WHAT WENT WRONG - Ghostbusters

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

A specter of a script! A lead prone to ghosting! A soul-wrenching schedule! This week, Chris & Lizzie cross the streams with 1984’s supernatural success story, Ghostbusters. Learn how a cabal of Canadian comedians created an American classic and how John Belushi haunted the film more literally than you may know.*CORRECTIONS:*Chris incorrectly stated that Gremlins was the first film to receive a PG-13 rating. Though it helped prompt the invention of the PG-13 rating (created on July 1, 1984), Gremlins was given a PG rating. The first film to receive this new designation was Red Dawn, released in August of 1984.*Lyndsey Buckingham caught some undeserved strays in this episode - he'd actually recently written Holiday Road for National Lampoon's Vacation and made quite a bit of sense as Reitman's choice to write the Ghostbusters theme.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello! And welcome back to What Went Wrong. This is a movie history and appreciation podcast about how difficult it is to make any movie, let alone a good one. I'm one of your co-host, Lizzie Bassett, here, as always, with your other co-host, Chris Winterbauer, who has a real treat for us today. If you couldn't tell by both our incredible custom intro and my shrieking redo of the vocals, I'm very excited.

Chris? As am I. That's right, Lizzie, tonight. we are crossing the streams. Oh, great. With 1984's Surprise Smash Hit Ghostbusters. Really quick, though, Lizzie, before we dive in to bust in the ghosts, I just wanted to give out a quick shout out,

a what's going right in my own streaming life to a little show from Australia called Mr. In Between, which I had not heard of before, and just started watching with my wife. It's on Hulu. It was an FX Australia-U.S. co-production. I highly recommend it. It's about the mundane, profane, violent existence of a melancholic hitman in Australia, played by the series creator, Scott Ryan.

And it's excellent. If you're a fan of The Sopranos, I highly recommend it. It's one of the best things I've seen in a while. So thank you to all of our Australian fans out there. Kudos. Well done. Three seasons, 30-minute episodes, very, very, very excellent. So just wanted to throw a shout out and recommendation.

Great. Chris, before we get started, can I just say, Bustin makes me feel good? Yes. So I've been listening to the theme song, like, on repeat. I don't know why. It's making me happy. It's very catchy. It's very catchy.

And every time it gets to the point in the song where he sings, Bustin makes me feel good, I'm like, that shouldn't be in there. Well, we'll get to the theme song. It's actually a big part of the end of this episode. And Ray Parker, kind of an odd fella. Is he? because that line is a bit of a tip off. Yep, and we'll get to a couple of other things

that might have tipped you off in quotes I found about this film. Okay. That's for the end. Aside from the euphemistic lyrics of the theme song, what were your thoughts upon re-watching Ghostbusters? Oh, it's great. It makes no sense. Structurally in terms of a typical movie,

just all over the place. But absolutely delightful. I came away feeling that Rick Moranus is my favorite part of the whole thing. I love him so much. Yes. He's so good. He's so good.

I also love, I just love how, like, tiny he is next to gigantic Sigourney Weaver. It's great. It's, like, on paper, it's an absolute mess, and I imagine that we're going to talk about that on the screen. Delightful. I don't care what's happening. I'm having a good time. Again, Bustin makes me feel good. So that's really my entire review of this movie.

Bustin makes me feel good too. It reminded me of Lizzie said in The Crow, you know, I don't need plot. Joe's Wester maybe has too much plot in some senses, but I loved this movie as a child. It has kind of been a bit of a movie of diminishing returns for me as I've gotten older and I've understood more of what's going on or less of what's going on. But I have to say it's a perfect example of why this podcast exists for me because once I researched the film, I fell in love with it all of it. over again because it's such a crazy story. I also think for me personally, it's a reflection of

my tastes having shifted from bad boy, Bill Murray, to sad boy, Bill Murray. And I now, I much prefer like Lost in Translation Broken Flowers, Bill Murray, as opposed to super sillious cad, Bill Murray. But he is very charming, even though the character hasn't perhaps aged wonderfully. I still enjoyed it. He's a total asshole throughout the whole thing. But he just embraces it. Yeah. I mean, you know, who knows what the real Bill Murray is, but he certainly pulls off just an absolute pestering jerk. Yes. It's a, yeah, he's great. Another one of my favorite lines in the whole thing is at the end when they're getting rid of the EPA guy.

And he goes, I'm going to miss him. Yes. That may have been improvised. He also did improvise the line when he walks in and he tickles the piano keys. And he goes, they hate that, which is a really funny line. Okay. So, Ghostbusters. The Details.

It is a 1984 supernatural comedy film directed by Ivan Reitman, written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramos. It was distributed by Columbia Pictures. The film stars Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson as the eponymous Ghostbusters. And then, of course, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, Annie Potts, William Atherton, and supporting roles. As always, Lizzie, the IMDB logline, three parapsychologists, four out of their university funding set up shop as a unique ghost removal service in New York City, attracting frightened yet skeptical customers. Which is like the first 23 minutes of the movie?

Honestly, this is like two movies. It's like they had the first movie and the second movie, and they just smushed them together into one. There's a reason for that, and we'll get to it. So a quick note, there's far too much on this movie to cover in even a 10-episode season of a podcast. It has been cataloged and archived to an incredible extent. I highly encourage you guys to listen to the commentary track on the film.

Two resources I found particularly illuminating that you should check out if you want further information are a convenient parallel dimension, how Ghostbusters slimed us forever. It's a great book by James Green Jr. Gives a lot of the business history and Hollywood history around the film too. And making Ghostbusters edited by Don Shea, which was released two years after the film came out and has an annotated copy of the shooting script with like very candid notes from the entire filmmaking team in the margins as you read it. It's a really cool resource. All right. Here we go, Lizzie. Ghostbusters. The love child of a litany of S&L Greats,

which, despite many setbacks, including a lead actor dying, an anemic budget, massive rewrites, and an incredibly tight production deadline, triumphed and became a true American classic, created by a cabal of outsider Canadian comedians, as well as some Chicagoans. Yes, I did some fun alliterations there, just for you, fans. But the story of Ghostbusters begins far from Manhattan on a little farmhouse in Ontario, Canada. The Acroid Farmhouse, that is, we're a young boy with the forehead of a grown man. Sorry. Yeah, seriously, dude. It's the biggest forehead I've ever scene and the hair is not helping. Yeah, as someone with a five-hand, I can appreciate a six-ed when I see one. Daniel Edward Aykroyd was raised in a world convinced of both the presence and power

of the supernatural, as well as the magic and inevitability of technology. His great-grandfather, a dentist, and a mystic obsessed with the spiritualist writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, who had written a book called Heaven and Hell about the afterlife, Madame Blavatsky, who founded like a fake religion called Theosophy in the late 19th century and Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, hence the terror dogs. As Aykroyd later told the Guardian,

all that stuff was lying around the old farmhouse, I grew up in it, so I was kind of steeped in it. Can I just say, I don't know that I want my dentist to be a mystic. That's my only criticism thus far. All of these family members are described as having very normal jobs, but also being deeply into spiritual occultism. It'll be like, his father, who worked for the government and performed seances around the home. Well?

So it was an eclectic childhood. He was a firm believer in Ghost Lizzie. Quote, I believe that they are between here and there, that they exist between the fourth and fifth dimension and that they visit us frequently. And it's not surprising that he could feel the presence of the dead, the farmhouse in which he grew up, had been occupied by Acroids for six generations. And as I mentioned, it was home to innumerable seances. is, Akroyd's grandfather was actually a telephone engineer that tried to use telephone technology to contact the dead through radio waves. Hell yeah.

I don't think he was successful. Oh. Akroyd did have stories from his childhood involving the supernatural, trumpets flying around the room, ectoplasmic tubes of light, visions of old occupants in the house. His grandmother was apparently lifted from her bed, thrown to the floor, and bitten by an invisible force at one point. Dan was, according to Don Shea's making Ghostbusters, a card-carrying member of the American American society for psychical research. So he was a, you know, real true believer. Now, unlike his

forefathers, Dan sought an audience with the living, not the dead. He learned the drums, took up improv, dabbled in theater, got kicked out of Catholic school for intoxication in public, and at age 17 had a brief stint in a short-lived Canadian sketch comedy series called The Heart and Lorne Traffic Hour. Any idea who the Lorne in that might be? going to be a Mr. Lorne Michaels. Lorne Michaels. Akroyd then did go to college briefly, studied criminology and sociology. I also read that it was psychology and social criminology.

He didn't. It doesn't matter. He didn't graduate. That was at Carlton University. He dropped out. And in 1972, he joined Second City Improv. And that's where he formed one of the most important relationships of his career. And that is, of course, his comedic partnership with Chicago-born John Belushi.

So as the Guardian later described it, Akroyd's off-kilter straight man was the perfect counter to Belushi's irreverent Gonzo clown. And guys, they are so funny together. Yeah, they really are. They were so good. Like Akroyd, Belushi had a musical background, although when they met, he was a metalhead.

And then Belushi's the one that introduced him to the blues. They had an insane commitment to the bit, whatever that bit might be. However, beyond that, they were a study in contrast. Accroyd had little taste for hard drugs and powders, and it seems a strong aversion to the treacherous relationship between stars and their hangers-on, but the two loved each other like brothers. Guys, Belushi will get his full do when we cover Animal House at a different point.

So I'll leave it at this. The two separated briefly as Belushi joined the National Lampoon Radio Hour, while Akroyd committed to the Canadian comedy scene, he wrote TV, he ran a speakeasy, drove a motorcycle. he just had this incredibly eclectic life. But of course, they were brought back together in 1974 when Lauren Michaels was given a 90-minute slot on Saturday night to, quote, do for comedy what the Beatles had done for pop music.

