Starring: |
Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Sigourney Weaver |
Directed by: |
Ivan Reitman |
Viewed by the Reagans: |
July 14, 1984 |
The Film That Energized the 1984 Campaign
On Tuesday, October 2, 1984, just over a month before the election in which the nation would decide whether to reelect Ronald Reagan to a second term, his supporters on the campus of Texas Tech University in Lubbock gathered for a rally. The guest of honor was Vice President George H. W. Bush, who had lived in Texas for many years and had represented a Houston-area district in the House of Representatives.
Before Bush spoke, the crowd in Lubbock was treated to a warm-up act: the “Fritzbusters.” These were members of the campus College Republicans chapter who performed a short song-and-dance routine mocking Reagan’s Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, who was also known by his longtime nickname “Fritz.” Their song included lines such as:
If there’s something strange in America,
Who you gonna call? Fritzbusters!
If your tax rates are high, way up in the sky,
Who you gonna call? Fritzbusters!I
The song, of course, was a parody of the theme from Ghostbusters, recorded by the R&B artist Ray Parker Jr., which had spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard charts in August.II The movie itself was even hotter. The top movie of the summer, it was breaking studio earnings records on a pace to eventually be the second-highest-grossing movie of the year.
It was no wonder the folks in Lubbock loved the Fritzbusters routine. A College Republican member at Texas Tech told the New York Times, “I thought they were too laid back for this kind of thing on this campus. I was surprised that they really got worked up.”III Even the Fritzbusters logo, a cartoon worried-looking Mondale in a red circle with a line through it, brought the movie to mind. The Fritzbusters act popped up on college campuses throughout the fall campaign.
That Ghostbusters permeated the ongoing national political debate in 1984 is just one measure of how popular the movie was. And it wasn’t just Republicans. Vendors at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco that year sold “Reaganbuster” T-shirts with a similar logo featuring the president.IV
Released nationwide on June 8, 1984, Ghostbusters starred eighties comedy icons Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis as Drs. Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler, respectively, three paranormal researchers who get booted from their university gig and go into business for themselves, snatching up and locking away troublesome spirits. The ghosts they encounter include a demonic librarian at the famous New York Public Library that will scare anyone into silence, and a chubby floating green blob with arms, known affectionately as “Slimer,” who causes havoc at a luxury hotel.
Sigourney Weaver plays Dana Barrett, a concert musician with a haunted apartment. Something is growing in her refrigerator more dangerous than any mold. Rick Moranis plays Louis Tully, her hapless accountant neighbor. Their fashionable apartment building on Central Park West just might end up being center stage for a global apocalypse brought about by an ancient vengeful spirit—unless, of course, the Ghostbusters manage to save the day.
But the four heroes—Ernie Hudson rounds out the group as Winston Zeddemore, hired by the original three when the ghostbusting business booms—have to contend with another villain as they seek to rid the city of spectral pests. This monster, however, is not supernatural. He’s about as monotonously down-to-earth as one can get. He’s a government bureaucrat, Walter Peck of the Environmental Protection Agency, played straight by William Atherton.
Peck is a humorless parody of a federal functionary, stuffed into a three-piece suit and speaking bureaucratese. He first shows up at the Ghostbusters’ headquarters (a dilapidated former firehouse) demanding to “assess any possible environmental impact from your operation—for instance, the presence of noxious, possibly hazardous, waste chemicals in your basement.” After Venkman throws him out, he comes back bearing an arsenal of regulatory cudgels, including a “cease-and-desist-all-commerce order, seizure of premises and chattels, ban on the use of public utilities for nonlicensed waste handlers, and a federal entry and inspection order.”
This walking copy of federal regulations was a perfect foil for the freewheeling Ghostbusters. When Dr. Spengler protests that Peck has barged into “private property,” Peck threatens him with “federal prosecution for at least a half a dozen environmental violations.” He even tries to push around an accompanying NYPD officer, who responds with one of the movie’s many quotable one-liners: “You do your job, pencil neck! Don’t tell me how to do mine!” Peck’s adherence to the rule book leads to an even bigger environmental hazard than he could have imagined: the possible end of the world.
