Randomness is lobster.’ ‘Invite yourself to the party.’ And ‘Drop coin on the world.’ By applying Murray’s philosophical tenets to your own life, says Edwards, you may discover the path to a better version of yourself. Murray has said that he is the best version of himself when he’s working on a film set. So his filmography is not just a list of roles performed by a fine actor, it’s an alternate map of the Tao of Bill. From the pages of The Tao of Bill Murray, here Edwards offers some insights into what’s undoubtedly one of Murray’s crowning achievements, his performance in the role of Dr. Peter Venkman in the 1984 classic Ghostbusters.
The apex of Bill Murray’s early career was Ghostbusters, where his attitude blended perfectly with ectoplasmic special effects for a smash hit. On paper, his Venkman character doesn’t seem particularly appealing: He’s lecherous, self-absorbed, and mildly sadistic. But Bill made him seem like the epitome of cool – a wisecracking guy who saved New York City from a vengeful god without breaking a sweat. When Bill started shooting Ghostbusters with director Ivan Reitman and costars Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, he was still dazed and jetlagged from The Razor’s Edge, which had wrapped only days before. He made an abrupt transition from monasteries in the Himalayas, taking a Concorde to New York City and going straight from the airport to a set on the corner of Madison Avenue and 62nd Street. He had dropped thirty-five pounds while shooting in India, and his first couple of weeks back, he slept as much as possible. The culture shock was severe: ‘Ten days ago I was up there working with the high lamas in a gompa, and here I am removing ghosts from drugstores and painting slime on my body,’ he reflected. ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ But Bill couldn’t help being
himself. Ramis remembered the movie’s first day shooting on the streets of New York: ‘Bill and Danny and I were just hanging out on the street, and everyone recognized Bill and Danny from Saturday Night Live. Someone walked by and said, “Hey, Bill Murray!” And Bill said, in a mock-angry voice, “You son of a bitch!” And he grabbed the guy and he wrestled him to the ground. Just a passerby. The guy was completely amazed – and laughing all the way to the ground.’ Ivan Reitman’s son, Jason Reitman (the director of Juno and Up in the Air), studied the differences between the screenplay and the produced film when he staged a live reading of the
‘Back off, man. I’m a scientist.’ script in 2012. ‘While almost all the dialogue in [the] original screenplay is echoed onscreen, the Venkman character is completely improvised,’ he reported. ‘It’s as if Bill Murray was given a mumblecore-style essay about each scene and then permitted to say whatever he wanted as long as he got the point across. He’s like a jazz musician who knows, “I have eight measures here and have to hit this note here and as long as I follow those rules everything else is up to me.”’ Ernie Hudson played Winston Zeddemore, the fourth Ghostbuster, a part that Aykroyd said he originally wrote with Eddie Murphy in mind and that got scaled back when Murphy didn’t join the cast. (Ivan
Reitman disputed this – his memory was that the role was always intended as a secondary part but it got bolstered during filming, when they discovered how good Hudson was.) Hudson said that Bill was directly responsible for making sure that he didn’t get squeezed out as the movie got rewritten on the fly, making sure that he got some choice dialogue: ‘Well, wait a minute, what about Ernie here?’ Hudson also got to see what life was like for Bill Murray: ‘I saw people driving down the streets and go, “Oh my God!” and slam on their brakes and jump out of their cars while they’re still running. And run over and go, “Bill Murray! Holy shit, man! Oh fuck, I can’t believe it’s you!” Bill just never ran from it. He would just wade down the street, like he was the mayor.’ Bill, Hudson said, never seemed to worry about his personal safety, or the film’s schedule. ‘A guy would say, “Bill, you know, I got this record collection…” and Bill would take off with him.’ At the end of the movie, after the Ghostbusters dispatch the gargantuan Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, white fluff covers Aykroyd, Ramis, and Hudson from head to toe – but not Bill. Why not? ‘It’s one of the mistakes I made as a director,’ Ivan Reitman confessed. ‘I thought, “He’s the one who always escapes consequence.” A little bit of a metaphor for what he’s really like in his life. But I probably should have done it – covering him in slime was so delicious and became such an iconic moment. Anyway, it was a choice that I’ve second-guessed myself on ever since.’
SOURCES: • INTERVIEW WITH IVAN REITMAN. • BREZNICAN, ANTHONY, ‘“GHOSTBUSTERS” LIVE-READ GRABS SETH ROGEN, JACK BLACK, AND RAINN WILSON,’ EW.COM, DECEMBER 11, 2012. • LABRECQUE, JEFF, ‘GHOSTBUSTERS: AN ORAL HISTORY,’ EW.COM, NOVEMBER 14, 2014.
The Tao of Bill Murray by Gavin Edwards. Century, September 2016. 17