And of course, he brought in the best from National Ampoon in Second City, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Michael O'Donohue, and following a very lengthy audition process, fellow Canuck Dan Aykroyd. Now, I'm not going to go into the history of Saturday Night, here, it's far too dense and fascinating to cover. Lizzie, I think we'll have to do another TV episode for Saturday Night Live at some point.

What is important to know is that Akroyd originally hired as a writer, became a performing cast member before the premiere, thanks in large part to his dead on impressions. In particular, Richard Nixon as a car salesman was a big one. I don't know if you remember his sketches. My favorite one was always the bas-o-matic. It's like the infomercial where he's just blending the fish. Yes. And it's so stupid.

Also, that line he does in the, I think it's the debate one, Jane, you ignorant slut, is like how he always prefaces his line. Jane Curtin, yeah. Yeah, exactly. He won an Emmy in 1977 for his writing on the show, and of course, by the end of the decade, he and his cohort of S&L originals were comedy superstars trying to make the leap from the small screen to the big screen. So, Akroyd has some early film highs, which would be Blues Brothers. I love Blues Brothers so much. We'll cover it on the show. I want to do that one for sure.

Some lows, Steven Spielberg's misbegotten, 1941, which Belushi actually pulled him into. And films that landed somewhere in between, 1981's Neighbors, which was also produced by Columbia Pictures. It's interesting. It's actually him and Belushi playing against Type. He plays the Crazy One, and Belushi plays the straight man. It's a neighbor dealing with crazy neighbors. The one constant was his continued collaboration with John Belushi. And so, in the early 1980s, Dan Aykroyd found himself.

sitting at the family farm, reading a parapsychology journal like any self-respecting Akroyd man is want to do. Sure. When he had a little idea. What if you could use quantum technology to trap ghosts? Akroyd's original treatment was titled Ghost Smashers. Right. Smash and makes me feel good. Sure. Smash and makes you feel good.

It was written specifically as a star vehicle for him and John Belushi. Okay. So which character was John Belushi supposed to play? Is it Bill Murray? Bill Murray's character. Yeah. Thankman. So the intention was always for Akroyd to be the technically oriented, honest mechanic, and for Belushi's, Vankman to be the more smarmy huckster of the two characters.

That's so interesting. It almost doesn't make sense, now having seen Bill Murray do it, because there's kind of a sweetness to John Belushi that Bill Murray doesn't have. Yeah. I mean, obviously, we are sad to have lost John Belushi so much. I think Bill Murray is a better choice at the end of the day in the role. I think they rewrote the role extensively for Bill Murray. Oh, that makes sense.

So, yeah, things changed drastically from this original treatment. So he specifically wanted to recapture the magic of these old comedy duo ghost films. So Abbott Costello's Hold That Ghost and Bob Hope's Ghost Breakers, both from, I think, 1940 and 1941. Yeah, I loved Abbott and Costello. So good. Ackroyd began developing the screenplay while he was in New York. It was complicated. It had time travel and established a society of interdimensional ghost chasers.

And it was much more serious than the final film. So it was definitely scares first. When on March 4th, 1982, Ackroyd arrived at work to find a voicemail from a very inebriated John Belushi. As Aykroyd later said, quote, he was fucked up and he was hurting. I'd never heard him that bad before. I thought, I'm going to finish this paragraph. and then I'm going to get on a plane and get the fuck out there, and I didn't. I tracked him down that afternoon on the phone instead.

He sounded sad and defeated. I said, John, come on, man, you got to come home. I'm writing something great for us here that's going to solve everything, but you've got to come back. And he said, okay. He said he was coming back on the red eye, so I didn't go. The next day, on March 5, 1982, while Akroyd was writing a line for Belushi's character, he received a phone call from manager and eventual ghostbust

Mr. Bollosters executive producer Bernie Brillstein. John Belushi had been found dead of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont. He was 33 years old. Of course, as I said, we will cover Mr. Belushi's life and career in a later episode. Obviously, Dan Aykroyd was devastated. He'd lost not just his co-star, but his brother of the last 10 years. As he later said, quote, my first impulse after John died was to split, to quit the business, pack up, jump on my Harley, and just disappear. I honestly thought it through. I'd liquidate, reorganize, give myself a new orientation and name. He actually thought of it so far in advance that one identity he came up with was Bruce

Smecter, Patton Rouge Welder. Bruce Smecter? I feel like he could have... Yeah, Bruce Smecter. Not to make a joke at a very sad moment, but maybe he would appreciate it. He could have reinvented himself as Razelinski, the Auto Parts King, as he does later. and Tommy Boy. But yeah, I mean, John Belushi was such an

unbelievable talent. And it's you know, I'm sure we'll probably cover David Spade and Chris Farley's relationship at some point too, but like the loss of that kind of partner, I don't know that you ever really recover from that. The sheer volume of projects that fell apart

as a result in such a tragic fashion too, we'll touch on some of them in this film. But I mean, the ripple effects were really far. and wide. I mean, he was incredible, like so magnetic, so funny. Of course, he was involved in everything, and he was at an absolute peak at that time and just so heartbreaking that, you know, he was that miserable when he was bringing so many people so much joy. Yeah. Dan Aykroyd and Ghost Smashers were adrift in need of a new anchor for their film and for themselves. So, Lizzie,

if one were to look up the word stable in the dictionary, It's unlikely a photograph of Bill Murray would be printed next to it. By 1982, the Illinois native deadpan comedian had stepped out from under Chevy Chase's shadow. He'd actually replaced Chevy Chase in Saturday Night Live's second season, and he was at this point best known for back-to-back roles in meatballs, caddyshack, and stripes. He was also equally known around the industry for his inability to fully commit to a project. Oh, no. The Mercurial Murray affectionately nicknamed the Murricane,

had shown up to Ivan Reitman's meatball set, a mere two days before production, when he read the script for the first time and threw it in the garbage. Reitman convinced Murray to stay on the movie by insisting that if he didn't like the cut, he would make sure that it was never released in the United States. Concern over Murray no-showing was actually so pervasive that, according to Columbia Pictures' studio head, Frank Price, the studio actually had another actor on retainer for Stripes just in case Bill Murray no-showed. But Bill Murray did show up, and Stripes was a bona fide smash.

Bill Murray continued to develop a reputation as a hothead, though. While on the press tour for that film, he berated a photographer at the Ritz Carlton and Boston for photographing him near a buffet, reportedly saying, I didn't order this stuff, I don't even eat any of it. They'll publish the picture, and people will think I did. When he realized the photographer had already left the room, he took a plate and threw it out the seventh-story window in the direction of the parking lot.

Six months after the death of John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd pulled himself back to the typewriter, putting ink to paper on four projects he had in development, chief amongst them, ghost smashers. Though the film was originally written for him in Belushi, there was a third team member present, even in its earliest iterations. Who Aykroyd had in mind for that role has shifted over the years. He's at various points said that he'd actually intended for Murray to be the third team member with him in Belushi, so I don't know how. how the personalities would have worked.

At other times, he mentioned Eddie Murphy, but in April of 1982, Variety announced that Richard Pryor was being sought to replace Belushi, and this actually is possible, considering Akroyd later mentioned having rewritten the part for a black guy. Interesting. Chevy Chase has been rumored

as being in consideration. He even said he turned down a role in the movie, and Tom Enriquez, the film Storyboard artist, says that when he first began on the film in June of 1983, he was instructed to draw a scene in which a ghost makes sexual advances on Chevy Chase.

So unclear, but it is clear that Ackroyd shared the Ghost Smashers' treatment with Murray at some point in 1982, and Murray loved it. Aykroyd later said, whenever you can actually put a script into Billy's hand, as if you are a process server, you got to look him in the eye and say, you did receive this. Oh, my God. So Ackroyd was encouraged that Murray actually responded positively. So he reached out to the one man he thought would be perfect to. to direct the film, and of course, that man was another Canadian.

Ivan Reitman and Dan Aykroyd first crossed paths in the early 1970s on a Canadian game show that Aykroyd hosted and Reitman produced. We'll cover Ivan Reitman at a later date. Just know, the Czechoslovakian-born, Toronto-raised son of Holocaust survivors, had come up producing horror and exploitation films. He actually crossed paths with Roger Corman and produced fellow Canuck David Cronenberg's Shivers and Rapid. He broke through with the John Landis-helmed, Harold Ramis, co-written Animal House, but found himself increasingly frustrated with producing. He felt he was largely responsible for getting Animal House off the ground,

yet received little to no credit for the film since he hadn't directed it. Hence, he jumps into directing with 1979's Meatballs, which is a big hit. He gets a three-picture deal with Paramount Pictures that the company immediately retracts. CEO Michael Eisner offered it. and studio chair, Barry Diller, took it away. So Reitman's agent, Michael Ovitz at CAA, retaliates by moving all of Reitman's projects to Columbia Pictures. So that move actually cost Paramount Ghostbusters in a way.

Yikes. So Murray and Reitman, of course, did Stripes in 1981, and Reitman was looking for his next film when Ackroyd sent him the first 50 pages or so of the Ghost Smashers script. Let's listen to Mr. Reitman describing it. Quote, it was set in the future, not far in the future, but far enough, and it took place on a number of different planets

or dimensional planets, and it was all action. There was very little character work in it. The heroes were catching ghosts on the first page and doing it on every single page after that without respite. By the 10th page, I was exhausted. By the 40th or 50th page, I was counting the budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars,

and there really weren't very many laughs. Although I could detect a comic attitude, the whole thing was written rather seriously. In the end, I just kind of set it aside and forgot about it. So not a great start with Ivan Reitman, but Dan Aykroyd was not to be deterred. He finished the draft.

He then videotaped himself wearing a jumpsuit uniform, homemade neutrona wands, and a proton pack that he built out of radio parts and old styrofoam. Amazing. Just Dan Aykroyd in his farmhouse

building ghost hunting equipment. That's incredible. I want to watch that movie. I want to watch that movie. Yeah. 100%. So he sends it to Reitman, and Reitman's intrigued. Apparently, at this point, they have the firehouse setting.

