The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray Page 3

  BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA

  As a child, Murray was so unruly that he was kicked out of the Boy Scouts before even being issued a uniform.

  BREAKFAST CLUB, THE

  Murray is a big fan of director John Hughes’s 1985 comedy about five high school misfits who spend a Saturday in detention together. He has called The Breakfast Club “an American gem, an amazing film, as important as any of Marty [Scorsese]’s movies. It’s just a real fuckin’ piece. And those kids were never better than that, and [Hughes] let ’em roll.”

  BROKEN FLOWERS

  DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

  WRITTEN BY: Jim Jarmusch

  RELEASE DATE: August 5, 2005

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: An aging lothario canvasses his ex-lovers in search of the son he never knew.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Don Johnston, jaded rake

  Completing the informal “sad middle-aged man” trilogy that began so promisingly with Lost in Translation and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Murray finally hit the wall with the torpid Broken Flowers. Playing an over-the-hill ladies’ man named Don Johnston (Don Juan—get it?), Murray delivers an infuriatingly affectless performance. His impassive character makes Steve Zissou look like Sam Kinison. Directed by Jim Jarmusch, with his customary paint-drying languor, Broken Flowers is one of the most heartbreaking misfires in Murray’s filmography—a movie that could have been great in the hands of a filmmaker more attuned to the importance of story and pacing.

  Although an aspiring screenwriter would later claim in a lawsuit that Jarmusch stole the idea for the film from him, the indie auteur maintained in interviews that he fashioned Broken Flowers as a showcase for the melancholic pole of Murray’s personality. “I wanted to create a character where he wasn’t reliant on things we expect or know or appreciate from Bill Murray,” Jarmusch told Movies Online. “I wanted that other side.” For his part, Murray was intrigued by the film’s novel premise, which has Johnston setting out on a road trip to reconnect with four former flames. “Just the very thought of someone my age going to visit old girlfriends had instant appeal,” Murray told the Guardian. “Even women think, ‘That would be interesting.’ Not comfortable, but interesting. It is not a comfortable film at any point.”

  Murray was entranced by the script but reluctant to commit to the project until Jarmusch promised him he could shoot the entire film within one hour of his house in New York’s Hudson Valley. Since Jarmusch had a home in the Catskills, finding locations amenable to both men proved to be easy. Keeping the star on set at all times was not. One day, Murray wandered off and barged into a private home next door to the house where they were filming. He emerged ten minutes later with a plateful of cookies for the crew.

  In an interview conducted for the Cinema.com website, Jarmusch compared working with Murray to capturing the attention of a small child: “If you sit down with some crayons and a coloring book and say, ‘Look, Bill, I’m coloring. Isn’t it fun?’ he’s not interested. But if you sit down and ignore him and you’re coloring and he comes over and says, ‘What are you doing?’ And you say, ‘Ehhh, I’m coloring.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, can I color?’ ‘Yeah, let’s color.’”

  While Broken Flowers impressed critics—scoring the coveted Grand Prix at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival—even Murray seemed to sense that his days of playing fiftysomething sad sacks were coming to an end. Or perhaps he just felt he had left it all on the playing field. After Broken Flowers premiered, he considered retiring from show business entirely. “I thought that was as good as I could do and I should stop,” he said. He would not play the lead in another live-action film until 2012. Fortunately for him, and the world, he reconsidered retirement in time to make Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties barely a year later.

  NEXT MOVIE: The Lost City (2006)

  BUTLER, JENNIFER “JENNY”

  Murray met his second wife, a Hollywood costume designer, on the set of Scrooged in 1988. At the time he was still married to his first wife. At Murray’s insistence, Butler went on to work as a costumer on Ghostbusters II and What about Bob? and as a costume designer on Groundhog Day. Following the formal dissolution of Murray’s first marriage in 1996, the couple married on July 1, 1997. Three days before their wedding, they signed a $7 million prenuptial agreement. Murray sired four sons by Butler between 1993 and 2001. But the later years of their marriage were marked by rancor, attributed in press accounts to Murray’s frequent travel. On May 12, 2008, Butler filed for divorce, citing her husband’s “adultery, addiction to marijuana and alcohol, abusive behavior, physical abuse, sexual addictions and frequent abandonment.” She alleged that he threatened to kill her, left menacing voicemail messages on her phone, and frequently left the country without notifying her for the purpose of engaging in “public and private altercations and sexual liaisons.” While divorce proceedings wended their way through the court, a judge issued a restraining order barring Murray from the family home. The divorce was finalized on June 13. Butler was awarded custody of the children, and Murray was granted visitation rights and compelled to pay child support. Murray later called his split with his second wife “devastating” and “the worst thing that ever happened to me in my entire life.”

