Caddyshack

by Chris Nashawaty

  In the end, Peters suggested that Kenney, Ramis, and Brian Doyle-Murray create their own poster. He gave them the various sketches that Orion had commissioned and some scissors. The three of them then sat on the floor of Rusty Lemorande’s office as if they were kids on a rainy-afternoon playdate and pasted them together like a ransom note. Peters then brought it to Medavoy’s office and told him this was the poster they’d be using. Kenney had won a small victory, but his contempt for the studio, for Peters, for the gopher, and for allowing himself to ever be put into such a helpless position was reaching its limit.

  * * *

  In June, Chris Miller flew to Los Angeles to meet with Doug Kenney, Alan Greisman, and Michael Shamberg at Three Wheel Productions about the Club Med comedy he was writing for them with his partner, David Standish. Club Sandwich was the first screenplay that Miller had worked on since cowriting Animal House with Kenney, and he was excited to catch up with his old friend and see how life as a Tinseltown celebrity was going. Miller and Standish were supposed to meet the producing trio and get their notes for the next round of revisions on the script. But after two weeks, Miller still hadn’t heard from Kenney. He was impossible to track down. They finally arranged for a 9 a.m. meeting at the Three Wheel office at Fox on Miller’s last day in town.

  When Miller showed up, Greisman and Shamberg were there, but Kenney was not. They waited … and waited. Finally, Kenney barreled in looking disheveled and acting contrite. He said he had overslept. As they started talking about the script, Kenney seemed distracted. Then, Miller says, “this greasy motherfucker showed up, and he was Doug’s coke dealer. It turned out that Doug had been up all night doing coke and that’s why he was late. The guy and Doug disappeared into one of the offices and when they came out Doug was a lot happier. Then Doug proceeded to lay a rail of coke along his arm from his elbow down to his hand and snorted it in one go. Standish and I, our jaws dropped. I’d never seen anyone do so much coke in a single snort. It was remarkable. But I also thought: Doug, is this you? What’s going on? It was almost like Hollywood had destroyed Doug in some way. At the time, someone asked me what Doug was like and I said he was like a broken mirror. All the shards were brilliant, but they made more sense together. He was talking a mile a minute, and sometimes he’d be funny, but he was incoherent. I was shocked.”

  Rumors about Kenney’s unslakable coke habit were starting to filter back to his old Lampoon friends in New York. But they brushed it off as Doug being Doug. After all, this was the same guy who just up and left the Lampoon to live in a tepee on Martha’s Vineyard to write an aborted novel and who left uncashed six-figure checks lying around. It was just another fleeting phase he’d pass through on the way to his next success. Then his old Lampoon pal Sean Kelly heard a story that made him suspect that Kenney might be going through something more serious and troubling.

  “Someone told me that Doug would spend his late nights driving his Porsche fast on Mulholland Drive with the headlights off. I thought maybe it’s a myth that he’s spreading about himself or it may be true, but it’s not a good a sign. That’s a death wish.”

  16

  Judgment Day

  MOST FILM EDITORS WILL TELL YOU that comedies are especially tough to cut. Not just because timing, with jokes, is absolutely critical down to the millisecond, but also because after watching the same gag over and over again—maybe hundreds of times—it’s impossible to know what you’re looking at anymore. Is it still funny? Was it ever funny? Test screenings provide an essential second opinion. A sort of appeals court. No filmmaker likes to subject his or her art to the fickle whims of ordinary folks pulled off the street. But a roomful of strangers with no skin in the game will let you know pretty quickly whether you’re sitting on a triumph or a train wreck.

  On Caddyshack, there were three previews: one on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, a second in Phoenix, and a third in San Diego. Assistant editor Rachel Igel remembers watching one of the previews play out from behind the glass partition of the projectionist booth and thinking it went well—certainly better than she had expected after so much chaos and cannabis in the editing room, not to mention that whole last-minute gopher drama. But Rusty Lemorande remembers everyone being a bit deflated: “I think we felt we had a stronger film than the reaction cards indicated,” he says.