They have the idea of these characters kind of as exterminators, which Reitman liked, and they had the idea for the logo. And that was basically all that Reitman liked from the entire script that Aykroyd sent it. All important things, to be fair. Absolutely. And trapping them ghosts. Yeah, bust and ghosts. Feeling good.

So the two met for lunch at Art's Deliccateson, and Reitman says, look, we have to make the film grounded. We have to set it in a modern American city. And it has to explain how they get into ghostbusting to begin with. So hence, Lizzie, feeling like two movies, the back half of the movie with Gozer and the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man, that was present in the original script. The whole origin story of how they became Ghostbusters was not.

It's a little weird. Like, I don't totally know that you, need it. Again, this movie is great. Obviously, no complaints, but like, it does feel quite tacked on, and it doesn't totally make sense that they're just like, they're like, yeah, we work at this university. Oh, they're kicking us out. They haven't told us why. Now we're out of bank, and we're all in suits. And Dan Aykroyd has gotten a third mortgage on his house. And somehow, with that third mortgage, they have completely redone this firehouse. And now it's incredible, and they have a ghostbusting system. We were watching it.

David got up and went into the kitchen for like literally 30 seconds, came back, and he was like, what happened? Did you skip ahead, like 20 minutes? I was like, no, this is it. They literally turned a corner and two years have gone by. Yeah. There's no explanation. There's a couple time jumps in there.

So, Reitman pitches this to Ackroyd, and Ackroyd agrees. He can see this version of the movie getting made, but they need help. And they need to turn to someone who will be able to ground the movie with the most possibly like the most deadpan sense of humor, I would argue even more than Bill Murray. And of course, that's Harold Ramos. And so in 1982, Harold Ramos had seen the mountaintop and perhaps worried he'd never see such sights again.

The Second City and National Lampoon Radio Hour alum had bypassed Saturday Night Live, so he'd continued to write for Second City television, but of course he exploded onto the film scene with Animal House, which he co-wrote, with fellow lampooner Doug Kenny, and then Meatballs. Then he directed Caddyshack, which he again co-wrote with Doug Kenny. That was his directorial debut.

And it's interesting, the movie really wasn't received with the same enthusiasm as Animal House. So despite its cult status today and the fact that it was ultimately a commercial success, the movie he had underperformed expectations and had received somewhat middling reviews. And then it also got totally dwarfed by the release of Airplane. Yeah, that makes sense. So Ramos and Kenny really both felt like, They failed. Doug Kenney goes to Hawaii to avoid the reviews after the movie comes out.

He's struggling to stay sober. And in late August of 1980, his body was discovered at the bottom of a cliff. Oh, no. Whether it was an accident or suicide, it was never determined. Harold Ramos had, like Akroyd, lost a brother, his writing partner. He said of the tragedy that, quote, Doug probably fell while looking for a place to jump, which only a comedian can eulogize a comedian. Yeah. Kenny, like Belushi, was 33 years old.

Oh, my God. Very young. So Ramos made his acting debut across Bill Murray in 1981 Stripes. He was pretty unhappy with his performance. He got pretty poor reviews for his work in that movie across Bill Murray. He was set to direct an adaptation of a Confederacy of Dunces starring John Belushi and Richard Pryor. But that project fell through. I'm not sure if it's because of John Belushi's death.

or not. He then switched to direct vacation, written by John Hughes and starring Chevy Chase, and he had actually just wrapped production on that film, post-production, when Ackroyd and Reitman walked into his office on the Burbank Studios lot, and it's an amazing moment because they literally burst into his office while Ramos is reading a different Dan Aykroyd script called Never Say Mountie, which is like a send-up of cop procedures through... Canadian Mounted Police, yeah. So, Akroyd grabs... the Mountie script, throws it away, hands him the Ghost Smashers script. He and Reitman spent 20 minutes

pitching the redone version of the movie, and in some accounts, apparently also offering him the role of the third Ghostbusters, giving him an opportunity to get another chance at acting. That's unconfirmed. That's a rumor. And after 20 minutes, Ramos simply said, I'm in. Incredible. He has probably the best one-liners in the whole movie. Absolutely. Of course, Ramos's comedic weren't the only thing Reitman and Ackroyd were after. They knew that by attaching him, they could further hedge against Bill Murray leaving the project. So Ramos was famously used as bait

to keep Bill Murray in films. Specifically, that's why Reitman brought him in on stripes. As Bill Murray later said, quote, the fact that he put Harold in it was kind of a cheap shot. Because if I said no, I said no to Harold too. His screen debut. I mean, Ivan could have laid a baby on the railroad tracks too.

So late that after night, rightman called Michael Ovitz. Twelve people in Hollywood, Ovitz was everyone's agent at this time. He was Murray's agent, Ramos's agent, Akroy's agent, and Reitman's agent. Obviously, he was the co-creator of CAA and would later become the president of Disney

for a short-lived stint. He's come up before. Yeah. So Michael Ovitz gets them a meeting with Frank Price, Chairman of Columbia Pictures. Price says, okay, what do you got? Ovitz goes, we have a project. Danny Written, Ivan,

I've been directing, Bill Murray is attached, we're bringing in Harold. Price is intrigued. So is the rest of Hollywood. The only problem, they can't show anyone the scripts because they know that it's going to be nothing like the script that they have. So Reitman goes into Price, pitches him the movie in five minutes. Price goes, great, let me read the script. Rightman goes, we don't have one. Price goes, okay, tell me what it's going to cost. Rightman goes, I have no idea. So it's unclear who came up with the number, but the two men in this meeting agreed that the budget would be $25 million based on nothing at all except Reitman believing that three times as much as stripes sounded reasonable. Great. I don't know. You got to start somewhere.

Yeah. So Price Green Lights, Ghostbusters, but it comes with one important caveat. Columbia needed a tent pole release for the summer of 1984, and at this point it was June of 1983. Oh, no. So that gave Reitman, Akroyd, and Ramos, 12 months to write the script, shoot the film, finish the visual effects, and deliver the film. That's not great. Yeah.

So not everyone was thrilled with this plan, including Fay Vincent, Columbia's New York-based CEO. He sent a lawyer to L.A. immediately to try to kill the project. He was convinced it was going to be another 1941, but Price refused to back out of the deal. As he later said, quote, I've got Bill Murray. Do you? I was going to say, he didn't actually.

No, he had Bill Murray. So in an attempt to make sure Murray would stay on the project, Murray had a passion project. It was a period piece of drama set in the 1920s called The Razors Edge that he'd been trying to get made and it would kind of be a transition into more dramatic film and it was stuck in development hell at Columbia. And Price basically said,

I'm going to green light this $12 million art house film just to make sure you do Ghostbusters. All right. Expensive guy. He was also paid $3.5 million. up front for his work on Ghostbusters. In 80s money. Yeah, 80s money.

That's a lot of cocaine. Yeah. So, why was Ghostbusters considered such a risk? It was a comedy first, and comedies were supposed to be cheap. Special effects and bloated budgets were to be saved for the homogenized mainstream releases of sci-fi action and horror blockbusters along the lines of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Dark. Meatball, Stripes, Caddyshack, they'd all been made for under $10 million. and there was a high likelihood that Ghostbusters would cost far more than its preset $25 million,

which is something that had kind of followed Dan Aykroyd and John Landis from Blues Brothers, which we'll cover later, which obviously started at like a $5 million budget and blew up to nearly $30 million. Yeah. All right. So it's time to get type typing. Ramis and Aykroyd would write the script every single day in Reitman's offices, pitch him pages. He would read it, cut stuff. Basically, Ackroyd wrote story and structure. Ramis did characters and jokes. So Ramos came up with

their personas. Vankman as kind of the Huxter salesman, stance as the honest mechanic, and then this new character, Egon Spengler, as the Spock that he would play. Yes. Reitman is the one who came up with the idea of it being the three of them at a university. Arrest the development, they finally get kicked out of the nest. And so while Ackroyd and Ramos were writing, apparently Ackroyd would write up to 40 pages in a day. which is... Oh, my God. Crazy.

I mean, they had to. Like, at the timeline you're talking about, they must have been cranking this out. Yeah, so Ramos would write, you know, maybe five pages a day with a lot of jokes. Akroyd would write 40,

and then Reitman would come in and just cut, cut, cut, anything that he felt wasn't working. It's interesting, too, how Reitman is the one who actually pushed a lot of the kind of libertarian aspects of the story into it.

Akroyd has a kind of well-known long fascination, if not reverence for institutions such as the police, in the military. He actually spent 20 years as a reserve officer in Louisiana and Mississippi. His maternal grandfather was a Mountie, and he's kind of long been taken by the culture of biker gangs. And so it makes sense that in the first draft, it was this interdimensional brotherhood of ghost chasers. And then in the end, you kind of get this upstart entrepreneurial 1980s business taking on overzealous and over-regulated government.

Right. You get on a tech startup, basically. You do, absolutely. So Reitman later described himself as, quote, something of a conservative slash libertarian. The first movie deals with going into business for yourself, and it's anti-EPA, too much government regulation. It does have a very interesting point of view that really resonates. And obviously, Reaganomics at the time, Reagan was very anti-EPA. Yeah. Which, of course, is also fascinating because the EPA was created by Richard Nixon. That's a story for another time. So, Akroyd and Ramis, they're working, they're working, they're working, and they realize this movie takes place in a grounded world. We need a grounded POV for the audience, an audience.

surrogate in this world, we need a skeptic on the team. So it's long been rumored that Winston Zedamore, the sole black Ghostbuster, was specifically written for, if you had to guess, Lizzie. I would guess Eddie Murphy. Eddie Murphy. However, that's been refuted by Ivan Reitman on multiple occasions. Eddie Murphy did at one point say he turned down a role in the film in order to do Beverly Hills cop. However, the timing of this doesn't quite make sense because Ghostbusters would have come across his desk before Sylvester Stallone left Beverly Hillscop. Yes, that's a movie for another day. It's entirely possible he passed because he didn't want a supporting role, though.