  “I’VE HAD A GREAT DEAL OF SUCCESS IN LIFE. I’VE LEARNED HOW TO LIVE AND I THINK I’VE LEARNED THINGS ABOUT LIVING. IT’S ALMOST LIKE: ‘OKAY, YOU LEARNED THAT MUCH, NOW LET’S TRY THIS. LET’S SEE HOW YOU CAN DO IF THIS HAPPENS TO YOU.’”

  —MURRAY, on the painful dissolution of his second marriage

  Accompanied by his brother Brian, Murray crashed the lavish opening night party for the film version of the Who’s rock opera, held on March 18, 1975, in the mezzanine of a New York City subway station. Tommy producer Robert Stigwood organized the bash, which cost $35,000 and attracted more than seven hundred A-list guests, including pallid pop artist Andy Warhol and twitchy Psycho actor Anthony Perkins. Mounted New York City police officers escorted partygoers via red carpet from the Ziegfeld Theater, where the movie premiered, to the dilapidated 57th Street station (best known to TV viewers for its appearance in the opening credits of the 1970s sitcom Rhoda). The Felliniesque spread included fifty pounds of octopus flown up from the Bahamas, six hundred oysters, five thirty-pound lobsters, and several one-hundred-pound rounds of roast beef. On a buffet table near the subway entrance, the name Tommy was spelled out in three thousand cherry tomatoes. “We had no business being at this thing,” Murray said later, “but we knew the guys in the kitchen. It was a party in the subway!”

  CADDYING

  As a teenager, Murray worked as a caddy at the upscale Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, Illinois. He made $3.50 for each “loop,” or golf bag, carried. On a busy Saturday, he could usually do two eighteen-hole loops carrying two bags at a time, for a total take of $14. He received an extra 25 cents per loop if he got rained on. Golfers were discouraged from giving gratuities, although Murray often lobbied for tips by telling them he was paying his way through school—which he was. He used the money he made at Indian Hill to cover his tuition at Loyola Academy, a private Jesuit high school.

  Murray first signed on at Indian Hill at age ten, following in the footsteps of his brothers Ed and Brian. (For years, he was known around the golf course as the “New Murray.”) Before working his way up to caddy, he spent time as a “shag boy,” retrieving practice drives for duffers for sixty cents an hour. “A guy would hit balls and you’d run out and collect them,” he told Sports Illustrated magazine. “You were basically a human target.”

  “WE DIDN’T HAVE COWS TO MILK SO YOU HAD TO GO CADDY.”

  —MURRAY, on why he followed his older brothers into the family business

  Caddying, Murray told an interviewer, provided “my first glimpse of comedy. When you see grown men near to tears because they’ve missed hitting a little white ball into a hole from three feet, it makes you laugh.” The experience also kindled his nascent class consciousness. “The kids who
were members of the club were despicable,” he once said. “You couldn’t believe the attitude they had. I mean, you were literally walking barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans, carrying some privileged person’s sports toys on your back for five miles.” In a 2014 interview with radio host Howard Stern, Murray called his caddying days “a great education… . You learned a lot about how you wanted to be treated and you learned how to treat people by seeing how these people treated you.”

  CADDYSHACK

  DIRECTED BY: Harold Ramis

  WRITTEN BY: Douglas Kenney, Harold Ramis, and Brian Doyle-Murray

  RELEASE DATE: July 25, 1980

  FILM RATING: ***½

  MURRAY RATING: ****

  PLOT: Snobs take on slobs in a battle for the soul of a tony golf and country club.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Carl Spackler, assistant greenskeeper and future Masters champion

  Fresh off the set of Where the Buffalo Roam and about to start work on his final season of Saturday Night Live, Murray could spare only six days of his schedule to work on this anarchic golf comedy from the Animal House creative team of Harold Ramis and Doug Kenney. But what a week it was. Although critically derided on its release, Caddyshack became one of the defining films of Murray’s career and a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. It wound up vastly outperforming the more ambitious Buffalo at the box office, setting the stage for far more lucrative Murray ventures in the 1980s.