  Harold Ramis and Jon Peters were equally split. The only thing they seemed to agree on was that the Baby Ruth “Doodie!” joke brought the house down. After six months of postproduction, Ramis had survived his first directing experience—barely. Part of him was excited; another part felt beaten down and resigned. “It just wasn’t Animal House,” he admitted. “Animal House was very tight. We gave John Landis a very tight script and he shot it almost word for word with very little improv. And Caddyshack was the opposite. It was more like, Let’s be funny and see what happens today. I wasn’t the practiced filmmaker that Landis was. He grew up with a camera making little movies. I never made a little movie. Caddyshack was the first thing I ever shot. So it didn’t quite hang together. It was my $6 million scholarship to film school.”

  For his part, the unsinkable Peters recalls, “When I saw the gopher in, I felt like it was going to be a giant hit!” Either way, the film was not reedited in any significant way after those three previews. Certainly nothing compared with the drastic series of face-lifts it had already weathered.

  While Caddyshack was going through its final sound and effects mixing stages, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s The Blues Brothers hit theaters, on June 20. In its own way their film had gone through a similarly tortured evolution, plagued by out-of-control budget overruns triggered by director John Landis’s overreaching ambition and Belushi’s snowballing drug habit. The two films were like a pair of high-speed locomotives on parallel tracks that both derailed before reaching the station. The critics were unkind to The Blues Brothers, but it would still end up making $57 million at the box office—just over double its final budget. There was another comedy that summer, though, that would catch everyone by surprise—especially Doug Kenney.

  In early July, just a few weeks before Caddyshack would open, Kenney and his best friend from Harvard, Peter Ivers, decided to check out the competition—an absurd, gag-a-minute satire of Hollywood disaster movies called Airplane! It was the kind of cheeky, sophomoric sendup that the early Lampoon might have conceived. When the lights came up at the end of the film, Kenney was probably the only person in the theater who wasn’t laughing. He felt like he’d been gutted. Recalls Ivers’s girlfriend at the time, Lucy Fisher, “I remember Doug saying after he saw Airplane!, ‘This is going to be what’s popular now and I’m not going to be.’ He just didn’t think Caddyshack was good enough.” They had beat Kenney at the game he had once mastered: The Art of Parody. Airplane! would end up making $83 million on a budget of less than $4 million. It would be the comedy hit of the summer.

  After surviving his wrestling match over the posters for Caddyshack, Mike Medavoy had no reason to include Kenney in the movie’s still-evolving marketing campaign. Still, he gave him a small budget to go off and write and record some radio and TV spots for the film. Kenney, Ramis, and Doyle-Murray asked their old pal from Second City and The National Lampoon Show, Joe Flaherty, if he wanted to pitch in. The four met several times for boozy lunches at Casa Cugat, a Latin restaurant on La Cienega owned by ex-bandleader Xavier Cugat. “They were known for their strawberry margaritas,” recalls Flaherty. “So we’d have a bunch of those and kick around ideas. You know what I never saw with Doug? The depression. But I saw the drinking side. He was pretty good at that. Anyway, I think the studio did it just to be nice to Doug and Harold. ‘Sure, we’ll let you have input!’ But they didn’t use anything we came up with. Our ideas might have been too strange. It’s advertising; they’ll always go with something safe rather than something good.”

  Something safe is putting it mildly. Even with an edgier comedy like Caddyshack, Orion’s marketing team aimed straight for the bland bull’
s-eye of Middle America with its promotional campaign. One idea that they thought would dazzle the media involved throwing the First Annual Hollywood Fun Drive Invitational Golf Tournament in the less-than-iconic parking lot of the iconic Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Set to take place on July 24, one day before Caddyshack opened, the event was scheduled to kick off right after Rodney Dangerfield’s handprints were immortalized in cement outside the theater.

  A so-called “mad cap” golf tournament played with whiffle balls, the Invitational was a Who’s Who of Hollywood’s C- and D-list “celebrities” competing against one another as they desperately grasped for a few fleeting moments in the public spotlight. The invitees included Buzz Aldrin, Bob Barker, Cathy Lee Crosby, Scatman Crothers, Phyllis Diller, Don Knotts, Jack Klugman, Karl Malden, Valerie Perrine, Telly Savalas, Robert Wagner, and Dionne Warwick. Clearly, the studio had no clue who the audience for their own film was.