Atherton was so good at playing the stiff that his Walter Peck character caused him trouble for years. People would try to fight him in bars or yell insults from the movie out the windows of passing busses.V And it has not been lost on the movie’s more politically aware viewers that the stifling hand of federal regulation was one of its main antagonistic forces—aside from the ghosts themselves, of course. As National Review summed it up in 2009 when it included Ghostbusters on its list of “The Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years”: “[Y]ou have to like a movie in which the bad guy . . . is a regulation-happy buffoon from the EPA, and the solution to a public menace comes from the private sector.”VI Not everyone thought that was a good thing. Thomas Frank wrote in Salon that the “Reaganism” in Ghostbusters was “fully developed”—and that wasn’t a compliment.VII The journalist David Sirota observed sarcastically that the Ghostbusters get “rich and famous,” but “real problems only arise when the big bad government tries to put them out of business.”VIII The movie’s tone was probably not accidental, either. Director Ivan Reitman later told Entertainment Weekly, “I’ve always been something of a conservative-slash-libertarian. The first [Ghostbusters] movie deals with going into business for yourself, and it’s anti-EPA—too much government regulation. It does have a very interesting point of view that really resonates.”IX
President Reagan watched Ghostbusters at Camp David on July 14, 1984, as his campaign for reelection was revving up for the fall. Despite being out for more than a month, it was still the number one movie in America. While I do not recall the film making a major impression on the president, or any of us gathered in his cabin that evening, at least one person remembered it differently.
In an article about the campaign published in the New Republic in September 1984, the journalist Sidney Blumenthal (who later gained notoriety in the Clintons’ service) includes this anecdote:
“About a month before the convention, according to a top political aide, Reagan screened the movie Ghostbusters at Camp David. ‘That was great!’ the president said. ‘It was better than movies when I was making them. You know why? If they had made Ghostbusters back then, the whole thing would’ve been a dream, and the guy would’ve woken up at the end.’ ”X
I don’t recall this and I doubt it ever happened. For one, it isn’t something Ronald Reagan would say. It sounds odd to hear him say any movie from the eighties was “better than movies when I was making them.” I often heard him state the exact opposite! It wasn’t his own movies that he liked better, he just liked the movies from that era more than those that came later. He thought those movies were cleaner, more wholesome, and thus more entertaining. While the president enjoyed many of the modern movies we watched, in his mind it was hard to top the classics from his own time in Hollywood.
In addition, as I envision the small crowd of regulars who gathered in Aspen for movie screenings, I simply do not believe anyone would leak anything to Sidney Blumenthal. I can’t imagine who the “top political aide” he mentioned might be. Blumenthal might have heard the story secondhand (or third- or even further back). It may be that the president did like Ghostbusters, but the details of his reaction got distorted by the time they found their way to the pages of the New Republic.
This July weekend at Camp David was a welcome occasion for the Reagans to rest and gather steam before the general election campaign kicked off at the GOP convention in Dallas that August. But plenty was going on even at this stage. The Friday before he left for the presidential retreat, he met with the speechwriter Ken Khachigian, who was helping draft Reagan’s acceptance speech for the convention. “I remember when I did all such things myself,” the president noted wistfully. “No way now—no time.”XI That was unfortunate because he was viewed by all the speechwriters and many others on the staff as “the best writer in the house.” He devoted what time he could, but the sheer volume of speeches required of a president made it impossible for him to do them all himself. I think he missed that.
Even though it has been reported that there was some uncertainty on the part of the president and Mrs. Reagan about whether he would seek a second term, there was zero uncertainty on the part of the staff. None of us thought he would be a one-term president voluntarily. We knew he had the energy, drive, and desire to “finish the job,” as he referred to it, and no one could imagine him walking away after only one term. We always believed the president would win reelection. But the first debate with former vice president Mondale, when Reagan seemed overprogrammed and uncertain in his answers, gave us a momentary scare. Mrs. Reagan was known to be upset about the prep for the first debate, and rightfully so. Rumor had it that she had made her displeasure known to either Mike Deaver or Dick Darman (White House Staff Secretary and deputy to chief of staff James A. Baker III), saying in a firm tone, “What are you doing to him?”
Despite the angst caused by the first debate, the campaign for reelection was fun. The president enjoyed traveling across the country, speaking at rallies and meeting voters. It was never routine to him. He liked people and was energized by how crowds at rallies responded to his speeches. Some of us in the traveling party—staff and press—however, did not always have the same level of excitement and enthusiasm. It was a lot of work, and at the end of some days, we were dragging.
