SABBATICAL
In late 1984, following the success of Ghostbusters and the critical and commercial implosion of The Razor’s Edge, Murray fled Hollywood for Paris, France. He remained there for six months, studying philosophy and history at the celebrated French university La Sorbonne. Murray has called his hiatus from moviemaking “the best thing I ever did.”
“I thought that Ghostbusters was the biggest thing that would ever happen to me,” he told film critic Roger Ebert. “It was such a big phenomenon that I felt slightly radioactive. So I just moved away for a while.” While at the Sorbonne, Murray immersed himself in the writings of the Greco-Armenian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. His second son, Luke François Murray, was born in Paris during his time away from home.
Years later, Murray described his Parisian daily routine to the Times of London: “I spent the morning in a class of other idiots learning French, and then in the afternoon I went to the Cinémathèque, and that was a fantastic life. At lunchtime I stopped by at a chocolatier, and I was always walking around with 150 grams of chocolate in my pocket, and offering a piece was a great way to start a conversation.”
At the famed Cinémathèque Française, Murray took a self-taught course in film studies with an emphasis on the silent era. He devoured the works of Buster Keaton, watched a print of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation with Russian subtitles, and discovered the 1919 melodrama A Romance of Happy Valley. Murray later credited that film with changing the way he thought about picking his own projects.
According to Murray, the half year he spent in France had little effect on his viability in Hollywood. “It took everyone a long time to stop counting the Ghostbusters money,” he once said. “They were distracted, and they left me alone for a while. There were times when they wanted me to make movies that were part of packages, and I would never bite. I knew certain movies—like Airplane!—were going to be successful, but I didn’t want to do it. It’s just not my thing. I don’t lie awake and think, ‘If only I’d done Revenge of the Nerds.’”
Although Murray returned to the United States in the spring of 1985, he remained disinclined to get back on the superstar treadmill. He canceled the one project he had agreed to do and declined another lead in a film for three years. He spent most of his time with his wife and sons at their renovated farmhouse in New York’s Hudson River valley, reading historical novels about Ireland.
“I would get twenty phone calls a day from people wanting to do a movie,” he told Roger Ebert, “and there would be this incredible amount of pressure. On Friday I’d get like thirty phone calls, and then on Monday no one would call, and I’d look in the paper, and someone else was doing the movie because I didn’t say yes.”
SANDLER, ADAM
Murray is not a fan of the comic actor whose imbecilic brand of humor defined Saturday Night Live in the 1990s. “Adam Sandler doesn’t make me laugh,” he once admitted. “I would enjoy driving in L.A. with the windows open more than I would enjoy watching The Waterboy.”
SANTA CLAUSE, THE
Family-friendly 1994 comedy about a shlubby Chicago dad who is contractually obligated to assume the role of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. The lead role of Scott Calvin was originally written for Murray, but after his unpleasant experience on Scrooged he had no interest in pursuing another holiday-themed project. The part went to Tim Allen, who milked it for two sequels.
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
Murray first achieved nationwide fame as a cast member on this late-night TV sketch comedy series from 1977 to 1980. He replaced the departing Chevy Chase, who quit the show midway through its second season to pursue a movie career in Hollywood. Murray remained with the program through its brilliant, erratic fifth season, when the departures of original cast members John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd left him with a virtual monopoly on “first white guy” parts in nearly every sketch. He has since returned to host the show four times. While many SNL alums have left feeling embittered by the experience, Murray has had nothing but nice things to say about the series that gave him his big break. “I’m not gonna bitch about Saturday Night Live,” he once declared. “Before Saturday Night Live, I was eating brown rice and cereal. It was so goofy, that show. You could say or do anything you like in the name of entertainment. I was water-skiing behind some very powerful animals.”
See also Aykroyd, Dan; Belushi, John; Chase, Chevy; DiLaMuca, Todd; Eldini, Jerry; Honker, The; Michaels, Lorne; New Guy Speech; Nick the Lounge Singer; Niko; Radner, Gilda; “Shower Mike.”
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE WITH HOWARD COSELL
After he was passed over for a spot in the original Saturday Night Live cast, Murray was personally selected by bewigged sportscaster Howard Cosell to join the repertory company for this freewheeling prime-time variety hour on ABC. Cosell had “discovered” Murray after seeing him perform off-Broadway in The National Lampoon Show. Murray’s brother Brian and fellow Lampoon alum Christopher Guest were also hired to impart some youth and hipness to the Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell cast, officially dubbed the Prime Time Players.
The series, which a People magazine preview noted was “conceived by Cosell and his high-rolling boss at ABC Sports, Roone Arledge,” was intended to evoke the eclectic spirit of the old Ed Sullivan Show. But Cosell was incredibly uncomfortable on camera, the comedy players were seldom used, and the show quickly devolved into an ungainly mishmash of vaudeville schtick, video trickery, and circus acts. Guests included John Wayne, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Walters, Muhammad Ali, Evel Knievel, Frank Sinatra, John Denver, Paul Anka, Shirley Bassey, Jimmy Connors, Siegfried and Roy, and the cast of the Broadway musical The Wiz. Although the Cosell show aired at eight o’clock, critics couldn’t resist measuring it against the NBC Saturday Night program. As Murray also noted, it was not a flattering comparison: “Everybody else was on the other show. So we were on TV, and they were on TV. But they were the show, and we were on with the Chinese acrobats and elephants and all sorts of crazy acts, and we would get cut almost every other week.”
Two months into its run, ABC abruptly canceled Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. Only fifteen live episodes ever aired, all of which remain buried deep within the network archives.
