The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray Page 10

  Not all the tweaks met with Murray’s approval. “I thought there was a lot of overwriting,” he declared in 2014. “And I held Harold responsible for that.” By all accounts, Murray was at his absolute surliest during the making of this film. “Bill was not easy to work with,” Tobolowksy admitted. “If I had been on my first movie, he would have brought me to tears more than once.” Most famously, Murray refused to shoot the film’s climactic scene—in which Phil Connors wakes up in bed with Andie MacDowell’s Rita Hanson, having escaped the time loop—until somebody told him whether he was still wearing the same clothes from the night before. When Ramis refused to take the bait, an assistant set decorator was forced to make the call on this crucial plot point.

  Adding to the bad vibes was the fact that Murray’s first marriage was disintegrating around the time Groundhog Day was being shot. Part of the reason Danny Rubin was dispatched to babysit Murray during preproduction was to get him away from Ramis, who was sick of dealing with Murray’s temper tantrums. “They were like two brothers who weren’t getting along,” Rubin told the New Yorker. “And they were pretty far apart on what the movie was about.” In classic passive-aggressive fashion, Murray took out his anger at Ramis by showing up late to the set, berating members of the crew, and engaging in occasional outbursts of autodestruction. “Whoever was around had to take it from him,” Ramis later said. “Or he’d go back and trash his motor home. I’d say, ‘Well, now you’ve trashed your motor home. Good idea.’” After weeks of being “irrationally mean and unavailable,” in Ramis’s view, Murray finally stopped speaking to the director altogether. They would remain estranged for more than twenty years.

  Although critics responded positively, Groundhog Day was not exactly a commercial triumph on its original release. Shortly after the film opened, a colossal blizzard buried much of the eastern half of the United States under a blanket of snow. “How could anyone go to the movies when they couldn’t even get out of their driveway?” Murray complained. “Two weeks later there was another ten inches of snow—same thing. So it wasn’t the box-office success it should have been.” Still, despite the agony he had gone through to get the picture made, Murray was proud of the work he had done and encouraged by the favorable notices he received for his performance. “That was sort of the turning point,” he later said. “That was the first time the New York press went, ‘Hey, wait a minute—this is a real movie here, not just that broad thing.’” One day that spring, Murray saw a caricature of himself in the New Yorker, depicting him emerging from the soil like the proverbial groundhog. “It was so cute and it was so great,” he said. “That felt good. It wasn’t an Academy Award, but it was somethin’ I liked a lot. It was more significant.”

  NEXT MOVIE: Mad Dog and Glory (1993)

  GUNG HO

  During his mid-1980s sabbatical from Hollywood, Murray passed on the lead role in this 1986 comedy directed by Ron Howard. Michael Keaton ended up playing the part of Hunt Stevenson, the cocksure American foreman of a Japanese-owned auto plant.

  GURDJIEFF, GEORGE IVANOVITCH

  Mid-twentieth-century Greco-Armenian spiritual guru whose teachings Murray began to study in the 1980s. Gurdjieff’s quasimystical philosophical system, commonly called “the Work,” “the Fourth Way,” or “the Way of the Sly Man,” is based on the idea that human beings live their lives in a state of perpetual sleep, ruled by forces beyond their control. Only by “waking up” through the practice of Gurdjieff-approved awareness exercises can they achieve a state of true enlightenment and free will. In his Jazz Age heyday, Gurdjieff ran an institute near Paris where he would unexpectedly create unorthodox events designed to startle his disciples into consciousness in the same way that Zen masters whack meditating students over the back with a stick.

  Dismissed by some as a crackpot, Gurdjieff developed a cult following among artists, intellectuals, and wealthy socialites. His esoteric teachings are still followed by a small and secretive coterie of adherents. Murray first began studying Gurdjieff in earnest during his Parisian sabbatical from filmmaking in the mid-1980s. Every January 13, Gurdjieff’s followers gather to commemorate his birthday with elaborate vodka toasts and performances of the Epic of Gilgamesh. According to eyewitness accounts, Murray has attended at least one such celebration. He has also taken part in so-called ideas meetings, during which passages from Gurdjieff’s masterpiece Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson are read and discussed.

  In a 2009 interview with GQ magazine, Harold Ramis attributed some aspects of Murray’s notoriously surly personality to his study of the spiritual figure. “Gurdjieff used to act really irrationally to his students, almost as if trying to teach them object lessons,” Ramis observed. “Bill was always teaching people lessons like that. If he perceived someone as being too self-important or corrupt in some way that he couldn’t stomach, it was his job to straighten them out.” According to Nothing Lasts Forever director Tom Schiller, also a Gurdjieff devotee, Murray’s connection to the Mediterranean mystic also accounts for his party-crashing and photo-bombing antics of recent years. “Bill fits Gurdjieff’s description exactly,” Schiller says. “At any moment, anywhere, he can engage perfect strangers in hilarious and spontaneous acts of humor that a mere mortal could never get away with.”

