The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray Read online

  MAME

  Broadway musical, based on the best-selling novel Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis, about the zany adventures of a devil-may-care bohemian. Murray intensely dislikes the show, considering it the worst musical ever made.

  A MAN’S A MAN

  Still on hiatus from Hollywood, Murray starred as Galy Gay, a guileless Irish dockworker dragooned into the British army, in a 1986 production of this Bertolt Brecht play. A Man’s a Man was staged at the Hyde Park Festival Theater in upstate New York, near Murray’s Hudson Valley home. Stockard Channing costarred as the conniving Widow Begbick. Reviewers were unimpressed by Murray’s performance. “It cannot be said that he convincingly becomes a warrior,” carped Melvin Gussow in the New York Times. “Remembering Mr. Murray’s Saturday Night Live impersonation of a tuneless lounge singer, one is pleased to note that he refrains from singing.” The critic for the Associated Press wrote: “Murray has a comfortable stage manner, but fans of the former star of Saturday Night Live may be bewildered by their hero’s performance.”

  MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE, THE

  DIRECTED BY: Jon Amiel

  WRITTEN BY: Robert Farrar and Howard Franklin

  RELEASE DATE: November 14, 1997

  FILM RATING: *

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: While visiting his brother in London, a dullard is mistaken for a secret agent.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Wallace Ritchie, dim-witted American tourist

  “I’ve never made any horrible, horrible movies,” Murray once declared. Apparently he never saw The Man Who Knew Too Little. Though not as mind-meltingly aggravating as Scrooged, this witless 1997 comedy is one of the lowlights of his career. It’s hard to believe the same man who stole scenes in Kingpin just a year earlier said yes to this misbegotten mélange of Hitchcock and Maxwell Smart.

  Based on Robert Farrar’s unpublished 1989 novella Watch That Man, The Man Who Knew Too Little follows the misadventures of a Des Moines video store clerk who stumbles into a web of intrigue during a trip to London. The feeble one-joke premise hinges on a series of misunderstandings straight out of the Three’s Company playbook. Murray had successfully portrayed mentally damaged characters before, most notably in Caddyshack and What about Bob?, but his talents are wasted here. As dull-witted patsy Wallace Ritchie, he is essentially playing the Dean Jones role in one of those live-action Disney movies from the 1970s.

  “THOSE MOVIES HAD GOOD PREMISES. I’VE HAD A LOT OF GOOD PREMISES. AND AT A CERTAIN POINT, I WENT, JESUS, ONE OF THESE FILMS HAS TO HIT. BUT EITHER WAY, I’M TOO FAR IN.”

  —MURRAY, on the late-’90s career tailspin epitomized by Larger Than Life and The Man Who Knew Too Little

  It is unclear why Murray decided to make this film, though a free trip to London may have had something to do with it. During breaks in filming, he played some golf, rode a tour boat down the Thames, and “walked over to Big Ben one night and saw where Danger Mouse lives.” Murray’s need to maintain viability as a leading man may have been a factor as well. If so, the one-two punch of Larger Than Life and The Man Who Knew Too Little effectively killed that dream, forcing him to concentrate on high-impact character parts for the rest of the decade.

  The Man Who Knew Too Little opened in the fall of 1997 to widespread public indifference. Murray dutifully plugged the film in numerous talk show appearances, offering moviegoers a money-back guarantee if they didn’t like what they saw. No one took him up on his offer.

  NEXT MOVIE: Wild Things (1998)

  MARCHING CABBAGE

  Murray once told an interviewer for McCall’s that this Tibetan dish was his culinary specialty. “You make it cold, and it’s red—spicy,” he said. “It’s good. It makes you want to cross a mountain range and attack another country.”

  MARIJUANA

  In 1970, Murray was busted by Chicago police for marijuana possession while boarding a plane to Denver on his way back to college. By all indications, it was not his first—or last—attempt to transport a little “product” to market. In a 1981 interview with Playgirl magazine, Murray admitted that he dropped out of school “to deal drugs and travel around.”