SCROOGED
DIRECTED BY: Richard Donner
WRITTEN BY: Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue
RELEASE DATE: November 23, 1988
FILM RATING: *
MURRAY RATING: *
PLOT: A loathsome network television executive learns the true meaning of Christmas at the hands of three increasingly abusive ghosts.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Frank Cross, president of the IBC network
After a four-year sabbatical from Hollywood, Murray returned to star in this loud, mirthless holiday comedy “inspired” by Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol. A special-effects-driven supernatural blockbuster in the manner of Ghostbusters, Scrooged marked a return to box office form for Murray after the disappointment of The Razor’s Edge. With the benefit of hindsight, that is hard to understand. This is easily the worst film of his career.
The screenplay for Scrooged sprung from the pens of Murray pals Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue, though O’Donoghue would later claim that less than half of what he wrote ended up on the screen. “The finished film was a piece of unadulterated, unmitigated shit,” the dark-hearted genius known as Mr. Mike complained afterward. “The only good thing is that big checks came out of Scrooged, which allowed me to get a home in Ireland.”
Murray’s big check for agreeing to appear in the film totaled $6 million, or more than the salaries paid to the producer, the director, and the rest of the cast combined. But Scrooged did not start out as a money play. Murray loved the original script, which combined sentimentality with biting satire. Desperate to escape the treadmill of cranking out crowd-pleasing comedies, he saw Scrooged as a chance to “give the public a little food for thought… . There are moments in the Dickensian morality of Scrooged where you have the creepy chance to contemplate your ruin—the bottom of your future.” To prepare for the role, Murray studied previous movie adaptations of A Christmas Carol. “I saw the Alastair Sim and the Albert Finney Scrooge. Mostly, I learned what not to do from them.”
Unfortunately, not everyone on the Scrooged creative team shared Murray’s vision for the project. Sydney Pollack was replaced as director early on. Murray chafed under the goading of his old-school replacement, Richard Donner, who encouraged the cast to play their parts as broadly as possible. At Donner’s urging, Murray mugged and yelled through most of his scenes. Conceived as a devilish rogue who gains redemption through a glimpse at his wasted life, his Frank Cross comes off as a boorish jerk who gets what he deserves. There is little of the charm and none of the joy of Murray’s previous performances, and the film is larded with product placements for Tab, Stolichnaya, and Budweiser. As a result, watching Scrooged is like being hit on the head with a hammer for 101 minutes—a cinematic crucifixion instead of a yuletide miracle play.
“That could have been a really, really great movie,” Murray later confessed to Roger Ebert. “The script was so good. There’s maybe one take in the final cut movie that is mine. We made it so fast, it was like doing a movie live. [Donner] kept telling me to do things louder, louder, louder. I think he was deaf.” Even Murray’s fabled powers of improvisation seemed to desert him on this one. He ad-libbed most of Cross’s climactic monologue, in which the reformed creep pleads the case for kindness and good cheer, but the speech plays more rambling than inspirational. O’Donoghue, who was on the set at the time, likened it to a rant by the suicidal cult leader Jim Jones.
Whether it was creative fatigue or the pressure of headlining his first big-budget movie in four years, the Scrooged shoot turned out to be an arduous one for Murray. With no big-name costars, he was forced to carry the load by himself, on and off camera. He has described Scrooged as “a lonely movie for me to work on because I was really the only guy who was always there. I mean, there were all these people coming in, they drive in, then they drive out. And they’re gone. And I’m still there. Like a schnook, you know? So I didn’t get to have any developing fun with anybody.” Things perked up for a while when Murray’s brothers John, Brian, and Joel dropped by to film cameos, but most of the time Murray had no one to hang out with on the set. He spent much of the shoot in a blue funk, alternately restless, tired, and moody. Donner tried to lift his spirits by subjecting him to endless practical jokes, but they had limited effect. “Sometimes he was just wiped out,” the director admitted. “You hadda keep the happiness level up around him, too. Sometimes you’ve got to artificially generate it, do silly things like print up T-shirts saying ‘Where’s Billy?’ after he had one of his few days off. It got him up again.”
Even worse than Donner’s mind games was the physical abuse Murray suffered at the hands of actress Carol Kane, who played the Ghost of Christmas Present. The script called for Kane to buffet Murray repeatedly about the head and ears during their scenes together. It was a task she seemed to relish. “She hurt me a lot,” Murray later revealed. “She separated my teeth from my gums. She didn’t even know. But she’s such a time bomb. If you say, ‘You hurt me,’ she’d cry for six hours and break down. So you’d just put on protection, a catcher’s cup, so the family heirlooms were covered.”
There was one lighter moment on the set, courtesy of comedian Buddy Hackett. Playing Ebenezer Scrooge in a film-within-the-film production of A Christmas Carol, Hackett brought shooting to a screeching halt one day with a blasphemous tirade about the mother of Jesus. As Murray told the story in a 1998 interview with Esquire: “We’re shooting in this Victorian set for weeks, and Hackett is pissed all the time, angry that he’s not the center of attention, and finally we get to the scene where we’ve gotta shoot him at the window, saying, ‘Go get my boots,’ or whatever. The set is stocked with Victorian extras and little children in Oliver kind of outfits, and the director says, ‘All right, Bud—just give it whatever you want.’ And Hackett goes off on a rant. Unbelievably obscene. He’s talking—this is Hackett, not me—about the Virgin Mary, a limerick sort of thing, and all these children and families… the look of absolute horror. He’s going on and on and on, and finally he stops. It’s just total horror, and the camera’s still rolling. You can hear it, sort of a grinding noise. And the director says, ‘Anything else, Bud?’”
