher would dance to.

  * * *

  One day while Ramis and Kenney were in the editing room, Peters popped his head in and asked if they had given any thought to who they wanted to do the movie’s music. Ramis and Kenney had been so consumed by soul-crushing gopher issues and the intensive slicing and dicing they’d been doing that they just looked at one another vacantly and shrugged. Finally, Ramis offered, “How about Pink Floyd?” Needless to say, the band took a hard pass. Instead, Peters reached out to a friend who had recently collaborated with Barbra Streisand on the song “I Believe in Love” for A Star Is Born—Kenny Loggins.

  Loggins had started his career writing songs in the early ’70s for those SoCal purveyors of mellow folk rock, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, before branching off to form the hugely successful yacht-rock duo Loggins and Messina with Jim Messina, formerly of Poco and Buffalo Springfield. The two parted in 1976 to pursue solo careers. “I Believe in Love” was one of the songs on Loggins’s first go-it-alone album and became a hit thanks to Streisand’s interpretation in A Star Is Born. That was the beginning and end of Loggins’s history with Peters. “Jon and I were in two different worlds,” he says. “He was a Hollywood high roller and I was much more of a bumpkin who made it overnight in rock ’n’ roll.”

  Loggins recalls getting a call one day from his A&R rep at Columbia Records, who asked him what he thought about doing songs for movies—still a fairly new concept in 1979. The next thing he knew he was driving down from Santa Barbara to Peters’s palatial home in Malibu. Peters asked Loggins if he was free to take a look at his latest movie and see if he had any song ideas.

  “I went to Warner Bros. to watch a rough cut of Caddyshack, and before it started, Jon said, ‘I’m going to have this gopher come out of his hole and do a little dance at the beginning.’ And I said, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!’” Stupid or not, Loggins remembers laughing his ass off while watching the movie with a notebook on his lap to scribble ideas in.

  “I ended up writing four pieces of music for the movie,” says Loggins. “But the main one was ‘I’m Alright,’ which just came to me from watching the opening scene of Danny on his bicycle. I’d never written a song specifically for a movie before, but I found it to be really easy because the emotional situation was handed to you on a platter. You didn’t have to come up with something out of the blue like you usually do as a songwriter. The temp music they put behind Danny was Bob Dylan’s ‘Gotta Serve Somebody,’ and what I got from that was they were telling me that they wanted to present him as a rebel caught in this country club environment where he had to suppress that. I felt like the song should have a fuck-all-you-people quality to it.”

  Loggins says “I’m Alright” poured out of him in a few hours at his kitchen table in Santa Barbara the same evening that he saw the unfinished film. Then he went into the studio and cut the song, using the movie’s opening-scene golf course sprinklers as percussion. When he brought the demo home, he listened to it and just started cracking up.

  “I knew I fucking had one in the bag,” Loggins says. “That doesn’t happen often enough. I just listened to it and thought, This is a smash!” Peters agreed. He then tapped veteran composer Johnny Mandel (M*A*S*H, The Last Detail) to fill out the rest of the light, jazzy score for the film.

  With John Dykstra finishing up work on the gopher scenes and the music now in capable hands, Ramis and Kenney finally had some time to catch their breath and take stock. The movie was coming together. It may not have been the movie that either of them had originally had in mind, but it was nonetheless inching toward the finish line. Ramis was supervising the sound mixing in anticipation of testing the film with preview audiences. Each day was filled with dozens of minor technical decisions, and Kenney was feeling more and more like an uninvited crasher at his own party.

  “Doug would come into my office with questions about technical things and he seemed really sad,” says Rusty Lemorande. “I think he just wanted to have something to do. He felt that the whole thing was a ship that was moving off that he thought he’d be on and he wasn’t.”