It's a pretty small part at the end of the day. So it wasn't originally. And that's what's really interesting. Dan Aykroyd obviously worked with Eddie Murphy in 1983 on trading places. Yes, of course, one of my all-time favorites. Amazing, which became an enormous hit. So by the time Acroyd and Ramis finished the draft of Ghostbusters dated August 1983, trading places had been released and had catapulted Ackroyd back into the limelight. It was his most financially successful film to date. Vacation had just cemented Ramos as a force to be reckoned with behind the camera. So these two have the wind at their backs. They double down on Ghostbusters. And in an attempt to do justice to the first black character either of them had ever written,

they decide to give Winston Zedamore this very detailed and impressive backstory. He was a former Air Force pilot, had a black belt, and he was introduced far earlier in the movie. It's actually on page 28. You can read the third draft online. Oh, wow. That's way earlier than...

It's right at the end of Act 1. Yeah, man, Ernie Hudson gets a short shrift in the final cut. Yeah, the first scene where he's introduced is a very funny interview scene where he's this incredibly impressive person. He's going to... And you can tell he's very serious. He's got a lot of experience.

And he goes, so what are you all up to here? And then Akroyd gives this nerdy explanation about hunting ghosts. And then there's a long pause and he goes, so you want to tell me what you're really doing? And that's the end of the scene. It's very funny.

Zedimore was a really meaty role. He participates in the first extermination at the hotel, early in Act 2. Yeah. He's specifically attacked by a ghost. And then at the end of the film, he's the one who inadvertently summons the stay-puffed marshmallow man.

Oh. Not Ackroyd. So the role was actually big enough that Gregory Hines, perhaps first known as an incredible tap dancer, but also actor, yeah, was drawn in and actually entered negotiations for the project. Those stalled, and he instead did Francis Ford Coppola's Cotton Club, which we'll cover another day.

Yafit Kodo, who, if you don't remember him, played Dennis Parker, the chief engineer in Alien, actually across Sigourney Weaver, the only black character in that film, was offered the role but passed for a very specific reason because he was concerned that acting in the film would, due to its subject matter, worsen the extraterrestrial experiences he'd been dealing with since childhood. Oh. As he later said, quote, aliens are here, they're among us, this stuff is real. After I did Alien, I started having these experiences again.

so when I got the script for Ghostbusters, I couldn't do it. I didn't want the stuff in my life. It's the same reason I turned down Empire Strikes Back and Star Trek. People say, wow, how can Yafat Koto turn this stuff down? Because I don't want the stuff happening to me. Ghostbusters was no fantasy. It was written by someone who knows. And now, before you laugh at his convictions,

remember, Dan Aykroyd would have agreed with him 100%. Yeah. Dan Aykroyd famously had a Ouija board with him during production and refused to pull it out because he didn't want to summon John Belushi's ghost to set. He wanted it as like a good luck charm, but he was nervous that its presence would bring a ghost over while they were filming. Oh, wow.

I mean, there is something to this movie in terms of, it feels more thought out in terms of like the way that the specters appear, the way that they are catching them. Like there's, there is sort of a methodology to this that I think, like as soon as you said that he really believed in it, it made complete sense. They talk about how he and Ramos spent a lot of time trying to make the movie feel as if a physicist could somewhat believe what was happening. And they spoke to physicists about how they could possibly use nuclear reactor technology to trap ghosts and whatnot.

So the part of Winston Zedamore found its way to what went wrong alum, Ernie Hudson. Listen to our episode on The Crow. Love Ernie. Like the character, Hudson had some military experience. he was briefly in the Marine Corps. The Michigan native turned to the stage at Concept East, which was the oldest black theater in the country where he became a resident playwright.

He eventually found his way to the Yale School of Drama on a full scholarship. Whoa. That's like one of the best in the world. Yeah. So unlike candidly, the other three Ghostbusters, he came from a true Thespian background. The others had really no training in the way that he did.

He dipped his toe. in Hollywood with a co-starring role in 1976's Leadbelly, but struggled to find consistent work afterward. He then returned to academia briefly, starred in a Minneapolis theatrical production of The Great White Hope, playing boxer Jack Johnson, and then by the early 1980s, he'd found a groove with guest spots in television shows like Fantasy Island, The Incredible Hulk, Taxi, the A-Team, and more, but he was still hungry for that big screen break, and Ghostbusters looked to be that movie. He reportedly auditioned for the part six times. So this was not just a shoe in. You know, he nailed it on the first try and they're giving it to him. He really had to work for it.

Columbia Pictures called his agent with an offer. It was less than half of his quoted rate. And he had just done a movie with Columbia. I think it was called Space Hunters. So he had a relationship with them and they were still kind of stiffing him. And Columbia did a lot to try to keep the budget down on this movie. Ernie Hudson, though, was certain that this movie was going to do wonders for his career. He had a meaty role. He was the fourth Ghostbuster. And these were three of the biggest stars on the planet.

Yeah, I mean, they are at a huge place at this point. Dan Aykroyd has scripts set up at every studio in town. Harold Ramos is one of the biggest comedy directors working. And Bill Murray is, after the death of John Belushi, candidly. He and Chevy Chase are the two biggest S&L comic stars in existence. Yep. So Ernie Hudson is in. Meanwhile, Ramis and Akroyd are writing,

and Reitman has to convince Frank Price to start spending money on a movie that doesn't have a script. Why? Because they need to start filming by October of 1983. That is tight. In order to give post-production sufficient runway to deliver

the over 200 special effects shots that the movie was going to call for. Now, of course, Lizzie, there's only one problem, and that's that 1984 is the year of the blockbuster and every VFX house is booked. Oh no. With films like Indiana Jones

and the Temple of Doom, Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, gremlins, and more. Never-ending story. There were so many. Industrial Light and Magic simply couldn't take on a film of Ghostbusters' scope.

The movie needed optical visual effects, matte paintings, puppets, costumes, explosions, lasers, miniature work, high-speed photography, You know, they have concrete blowing up in front of a building on Fifth Avenue. It's a lot. I mean, the amount of effects shots that are in this, like, that really took me aback this time. And also, they're very fun.

Like, I understand that some of them look really hokey, the sort of dog creatures in particular. But some of them hold up pretty well. I agree. A lot of it's very practical. I'll briefly touch on the terror dogs now. They were finished so last minute that they actually, the shot of the dogs running. Yeah, into Central Park. Yeah, that was a pickup shot, I believe, at the end of the film, because the terror dogs were not ready in time to finish. And they were so fragile, Bill Murray put his hand on one of them and the horn just snapped off. And they were like, oh, my God, we have to go fix the tarotog right now. I will say, we're going to be a little light. Actually, we're going to be very light on special effects coverage here. There is so much amazing work online, guys, videos breaking this down. This is not the medium for me to describe in tedious detail optical effects for you. So please, there are tons of resources online.

Seek those out. Do your own homework. Yeah, do your goddamn homework. It was Ivan Reitman, according to Ivan Reitman, who came up with the idea to start their own effects house. Luckily for him, Oscar-winning visual effects master, Richard Edland, who had done Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and perhaps most importantly, Poultergeist, listened to our episodes on all of those, was looking to start his own effects house, and he was stuck in a hospital bed following a back operation. So aside from needing to heal, he was available. That feels like a big caveat, but all right, just prop them up. Yeah. Columbia Pictures joins forces with MGM. They also need AVFX house for their 2001,

a Space Odyssey sequel, 2010, the year we shouldn't have made this movie, the two studios co-funded Edlin's new company titled Boss Film Studios. Things come together in the fall of 1983 giving Edland basically nine months to, as he later said, quote, build the studio, shoot all the scenes, composite everything. It was an incredibly ambitious amount of work. Yeah, that's nuts. So Edlin and associate producer Michael Gross built a wonderful team of designers and artists to create the cadre of creepy that filled the film, pouring themselves into every detail. I'm going to highlight two ghosts in particular that I think are worth talking about or creatures. And Lizzie, can you guess what's the one the first one is?

I hope it's the lady in the library. It's not, although this is, that woman was designed by this artist who I'm going to talk about. Okay, is it slimer? Slimer. Yeah. Who wasn't known as Slimer at the time. He actually was known as the grinning ghost, I believe, or onion head because of how bad he smelled, literally the built creature himself. So, slimer was assigned to the incredible Steve Johnson, and if you're unfamiliar with his name, you know his work, Fright Night, Poulter,

to an American Warwolf in London, and many more. As Johnson told, bloody disgusting in 2018, Slimer took six months to design and was, quote, the most annoying, horrendous experience I've ever had with working with art directors, producers, and directors ever. In the beginning, they asked me for a smile with arms, but before I knew it, it was a goddamn bleeding nightmare.

Give him 13% more pathos, put ears on him, take his ears off, less pathos, more pathos, make his nose bigger, now his nose is too big, make his nose smaller. Are you kidding? Make him more cartooning. make him less cartoony, I almost fucking severed my own head during that process, end quote. Well, ended up great, very iconic.

Well, let's find out why. After months of work, Johnson found himself with 24 hours to redesign the ghost. He would be presenting his final design to the producers of the film, failure, and he'd be fired. Out of ideas and very, very high on cocaine, he received an important bit of direction that Dan Acroyd and Harold Ramis had somehow failed to provide earlier. Make him look like John Belushi. Oh. As Johnson later said, quote, so I pulled out a stack of headshots of John Belushi, poured a gram of cocaine on it, and started chopping lines up. I was three grams into the night and in a cocaine-induced delusional paranoia, and I literally thought that John Belushi's ghost came to help me out.