NEXT MOVIE: Ghostbusters II (1989)
Scrooged may not be Murray’s best film, but it does have its supporters. No less a cinema geek than Quentin Tarantino has pronounced himself a fan of Murray’s performance. “He’s like W. C. Fields in Scrooged!” Tarantino once proclaimed. For the record, here are the Pulp Fiction auteur’s five favorite Bill Murray movies:
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SCTV
Murray was the special guest star on the 1982 season finale of this Canadian sketch comedy show. He impersonated Joe DiMaggio in a parody commercial for DiMaggio’s on the Wharf Italian Restaurant, appeared as an out-of-breath wedding guest in an installment of the ongoing soap opera spoof The Days of the Week, and played a ne’er-do-well who insinuates himself into the inner circle of TV host Johnny LaRue (played by Murray’s old Second City cohort John Candy).
SECOND CITY
Vaunted improvisational theater troupe based in Old Town Chicago, famed for churning out North American comedy talent since 1959. In 1973, Murray joined Second City at the invitation of his brother Brian. “Brian lived in Old Town, where all the hippies were, and I started hanging out at his place,” he explained to Rolling Stone. “That’s where I met Harold Ramis and John Belushi and Joe Flaherty and Del Close, who directed the show, and Bernie Sahlins, who ran Second City. They thought I was a riot—weekend hippie, you know, going back to my straight life in the ’burbs every night.”
Sometime earlier, Murray had auditioned for one of the troupe’s vaunted improv workshops—with disastrous results. “I was so bad I couldn’t believe it,” he confessed to Cosmopolitan magazine. “I was really depressed. I walked off the stage and just never went back.” After time away, Murray had a fortuitous run-in on a street in downtown Chicago. “It was Christmastime,” he later recalled. “Bells were ringing. There under the clock at Marshall Field, I met the head of the workshop, and he said, ‘We’d like to offer you a scholarship, if you want to come back.’ The bells were going bong, bong, bong, and I figured it was a miracle. I said ‘Thanks, I will. Merry Christmas.’” He returned to find his skills as an improv performer markedly improved. “Somehow in the time I’d been away, I’d learned how to do it,” he said. “All of a sudden, I seemed to have an aptitude for it.”
Murray quickly worked his way up from the improv workshops to the main stage, where he spent a year honing his craft alongside the likes of John Candy, Betty Thomas, and Tino Insana (the future voice of Disney’s Darkwing Duck). Murray developed a reputation as one of the troupe’s most fearless and unpredictable performers. “You couldn’t keep your eyes off Bill on stage,” observed Second City director Sheldon Patinkin, “because there was so much going on inside the guy that you knew something would come popping out sooner rather than later. He emitted a true sense of danger.”
Murray left Second City in 1974 to join the cast of The National Lampoon Show in New York. In interviews, he has often cited the guiding principle he learned at Second City as his surefire formula for show business success: “The reason so many Second City people have been successful is really fairly simple. At the heart of it is the idea that if you make the other actors look good, you’ll look good. It works sort of like the idea of life after death. If you live an exemplary life, trying to make someone else look good, you’ll look good, too. It’s true. It really does work. It braces you up, when you’re out there with that fear of death, which is really the difference between the Second City actors and the others.”
SEINFELD
Though his brother Brian appeared in one of the show’s best-loved episodes (“The Bubble Boy”), Murray admitted in a 2010 interview with GQ magazine that he had watched only one episode of comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s 1990s sitcom. “I never saw Seinfeld until the final episode, and that’s the only one I saw. And it was terrible. I’m watching, thinking, ‘This isn’t funny at all. It’s terrible!’” In 2014, Murray told radio host Howard Stern that he had subsequently caught up on the series: “I’ve since seen some of it and I see what people like about it.”
During a New York City performance of The National Lampoon Show in 1974, comic actor Martin Mull sat up front near the edge of the stage. He drank heavily and yakked loudly with his companion, actor Peter Boyle, throughout the show. After the final curtain, Mull went backstage to pay his respects to the cast. When Murray saw him, he flew into a frothing rage, grabbing Mull by the throat and attempting to strangle him. “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill that fucker!” Murray screamed. “He talked through the whole thing! I hate him!” John Belushi ended up having to pull Murray off Mull, who escaped the dressing room to accusatory cries of “Medium talent! Medium talent!”—a favorite Murray insult he would later use on his Saturday Night Live nemesis Chevy Chase. “I confess to having been extremely rude, though not quite as rude as Bill Murray trying to strangle me afterward,” Mull remarked of his ill-fated evening at the theater.
SHAME OF THE JUNGLE
DIRECTED BY: Picha and Boris Szulzinger
WRITTEN BY: Pierre Bartier, Picha, Anne Beatts, and Michael O’Donoghue
RELEASE DATE: September 14, 1979
FILM RATING: *
MURRAY RATING: *
PLOT: A henpecked he-man must rescue his sexually frustrated wife from the clutches of an evil jungle queen.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: An announcer reading the news on the radio
Murray supplies the voice of an unseen radio announcer in this mildly pornographic animated feature directed by Belgian cartoonist Jean-Paul “Picha” Walravens. Originally released in Europe under the title Tarzoon, Shame of the Jungle (and also known as Jungle Burger), the raunchy comedy parodies Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan adventures. The film was completed in 1975 and then moldered on a shelf in France for four years before being redubbed by American actors and released stateside. In the meantime, the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs sued, demanding that the title be changed and all references to Tarzan be removed. John Belushi, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Christopher Guest joined Murray in supplying voices for the redubbed Shame of the Jungle, which received a dreaded X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. Johnny Weismuller Jr., son and namesake of the longtime big-screen Tarzan, plays Shame. In one representative scene, Shame’s pet chimpanzee relentlessly masturbates while his wife is orally serviced by two penis-shaped creatures. Radio ads touting the film promised “You’ll laugh your X off.”
An unpleasant, unfunny film rife with sexist and racist stereotypes, Shame of the Jungle received mostly negative reviews and almost immediately disappeared into the cinematic memory hole. Writing in the Village Voice, critic Tam Allen called it “an uncomfortably accurate reflection of that civic eyesore known as toilet art.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby derided the film’s humor as “bland and exhausting.” Playboy’s reviewer was more kind, dubbing Shame of the Jungle “the most literate, prurient, and amusing challenge to community standards since Fritz the Cat.”
