The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray Page 15

  “HE’S A NICE JEWISH BOY FROM TORONTO. HE’S VULNERABLE TO GUILT AND WHEN PEOPLE NEED HELP, HE HELPS THEM.”

  —MURRAY, on Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels

  MILAN

  This densely populated Italian city and international fashion capital is one of Murray’s favorite cities to visit. “I like Milan a lot,” he once said. “It reminds me of Chicago, where I come from, because it’s tough; it’s a working city, but it’s beautiful. It’s like a hard-working industrial city, but it’s also got this crazy fashion thing. So all the women are dressed like crazy. And they’re riding around on motor scooters, smoking cigarettes and doing their makeup at the same time. It’s hilarious. It’s my kind of fun.”

  MONSTERS, INC.

  Murray tested for the role of James P. “Sulley” Sullivan, the genial horned beast who frightens children for a living, in this 2001 comedy from Pixar Animation Studios. But when studio executives tried to contact him to offer the part, he was nowhere to be found. Calls to the actor’s vaunted 800 number went unanswered. “We took that to mean ‘No,’” said director Peter Docter. Murray would have to wait three years before taking on another voice-acting role, in 2004’s Garfield: The Movie.

  MONTANA COOLER

  In 2013, Murray told an interviewer from Dazed and Confused magazine his preferred method for drinking champagne, a proprietary iced drink he calls a Montana Cooler:

  “You buy a case of champagne and you take all the bottles out, and you take all the cardboard out, and you put a garbage bag inside of it, then you put all the bottles back in and then you cover it with ice, and then you wrap it up and you close it. And that will keep it all cold for a weekend and you can drink every single bottle. And the way I like to drink it in a big pint glass with ice. I fill it with ice and I pour the champagne in it, because champagne can never be too cold. And the problem people have with champagne is they drink it and they crash with it, because the sugar content is so high and you get really dehydrated. But if you can get the ice in it, you can drink it supremely cold and at the same time you’re getting the melting ice, so it’s like a hydration level, and you can stay at this great level for a whole weekend. You don’t want to crash. You want to keep that buzz, that bling, that smile.”

  See also Champa Tampa.

  MONUMENTS MEN, THE

  DIRECTED BY: George Clooney

  WRIT TEN BY: George Clooney and Grant Heslov

  RELEASE DATE: February 7, 2014

  FI LM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: It’s Ocean’s Eleven with Nazis as an all-star team of scholars scours war-torn Europe for purloined art treasures.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Richard Campbell, laconic Chicago architect

  Murray’s late-life BFF George Clooney pitched him on this well-intentioned World War II drama over pasta and salad one day in 2012. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, this sounds so good,’” Murray told PBS’s Charlie Rose. “But then, I thought, ‘I wish George would have asked me to be in that movie, it sounds so good.’ And then, nine months later, he said, ‘Are you busy?’ And I said, ‘I’m busy, but I’m not that busy!” The Monuments Men reunited Murray with his Moonrise Kingdom costar Bob Balaban, with whom he shares most of his scenes. But while the company was congenial, the German location shoot was arduous, providing Murray with a reminder of why he hadn’t made an army movie since Stripes in 1981. “They’re hard,” he said. “You have to get in and out of vehicles that are made for the 1930s, you know? So you are fitting into a small space, and we’re huge people now compared to what they were then. So it’s physically uncomfortable. We were outdoors all the time and it was a long movie. Long.”

  Murray called the true-life tale of a hardy band of museum curators who recover masterpieces looted by the Nazis “a great script and a fascinating story that no one has ever heard before.” But audiences were not nearly as intrigued. Although the film’s all-star cast did its best to promote The Monuments Men on the international festival and junket circuit, the ponderous, old-fashioned prestige picture fizzled like an unexploded land mine at the box office. Confidential e-mails leaked in 2014 portray Clooney as wracked with guilt over the movie’s failure to ignite. “I fear I’ve let you all down,” he confesses at one point to Sony Pictures Entertainment honcho Amy Pascal. “Not my intention. I apologize … I won’t do it again.”