Now, be it a hallucination, divine intervention, or something in between, Johnson was subsequently visited by the spirit of John Belushi, who not only gave him positive reinforcement, but modeled for him and warned him of the dangers of cocaine. I was going to say. Yeah, apparently parted with the advice, quote, watch that shit, Steve, it'll kill you. Oh. What he designed in that drug-fueled creative frenzy is what ended up in the film. I believe it. I think John showed up. Well, this is how I kind of know John showed up. He also said in another interview that Belushi's ghost looked at the final design and said, quote, that looks nothing like me, Steve, end quote. I'd also just like to take a brief moment to discuss the stay puffed marshmallow man. I love it. It's such an insane moment. The entire

film builds to it. It feels completely appropriate and entirely out of nowhere. It's the moment that no one really knew if it would work or not. In fact, Dan Aykroyd's father, after reading the script, told Dan to cut it from the movie. He said, there's no way this will ever work. The marshmallow man is the one creature that had been in the movie since the first draft, though. So apparently the first draft

had a lot of giant, kaiju-sized monsters, and the stay-puffed marshmallow man was the only one that survived. He's so great. I love his evil little face. So good. That all goes to special effects sculptor,

Bill Bryan. He used three types of foam to build the puff monster's full-body suit. So he and two other stuntmen wore it while walking across a miniature rendition of 8th Avenue, filmed at 72 frames per second, which is, of course, three times the standard 24 frames per second, so you can slow down the movement to one third,

which then, again, if you're filming, shooting up at him, makes his strides look longer than they are, hence exaggerating the size of the small set. Further, the three versions of the suit that were created, I believe there were nine suits made total and various burn stages. Cost somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000 to make each. Wow.

It sounds like they were all set on fire while worn by stuntman Brad Allen. There's apparently a ton of continuity errors that I never have noticed because of the way that they went about this. I don't think it matters. Further, the, quote, marshmallow that coats the city after the fight scene

is actually shaving cream, 200 pounds of it. It looks like it, yeah. Bill Murray was like, don't put any more of that shit on me. And Dan Aykroyd was like, put as much on me as you want. You can tell, because Bill Murray is the only one not covered in it at the very end. The rest of them are literally head-to-to-toe covered.

Bill's like, I'm the movie star. People want to see me. And everyone else is like, it's fine. Just cover us. All right, let's do a couple other things on casting. So initially, Dana Barrett and Louis Tully were supposed to be the human disguises of multidimensional monsters. So possession wasn't actually part of the original story.

And I guess they threw that idea out the window when Sigourney Weaver won the part of Dana Because they thought, oh, wow, she's so good. Yeah. She can ground the character as a human and then be possessed. Other folks that read or were considered, I read Daryl Hannah, Kelly McGillis, and in one source, Julia Roberts, although I couldn't confirm that. But it was Sigourney Weaver, another Yale grad, who was hungry to play comedy after her breakout in 1979's Alien.

As she later told Vanity Fair, quote, I had to audition for Ivan, and she decided to show him her best rendition of a terror dog. So she says, I remember starting to growl and bark and gnaw on the cushions and jump around. Ivan cut the tape and said, don't ever do that again. And then he called Harold Ramos

and said, I have our Dana. Apparently everyone was just shocked that she wanted to do the movie. Yeah, she was a huge star. Yeah, and a serious actress. And so she later said, quote, Bill, Danny, and Harold all came up to me and said things like,

are you sure you read the script? You're a serious actress, end quote. She was all in. And every quote I read, she was so game. And it's no surprise, we covered Galaxy Quest. She's so good in that movie. She brings so many good ideas to the table. It was her idea, apparently, to change Dana's profession from model actress to musician.

And I wonder if it was her idea to bend Rick Moranus over on the kiss. Oh, yeah. I love that so much. Such good blocking in that moment. And, like, the height disparity, as you mentioned. Speaking of Rick Moranis, so Louis. Tully's original human counterpart, a libidimous party animal. He was supposed to be super creepy, not the kind of like dweeby lurker that he is in the final film. Yeah, he's a sweet lurker.

He's a sweet lurker. The role was written for any guesses, Lizzie, Canadian comedian. Is it Martin Short? No. Heavy set. Heavy set. John Candy. Oh. Yeah. Okay, that also would have been good. So apparently John Candy turned down the role, as he told Gene Siskel in 1986, quote, at the time I was under contract to Disney for $350,000 a picture, and the producer of Ghostbusters wouldn't pay me that kind of money. It should be noted, though, that Ivan Reitman claims he withdrew the offer to Candy, after Candy said, I would do the part if I could do it with a German accent and be flanked by two big dogs, which sounds really weird, and I kind of just believe his explanation that they weren't offering him a ton of money and he decided to go with a different

movie. Oh, it's very specific though. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. So Michael McKeen, then known for LeBerman and Shirley, and of course, perhaps now for Better Call Saul. And Spinal Tap. Yeah, Spinal Tap.

Also auditioned for the part, but it was won by another Second City TV star. And that's, of course, another Canadian, Rick Moranis. The Nebish, Torontoan had gone from radio DJ to writer and cast member on SCTV. He co-wrote, co-directed, and co-star. in 1983's Strange Brew with Dave Thomas. Which is great. Super fun, weird riff on Hamlet. Yes.

And had recently been attached to Dan Aykroyd's Never Say Mountie. Of course. So that film went into development hell when MGM said it was too Canadian, which, what did you think when you bought a movie called Never Say Mountie? Yeah.

Moranis was thrilled to play Louis Tully. He turned him from a total creep into a hopelessly love-struck little nerd. Yeah. It was just a little bit creepy. I, as you mentioned, Lizzie, love Moranus in this movie. He's so good. I did not appreciate how good he was when I was younger.

No. I really, really think he steals every scene that he's saying. Just the joke of him always getting locked out of his apartment is stupid funny. Should not be funny. That's incredible. Also, I love when he's like, oh, you shouldn't leave your TV on. Somebody was complaining about how loud your TV was. No, don't worry about it.

You know what I did is I turned mine on really loud. He takes something that could be so letcherous and creepy And he just ends up being so sweet I love it And it makes for such a fun turn When they end up coming together in the third act In a sexual way And it feels, I don't know

In some way it's not gross Exactly And I'd like those are the only two that I think could make it not gross I agree So Gozer, the Sumerian god was originally written as a white guy in a business suit, kind of more of a G-man, it sounds like. And apparently Paul Rubens was considered for the part.

Would have been fun. But they eventually decided to go with an androgynous, sort of David Bowie-esque look and settled on Yugoslavian actress Slavitsa Yovan, who was quite the rebel and pioneer back in her home country. She had actually come up performing in productions that challenged the dictatorship she lived under, including a 1969 rendition of hair that was the first to occur behind the iron curtain.

Wow. She only gets two minutes of screen time in this, but she apparently was quite the pioneer. Of course, the only issue was her accent. Apparently when she said, choose and perish, it sounded more like Jews and berries. So her lines were dubbed by TV actress Patty Edwards, who remained uncredited. On the film, William Atherton was hired as EPA. villain Walter Peck. Apparently, people would like a costume on the streets after the film was released and just call him a dick. Oh, great. Because they hated his character so much.

Just means he was good at his job. Yeah, very. And Annie Potts took on the deadpan secretary role of Janine Meltnitz when comedian Sandra Bernard passed. All right, let's crank through a couple production things. The decision both to set the film in and shoot the film in New York was considered a bit unorthodox at the time, specifically because it seems like most people considered New York to be a crime-ridden wasteland, a society in decay, and film had largely moved to the West Coast.

The reality was much more complicated, of course. As writer Tom Schells put it, though, perception is reality, and the perception was that New York was the horrible, dirty crime center where decent people didn't go, synonymous with the sleazyest slum in the country. Sure.

Perfect to be cleaned up by the Ghostbusters. and Ivan Reitman was adamant that Ghostbusters would be his New York movie. So second unit photography began on Ghostbusters in mid-October for two weeks before principal photography began because Bill Murray wasn't available until October 27th because he was still in Paris and India shooting his passion project, The Razors Edge, which had been filming since July, had fallen woefully behind schedule, due to food poisoning, alcohol sickness, and general delays. What is that movie about? Because I'm having flashbacks to, I think, a teacher I had in, like, middle school liked

this movie, maybe, and I may have seen it more than once, but I've, like, blocked it out of my head. Is it World War I? I believe so. It is a World War I almost, like, the Four Feathers-esque, like, war romance movie. And I have never seen. seen it. Oh, man. It's based on a book that was considered really, really beautiful, and the book was actually gifted to Bill Murray's wife by the author, and that's how Murray found out about the book.

He read it, he loved it. He co-wrote the script. It really, he put everything he had, you know, into this movie. So much so that he actually showed up to set 35 pounds lighter than when he'd started that production. So if you notice that Murray looks a little thin in this film, it's actually because of the Razor's Edge. As he later said, quote, I got off the Concord from Razor's Edge and drove to 62nd Street and Madison to work on Ghostbusters. I left Paris at 9.30 in the morning and went to work at 11 o'clock in the morning in New York. I will never do that again. That was terrible. I mean, I was asleep the whole time. Yeah. End quote. Bill Murray wasn't the only one arriving under less than ideal circumstances.