The following year, Murray lent his vocal talents to Picha’s next feature, the slightly less dreadful prehistoric cartoon B.C. Rock.
NEXT MOVIE: Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video (1979)
SHE’S HAVING A BABY
DIRECTED BY: John Hughes
WRITTEN BY: John Hughes
RELEASE DATE: February 5, 1988
FILM RATING: **
MURRAY RATING: *
PLOT: Cutesy-pie newlyweds deal with the vicissitudes of marriage in the 1980s.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Himself
Murray is one of several Reagan-era celebrities who do cornball cameos in the end credit sequence of this 1988 family comedy from director (and Illinois native) John Hughes. Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Wil Wheaton, Matthew Broderick, and the cast of the TV sitcom Cheers also appear. The special guests, who were all friends of the director and/or working on the Paramount lot at the time, suggest names for the titular infant. Murray’s contribution is: “Schwuk. I don’t know what it is—I heard it on a bus.”
NEXT MOVIE: Scrooged (1988)
SHOTGUN GOLF
Madcap amalgam of golf and skeet shooting invented by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson at his “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, in the summer of 2004. In the final column he ever wrote, for ESPN’s Page Two website, Thompson described pitching the idea for Shotgun Golf to Murray in a late-night telephone call. According to Thompson: “The game consists of one golfer, one shooter, and a field judge. The purpose of the game is to shoot your opponent’s high-flying golf ball out of the air with a finely tuned 12-gauge shotgun.” Thompson listed Murray as a “founding consultant” on his Shotgun Golf enterprise and credited the actor with teaching him “how to mortify your opponents in any sporting contest, honest or otherwise.”
“SHOWER MIKE”
Seminal Saturday Night Live sketch, written and performed by Murray and Gilda Radner with guest host Buck Henry for the show’s second season finale on May 21, 1977. In the sketch, Murray plays Richard Herkiman, a cuckolded husband who cajoles his cheating wife and her lover to join him in the shower as part of an impromptu nightclub act. “Shower Mike” was the crowning achievement of Murray’s first season on SNL, capping a turnaround in his fortunes that began with the New Guy Speech two months earlier. Once relegated to playing the “second cop” in skits that featured the other cast members more prominently, Murray was now a force to be reckoned with on the show. “In the beginning of SNL I was angry a lot,” he later admitted. “The writers weren’t interested in writing for me… . If I hadn’t written the Shower Mike sketch, I might have been off the show.” The genesis of the skit came the week of the season’s final episode, when Murray picked up a microphone-shaped bar of soap-on-a-rope given to him by John Belushi’s wife the previous Christmas. After hitting on the idea of transplanting his sleazy nightclub singer character to a shower setting, he and Gilda Radner went off and wrote the sketch together in twenty minutes. Murray reprised the role of Richard Herkiman in a sketch with guest host Jill Clayburgh the following season.
SHREK
In 1991, after Steven Spielberg acquired the rights to adapt William Steig’s popular children’s book as a hand-drawn animated film, he selected Murray for the role of the titular green ogre. Steve Martin was slated to play Shrek’s companion, Donkey. By the time the movie was reimagined for CGI ten years later, Murray and Martin had moved on. Their parts went to Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, respectively.
SIMON, KERRY
Murray is a longtime friend of this celebrity chef and restaurateur, widely known as the “Rock ’n’ Roll Chef.” Simon grew up in Evanston, Illinois, not far from Murray’s hometown of Wilmette. The pair worked together at a Chicago-area Little Caesars pizza franchise in the early 1970s. Murray has often appeared as an emcee at charity events organized by Simon. In 1995, when Simon appeared on the Food Network cooking competition show Iron Chef, Murray and his wife cheered him on from a VIP box high above “Kitchen Stadium.”
SIRENS OF TITAN, THE
In 1984, Murray was in talks to play the lead in a big-screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1959 novel about a wealthy industrialist who gets caught up in a Martian invasion of Earth. For various reasons, the project never got off the ground.
A year earlier, Vonnegut had sold the rights to his trippy sci-fi opus to Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia. Garcia then hired former Saturday Night Live writer Tom Davis to collaborate on a screenplay, which they pitched to Murray in June 1984, at the height of Ghostbusters mania. In author Robert Greenfield’s oral biography of Jerry Garcia, Dark Star, filmmaker Gary Gutierrez—who created storyboards for the abortive film—recounts a meeting in Hollywood to discuss the project:
“It was Tom Davis and Bill Murray, and Jerry and me, and a bunch of attorneys and this guy from Universal [Mike Ovitz] sitting around this huge table, and during this very serious discussion about the deal, there was Bill Murray making his mouth like a billiard pocket at the edge of the table and Tom Davis was rolling gum balls across the table, trying to get them in Bill Murray’s mouth.”
SLEEPY
Murray’s childhood nickname. “When I was a little kid playing baseball, my manager called me Sleepy. And only a few people, who know me from way, way back, call me that still. I used to drift off and that’s why they made me the catcher, so I wouldn’t fall asleep. That gift I have still.”
SLICK CITY TRIO, THE
Murray was a member of this three-man folk music combo while a student at Loyola Academy in the late 1960s. The group covered material by singer-songwriter Bob Gibson, the Mamas and the Papas, and other folk-rock artists of the era. Murray’s classmates John Heller and Larry Basil rounded out the trio, which re-formed in 2005 as a duo (without Murray’s participation) under the name Basil and Heller.