  NEXT MOVIE: St. Vincent

  MOONRISE KINGDOM

  DIRECTED BY: Wes Anderson

  WRITTEN BY: Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola

  RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2012

  FILM RATING: ***

  MURRAY RATING: ***

  PLOT: A pair of lovesick teenage runaways confounds the scout troop sent out to retrieve them.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Walt Bishop, flinty New England cuckold

  In an odd bit of typecasting, Murray plays an outwardly successful, sexually frustrated older man for the fourth time in a film directed by Wes Anderson. It’s also the fourth time he has played an attorney on-screen—edging out gangster and ghostbuster as his most-favored make-believe occupation. A return to form for Anderson after his previous live-action film, the irritating Darjeeling Limited, Moonrise Kingdom also pairs Murray auspiciously with his future Olive Kitteridge costar Frances McDormand. As Anderson explained to Rolling Stone: “I had this idea that I really wanted Bill and Frances McDormand to play a married couple. I just pictured it in my head, the two of them being these two lawyers. I always thought they would click and there would be a special chemistry. When I got them on set, that ended up happening for real… . There was some real emotion shared between them on that set. They were both brilliant, but also fun and charming friends.” Adding to the good vibes on the Rhode Island shoot was the presence of Cooper Murray, Murray’s fourteen-year-old son, who played one of the Khaki Scouts dispatched to capture the film’s main characters.

  NEXT MOVIE: Hyde Park on Hudson (2013)

  MOUNTAINS

  Murray has always been fascinated by mountains, although he never saw one firsthand until he moved to Denver to attend Regis College in 1968. He described the experience in a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone magazine: “It was just a matter of being high and seeing a different order—as opposed to whatever the hell I knew when I was eighteen years old. School and lunch. And beer. Aside from those three, I didn’t have much experience. And girls. So there was just something different happening. I saw there was something else to see. I can’t describe it. It’s just a better feeling than usual. And yet it’s perfectly ordinary because it’s intended to be perfectly ordinary. It’s not like lightning bolts hitting you on the head. It’s just different.” After seeing the Rockies for the first time, Murray could not get enough mountains. “Then I wanted to see them all,” he said. Murray spent extensive time in the Himalayas while shooting The Razor’s Edge in 1983.

  MR. MAGOO

  Murray is a huge fan of Quincy Magoo, the famously myopic 1960s cartoon character voiced by comic actor Jim Backus. “I thought there was a lot of truth in the exaggerated vulnerability of the near-sighted little cartoon guy,” he once said. In another interview, he cited the squinting skinflint as a model for the types of roles he would like to play. “It sounds corny but I’d like all my stuff from here on out to be things you wouldn’t be afraid to let your kids’ kids discover decades from now. Like I discovered A Tale of Two Cities or even Mr. Magoo.”

  Murray considers the 1962 animated special Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol the finest adaptation of Charles Dickens’s holiday classic ever made. “My favorite Scrooge was Mr. Magoo,” he told the Boston Globe. “It was funny, but it didn’t lose any of the emotion, you know? And you’re watching a cartoon, thinking, ‘This isn’t going to get me.’ And then it gets you.”

  In the summer of 1990, Murray spent a month in southwest Virginia filming What about Bob? on scenic Smith Mountain Lake. When he found out that MC Hammer was playing a concert at the nearby Roanoke Civic Center, Murray called his age
nts requesting tickets for himself and the entire crew. When they arrived at the venue, Murray’s entourage was seated on the side of the stage, where many jugs of moonshine were consumed. Murray later estimated that he had consumed “four or five ounces of 190 proof alcohol” by the time Hammer invited him on stage for his show-stopping number, “U Can’t Touch This.” “I did the dance,” Murray told Cigar Aficionado magazine. “That’s right, the Hammer dance. Surprisingly, I knew all the steps. But I learned why he wore those weird chef’s pants, because I split my pants right up the back. And since it was the end of the month off on a remote location, all I had was my pants. I was going commando, if you know what I mean. I was working without a net.”