First assistant director, Peter Giuliano, was brought on the Friday before filming began. replacing the newly fired Newt Arnold, a highly regarded first AD known for Blade Runner, among other films, listened to Our Episode. He had to hit the ground running, shooting a special effects-laden action comedy in the middle of New York, starring the Tempestuous,

and suddenly 35 pounds later, Bill Murray. Sounds like quite the Herculane task. Yeah. But apparently he did it with a plum. Now, Lizzie, Ernie Hudson also found himself on the wrong end of an unwanted surprise upon arrival. The role that he had been so excited to dive into had been, for lack of a better word,

gutted in the most recent rewrites of the script. Gone were Winston Zedemore's credentials and backstory. Gone were his moments with ghosts. Gone was his relevance to the finale, his new motivation, a paycheck. The irony, of course, was that he'd effectively foregone his to take this part. As Hudson later wrote in Entertainment Weekly, quote, I'm panicked, meaning this is the night before

filming. I don't sleep that night. It was like my worst nightmare is happening. The next morning, I rushed to set and plead my case. And Ivan basically says, the studio felt that they had Bill Murray, so they wanted to give him more stuff to do. I go, okay, I understand that. But can I even be there when they're established? And of course, he said, no, there's nothing to do about it. It was kind of awkward, and it became sort of the elephant in the room, end quote. I would suck so much. It's pretty tough. Reitman's explanation was that it was a studio mandate to give the screen time originally set

for Winston to Murray. However, Harold Ramis had a different explanation, and this can be found in the annotated script published as part of Don Shea's making Ghostbusters, and I'll read his surprisingly candid quote. Quote, as writers, we'd never done a black character, nor had we ever written women very well. The Writers Guild sends out letters about this regularly. Let's see more women and more minorities. So when we wrote Winston, I think we had our own little reverse backlash going.

We bent over backwards to make Winston's character good, and in doing so, we made him so good that he was the best character in the movie. We looked at it and said, Jesus, he's got all the good lines. At the same time, everybody was saying that Bill's character was a little weak. So little by little, we started shifting Winston's attitude to Bill's character, which made perfect sense, and we also ended up delaying Winston's introduction until much later in the film, end quote. Now Hudson, for his part, later remarked that, quote, had I been as big a star as Eddie Murphy, I don't think the part would have been cut, end quote. Yeah, no way. Akroyd actually pushed to leave one

moment in particular to Winston's character, and that was the summoning of the stay-puffed Marshmallow Man. As Ramas later said, quote, we had to talk Danny into it. He saw it as Winston's big moment. But Ivan and I both felt very strongly that it should be Dan's line. The marshmallow man was, after all, his creation in reality. So why shouldn't he create it in the film? I'm with Dan Aykroyd in that one. Why do you need to give that to him? Like he's had such a incredible time. Like honestly, there's something funnier about that being Winston because he's been so straight the entire time so like not swayed by the supernatural stuff for it to be him that summons this like that that adds a dimension that's not there i i think that's i think that's wrong

yeah you can read the version of that script and i did and i i i think structurally the movie makes more sense in the third drafts the where winston's introduced earlier he feels it feels a little jarring with how late he's introduced. I have some thoughts I'll share later on these decisions, so I'll leave it for now, because I think it happened for a very specific reason that has not yet been mentioned. Production was tough, but the filmmakers were aided by a truly spectacular crew, including cinematographer Laslo Kovach of Paper Moon and Easy Rider, among many others. Wow. So he was specifically trying not to shoot the film as a comedy. And I think that comes across. I think the movie looks extremely cinematic.

He was the one who came up with the idea of making the Ecto 1 white instead of black. Originally, it was going to be a black renovated ambulance. Production designer John Dequeer of Hello Dolly, The King and I, and Cleopatra. Wow. Listen to our episode on Cleopatra. And this makes perfect sense because the biggest thing he had to do for this movie was build Gozer's Temple, which was one of the largest sets in history at the time. It was six stories tall with 30-foot doors.

and he had to build that all in L.A. in a matter of months. And it is fabulous. It is. Ghostbusters shot for just under four weeks in New York, faced a few hurdles along the way, including the need to get a $3 million insurance policy to get a shot from the roof of the RCA building. That is so fast. I'm sorry, four weeks? Well, the rest of it was sound stages for all the interiors.

Was this movie brought to us by cocaine? Maybe. It's pretty incredible. Co-op boards and bureaucrats blocked access to certain exterior locations in Greenwich Village, and they required an intervention by the mayor, Ed Koch, at the behest of Murray and Akroy. So actually, the set shut down. They couldn't get the location they wanted.

No one could find Murray and Akroyd. And then they returned a set 45 minutes later with the mayor to tell the police to let them film somewhere. That is when they shut down traffic at Central Park West. And that is the scene towards the end where everyone's chanting Ghostbusters. Of course, according to First 80 Peter Giuliano, that scene was insane.

He goes, quote, closed Columbus Circle. People don't do that. The cops were losing their minds. The movie division was like eight cops total. You get like 300 for a parade, end quote. So apparently they just started pulling people out of cars and arresting them because people were getting so unruly.

And it's actually rumored that Reitman chose to shut down a Columbus Circle rather than use a, quote, visually identical location because he wanted to shut down as much traffic, like parking and traffic as possible. in order to generate hype around the movie. So according to his personal assistant at the time, Amy Friedman, quote, he knew parking the big, gaudy ghostmobile there, holding up traffic every afternoon from three to five,

utterly destroying the city's rush hour patterns, would be public as hell. Everyone in town would know that a movie with those funny guys driving a big white hearse with that ghost symbol emblazoned on the side was being made months and months before it was released. Yeah, makes a splash. We're not going to talk a lot about Bill Murray's onset antics

in this episode. I would like to save our exploration of that topic for when we cover Groundhog Day, the film that ruined Harold Ramos and Bill Murray's relationship for nearly 20 years. But there is one story that's worth sharing. Bill Murray disappeared from set at one point while shooting on Columbia University. And apparently he was discovered by a frantic PA hooking up with a, quote, beautiful Chinese undergraduate student. Bill Murray was so upset at being interrupted that crew members were subsequently told not to interact with. or look at Murray for the rest of the shoot. Amy Friedman again said, quote, if Bill caught someone looking at him

by the next day, they were gone, end quote. Okay. That part doesn't sound super fun. Listen, Bill Murray doesn't sound super fun. Like, I feel like that's sort of a known quantity. He's a great actor. He's very, very funny. Weird guy.

Strange, strange guy. I think has struggled with fame, and we'll get to the toll that the movie took on him. in its release as well. The skyline backdrop scene that you see from the inside of Dana's destroyed apartment of Central Park took 300 hours and cost a million dollars to make.

It looks amazing. I think that backdrop looks great. It took so much power to light that you actually could have used the amount of electricity needed to power a town of 4,000 people. It did cause a brownout on the lot and nearly burned down the soundstage

at one point. But they had firemen at the ready, real firemen at Ghostbusters, to save the day. However, overall, Lizzie, production was described as relatively smooth. As Michael Ovitz later said, quote, if we had one problem with Ghostbusters, the film never would have made the release date. The consensus seems to be that everyone involved was so experienced, especially in the worlds of improv and sketch,

that they could move at a speed that nearly felt impossible. Yeah, you would have to be able to. So, production wraps in January of 1984, and they did a test screening in February. of 1984. How? So they had to cut a version of it in three weeks. That's the editor's Sheldon Khan and David Blewett.

They had roughly half the standard 12 to 14 weeks to cut the film in order to give the post-production special effects house boss films time to create all of the effects for the movie. Basically, as Sheldon Khan explained, they had to guess the length of time for shots that involved ghosts, lasers, etc. Quote, Bill Murray may be talking to a ghost, but you have to use. a piece of blank film in the place of a ghost who has to be manufactured later. You have to guess 99.7% correct because the material given back to you by the optical house would be as long as the leader you put in.

Like shooting the ray guns. You had to be pretty accurate about how long it took for the ray to hit something. And they would draw it that way. If you made a mistake by making it too long or too short, especially if you needed more of something, you were stuck because there was no more, end quote. And I love that idea, especially with the streams, you know, their neutron rays or, whatever they're called, because, yeah, they had to time the shot for when the ray, like, made contact with a ghost, and then the cut would happen. But they had no idea what it was going to look

like. That's crazy. So Edlin's boss films was burning the candle at both ends. As he later said, quote, we had three different studios going at once. I had a motorcycle going back and forth from one to the other. Apparently, Ivan Reitman asked him to add 100 shots with only two months left. And Edlin literally met him in the parking lot with a samurai sword in hand. And Reitman dropped the ask to 50 shots. Only to 50? If somebody showed up in a parking lot with a samurai sword, I'd be like, negative 10. Sounds good. So apparently the first test screening included no visual effects shots with a couple of exceptions. The librarian ghost at the beginning and the profile shot through the apartment window of the stay puffed man's giant head walking past.

And it was in that first test screening that Wrightman thought that they had the right tone for the film because both of those scenes played extremely well. Like the scenes with ghosts played really well. Wrightman cut a ton of stuff that had been shot from the film, slimer attacking a pair of honeymooners. There's an extended sequence at the military base. You see a brief moment, Akroyd receiving oral sex from the ghost. Yeah.

That was like a much bigger sequence in the film. Okay, that almost makes me feel better because it's so fast and weird in this that you're just like, oh. Yeah, it's just part of a montage, basically, and it was its whole own scene. There was apparently also a scene of two hobos, which were played by Akroyd and Murray in makeup, being attacked by the terror dogs, but it didn't play because you could tell that it was Murray and

Acroyd, which was confusing. And of course, there was a romance between Egon Spengler and Janine, the secretary, that was ultimately cut at the end of the day for pacing. So, heading into the summer of 1984, Columbia Pictures needs to start marketing Ghostbusters, because it's the big summer of Blockbusters. But there's one problem, Lizzie. They don't own the name Ghostbusters. You know, I'll tell you, Chris, the number of times where you're working on a production and it's getting close to launch and then you find out that the title has not been cleared, it's not small. It's actually a somewhat frequent occurrence.

And I don't understand it personally. It seems like number one task is clear the title. Well, you would think, but Columbia Pictures began work on Ghostbusters seemingly unaware of the fact that a different company, Filmation, not Film Nation, which is a different company, had produced a live-action comedy TV series of the same name in 1975 that aired on CBS. Erica Scheimer, daughter of Filmation's founder, Lou Scheimer, believes that Dan Aykroyd knowingly lifted the name. Quote, Our Ghostbusters was a teenager college kid, Colt Shimer, and the guys on S&L loved it. They absolutely stole the concept

and refused to get the rights until we contacted them. And contact them, they did. So Filmation reaches out, threatens legal action, and Columbia realizes they might need to change the name. So, some other names they consider.