SLOVENIA VODKA
In 2013, Murray lent his name and a chunk of investment capital to this high-end vodka made from “crystal clear water sourced at the foot of the Julian Alps in Slovenia.” Ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov is a fellow investor in the company, which was cofounded by chef Peter X. Kelly of the Xaviar’s Restaurant Group in New York’s Hudson Valley. Kelly and his team created Slovenia to be “the culinary vodka, the perfect vodka for pairing with exquisite dishes; for use in the creation of these dishes; and for the creation of the most dramatic cocktails by chef mixologists.”
A longtime vodka enthusiast, Murray rhapsodized about the charms of Slovenia in a 2013 interview with Esquire magazine: “Different vodkas have different effects. Some make you feel a little … poly-lingual. Some make you feel like you want to talk back to someone who’s giving you a hard time. Some make you feel like lifting kettle bells. There’s something about the taste of this vodka that takes the bad taste out of your mouth. I don’t mean like a mouthwash, but if something bad is on your mind, this makes it go away. I have a quieter voice when I drink it. I drink gin, and once, when drinking gin, I made a large man cry. Not with this. This makes you kind of sweet.”
SONG OF THE LARK, THE
Nineteenth-century oil painting by French realist Jules Breton that Murray has credited in interviews with saving him from suicide. At a 2014 press event for The Monuments Men, Murray revealed that he was so despondent after his disastrous Chicago stage debut that he contemplated walking directly into Lake Michigan. “I was ready to die,” he admitted. “I thought, ‘If I’m going to die, I might as well go over toward the lake and float a bit.’” On his way over, however, Murray took a detour to the Art Institute of Chicago, where Breton’s 1884 oil on canvas was on display. The painting depicts a young peasant woman at daybreak holding a scythe. “I thought, ‘Well there’s a girl who doesn’t have a whole lot of prospects,’” Murray said. “‘But the sun’s coming up anyway and she’s got another chance at it.’ So I think that gave me some sort of feeling that I too am a person and I get another chance every day the sun comes up.”
SOUTH CAROLINA
Murray has lived part-time in Charleston, South Carolina, since the mid-1990s. “I didn’t choose to go there,” Murray told PBS gabber Charlie Rose in 2014. “Life took me there. That’s where my sons are and that’s where I am.” As part of his divorce settlement with Jennifer Butler in 2008, Murray’s ex-wife was granted ownership of the Murray family home on South Carolina’s Sullivan Island. Murray continued to maintain a residence in Charleston to be near his children.
SOUTH PACIFIC
Murray played Luther Billis, a conniving Seabee, in a staged concert version of this classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, presented on May 22, 2000, at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.
SPACE JAM
DIRECTED BY: Joe Pytka
WRITTEN BY: Leo Benvenuti, Steve Rudnick, Timothy Harris, and Herschel Weingrod
RELEASE DATE: November 15, 1996
FILM RATING: **½
MURRAY RATING: **
PLOT: It’s Bugs Bunny and friends to the rescue when a group of evil space aliens suck the life energy out of a motley assemblage of 1990s NBA stars.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Himself
A mere fortnight after Larger Than Life blighted multiplexes, Murray wiped the bad taste from moviegoers’ mouths with a spirited cameo in this highly successful basketball comedy mixing live action, cel animation, and CGI. One might think he would have leapt at the chance to share the screen with Bugs Bunny and NBA legend Michael Jordan, but Murray had to be talked into making Space Jam by producer Ivan Reitman. “I always have to convince him to work,” Reitman told USA Today. In the end, Reitman was able to cajole Murray into doing two scenes for the film. In one, set on a golf course, Murray spoofs his Caddyshack persona; in the other, he takes the court alongside the Looney Tunes “Tune Squad” for the climactic face-off against the evil “Monstars” basketball team. Murray’s ad-libbing enlivens an otherwise lackluster cartoon feature weighed down by Michael Jordan’s somnambulant lead performance. Space Jam also marks the first instance where Murray went “full meta” on the audience, riffing on his public image as a golf-loving eccentric. In another sign that Murray was now as much a personal brand as an actor, he insisted on wearing the cap of the St. Paul Saints—the minor league baseball he co-owned at the time—throughout his performance.
NEXT MOVIE: The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997)
SPACKLER, CARL
Demented assistant greenskeeper played by Murray in the 1980 film Caddyshack. A close cousin to the Honker, the sideways-talking drunk Murray dreamed up at Second City, Spackler is arguably the actor’s most iconic creation. He does not appear in early drafts of the Caddyshack script, although an older caddy named Ray may be something of a proto-Spackler. Murray’s role in the film was originally supposed to be a cameo—he was scheduled to be on set for only six days—and his character was virtually mute. “It was written like Harpo Marx, just not talking at all,” director Harold Ramis later recalled. But according to Murray, the part “just kept growing like a mushroom. I’d go back to New York and work on SNL, and they’d call me up and ask if I wanted to come back down and do some more. I was good back in those days. Improvising about golf was easy for me.”
While the Honker is almost certainly schizophrenic, and clearly an alcoholic, Spackler—who aspires to become head greenskeeper one day—is the more self-actualized character. “He’s clearly damaged in some way, but he’s not dumb,” Ramis once observed. “His dialogue is as clever and inventive as any in the movie, really. To write even dumb or crude characters in a smart way, that’s the goal.” “He had a vision of himself as holding a place of real importance in life,” Murray told the New York Post. “It was just plugging into that desire to fall asleep to your own dream, as if you were slowly fading into the sunset at the top of the mountain. It was a beautiful thing.”
During a 2006 visit to St. Andrews, Scotland, for a celebrity golf tournament, Murray accompanied twenty-two-year-old Norwegian social anthropology student Lykke Stavnef—whom he had just met in a local pub—to a house party full of Scandinavian college students. “Nobody could believe it when I arrived at the party with Bill Murray,” Stavnef said afterward. “He was just like the character in Lost in Translation.”