  Exposed and flailing, Murray staggered to the wings, where his costumer—later to become his second wife—managed to fasten up the breach in his britches with seven giant safety pins she happened to be carrying. “She fixed me up, and I went out and finished the number,” Murray said. “Later [Hammer] told me that professional athletes would come up and not be able to finish the number. I wondered if it was because of the pants, and he said, no, they didn’t have the stamina.”

  MR. MIKE’S MONDO VIDEO

  DIRECTED BY: Michael O’Donoghue

  WRITTEN BY: Michael O’Donoghue, Mitch Glazer, Dick Wittenborn, and Emily Prager

  RELEASE DATE: September 19, 1979

  FILM RATING: *

  MURRAY RATING: *

  PLOT: Sinister sleazebag “Mr. Mike” takes moviegoers on a globe-hopping cinematic tour d’horizon.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: The Honker, ever so briefly

  Murray has a brief cameo in this wincingly unfunny video film from Saturday Night Live writer/provocateur Michael O’Donoghue. A self-indulgent, glacially paced parody of the 1962 documentary Mondo Cane, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video was bankrolled by SNL producer Lorne Michaels and scheduled to air in the SNL time slot during one of the show’s off weeks in the 1978–79 season. But NBC executives balked when they saw the footage, refusing to broadcast it and forcing O’Donoghue to pad it out to feature length for a mercifully short-lived theatrical release. Several SNL regulars and guest hosts appear in the film. Murray plays his mush-mouthed drunk character, the Honker, in a man-on-the-street interview segment.

  NEXT MOVIE: Where the Buffalo Roam (1980)

  MTV EUROPE

  During a visit to Rome in 2004 to promote Lost in Translation, Murray spent an evening in Sofia Coppola’s hotel room watching MTV Europe with a group of friends from the movie. In an interview with the New Yorker, he described the channel’s programming as “terrible, awful, like funeral music from another planet.”

  MURRAY, ANDREW THOMAS

  Murray’s younger brother, the seventh of the nine Murray siblings, was born in Evanston, Illinois, on April 5, 1956. An accomplished chef and restaurateur, Andy Murray developed the menu for the Murray Bros. Caddyshack, the family’s golf-themed eatery in St. Augustine, Florida. An honors graduate of the New York Restaurant School, he previously worked in such fabled Manhattan hot spots as Mortimer’s, the Tribeca Grill, and the Lone Star Roadhouse.

  MURRAY, BRIAN

  Murray’s older brother, the second of the nine Murray siblings, was born on October 31, 1945, in Evanston, Illinois. An actor and writer, Brian Murray adopted the hyphenate Brian Doyle-Murray (after his maternal grandmother, Mary Agnes Doyle) to avoid confusion with a South African stage actor of the same name. Bill Murray has called Brian “my first great influence” and said of him: “He made much of what I am possible.”

  “I LIKE TO SAY THAT THEY PEAKED WITH ME, AND IT WAS ALL DOWNHILL AFTER THAT.”

  —MURRAY, on being the fifth of nine children

  After graduating from Loyola Academy in 1963, Brian Murray briefly attended Saint Mary’s College of California before dropping out to become a railroad switchman. “He put a couple cars into San Francisco Bay once,” Bill Murray once recalled. “But I guess all railroad men do something like that. He did a lot of weird things.”

  After family patriarch Ed Murray died in December 1967, Brian returned home to help support his widowed mother and eight siblings. He took a job as a peanut broker in downtown Chicago but lasted only six months. “If he’d stayed in it, he’d have ended up a very wealthy man,” Bill Murray later claimed. When the legume game petered out, Brian devoted himself to acting full-time. He accepted a position at Second City and attended nighttime improv workshops with the legendary Del Close. In 1973, he left Chicago for New York to join the cast of The National Lampoon Radio Hour. That led to writing and performing stints on Saturday Night Live, recurring and guest roles on TV sitcoms throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and noteworthy supporting parts in films like JFK, Wayne’s World, and Cabin Boy. Brian Murray also cowrote the screenplay for Caddyshack and appeared alongside his brother Bill in that film as well as The Razor’s Edge, Scrooged, Ghostbusters II, and Groundhog Day.