Oh, no. Ghost chasers. No. Ghost stoppers. Uh-huh. Ghost breakers. Ghost blasters. I can tell you how I,

would do this if this became my job, which certainly if I were on this production, I feel like I would be the poor person. I would be sitting at thesaurus.com, just looking for synonyms for busters. They actually did some shots where they filmed alts, including ghost stoppers and ghost blasters. So presumably that footage does exist.

The production team backed Columbia into a corner when they shot the climax scene in which the hundreds of extras assembled at Central Park West, a location they'd never get again, chanted on film, Ghostbusters again and again and again. The producers called the studio and said, for the love of God, get the name Ghostbusters. The movie can't be called anything else. Yeah. So as Columbia and Filmation renegotiated and renegotiated, the marketing team came up with a brilliant solution.

They put the anti-ghost logo on a black poster with the tagline, coming to save the world this summer with no movie title. Wow. So Ghostbusters was originally advertised without a name. They spent $7 million on the campaign, and it proved to be extremely effective and viral. That's amazing. Shout out to Associate Producer Michael Gross

and Creature Design consultant Brent Boats on the final design of the anti-Ghost logo, which looks great. Yes. The Ghostbusters drafts, Lizzie, had from the beginning included an original song. Hell yeah. It's time.

A little jingle that would serve as an advertisement for the ghost busting business. Of course, the team entered production with no such song written. There was no time, as we've discussed. So, Ivan Reitman had the editors cut the film to a track that he liked off of Huey Lewis and the News' new album

called, I Want a New Drug. Now, the only problem was when Reitman reached out to Huey about writing a song for the film, Huey said, I'm good, man, and passed. Yeah, it doesn't feel like a Huey move, although he would, of course, be prominently featured in another movie that I know we will be covering later. American Psycho.

So, Reitman and the team scrambled. They tried to recruit a ton of different musicians, including Fleetwood Max Lindsay Buckingham. Would have loved to hear what he wrote for this one. That's not good. They were either rebuffed or unimpressed with the results. They reportedly fielded over 60 versions. And if you don't find me a ghost, then we're going to bust a ghost.

At least higher Steve, Nick. I don't know what to tell you. Yeah. Hard rock duo Hughes Thrall thought they'd gotten the gig with the track they put together, only to show up to a lunch during filming and have Bill Murray dump all over it saying, it needs to be serious. And they said, your reference music was Huey Lewis in the news. Yeah. Post-production was nearly complete when a Columbia executive suggested her boyfriend.

Sessioned guitarist turned pop artist Ray Parker Jr., who had actually been part of the spinners, the Motown group briefly, and I believe he had toured with Stevie Wonder as well. Oh, wow. So he was a very, very, very talented musician. The job was a no-brainer for him. He was going to get paid whether they used the song or not. They were so desperate, they were just paying musicians to write anything. And the only requirements were that it be 30 seconds long

and include the word Ghostbusters. So he spent 48 hours with British duo Q-feel writing a jingle and then turned to his other girlfriend. Yeah, he was double-dibbin at the time. Okay. A 17-year-old high school student. Aye, yeah. Oops.

Who brought her friends over from school to shout the Ghostbusters response in the call and response that you hear in the final record. Okay. Well... That is Ray Parker Jr.'s underage girlfriend and her friends after six period. Those underage girls did a great job. They did.

So Columbia sent a messenger to pick up the recording. It didn't have a verse. So Parker Jr. made the words up while the messenger waited. And I guess he was looking at all those high school girls when he wrote the lines, Lizzie, because that's where you're getting your double. entendre that we mentioned. Oh, God. We'll get back to that song in a minute.

I have one comment on the song. I'll keep it brief, but I miss when movies had theme songs that have the title in them and they play during the movie. Can we please bring that back? It was great. Yeah, I'm all for it. I think it should be required. Yes.

Movie that comes out, no matter the genre. That's right. I don't care what it is. Columbia and parent company Coca-Cola were very nervous about the release of Ghostbusters, not the least of which because it was releasing in the middle of one of Hollywood. Hollywood's most competitive summer seasons, as we mentioned, but specifically it was releasing the same day as another horror comedy. Lizzie? I have no idea.

Joe Dante's Gremlins. Oh. Sorry. There's just that, it comes into my head and it just immediately leaves. Yeah. I love Gremlins, but yeah. I do too. So Gremlin, interestingly, had a not dissimilar marketing campaign. The trailers didn't show any of the Gremlins. That's smart. So they also had a very, very viral campaign. Dante was so insistent that they didn't have the gremlins in the trailer that he cut the gremlins out of the movie when they sent it to the trailer house. Wow.

So he was so paranoid they would ruin the surprise. No blender gremlin? It's my favorite part. No blender gremlin. No microwave gremlin, none of it. No, my dad was coming down the chimney and he snapped his neck either. So the movie's budget, Ghostbusters, had also grown to an estimated $40 million that included marketing.

The studio was so anxious that they cut the names of 50, Special Effects technicians from the end credits of the film to save $60,000 in printing costs, which... I would be so mad. Talk about... I mean, visual effects artists already get short shrift and in our conversations nowadays. People just dump on VFX, even though it's a wonderful art constantly. Imagine then you go to the theater, mom, dad, I was in this movie, and they saved 60 grand.

What a stupid cheap move. That sucks. Here's the irony, Lizzie. Frank Price had already made his money back. He sold the ancillary rights to Ghostbusters to HBO, NBC, and RCA for a combined 135% of the film's budget. He was in the black before the movie ever released. They just don't care. So there was no need to cut their names off of the film.

Yeah. They don't care. So Ghostbusters had its industry premiere on June 7, 1984, and it was a complete dud. Oh. People hated it, apparently. Michael Ovitz later said, not a laugh was heard. Everyone came up to him afterwards with condolences, going as far as to say, we all make mistakes. Coca-Cola executives were convinced we're going to lose our shirts on this one.

Wow. So apparently just people in the industry were not having it. One saving grace, Ghostbusters had secured a PG rating. Parents around the country had been up in arms over the release of Spielberg's Temple of Doom, having taken their children to that fun heart ripped out of your chest PG experience. And they then led to the creation of the PG-13 rating, which was first applied to Gremlins. Actually, specifically not for the violence,

but for the scene when she describes how her dad died coming down the chimney on Christmas. That was the scene that people actually objected to from a content perspective. I would have thought, again, Blender Gremlin, but sure. Yeah, no, it was a patricide. So Ghostbusters, I guess, accidental suicide? Ghostbusters had looked at films like an American Warwolf in London and decided to go comedy first, horror second, to great effect, apparently.

That didn't mean a ton of critics. Actually, critics were largely kind of middle of the road to positive when the film was first released. Outlets from the New York Times to Variety in the Boston Globe were largely unimpressed with the film, although most did single out Bill Murray's performance and the visual effects as highlights. I think most of them specifically said it wasn't as funny or as scary as they kind of I've wanted or hoped it to be. That's crazy. It's very funny.

Fortunately for our heroes, no one cared. Yeah. No one cared what those elitist thought because Ghostbusters opened big. June 8, 1984. It secured the top spot at the box office that weekend with $13.6 million, just beating out Gremlin's $12.5 million. So what's really amazing is both films actually crushed it. Yeah.

Both films also, they increased their revenue going into the game. the second weekend. Wow. But it was Ghostbusters that turned into that year's little engine that could. The film was number one at the box office for basically 16 weeks straight. There was one weekend when it was bumped to number two by Purple Rain. It was a summer movie that became a Halloween movie that became a holiday movie. By December, it had cleared over $220 million at the box office.

It was the highest grossing film of the year. And it was the first film in five years, not directed or produced by either Stephen Spielberg or George Lucas to be the highest grossing film of the year. Wow. So, Reitman dethroned those two. Ray Parker Jr.'s Ghostbusters spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and 21 weeks on the charts altogether. And those 16-year-olds were paid $0.

Oh, no, not just paid $0. He refused to give them credit. And then when he was asked why he didn't give them credit, he said, why would I give them credit, they had nothing to do with the song. And people were like, no, but it's their voices. And he goes, they're not singing. That was literally his explanation. Love this guy. Well, he's about to get a little bit of a come-up. And so, Akroyd, Murray, and Ramis, according to Michael Ovitz, took home nearly 30% of the film's revenue. Wow. Which is wild. Apparently, Bill Murray made between $20 and $30 million on the film. Of course,

Columbia's accounting department made sure that on paper, the film, the film, never made a profit. So Ghostbusters title owner, filmation never made a cent on the back end, even though in the end they did give up the title for $500,000 and 1% of the film's profits. So they only made $500,000 in the end, thanks to Hollywood accounting. Wow. Of course, a third comedy film had been scheduled for June 8, 1984, the Zucker Brothers' top secret, their follow-up to airplane, which was crushed by Ghostbusters and Gremlins. Harold Ramos had exacted his revenge for what they'd done to Caddyshack. Ghostbusters was nominated for two Academy Awards.

Any guesses, Lizzie? Visual Effects. Yes. And original song? Yeah, you nailed it. Perfect. Oh. It lost both. Great. FX went to Temple of Doom and song to Stevie Wonders. I just called to Say I Love You from The Woman in Red.

This is a great song. Nope. I'm sorry. Bustin makes me feel good. It's better. All right. Ghostbusters, too, seemingly should have been high on everyone's mind. However, that film wouldn't come together for a number of years, for a number of reasons that we'll talk about whenever we cover that film. Frank Price actually left Columbia for Universal before Ghostbusters released. The rest of the team found themselves unable to sustain the high that the film had achieved.

Ghostbusters itself was quickly eclipsed by Beverly Hills Cop. Its title of the highest grossing comedy of all time was stolen by the ascendant and incandescent Eddie Murphy. Ghostbusters was re-released in the United States. in August of 1985, so it regained that title. But if you just go original run, it was Beverly Hills Cup. Bill Murray struggled to adapt to the sudden explosion in fame he experienced after the release of the film. And then, of course, the Razor's Edge, the movie he had shot before Ghostbusters, bombed in the fall.