  As every sentient American moviegoer knows by now, Caddyshack transplants Animal House’s “snobs versus slobs” conflict to the tony environs of Bushwood Country Club. Murray plays Carl Spackler, the deranged assistant greenskeeper who wages a counterinsurgency campaign against a mischievous boogying gopher bent on destroying the club’s golf course. Ramis directed, from a script he cowrote with Kenney and Murray’s brother Brian. The screenplay drew heavily on the Murray siblings’ experiences as caddies at the Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, Illinois. The character of Danny Noonan, the young looper who dreams of going to college on a caddy scholarship, was based on Murray’s brother Ed, who did win such a scholarship. In fact, Murray has called Caddyshack “the gripping tale of the Murray brothers’ first experiments with employment.”

  In early drafts, Caddyshack started out as a coming-of-age film centered on Danny Noonan and the other caddies, with a class warfare subtext inspired in part by British director Lindsay Anderson’s If… . The finished film deemphasized Noonan and tamped down the Marxist overtones, to Murray’s chagrin. “The movie was knowledgeable about golf,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 1988, “but it should have had more about the stratification of country club life.”

  To embody that stratification in the broadest possible way, Ramis cast two show business veterans: stand-up comedy legend Rodney Dangerfield (a late substitute for the director’s first choice, Don Rickles) as vulgar condo developer Al Czervik; and Mary Tyler Moore Show stalwart Ted Knight (stepping in for Jason Robards) as pompous Judge Elihu Smails. Michael O’Keefe, a scratch golfer, played Noonan. (Fresh off an acclaimed performance in The Great Santini, O’Keefe was thought to be a safer choice than the other finalist, Mickey Rourke.) Murray’s Saturday Night Live bête noire Chevy Chase rounded out the main cast as the Zen-spouting golf prodigy Ty Webb, with Doyle-Murray in a supporting role as caddymaster Lou Loomis, a character based on the Murray brothers’ real-life loop whisperer, Lou Janis.

  “THEY GAVE ME THIS GREAT GREEN LINCOLN CONTINENTAL RENT-A-CAR WITH GREEN UPHOLSTERY, AND BACK THEN THERE WAS NO ONE LIVING IN FLORIDA SO YOU COULD DRIVE AT 90, AND GET REALLY HAMMERED. IT WAS A GOOD TIME TO BE AN AMERICAN.”

  —MURRAY, on the experience of filming Caddyshack in 1979

  Caddyshack was shot over eleven weeks during the late summer and early fall of 1979 at the Rolling Hills Golf and Tennis Club in Davie, Florida. The location was chosen principally for the lack of visible palm trees—the better to stand in for suburban Chicago. The budget was $6 million, the vast majority of which seems to have gone for drugs and alcohol. Cast and crew reportedly plowed through eighty grams of cocaine a week, part of a rolling orgy of overindulgence unseen since the days of Caligula. “Debauchery reigned every night,” producer Jon Peters reported in his memoir.

  Murray showed up in the midst of the bacchanal, at the last minute, reportedly after some haggling over the profit points in his contract. He immediately left an indelible mark on the production. On his first day on set, he filmed the legendary “Dalai Lama” speech, in which Carl waxes rhapsodic about the Tibetan holy man while menacing a caddy with a pitchfork. Other iconic scenes would follow: the classic “Cinderella Story” speech where Carl mock-narrates his miraculous victory at the Masters championship; and a bizarre encounter between Carl and Ty Webb in Carl’s ramshackle greenskeeper’s quarters. (Murray provided much of the decor for Carl’s “apartment” himself.)

  This last scene sprung from a note given by Peters to Ramis bemoaning the absence of a scene pairing Murray and Chase, two of the biggest comedy stars on the planet. Apparently Peters was unaware the two actors had recently come to blows backstage at Saturday Night Live. “I was never told that they shouldn’t be on the set at the same time,” said production executive Mark Canton, “but I think that they chose not to be on the set at the same time. They were not the best of friends. Everyone seemed to know it.”