Stavnef’s Georgian townhouse was reportedly “overflowing” with chesty blonde coeds. Clad in a checkered shirt and brown vest, Murray drank vodka from a coffee cup and marveled at how drunk everyone was. “He seemed to be in his element, cracking lots of jokes,” observed fellow partygoer Tom Wright. When the party was over, Murray personally washed all the dirty dishes in the students’ sink. “The pasta was probably quite hard to get off the dishes because they had been sitting around,” said one of the students.
SPEAKING OF SEX
DIRECTED BY: John McNaughton
WRITTEN BY: Gary Tieche
RELEASE DATE: October 5, 2001
FILM RATING: **
MURRAY RATING: **
PLOT: Farcical complications ensue when a bumbling marriage counselor sleeps with one of his clients.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Ezri Stovall, bewigged Boise malpractice attorney
Undaunted by the law of diminishing returns, Murray re-upped for a third feature with Chicago-born director John McNaughton. In Speaking of Sex, he plays a sleazy lawyer virtually indistinguishable from the one he played in McNaughton’s previous film, Wild Things. This time he wears a cowboy hat and a terrible toupee. The frenetic sex comedy languished in development hell at Fox for more than a year until French cable TV channel Canal Plus purchased the rights and gave McNaughton $11 million on the condition that he film it in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Costars James Spader, Catherine O’Hara, Lara Flynn Boyle, Jay Mohr, Melora Walters, and Megan Mullally make the most of the subpar script, but any film that ends with a sped-up Benny Hill–style chase sequence is probably beyond repair.
In 2014, McNaughton announced plans for a fourth collaboration with Murray. Entitled Counterfeit, the new film would once again cast Murray as a disreputable attorney who comes to the aid of two young criminals.
NEXT MOVIE: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
SPLASH
Murray passed on an offer to play the lead in director Ron Howard’s 1984 comedy about a man who falls in love with a mermaid. According to actress P. J. Soles, when she presented Murray with the script, he proceeded to fling it across the room in disgust. Michael Keaton and John Travolta were also considered for the role, which wound up going to Tom Hanks.
“I’VE PROVIDED WHOLE CAREERS FOR OTHER PEOPLE BY REJECTING MOVIES.”
SQUARE PEGS
Murray did a one-shot guest appearance on the February 14, 1983, episode of this high school sitcom created by erstwhile Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts. In the episode, entitled “No Substitutions,” Murray plays Jack McNulty, a downtown New York City actor (founding member of the Greenwich Village Theater of Mime and Anger) who doubles as a substitute teacher. Sporting his unkempt Ghostbusters-era hairdo and wearing a billowy pajama top for much of the episode, Murray’s character briefly upends the social order at suburban Weemawee High with a classroom experiment in which he pairs the students in mock marriages. Like most episodes of Square Pegs, “No Substitutions” plays best today as a time capsule of life in the early 1980s. In the episode’s most memorable scene, Murray gets to boogie awkwardly with a young Sarah Jessica Parker to the tune of “Dancing with Myself” by Billy Idol.
SQUID AND THE WHALE, THE
Murray was director Noah Baumbach’s first choice for the role of Bernard Berkman, a washed-up novelist going through a bitter divorce, in this 2005 indie comedy-drama. When Murray proved impossible to reach by phone, Baumbach gave up on him and offered the part to Jeff Daniels, who scored a Golden Globe nomination for his performance.
STALAG 17
This 1953 drama about a group of American airmen being held captive in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II is one of Murray’s favorite films. “When Stalag 17 comes on, I can’t turn it off,” he told film critic Elvis Mitchell. “I have to watch it. I have to go all the way with that movie. It’s a Swiss watch. It’s just a gorgeous movie.” Murray is particularly enamored of William Holden’s Oscar-winning performance as Sergeant J. J. Sefton, the film’s jaded, conniving antihero. “Even though I’ve seen it many times,” he said, “I’m still fascinated at watching him turn the worm.”
STAND-UP COMEDY
Murray has performed stand-up comedy only one time. “I did it once and it was fun,” he said. “But I only had to do it once to realize I could do it, but I don’t want to do it.” In numerous interviews, Murray has pointed out that close observation of stand-ups early in his career left him with a bad impression of their mental health. “I saw them work, and they seemed so unhappy. If an audience didn’t like them, they’d get so miserable about it. It looked too miserable.”
STAR WARS
Legend has it that Murray was one among the legion of actors who auditioned for the part of Han Solo in George Lucas’s 1977 space opera. Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Perry King, Kurt Russell, Al Pacino, and Christopher Walken were all reportedly under consideration for the role, which helped make Harrison Ford a star.
STEWART, JIMMY
Murray had a brief, awkward encounter with this legendary actor at the thirty-eighth annual Cannes Film Festival in 1985. Murray was living in France at the time, and Stewart was in Cannes to be feted by the French government and watch a restored version of his 1954 film The Glenn Miller Story. “He had no fuckin’ idea who I was,” Murray said of the then-seventy-six-year-old screen icon. “Of course, I’m not sure he knew who his wife was. But I figured, well, shit, I’ll walk up to him and say hello—‘I’m so-and-so, I’m an actor, and I like your stuff.’ And sometimes when you say you’re an actor, they at least fake it—‘Oh, sure, sure.’ He couldn’t even swing that.”
ST. JOSEPH SCHOOL
Catholic grade school in Wilmette, Illinois, that Murray attended from 1956 to 1964. While at St. Joseph, Murray’s class clown antics often got him in hot water with the nuns. “I was basically causing trouble all the time,” he told an interviewer. “But not very serious trouble.” He later described his experience at the school as “good practice for the entertainment business. I was constantly playing with danger and trying to get laughs out of an audience that doesn’t think it’s funny. That’s what working with nuns was all about.”