  * * *

  Two weeks before its release, the nation’s film critics and entertainment journalists finally got their first chance to see Caddyshack during a splashy two-day press junket in New York City. A Friday-night screening at the Loew’s State Theatre in Times Square would be followed by a Saturday morning press conference and series of round-robin interviews with the film’s stars at Dangerfield’s comedy club on the Upper East Side.

  The studio’s publicity team working the event had been instructed in a strongly worded memo that despite all of the stars in the picture, no one star should be favored. “Caddyshack’s comedy involves the combined talents of four of today’s most popular comedians: Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, and Ted Knight. We do not want to spotlight any one personality.… Caddyshack should not be sold (or seem to be sold), for example, as just a Chevy Chase film, or a Rodney Dangerfield comedy. Rather, all four comedians should be treated as a comedic ensemble.…” It would be a long weekend of careful ego-massaging.

  Back in LA, as the junket weekend approached, Caddyshack still wasn’t quite finished or “locked.” And it wasn’t clear whether it would be in time. They were still correcting the film at Technicolor. When that was done, the negative still had to be developed and then a print had to be made. It was going to go right down to the wire. In the end, Rusty Lemorande would end up carrying what they call a “green print” as checked baggage on a plane to New York, just ahead of the press screening (a green print is basically a still-wet copy of the film that’s right out of the lab and still has a greenish tint which fades over the course of a few days—days that they did not have). The green print is what the critics would end up seeing, which was, of course, less than ideal.

  The reaction to the press screening on the evening of Friday, July 11, was neither through-the-roof good nor tomato-tossing bad. The film just sort of played to a sea of indifference. There were some laughs (how could there not be?), but not nearly as many or as loud as the studio, the cast, and the filmmakers had been hoping for. “It was clear that people were not crazy for the film,” recalls Lemorande. Orion was beginning to realize that Caddyshack was not going to be its summer savior, never mind another Animal House–size blockbuster. Maybe if everything went well with the media the next day at Dangerfield’s, and the stars really puckered up and schmoozed the roomful of journalists, that might steer reviews in a more positive direction.

  At the ungodly hour of nine the following morning, Kenney, who had been up all night getting loaded, trying to numb his own sense of failure and drown out all of the creative concessions he’d made and battles he’d surrendered over the previous six months, stood on the corner of First Avenue and 61st Street. The blinding midsummer sunlight was like a pickax to his throbbing skull. He looked across the street at the entrance to Dangerfield’s comedy club and began the forced march to what he believed would be his professional execution.

  The film’s stars were already there: Bill Murray in his pink shorts and rumpled polo shirt, hiding behind sunglasses; Chevy Chase in his cream-colored linen pants and matching silk shirt and driving cap, getting surlier by the moment; Rodney Dangerfield, as wired as a downed power line in his khaki cabana shirt; and Ted Knight, with his silver-fox hair and natty Brahmin pocket square.

  Kenney slipped in and made a beeline for a table in the back, where he began drinking—or, to be more accurate, continued drinking from the previous night. The sunny young Warner Bros. publicist in charge of the event welcomed the media from the club’s seedy stage and asked, with all of the mock enthusiasm he could muster, if they’d enjoyed the previous evening’s screening? That’s when Kenney, who couldn’t swallow the rage that constricted his throat anymore, began to heckle both the studio flack and the movie—his movie. Kenney let the room know how much he thought Caddyshack sucked before telling everyone, including the press he was ostensibly there to woo, to go fuck themselves. He then passed out cold, facedown on the table. “He was dead drunk,” recalls Chase, still wincing at the memory. Added the equally shocked Ramis, “Doug was very depressed, and I think his substance abuse was peaking. Someone once said to me, ‘You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.’ And Doug kept going to his substance abuse for comfort, and there’s no comfort there. It was a pretty bad scene.”