  Somehow Murray and Chase were able to put aside their mutual antipathy and bulldog their way through the scene, which ended up being one of the film’s most memorable. With Ramis’s help, they sketched out a premise over lunch—Ty “plays through” Carl’s place during a nighttime round of golf—and shot it later that afternoon. Like most of the best moments in Caddyshack, the sequence was almost entirely improvised. “I just reacted to whatever he did,” Chase remembered later. “I had no idea that Billy was going to go through the rap about being able to smoke the grass. Chinch bugs? I’d never heard of a chinch bug. The pond line. It all made sense. It took a lot to keep a straight face in that scene.”

  Today it is considered a minor classic, but Caddyshack received decidedly mixed reviews upon its July 1980 release. New York magazine’s critic David Denby called it “a perfectly amiable mess, an undistinguished summer diversion.” He slammed Murray in particular as “more of a nut brain solipsist than actor.” The reviewer for the Boston Globe railed that “Caddyshack represents everything that is wrong with contemporary film comedy. It relies on stock television characters and a stale sitcom style. It is an unoriginal pastiche of other slapstick farces such as Meatballs, and it presupposes an audience with the collective intelligence of a lobotomized ape.”

  On the Today show, mustachioed movie maven Gene Shalit called Murray “wearisome” and the film “a sketchy bramble of golfers, caddies, and country clubs.” Newsweek’s David Ansen predicted Caddyshack “will be of interest only to the actors’ agents.” The New York Times’s Vincent Canby was more charitable, writing of Murray’s performance: “You don’t for a minute believe him—you are always aware of the distance between the performer and the performance, but you appreciate the effort and the intelligence behind it.”

  Caddyshack’s poor critical reception can be attributed in part to a disastrous press junket that Murray took part in the morning after the film’s initial screening. Appearing on stage with his costars at Rodney Dangerfield’s eponymous comedy club in New York City, an unshaven, surly, and apparently hungover Murray gave clipped answers to the assembled entertainment journalists. Even worse, screenwriter Doug Kenney loudly proclaimed his hatred for the film and told everyone in the audience—including his own parents—to “fuck off.” “We were so poorly behaved,” Harold Ramis said later. “We didn’t create a popular rooting interest for the film. Someone wrote, ‘If this is the New Hollywood, let’s have the Old Hollywood back.’”

  Although it failed to replicate the success of Animal House, Caddyshack did fare well at the box office, grossing nearly $40 million in the face of stiff competition from the likes of The Blu
es Brothers, Airplane!, and Smokey and the Bandit II. Over the ensuing decades, the film’s reputation has only grown, fueled in part by its popularity among professional athletes and recreational golfers. For Murray, that has been something of a mixed blessing. “I can walk on a golf course, and some guy will be screaming entire scenes at me and expecting me to do it word for word with him,” he said. “It’s like: ‘Fella, I did that once. I improvised that scene. I don’t remember how it goes.’ But I’m charmed by it. I’m not like, ‘Hey, knock it off.’ It’s kind of cool.”

  One person who never shared the public’s love for Caddyshack was its director, Harold Ramis. “I can barely watch it,” he once said. “All I see are a bunch of compromises and things that could have been better. Like, it bothers me that nobody except Michael O’Keefe can swing a golf club. A movie about golf with the worst bunch of golf swings you’ve ever seen!”

  NEXT MOVIE: Loose Shoes (1980)

  CAINE MUTINY COURT MARTIAL, THE

  As a high school senior, Murray played Lieutenant Thomas Keefer in the Loyola Academy Drama Club’s production of this play based on Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1952 novel. Keefer is an officer aboard the USS Caine, a U.S. Navy minesweeper whose crew revolts against the tyrannical Captain Queeg. In a 1984 interview, Murray described his character as “a sleaze guy who rats on everybody.” “It wasn’t much of a part,” he recalled of his first dramatic acting experience. “The only great thing about it was that you got to get out of class for a few hours, and that was like getting a three-day leave in the army, because class was hell.”