In 2004, Murray returned to St. Joseph for his fortieth reunion. He had to take time off from shooting The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou to make it to the event, which he described as “a hoot.” “I made an extraordinary effort to be there,” he said. “I had to work extra-long days to get the day off to go. But it was worth it. The kids laughed at me at school and they still laugh today. I got the wish to play to an audience from them.” Murray reunited with the Meatballs creative troika of Harold Ramis, Ivan Reitman, and Danny Goldberg to make this 1981 service comedy. The result was somewhat less successful, unless you look at it from the perspective of Murray’s accountant.
STRIPES
DIRECTOR: Ivan Reitman
SCREENPLAY: Len Blum, Harold Ramis, and Daniel Goldberg
RELEASE DATE: June 26, 1981
FILM RATING: **½
MURRAY RATING: ****
PLOT: A pair of shlubby New Yorkers join the army and keep its monstrous new weapon from falling into the hands of the Russians.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: John Winger, cab driver turned U.S. Army recruiting tool
“By the time I made Stripes, I’d made money from SNL and I was famous from SNL,” Murray observed later. “That made it a lot easier to make the right decisions.” In this case, the decision was to attach himself to a long-moldering vehicle for the comedy duo of Cheech and Chong, retooled for him and Harold Ramis at the behest of director Ivan Reitman. As Reitman told the New Yorker in 2004: “Bill is this great improv player, but he needs Harold, the focused composer who understands setting a theme and the rules of orchestration. So I told Harold, ‘One, I want you to costar in my movie, and, two, I want you to rewrite it for two really intelligent guys—you and Bill.’”
Ramis obliged, cutting the creaky pot jokes from the Cheech and Chong script and convincing Murray to take on the new lead role of John Winger, a down-on-his-luck New York City cab driver who joins the army after his life falls apart. Ramis took the secondary lead as Winger’s friend, laconic English as a Second Language teacher Russell Ziskey. Studio executives balked at the casting of Ramis, preferring the more seasoned Dennis Quaid for the role, but Murray insisted. Either Ramis was in or he was out. The suits relented, and Stripes ended up being Ramis’s big-screen acting debut. A raft of newcomers who would go on to leave their mark on 1980s pop culture, including John Candy, John Larroquette, Sean Young, and Judge Reinhold, rounded out the supporting cast.
Production of Stripes took place during November and December of 1980, with Kentucky’s Fort Knox doubling as the fictional Fort Arnold. For his first few days on the set, Murray tried getting up at five in the morning to go jogging with the real-life U.S. Army troops. But he quickly abandoned his plans to keep up the regimen for two full weeks. The rigors of day-to-day army life did leave an impression on the filmmakers, however, and that was reflected in the finished film. “It wasn’t Reds or anything, but it captured what it was like on an army base,” Murray later remarked. “It was cold, you had to wear the same green clothes, you had to do a lot of physical stuff, you got treated pretty badly, and had bad coffee.”
John Winger wound up being one of Murray’s most beloved fictional creations (and the inspiration and namesake of Joel McHale’s Jeff Winger on the TV sitcom Community). Playing a character closer to his real-life personality than, say, Carl Spackler or Hunter S. Thompson, Murray inhabits the part in a manner not seen since Meatballs. Speaking to an interviewer about his experience on the film, Murray said he worked “more efficiently than I ever worked before. The hard part with movies is to sit around and wait and still have yourself right there when you’re needed for those three minutes a day they actually film. I really tried to keep control of myself for this one.” Indeed, his performance is more restrained and less volatile than in his previous films. Winger’s confrontation with Sergeant Hulka, the no-nonsense drill instructor played by veteran character actor Warren Oates, provides a rare early opportunity for Murray to show off his acting chops.
Although Stripes is maddeningly uneven—Ramis’s soporific performance as Ziskey is a real lowlight—it does boast a number of bravura comic scenes. Murray gets to deliver another one of his signature improvised speeches—an oration exhorting his fellow army recruits to pull themselves together before the graduation ceremony—and the film briefly put the catchphrase “That’s the fact, Jack” on the lips of every twelve-year-old in America. What holds Stripes back from classic status, however, is the toothlessness of its take on military authority. Strip away the sex and mud wrestling scenes and the film is virtually indistinguishable from the tepid service comedies of the 1940s and ’50s. Even more problematic is the fact that Stripes goes completely off the rails in the final reel, an interminable chase sequence set in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. The sequence’s slapstick pratfalls and jingoist subtext seem jarringly out of sync with the rest of the film. “That was just Ivan grinding his anti-Communist ax,” Harold Ramis later revealed. (The director’s parents were Czech refugees who fled to Canada after the Communists seized power.) Years later, Murray was still kvetching about some of the violent action scenes Reitman insisted on making him film. “I’m still a little queasy that I actually made a movie where I carry a machine gun,” he confessed. “But I felt if you were rescuing your friends it was okay.”
With a bombastic score from Academy Award–winning composer Elmer Bernstein and positive PR support from the Pentagon (who provided “technical assistance” in return for an advance look at the script), Stripes struck a chord with audiences in the emerging era of Ronald Reagan, G. I. Joe, and Rambo. It grossed more than $85 million and proved that Murray’s name above a title could carry a movie. Critics were more divided. “Stripes will keep potential felons off the streets for two hours,” wrote Time magazine in a decidedly backhanded rave. Newsweek called Murray “a funny original presence” but questioned his participation in the project. “Could it be that Murray himself doesn’t give a damn that he’s diddling away his talents on mediocrity?” the reviewer asked. “Stripes reeks of halfheartedness.” The doyenne of American cinephiles, Pauline Kael, was even more cutting. Writing about Murray’s character in Stripes, she opined, “I wouldn’t want to be within fifty yards of anything he believed in.”