  After Kenney was escorted from the club’s main room by his concerned and red-faced parents, it was clear to everyone that he hadn’t done Caddyshack any favors by verbally assaulting the people who held its fate in their hands. It was an act of pure self-destruction. Meanwhile, the film’s stars didn’t exactly go out of their way to salvage the morning, either. Chase was glib and smarmy with interviewers, Murray basically clammed up and offered clipped, unfunny answers, and Dangerfield seemed uncharacteristically serious and defensive. The three funniest men on the planet temporarily forgot how to be funny. Only Knight, the old pro, seemed willing to make a halfhearted effort. During one particularly awkward group interview with Bobbie Wygant, a veteran television correspondent from the NBC affiliate in Dallas, the four Caddyshack stars could barely conceal their hostility and discomfort.

  With a Betty Ford meringue hairdo, troweled-on makeup, and a Good Housekeeping smile permanently pressed on her face, Wygant looked like a caricature of an aging Southern belle. If she’d actually seen the film, you wouldn’t have known it from her questions. Chase, Murray, and Dangerfield were clearly in no mood to suffer fools. They looked like they were caught in a hostage video—curt, defensive, and smug. It was the definition of cringe-inducing. The six-minute interview ended with Chase’s cracking a joke about having sex with the entire Osmond family. The final silent seconds seem to last an eternity—a fitting coda to an excruciating morning.

  “The next day someone sent me a clipping from the event that said, ‘If this is the new Hollywood, let’s have the old Hollywood back,’” said Ramis.

  * * *

  A little more than a week later, on the eve of the film’s official release, Orion threw a splashy red-carpet premiere at a Times Square theater followed by an after-party at the Rockefeller Center skating rink. If the studio knew that it was in possession of a DOA flop, it didn’t act like it. No expense was spared. True to his threats back in Florida, Jon Peters ended up not inviting Cindy Morgan to the event. The actress, who was now dating her Caddyshack costar Scott Colomby, would attend only after Kenney personally reached into his pocket and bought her two first-class air tickets from LA. At the premiere, Morgan remembers, she spotted Peters at the concession stand, walked up to him, and flippantly asked him what he was doing there. She thought that was something Lacey would do. She says he was so surprised to see her, he spilled his popcorn.

  Peter Berkrot, the young actor who’d been on the business end of Bill Murray’s menacing pitchfork in the Dalai Lama scene, wasn’t invited to the premiere either. But he finagled a pair of tickets from the Warner Bros. publicity office. “I remember that night like a Polaroid,” he says. “I remember sitting in the theater and being astonished that all of the scenes I’d done ended up in the m
ovie. But then I saw how upset some other people were because so much of their stuff was cut.” After the screening was over, an ashen Scott Colomby trudged into the lobby looking stunned. “I was pissed,” he says. “I was one of the stars replaced by a gopher.”

  At the after-party, top-shelf vodka flowed. Everyone seemed to get wasted. Rodney Dangerfield staggered out onto the ice skating rink and proceeded to slip and slide around before falling ass-over-teakettle so many times that some onlookers thought he was doing a routine. He wasn’t. Kenney ended up getting so drunk that at one point, he ran through the crowd as his parents were leaving, loudly begging his mother to let him suckle at her teat one last time. “I’m sure he was kidding,” says Brian McConnachie. “But I guess he thought that if he could do that, it would make everything good again.”

  Morgan was one of the many revelers there who recognized that Kenney was in a scary state—even for him. She walked up to Kenney’s parents and introduced herself, before saying, “I don’t normally stick my nose into other people’s business, but please take care of your son.”

  * * *

  The first review of Caddyshack appeared in the July 23, 1980, edition of Variety. It began: “In its unabashed bid for the mammoth audience which responded to the anti-establishment outrageousness of National Lampoon’s Animal House, this vaguely likable, too-tame comedy stands to fall short of the mark.…” It didn’t get better from there. The industry paper’s critic mentioned the film’s “thinly plotted shenanigans” and “stock characters.”

  In The Washington Post, Gary Arnold wrote that the “latest misbegotten spawn of National Lampoon’s Animal House” was “shabbily photographed, and raggedly assembled,” adding that “Caddyshack is hanging evidence that Ramis wasn’t prepared for the assignment or clever enough to fake it” before labeling it a “stinky, dismembered heap.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Arthur Knight began his review: “To attempt a critical evaluation of Orion’s new Caddyshack is a little like describing the esthetic qualities of an outhouse.”