  GUYS, THE

  In one of his rare forays onto the dramatic stage, Murray played a New York City firefighter haunted by his memories of September 11 in this 2001 play by Anne Nelson. Sigourney Weaver starred as the newspaper editor who helps him compose eulogies for his fallen comrades. The Guys opened at the Flea Theater, just a few blocks from Ground Zero, in December 2001. In an interview, Murray described the experience as cathartic and credited his costar with giving him the strength to get through it. “It was just something that had to be done,” he said. “It was so hard going out there night after night with a situation that was so raw. She never lost sight of the moment onstage, because she kept focus, and that kept things going right. It helped me keep on track, too.” Although Murray left the production shortly after opening night, replaced by Bill Irwin, it was not because of poor notices. Variety found the play “dramatically a bit on the dull side” but praised Murray’s performance as “utterly artless and unactorly, and very touching in its honesty.”

  The Connected Wisdom of

  Bill Murray and G. I. Gurdjieff

  * * *

  “Only by beginning to remember himself does a man really awaken.”

  —Gurdjieff, from his essay “Awakened Consciousness”

  “Whatever the best part of my life has been, has been as a result of that remembering.”

  —Murray, in an interview with the New York Times

  * * *

  “Only he who can take care of what belongs to others may have his own.”

  —Gurdjieff’s Aphorism #20

  “I think if you can take care of yourself and then maybe try to take care of someone else, that’s sort of how you’re supposed to live.”

  —Murray, during a 2009 appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box

  * * *

  “A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.”

  —Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous

  “It’s not easy to really engage all the time. It’s so much easier to zone, to get distracted, to daydream.”

  —Murray, to interviewer Charlie Rose in 2014

  * * *

  “I love him who loves work.”

  —Gurdjieff’s Aphorism #15

  “I don’t want to have a relationship with someone if I’m not going to work with them.”

  —Murray, to GQ magazine in 2010

  * * *

  “He who has freed himself of the disease of tomorrow has a chance to attain what he came here for.”

  —Gurdjieff’s Aphorism #28

  “What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today!”

  —Murray, as weatherman Phil Connors in Groundhog Day


  * * *

  “All that men say and do, they say and do in sleep. All this can have no value whatsoever. Only awakening and what leads to awakening has a value in reality.”

  —Gurdjieff, from “Awakened Consciousness”

  “You’re unconscious most of the time. Not out cold, but you’re unconscious. Lights on, nobody home. If you come back, ‘Oh, there I am again.’ All of a sudden, you’re looking at yourself, like, ‘Where am I now? What was I thinking? What am I feeling? What’s my body doing?’ Usually, I have a pang of remorse or a reminding, like, ‘Oh, here I am again. How was it I wanted to be living?’”

  —Murray, in an interview with the Detroit Free Press

  * * *

  “One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment.”

  —Gurdjieff’s Aphorism #33

  “I’ve got a moose head on the wall. The biggest moose head I’ve ever seen. It’s a sobering thought that something that big can die.”

  —Murray, describing the decor in his New York City apartment, in 1981

  On a brisk fall day in 2012, Murray visited New York City to check out the recently completed Franklin Delano Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, located at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. After getting a sneak peek at the FDR memorial, which was not yet open to the public, he found himself inexorably drawn to a beer-league kickball game being played on a nearby stretch of grass. Kickballers were surprised by the apparition of a slightly disheveled older man, wearing blue cutoffs and a loose-fitting flannel shirt, who suddenly and without warning jumped into their game. “We just figured he was someone’s dad on the other team and kept playing,” one of the players said later. Taking a turn at the plate, Murray launched a booming single but was chased back to first when he attempted to go for two. It was at that point that the other players realized who he was. After getting erased on an ensuing double play, Murray jogged around the bases high-fiving everyone, bear-hugged a player’s mother, posed for a team photo, and then went home.

  HACKMAN, GENE

  When he first arrived in New York City in 1974 to work on The National Lampoon Show, Murray sublet an apartment in a building that was once home to Academy Award–winning actor Gene Hackman. According to Murray, the woman from whom he was subletting “hadn’t paid her gas or electric bill in eight years. She told me Gene Hackman had lived in this building. There were millions of cockroaches, but I thought, ‘Well, Gene put up with it, I can put up with it.’” The two men later worked together on The Royal Tenenbaums.

  HALLOWEEN

  When dressing up for Halloween, young Murray stuck with the classics: hobos and ghosts. “I didn’t have any costumes when I was a kid,” he told the New York Daily News. “We were basically working with a sheet most of the time or I went as a bum, which is basically cork smeared on my face and some bad clothes.”