He left for France, lived there for six months. And as he later said, quote, I was considered the biggest star in movies, and it was something I don't think I completely earned or deserved. end quote. So Bill Murray returned to New York after six months and actually lived a semi-retired life not appearing in another movie for four years. He passed on projects left and right,

including Rain Man, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Witches of Eastwick, three men and a baby, and many, many others, most of which Michael Lovitz couldn't even get him to read the script for. Wow. Ray Parker Jr., quickly found himself, along with Columbia and the filmmakers,

being sued by Huey Lewis and the News. Hell yeah. Turns out that perhaps the reason he'd been able to write that song so quickly had more to do with how much he'd pulled from I Want a New Drug than actual musical ability. So Lizzie, I would like to share with you

a couple of songs, and you can tell me how much they sound like. I can't wait. This first one is the Ghostbusters team, which you've heard, I'm sure. Okay. Now, Hughie's. Huey Lewis in the news, I want a new drug.

Great. Great. So Ray Parker Jr. said, guys, come on. I have this chorus part that doesn't sound anything like Huey Lewis's song. And you know how I know that? Because I actually stole it from another song. Oh my God. Called Soul Finger by the Bar Keys from 1967.

So let's just listen to that song mashed up with Ghostbusters. Yeah. So in that song, they shout, Soul Finger! And that's where he got Ghostbusters. So, yeah, they settled for a rumored $5 million plus profit participation in the back end. Hugh, he got his money. Good.

Pretty wild. So Ghostbusters composer, Elmer Bernstein, was also very miffed by the film's soundtrack. The movie actually has a really, really great score, and a lot of it was actually lifted and replaced by the rock and roll needle drops that you hear throughout the film, of course, not the least of which is the Ghostbusters theme. Harold Ramos pivoted to the Robin Williams-led Club Paradise, a film that quickly became a career Nadir. Columbia Pictures also suffered a down year in 1985, as did Dan Aykroyd, who appeared briefly

in John Landis's Into the Night, a film panned for its gore and violence, especially given that Landis was under indictment over the deaths of Vicks. Morrow and two child actors, Micah Dinley and Renee Shin-Yi Chen on the set of Twilight Zone, The Movie. And obviously, listen to our episode for more details on that tragedy. Lizzie excellently breaks down everything that went wrong in that film. Akroyd infamously referred to the onset deaths as, quote, an industrial accident, nothing more, end quote. Accrode? Yeah.

Wow. Landis and Akroyd continued to tank in 1985. with the Acroid-penned Spies Like Us, the film which co-starred Chevy Chase was a bomb. Mm, karma's a bitch. Yeah, Ivan Reitman tried to parlay his supernatural success into an adaptation of his White Whale project, a hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

When that fell apart, largely due to David Cronenberg's disinterest in directing it, he hopped over to direct Legal Eagles, which was a Golden Hollywood-era-style caper, originally built around Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman, that ended up starring Robert Redford and Deborah Winger. That movie was a mess. We'll cover it at some point.

It seems like all three of them just did not like working with each other. Deborah Winger later described her experience akin to being a P-O-W. So not a good vibe. And of course, Ernie Hudson found himself back in the trenches. It turned out that being in a number one movie was not the career changer he'd been convinced. It would be, quote, Ghostbusters made people aware of me, but it did not get me the kind of stuff I wanted to do. I learned what it means to be poor and popular.

Sigourney Weaver, of course, acquitted herself somewhat better. After a couple of down years, she took Hollywood and the award circuit by storm with her return to Ripley and James Cameron's aliens in 1986. But of course, perhaps no one bounced out of Ghostbusters with more success than Rick Moranis. Director Frank Oz loved him so much in Ghostbusters that he offered him the lead in Little Shop of Horrors. Nice. Which we'll have to cover at some point. And then, of course, honey, I shrunk the kids. Yes, yeah, and many more.

So aside from being a money printing franchise that's largely failed to live up to the spontaneous success of the original, what's the legacy of Ghostbusters? It proved many things that television actors could make the leap to film, that New York remained a vibrant hub for humanity, that comedy could punch above its weight in the same categories as action and science fiction. it, as Politico writer Derek Robertson wrote,

quote, inspired a round of conversation about entrepreneurship and the relative merits of deregulation. It was a smart movie. It was a smash four-quadrant hit. It set the stage for films like Back to the Future and Jurassic Park. Perhaps, though, more than anything,

it was a perfect vehicle for our collective and very American imaginations and how we all kind of see ourselves as outsiders. And Ghostbusters set a group of outlets. against a not necessarily evil, but perhaps simply lazy, inept, and incompetent bureaucracy, content with letting the world go to hell in the name of rules and regulation. We could all see in Ghostbusters a bit of ourselves and our frustrations with the sheer banality of evil. The film remains unique in being a true blockbuster that has been embraced by both

conservatives and liberals alike. The film was actually listed by the National Review as one of the 25 best conservative movies, and yet it was, of course, famously rebooted. in a specifically liberal fashion in 2016 by Paul Feig. On this note, I'd like to briefly return to the point of Ernie Hudson and Winston Zedemore. I think it's too easy and reductive to simply point at racism when discussing the reduction of his role. To be clear, Hudson has made the same point in intervening years. However, I do think it is illustrative of an interesting phenomenon in which a group of

outsiders failed to realize that at a certain point, they had become the very institution they sought to unseat. In the early 1980s, there were few more powerful men in comedy than Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramos, Bill Murray, and Ivan Reitman. They were revolutionary. They sought to upend the system,

and they succeeded. However, the decision to shift the balance of narrative power toward Murray's Venkman and away from Hudson's Zedamore, it seems to me, perhaps came not from a desire to rebel, but rather a fear of disruption. They were suddenly insiders, and, like Frank Price and the studio, realized that Bill Murray was the goose who could lay the golden egg, or at least provide a hedge against the film laying a normal one.

The because the studio asked or because they feared that Murray would be upset by the script when he arrived, something that had happened to them before, they stripped the true outsider of the group to the studs. Not, I don't think, because he was black, but because he was the last person to the table, which, of course, was, at least in part, because he was black. Yeah. Ironically, Murray, it seems, never cared. As he told the LA Times, quote, they gave me all the lines. I was resisting it.

I didn't think it was right not to have it more balanced. But nobody wanted to hear about that. Dan didn't want any more lines, and Harold was the same, end quote. It's an unusually magnanimous quote from Mr. Murray, deferring to the talents of his co-stars. Unfortunately, the fourth Ghostbuster wasn't part of that conversation. Mm-hmm. And I'd like to end there in my coverage of Ghostbusters,

a film that I enjoy immensely and I really, really enjoyed researching. Nice. Great job, Chris. That was really fun. Yeah, I thought it was a really fascinating, fascinating intersection, intersective moment in Hollywood history. You have all of these characters and all of these films being made just right in this five your span, and it just, we have so many movies we have to cover from the early 80s, clearly. Yeah. 70s, all these S&O greats.

Lizzie, would you like to kick us off with what went right? Well, I will, and I feel like I have to give it to the poor VFX artists who didn't even make the credits. This is an absolutely crazy timeline. You know, like we said, some of the VFX look a little hokey, but they're still pretty fun, and a lot of them look great. I think slimer looks great. I think the woman in the library looks great.

I think the marshmallow man is awesome. I think they pulled off something that is simultaneously, like right on the razor's edge. Sorry, Bill Murray for your failed movie of scary and very funny in the way that the ghosts looked and acted and moved. So I think the VFX. I'm going to give mine to Dan Aykroyd collaborative screenwriter. Yeah. I think it's, we read a lot about these films. And in many instances, there's a desire to be the sole voice of something, and I have felt that in my own work.

And I was just very impressed by Akroyd's ability to bring in Reitman and then Ramos to just endlessly rewrite himself and this story into a position where it could get made and be as effective as possible. And even though we discussed certain decisions that perhaps in retrospect we don't agree with, again, 30,000 foot. view without visibility into people's true intentions. I think it just shows a collaborative spirit that this movie never would have succeeded without. 100%. And with that, we'll say thank you to you all. Thank you for listening to any new listeners who have joined us. Welcome.

Please feel free to reach out to us and suggest movies. We do read your messages. You can reach out to us on Instagram via DM. You can email us at What Went Wrong Pod. at gmail.com, or you can message us through our website. We also have a Patreon. Chris, do you want to tell them a little bit about the Patreon? I would love to. Guys, if you are interested in supporting this podcast, head to our Patreon, www.com slash what went wrong podcast. You can sign up for free, but for $1, you can vote on films that we cover. Ghostbusters was the result of a poll. For $5,

you get an ad-free RSS feed, and for $50, you get a piece of merch shipped to. quarterly plus a shout out just like this. Cue the music, David. We got to give a shout out to our full stop supporters. Lizzie, you want to do the honors? I certainly do. Jake Killen. Kang. Andrew. Matthew Jacobson. Grace Potter. Ellen Singleton. Jewishri Samant. Lockland Marrow. Scott Gourwin. Sadie. Chris Leal. Kathleen Olson. Leah Bowman. Steve Winterbauer. Don Schivers. Don George, Rosemary Southward, Tom Kristen, Nathan Orloff, Soman Chaynani, and Michael McGrath. Thank you so much. And with that, we'll let you guys go.

In two weeks, we'll be covering Garden State. And we have a little surprise for you, so make sure you tune in for that one. If you're ever curious as well about what movie we're covering next, you can just head to our website, www. what went wrongpod.com, and it displays it right there with a coming soon logo right at the top of the page. Anything else, Lizzie? Buy our merch. Bye! Our merch.

Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at what went wrong.com. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Additional research for this episode provided by Sarah Baum.