  Michael O’Keefe says that during postproduction he was called back to reshoot a scene between him and Sarah Holcomb to fill in a narrative gap in the edit. It was the scene when Maggie finds out that she’s not pregnant and does a celebratory dance in her nightgown on the golf course. O’Keefe was working on another movie at the time, and his hair had been cut short for it. So they slapped a preposterously cheesy-looking wig on him and stuffed it under a baseball cap. There had been some debate about whether to even bother with reshooting the scene. Lemorande remembers advising Peters that they should just drop it altogether. Peters agreed. But Kenney insisted that it stay in. Sensitive to how estranged Kenney was feeling, Peters let him have his way even though he was the one who ultimately had final cut on the film. He just wanted to keep the peace.

  On April 25, 1980, Bill Murray’s Hunter Thompson movie, Where the Buffalo Roam, opened in 464 theaters. It was the first film of his to come out in the wake of Meatballs, and although it was being distributed by Universal, Orion was tracking it closely. After all, if Murray managed to score his second hit in a row, that would only mean good things for Caddyshack. The critics savaged it. In what was one of the more upbeat reviews (two out of four stars), Roger Ebert wrote, “This is the kind of bad movie that’s almost worth seeing.” Universal quickly yanked it from theaters after it limped its way to $6 million at the box office. Thompson himself would subsequently disown the picture. Soon, there were to be even more bad omens.

  On May 24, the fifth season of Saturday Night Live came to a close. By that time, both John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd had left the show to pursue movie careers. During the run of the season, Lorne Michaels seemed to be doing everything he could to help Caddyshack out—Chevy Chase, Ted Knight, and Rodney Dangerfield had all guest-hosted. The season finale, hosted by Buck Henry, would turn out to be the end of another five-year era like the one at National Lampoon after Kenney and Henry Beard cashed out. The remaining Not Ready for Prime Time Players, including Bill Murray, would not be coming back. And Michaels, the creative spirit and protean spark behind the enterprise from the very beginning, was unceremoniously let go by NBC. He would not step foot in Studio 8H again for another five years.

  A week later, the Caddyshack team got some distressing news of its own. In March, President Carter had announced that the United States would officially boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow after the Soviet Union ignored his ultimatum to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Now, in the aftermath of that announcement, the studios were furiously jockeying and reshuffling the release dates of their summer films to fill in the yawning gap on the calendar they’d left open for the Games (when their audiences would have been at home, glued to their TV sets). On June 5, The Hollywood Reporter announced
that Orion would be pushing Caddyshack’s release up from August 8 to July 25. Ramis and Kenney now had two fewer weeks to put the finishing touches on the film.

  As Kenney was feeling more and more alienated from Caddyshack, he looked for areas where his input might be welcomed. One of those areas was the film’s poster. Without his knowledge, Orion’s marketing team had put together the preliminary one-sheet for the movie. Along with its trailer, this would be the first—and perhaps most indelible—impression that potential audiences would get of the film. It had to strike the perfect tone if Caddyshack was going to have a strong opening weekend in what was a very busy summer. Orion had spent a lot of money hiring some of the biggest-name poster artists to mock up their ideas. When Ramis and Kenney saw them, they hated every single one. The image that the studio was pushing the hardest was designed to resemble a Norman Rockwell painting, like The Saturday Evening Post’s version of Caddyshack, with all of the characters from the film lined up in front of Bushwood. “Doug got all fired up,” said Ramis. “He’d been up all night and he didn’t look good and he was really itching for a fight.”

  According to Ramis, Kenney stormed into Peters’s office, and what had started as a verbal tirade turned physical. “They started wrestling,” said Ramis. “No punches were thrown, it was inept wrestling, but finally Jon calmed him down and said, ‘Come on, let’s go see Mike Medavoy, and we’ll talk about it.’ So we go to see Medavoy and Doug starts in on him. And Medavoy says, ‘You don’t want to discuss this; you want to fight.’ And Doug says, ‘Yeah!’ And they started wrestling.” Says Medavoy, “It wasn’t a fight I was relishing. I thought the whole thing was too stupid for words.”