NEXT MOVIE: Tootsie (1982)
ST. VINCENT
DIRECTED BY: Theodore Melfi
WRITTEN BY: Theodore Melfi
RELEASE DATE: October 10, 2014
FILM RATING: ***
MURRAY RATING: ***
PLOT: An adorable tyke teaches a grouchy alcoholic how to care again.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Vincent MacKenna, irascible Brooklyn barfly
“I’m a sucker for hero roles,” Murray once said. “The big brother parts, especially superheroes—providing they have flaws.” He found just such a part in writer/director Ted Melfi’s crowd-pleasing St. Vincent, which finds Murray fishing for his elusive Oscar in the brackish waters off Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Playing an outer-borough grump who reluctantly befriends a single mother and her twelve-year-old son, Murray struggles mightily to maintain his Brooklyn accent. (At times he comes off as Chicago crossed with South Boston.) But his performance is so hammily charming it seems uncharitable to nitpick.
Jack Nicholson was Melfi’s original choice for the title role, but he turned it down. (An interesting turn of events, since Nicholson had poached several parts from Murray’s reject pile in the 1980s.) At Nicholson’s urging, Melfi then embarked on a full-court press to convince Murray to sign on to the project. He secured the actor’s secret 800 number from Fred Roos, the legendary Hollywood producer, and cold-called it incessantly over two months in early 2012. When that proved fruitless, Melfi turned to Murray’s attorney, David Nochimson, who suggested writing a letter and mailing it to a mysterious post office box somewhere on the East Coast. That seemed to get Murray’s attention. He requested a script and then promptly cut off all communication.
Several months later, according to Melfi, Murray texted him out of the blue and asked him to meet up at the Los Angeles International Airport. So began an unusual rolling story conference, as Murray’s chauffeured Lincoln town car took the actor and the would-be auteur first to In-N-Out Burger to pick up grilled cheese sandwiches and then on a three-hour drive through the Pechanga Indian reservation to Murray’s mansion adjacent to a golf course about an hour north of San Diego. All the while, Murray gave Melfi notes on the script. As the afternoon drew to a close, he announced: “We should do this. Let’s make a movie.” And the deal was done.
Murray later revealed that he had been attracted to the project by the quality of Melfi’s writing (“The people sounded like real people,” he told Bloomberg.com) and by the chance to sink his teeth into a meaty role for the first time since Hyde Park on Hudson. “It is ambitious and it is larger,” he said. “I’ve just been taking the jobs I like. I haven’t had any kind of a plan, really. It really was a big, leading part. I thought to myself, ‘God, I haven’t had to be the leading part in a while.’” The revelation that there was a vegetarian option at In-N-Out Burger may have had something to do with it as well. “I didn’t realize you could get a cheeseburger without a hamburger,” he confessed to USA Today. “No meat.”
Shooting for St. Vincent took place in Sheepshead Bay and surrounding Brooklyn neighborhoods over thirty-seven days in the summer of 2013. Murray bunked at a friend’s house in the hipster enclave of Williamsburg the entire time, riding a ten-speed bicycle fifteen miles to and from the location each day. “I got myself in some kind of shape,” he said afterwards. “People have been talking about Brooklyn for a long time, but I’d never really seen it. Williamsburg is hopping.” On the set, Murray was his usual antic self, repeatedly tossing banana peels in the paths of passing crew members and periodically disappearing on impromptu walkabouts. One day Murray wandered off to chew the fat with a local military veteran who sat on his porch every day watching the shoot. Another time, he commandeered a golf cart and took costars Naomi Watts and Jaeden Lieberher for a joyride. The studio eventually hired a production assistant just to follow Murray around and record his whereabouts.
NEXT MOVIE: Dumb and Dumber To (2014)
SULLAVAN, MARGARET
Spitfire screen actress of the 1930s and ’40s whose work Murray admires. “What a creature she was,” he gushed to film critic Elvis Mitchell during a 2008 interview. “She could really do some funny physical stuff, which you didn’t see in those old movies. Everyone was such a glamor puss… . This girl was really, really funny and beautiful. And to me that is fatal. I’m crazy about funny girls.” Murray is especially enamored with Sullavan’s performance in the 1936 screwball comedy The Moon’s Our Home, in which she has a spirited pillow fight with her ex-husband Henry Fonda. “I love pillow fights with girls,” Murray has admitted. “One of my favorite things.”
“SUMMER BREEZE”
Murray loathes this 1972 hit song from pop duo Seals and Crofts. The soft-rock chestnut received so much AM radio airplay in the 1970s that the actor grew sick of it.
SWEET SPOT, THE
Golf-themed reality series featuring Murray and three of his brothers that aired on Comedy Central over five weeks in April 2002. The show followed Bill, John, Brian, and Joel Murray as they travelled the world, visiting exotic golf courses and teeing off against one another in pursuit of the elusive “Braggart’s Cup.” Interstitial comedy skits occasionally broke up the brotherly banter, which rarely rose above a “Dorf on Golf” level of humor.
In July 2014, Murray was filming Rock the Kasbah in Sherman Oaks, California, when neighborhood ice cream vendor Joe Nicchi decided to throw a “Bill Murray Ice Cream Social” in his honor. After parking his fully restored 1961 Mister Softee ice cream truck just off the set, Nicchi spread the word among the crew that he would scoop free cones in Murray’s honor all evening long. To the ice cream man’s astonishment, the guest of honor ambled over to test the wares. “When he actually started walking toward the truck, the crew members were following closely behind him,” said Nicchi. “They seemed like proud parents excited to see this moment actually happening for me.” On Nicchi’s recommendation, Murray treated himself to a chocolate and vanilla twist with sea salt on the house. He took a few photos, asked Nicchi to deliver trays of ice cream to feed the rest of the crew, and then left.