  In his 2014 “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, Murray addressed the issue of marijuana legalization:

  “Well that’s a large question, isn’t it? Because you’re talking about recreation, which everyone is in favor of. You are also talking about something that has been illegal for so many years, and marijuana is responsible for such a large part of the prison population, for the crime of self-medication. And it takes millions and billions of dollars by incarcerating people for this crime against oneself as best can be determined. People are realizing that the war on drugs is a failure, that the amount of money spent, you could have bought all the drugs with that much money rather than create this army of people and incarcerated people. I think the terror of marijuana was probably overstated. I don’t think people are really concerned about it the way they once were. Now that we have crack and crystal and whatnot, people don’t even think about marijuana anymore, it’s like someone watching too many video games in comparison. The fact that states are passing laws allowing it means that its threat has been overexaggerated. Psychologists recommend smoking marijuana rather than drinking if you are in a stressful situation. These are ancient remedies, alcohol and smoking, and they only started passing laws against them 100 years ago.”

  MARRIAGE

  Murray has been married twice—to Margaret “Mickey” Kelly from 1981 to 1996 and to Jennifer Butler from 1997 to 2008. His comments on the subject of marriage are rarely positive. “There’s such a finality about marriage,” he once said. “What you’re doing is saying you have to change the way you are, now, as of a Saturday in June, and most people are incapable of change on short notice. Or even on long notice.” Of wives, Murray has complained that “at moments they demand regular, socially acceptable behavior.” The institution of marriage “has to adapt to the culture if we’re going to take it seriously again,” he once opined. “I think people’s conception of it comes from romance magazines. People make mistakes in marriage, they make mistakes all the time, and then other people won’t let them slide on a mistake. They say he or she screwed up, and that’s it. They break friendships over an act which could be forgiven, and won’t be, because they take themselves too seriously. I guess that’s what’s happening with marriage, too, the lack of forgiveness that makes people less open.”

  “PACE YOURSELF. IF YOU DO IT RIGHT, YOU SHOULD BE DRUNK WHEN YOU GET TO THE ALTAR.”

  —MURRAY’s advice to a bridegroom whose bachelor party he crashed in 2014

  Two bitter divorces may have colored Murray’s thinking on long-term relationships. His first marriage reportedly ended because of his affair with Butler, and his second disintegrated amid charges of abandonment and spousal abuse. Of the breakup of a marriage, Murray once observed: “It’s like your faith in people is destroyed because the person you trusted the most you can no longer trust at all… . The person you know isn’t there anymore.” When counseling others about the pitfalls of matrimony, Murray has been known to quote his friend John Heller: “Would you buy a product that fails one out of three times?”

  MARX BROTHERS, THE

  Sibling comedy team from the first half of the twentieth century whose anarchic brand of humor touched a chord with Murray. He has called the Marx Brothers “comedy assassins … killers” and cited the aggressively physical style of Groucho Marx as a particular inspiration. “He really did go to the body on people. He was like a boxer. He’d zip in, he had that crazy duck walk he’d do. And he’d go right at people, he’d go right at their body and get right in their space and just sort of shake their jelly… . I figured out a long time ago that the only way for me to go was through the body to get it done. That’s what I need to do. That’s how I work.”

  MASERATI

  Murray is an aficionado of this Italian luxury auto brand. He has called Maserati “the best car” in the world.
/>   MAY, ELAINE

  This actress, screenwriter, and improv legend—one half of the comedy team of Nichols and May—did uncredited last-minute revisions on the scripts for Tootsie and Scrooged. Murray has praised May in interviews, saying she has “a great coconut when it comes to throwing dead flesh off a rotting script.” He once called her “the most attractive woman in the world” and cited her as the archetype of the “funny female” he has always been drawn to. “If I’d come up when Elaine May was coming up, I would have chained her to a typewriter and made love to her every four hours just to keep her going,” Murray told movie critic Elvis Mitchell in a 2008 interview. He also claimed to have once seen May eat an entire pound of cherries in one sitting. “She’s crazy about cherries.”