  HAMLET

  DIRECTED BY: Michael Almereyda

  WRITTEN BY: Michael Almereyda

  RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2000

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: A brooding slacker plots the hostile takeover of his uncle’s company.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Polonius, prattling corporate toady

  Following in the footsteps of such distinguished actors as Hume Cronyn, Ian Holm, and Michael Redgrave, Murray essayed the role of Polonius, the pompous royal retainer who gets plugged in his arras, in this modern-day reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

  The challenge of taking on a classic appealed to the scrapper in Murray. “A lot of people act like they’re destined to play Shakespeare, and that pisses me off,” he told an audience at a retrospective of his films in 2004. Finding the humor amid all the gloom and gore was also part of the project’s allure. “Polonius is a guy who’s spying for the king on the prince to the throne which was usurped by the brother who killed the actual king and then stole his wife. Shakespeare knows there are laughs there, but where the hell are they? You’ve got to find those laughs and at the same time make the drama work. That’s why comedy is harder to do than straight drama.”

  Although Murray seems somewhat ill at ease mouthing Shakespeare’s dialogue—he comes off more like a fey imbecile than the tedious old windbag called for in the text—he fares better than some of the other actors in this intriguing but uneven film. As Hamlet, Ethan Hawke is practically catatonic. He mumbles his way through soliloquies he doesn’t seem to understand, repeatedly putting the stresses on the wrong words and syllables. Still, if you’ve always wondered what it would be like to see Hamlet faxing, riding a motorcycle, or renting videos at Blockbuster, this is the adaptation for you.

  For Murray completists, Hamlet is also noteworthy for the scene in which Hawke’s vengeful prince shoots Polonius in the eye with a handgun. It marked the first time Murray had ever died on-screen—unless you consider The Man Who Knew Too Little a prolonged suicide attempt.

  NEXT MOVIE: Charlie’s Angels (2000)

  HEISS, CAROL

  Murray has named this mid-twentieth-century Olympic figure skater as the one sports figure in the world he would most like to be. Heiss won a gold medal at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, and went on to star in the 1961 film Snow White and the Three Stooges. “I always had a thing for Carol Heiss,” Murray said. “I just thought she was kind of special.”

  HERKIMAN, RICHARD

  See “Shower Mike.”

  HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, THE

  Murray was briefly under consideration for the role of Ford Prefect in a proposed early 1980s big-screen adaptation of Douglas Adams’s novel. The film, which would have reunited Murray with Stripes director Ivan Reitman, was shelved in favor Ghostbusters.

  HOLDEN, WILLIAM

  The Academy Award–winning star of Stalag 17, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Sunset Boulevard is one of Murray’s all-time favorite actors. In a 2004 interview with film critic Elvis Mitchell, Murray lauded Holden for his chiseled physique, admiring his ability to work without a shirt on for long stretches of the 1955 film Picnic. He described Holden as “a total stud” and called his Oscar-nominated turn in 1976’s Network “a totally stud performance.”

  HOME ALONE

  Murray was one of many actors considered for the role of Peter McCallister, Macaulay Culkin’s absent-minded father, in this 1990 film about a mischievous eight-year-old who outwits a pair of idiotic burglars. Jack Nicholson and Harrison Ford were also considered for the part, which went to John Heard.

  HONKER, THE

  Mush-mouthed, possibly schizophrenic drunk played by Murray in numerous Saturday Night Live sketches, as well as the short film Perchance to Dream. The Honker is one of Murray’s oldest characters, dating back to his Second City days. He performed a brief monologue as the Honker for his Saturday Night Live audition. A scene of Murray as the Honker was cut from Ghostbusters. Carl Spackler, the deranged assistant greenskeeper Murray played in Caddyshack, shares some DNA with this woozy character.

  HOOSIERS

  Murray has called this heart-tugging 1986 film about a small-town Indiana high school basketball team “a movie I cannot turn off” whenever it is on television. “[Hoosiers] makes me cry and laugh at the same time,” he said in a 2008 interview. “It’s corn, but corn’s okay. Indiana basketball is a corn tradition.” On the general subject of schmaltz in films, Murray believes it all depends on how it’s ladled out. “It’s only how it’s executed that makes it sappy or sentimental. It’s emotional and you have to have emotion. But it’s only when you execute it poorly and you arrive at sentimentality, then you have to take those people out and shoot them. You have to take them out in the cornfield and bury them like Joe Pesci in Casino.”

  “I CAN CRY AT HOOSIERS. I USED TO CRY AT BURGER KING COMMERCIALS. I CAN GO.”

  —MURRAY, on his weakness for mawkish entertainment

  HORNY DEVIL

  Unproduced screenplay commissioned by Murray in the m
id-1980s from the screenwriting team of Tom Schiller and Lauren Versel Bresnan. The script had Murray’s character traveling back in time to review the events of his life in a manner reminiscent of the Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Murray lost interest in the project following the disappointment of The Razor’s Edge and his subsequent sabbatical from Hollywood.