  MURRAY BROS. CADDYSHACK

  Golf-themed restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida, co-owned by Murray and his brothers Brian, Joel, Andy, and Ed. The restaurant’s official slogan is “Eat, Drink & Be Murray.” The Murray Bros. Caddyshack, which opened for business on June 7, 2001, occupies an 8,000-square-foot space adjacent to the World Golf Hall of Fame. The dining area is decorated with Caddyshack-related memorabilia, including rakes, pails, lawnmowers, and assorted stuffed gophers. The menu was crafted by Murray’s brother Andy, a professional chef, to reflect the food of the Midwest where the brothers grew up. Popular menu items throughout the years have included Sheboygan bratwurst, Chicago hot dogs, an Italian beef sandwich, the Double Bogey Cheeseburger, the BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwedge, the Caddyshake, and the Baby Ruth cheesecake.

  MURRAY, CALEB JAMES

  Murray’s third son and first child by his second wife, Jennifer Butler, was born on January 11, 1993.

  “MURRAY CHRISTMAS”

  Since 2012, Murray has been sending friends a Christmas card bearing this greeting, featuring four photographs of himself wearing nothing but a red scarf. In 2013, he randomly mailed a “Murray Christmas” card to professional wrestling legend “Rowdy Roddy” Piper. “How and why I got this from Bill Murray, I have no idea,” Piper tweeted.

  MURRAY, COOPER JONES

  Murray’s fifth son and third child by his second wife, Jennifer Butler, was born on January 27, 1997. Cooper Murray appears as a Khaki Scout wearing a Native American headdress in his father’s 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom.

  MURRAY, EDWARD JOSEPH

  Murray’s paternal grandfather was born on February 3, 1886. He died on December 7, 1973, when Murray was twenty-three years old. “Grandpa Ed” Murray’s family immigrated to the U.S. from County Cork, Ireland, shortly before his birth. The Chicago native drove a city bus, wore neatly tailored suits, and was known for his jocular disposition. “He always had licorice in his pocket, and he always had a Budweiser and a Camel,” Murray said. “He had false teeth. There was always a baby in our family, and he’d always say, ‘Come here, little baby.’ And then he’d pop out his teeth exactly like the ghost in Ghostbusters and just scare the hell out of the baby. My mother’d get really pissed at him. ‘Grandpa! How could you scare him like that?’ He wouldn’t say anything; he’d just drink his beer.” An inveterate prankster, Murray’s grandfather was known to set off firecrackers unexpectedly. His arsenal of novelties included a pair of chattering teeth, a bag of laughs, and a light-up bow tie, which, according to Murray, “he used very tastefully.”

  MURRAY, EDWARD JOSEPH II

  Murray’s father was born on January 4, 1921, and died on December 29, 1967, at age 46, of complications from diabetes. Ed Murray was a longtime employee of the J. J. Barney Lumber Company in Wilmette, Illinois, first as a salesman and later as vice president of sales. Bill Murray once described him as “an interesting combination of a thin, fragile man and a disciplinarian.” Whenever one of his nine children misbehaved, he was known to whack the offender with a yardstick brought home from the lumberyard. But Ed Murray had a
lighter side as well. Known for wearing pistol-shaped cufflinks that fired blanks, he was likened by his oldest son and namesake to comedian Bob Newhart. “At the dinner table, he was very dry and quiet,” Bill Murray told the New York Times, “but always triggered to laugh.” A slow eater, Ed Murray was notoriously difficult to impress. The children would compete to see who could make their father spit out his food with laughter. Bill Murray has likened the scene at the Murray family table to a Friar’s Roast and the feeling of making his father laugh to winning a National Merit Scholarship. “If you weren’t funny, you did the dishes,” he said. One of Murray’s most vivid childhood memories is of the time he fell off his chair at the dinner table while doing an impression of James Cagney. “I hit my head very hard on the metal foot of the table leg, and it hurt terribly. But when I saw my father laughing, I laughed while crying at the same time. I guess that was some kind of beginning.” Murray has called his father’s death when he was just seventeen “the worst pain I’ve ever known in my life.”