  MEATBALLS

  DIRECTED BY: Ivan Reitman

  WRITTEN BY: Len Blum, Dan Goldberg, Janis Allen, and Harold Ramis

  RELEASE DATE: June 29, 1979

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: ****

  PLOT: Hijinks abound at a low-rent Canadian summer camp populated by misfits and slackers.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Tripper Harrison, wisecracking camp counselor

  In his first starring role, Murray scored a huge box office hit with this raunchy Canadian-made summer camp comedy that spawned three sequels and a slew of imitative teen sex romps in the 1980s. The delightfully plotless Meatballs was originally conceived as an ensemble piece, but Murray steals the show as Tripper Harrison, the libidinous counselor-in-training at Camp North Star.

  Meatballs was the brainchild of National Lampoon’s Animal House producer Ivan Reitman, who was eager to cash in on the success of that film and establish himself as a director. To entice Murray to join the cast of what was then called Summer Camp, Reitman hired Murray’s old friend Harold Ramis to doctor the script, tailoring it to the actor’s strengths (and reducing the screen time of everybody except Murray and child actor Chris Makepeace). But not even Ramis’s involvement could ensure Murray’s participation in the project—or even his attendance.

  When shooting began in the summer of 1978, during the break in production following Murray’s first full season on Saturday Night Live, he still hadn’t formally committed to do the movie. “I want to play baseball and golf all summer,” he announced at one point, then initiated radio silence. “We couldn’t reach him,” production chief Don Carmody recalled in a 2014 interview. “It was very worrying, but Ivan always believed he would show up.” Reitman shot around Murray’s scenes with the rest of the cast at the real-life Camp White Pine near Haliburton, Ontario. At last the star ambled onto the set, disheveled and sporting the Hawaiian shirt and red short shorts Tripper wears in the finished film. Three days into his work on the film, Murray finally signed his contract.

  “We worked like dogs,” Murray said of the arduous Meatballs shoot. On his first day on the set, the makeup artist burned his face with a cigarette. “So I wasn’t going to have my hair done,” he kvetched. “I was gonna do it with my fingers and get a suntan and that was gonna be that.” As the summer wore on, the camp, which was located deep in the Canadian wilderness, was besieged by deerflies. To escape them, Murray took to sleeping in his car. He spent most of his downtime doing rewrites of the screenplay, which he considered “a mess.” It was then, he recalled in a 2004 interview, that he first realized he could improve a script by ad-libbing his own dialogue. “That’s when I knew that I was better than the material,” he said.

  Full of antic Bugs Bunny energy, Murray’s performance enlivens the entire film. It marked the first flowering of what would become his 1980s persona: the brash outsider full of snarky bravado. “He was funny and bold and said things no one else would say,” Harold Ramis later observed. “The prevailing Woody Allen–type heroes at the time were losers, nebbishes, schlemiels. Bill’s character wasn’t a loser; he was a rebel. He was an outcast by choice. He had confidence and power.”

  Audiences responded, making Meatballs the sleeper hit of the summer of 1979—and a landmark in the history of Canadian cinema. Made for a mere $1.6 million, the film pulled in an impressive $43 million at the box office, setting a record for the highest-grossing Canadian film ever (until Porky’s came along in 1982). At the first-ever Genie Awards ceremony—the Canadian equivalent of the Oscars—held in Toronto on March 20, 1980, Meatballs snagged three awards, including best actress (Kate Lynch) and best original screenplay. It also won the coveted Golden Reel—presented annually to the Canadian film with the biggest box office gross—but was beaten out for best picture by the haunted house thriller The Changeling. George C. Scott, the star of that film, bested Murray for best foreign actor in a Canadian film. For Murray, the loss established a pattern for future awards-ceremony disappointments. “I got nominated for a Canadian Oscar—for Meatballs. For MEATBALLS!” he railed. “And who am I up against? George C. Scott. So he wins the award and I stand up and go, ‘That’s it—let’s get the hell outta here.’”

  In the end, Murray preferred to get his validation in the form of the instant gratification to be found at the local cineplex: “There’s nothing more exciting than sneaking into the back of a theater to watch your movie and hearing people laughing out loud. I remember the first time that happened, when I was at a screening of Meatballs. You get an electric charge through your whole body. It’s great to hear the waves of laughter, because you never get a laugh while you’re shooting a movie. If anyone laughs on a movie set, it ruins the take. But seven or eight months later, you go to a theater and get this huge laugh for a comic bit that you’d forgotten all about. It’s like finding lots of money in a big bank account that you didn’t know you had.”

  NEXT MOVIE: Shame of the Jungle (1979)

  MEDICINE

  As a young man, Murray aspired to become a doctor. “I wanted to do something hard,” he once explained. “I figured to be a doctor you had to know something, you had to have some humanity.” But his idealized vision of a medical practice may have been somewhat unrealistic. “I wanted to be some kind of emergency surgeon who would be down in the Caribbean going from island to island in paradise where I would be the only doctor for a hundred miles, and everyone would really need me in these life-or-death situations.” When he entered Regis College in 1968, he briefly enrolled in the premed program. However, he was dismayed at the amount of study involved. “Besides, most of the people in med school are no fun.” After Murray was busted for marijuana possession in 1970, he was forced to drop out of college, and his medical dreams went up in smoke.

  In the summer of 1979, after completing work on Where the Buffalo Roam in Hollywood, Murray volunteered to drive Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels’s Volkswagen Super Beetle cross-country from Los Angeles to New York. It turned out to be a very circuitous journey. Accompanied by his brother John, Murray drove from southern California to Aspen, Colorado, and then nonstop going ninety-five miles an hour through Texas to Mobile, Alabama. “Remember, I was his boss,” Michaels recalled. “Occasionally, I would hear from Bill on the road. He’d be in Florida, and I’d say, ‘But Bill—is Florida on the way?’” It is if you’re stopping off in Broward County to shoot a few scenes in Caddyshack before returning to New York. Finally, in September, just before the start of the new SNL season, Murray returned the car to its owner—with one slight enhancement for his trouble. “It took all summer to get the Beetle,” Michaels said, “but Bill had installed a stereo.”

  MENDEL, GREGOR

  In a 2014 “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, Murray identified this nineteenth-century geneticist as the historical figure he would most like to go back in time to meet. “He was a monk who just sort of figured this stuff out on his own,” the actor opined. “That’s a higher mind, that’s a mind that’s connected. They have a vision, and they just sort of see it because they are so connected intellectually and mechanically and spiritually, they can access a higher mind. Mendel was a guy so long ago that I don’t necessarily know very much about him, but I know that
Einstein did his work in the mountains in Switzerland. I think the altitude had an effect on the way they spoke and thought. But I would like to know about Mendel, because I remember going to the Philippines and thinking, ‘This is like Mendel’s garden’ because it had been invaded by so many different countries over the years, and you could see the children shared the genetic traits of all their invaders over the years, and it made for this beautiful varietal garden.”

  MEXICAN COKE

  When he’s in the mood for a soft drink, Murray insists on Coca-Cola imported from Mexico, where it is sweetened with cane sugar rather than corn syrup.

  MICHAELS, LORNE

  Legendary television producer who rescued Murray from the ruins of Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell and installed him in the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Murray had nothing but praise for Michaels during a 2011 appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show: “He’s a complicated character and he really has gotten really, really good at that job. He’s a million times better at it now. He really is good at the job… . He keeps the people together, which is really a hard part. I mean, there are infamous people in the comedy world that had all the talent and alienated them and they went away. But he’s managed to keep good people, good writers, good actors, and good technicians—I mean good cameramen, good lighting guys. That’s a tough building to keep all the best guys in one room.”