At many rallies, the president would tell a joke about Republican puppies versus Democratic puppies, which the crowd always enjoyed. After all, it was the first time the crowd was hearing the joke. Not so for the traveling staff and press corps, who heard it several times a day. On one occasion, toward the end of the campaign, the pool of reporters, TV cameramen, and still photographers who were in the buffer zone between the stage and the first row of the crowd just in front of the presidential podium handwrote a sign that read: “Please, no puppy story!” and held it up, hoping the president would see it. He did, laughed, and told the crowd that “they” (meaning the press pool in front of him) asked that he not tell the story, but he did anyway. And, of course, the crowd loved it. As I recall, the joke went something like this: A child had a sign on her front lawn that said “Democratic puppies, one dollar each.” The next day the same child had a sign that said “Republican puppies, two dollars each.” When confronted by a potential customer who asked why there was a difference in price for the puppies, she replied, “Well, yesterday when the puppies were just born, they had their eyes closed. But today they’re open.”
And as much as the crowd loved hearing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” which was played at the end of every rally, several of us (myself included) were so sick of that song by Election Day that we prayed to never hear it again.
On the Democratic side, Walter Mondale had made history just days before this Camp David visit by announcing his running mate: Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York. It was the first time a woman had occupied a spot on a presidential ticket for a major political party. Mondale had been trailing Reagan by sixteen points in the polls. After this announcement, he enjoyed a bump that brought him temporarily even with the president.XII Even while relaxing at Camp David, Reagan was aware of the wall-to-wall coverage the Ferraro announcement was getting.
Debate prep was a far-off concern on the Saturday the president watched Ghostbusters in July, however. That afternoon, he gave his typical radio address, speaking at 12:06 p.m. Interestingly, this week’s topic was the environment, and he explained how his administration was working through the EPA to handle environmental challenges, while transferring some responsibility back to the states. He cited a billion-dollar initiative to refurbish national park facilities, remarking wryly that “our progress on protecting the environment is one of the best-kept secrets in Washington.”XIII He may have chuckled when—just a few hours later—he sat down to watch a movie in which the main villain was a functionary of the EPA.
Ghostbusters held the top box office spot for seven weeks before finally being knocked off by Prince’s film Purple Rain.XIV Perhaps it was inevitable that the popularity of the movie and the season’s biggest news story—the presidential campaign—would eventually collide.
The Fritzbusters were the product of that collision, the brainchild of some officers of the College Republican National Committee. Twenty-three-year-old Paul Erickson, the CRNC treasurer, who had seen the movie three times, wrote the parody song that poked fun at Fritz Mondale.XV Also in on the act was the CRNC’s president, a young Jack Abramoff, who went on to an ignominious lobbying career. Abramoff was convicted of corruption and served time in prison for mail fraud, conspiracy to bribe elected officials, and tax evasion. The Fritzbusters routine debuted at the Republican convention in Dallas, and reportedly sold seven thousand T-shirts bearing their cartoon logo that week before taking the act on the road.XVI
Erickson and the others would visit campuses for rallies, appearing onstage “wearing coveralls, black rubber gloves, and goggles—essentially the same outfit that the actor Bill Murray wore in ‘Ghostbusters,’ with students as backup dancers,” the New York Times reported.XVII They even traveled in a repurposed ambulance, just as Murray and the other Ghostbusters did in the film.
The fusion of politics and popular entertainment worked, and showed no signs of diminishing as summer turned to fall. The Times reported that in September, one crowd of Michigan students was “roused to a pitch usually reserved for the football field,” giving Vice President George Bush “one of his most organized and vibrant receptions of the past two weeks.”XVIII
Reagan was not comfortable with negative campaigning, though, and lead Fritzbuster Paul Erickson would later tell the press that Michael Deaver, deputy chief of staff and lead curator of the president’s image, had reacted negatively “through a back channel.” According to Erickson, Deaver sought to ensure “the campaign is pro-Reagan and not anti-Mondale,” and worried that “this song is obviously anti-Mondale.”XIX
I wish I had known that on Election Night 1984. As had been their practice throughout the president’s political career, the Reagans went to the home of their dear friends Earle and Marion Jorgensen to have dinner and await the returns with a small group of close friends and family. While there, the president received the call from Walter Mondale conceding the election. He took it in a spare bedroom, where a small portable television had been set up. Mrs. Reagan, Mike Deaver, and I joined him in the room. The call did not last long. From the president’s end, it was cordial and gracious. After the call, Mike, thinking of national unity, said to Reagan, “You really should invite him to the White House.” Before the president could reply, I chimed in with “For what? A tour?” To my great pleasure, Mrs. Reagan laughed heartily. Mike, though, was not amused. At all. He shot me a look I will never forget. The president readily agreed to have Mondale over for a visit.
The convention, the Fritzbusters, and the charged atmosphere of the coming fall campaign were still a ways off when Reagan watched Ghostbusters at Camp David in July. It may have been made with some free-market, libertarian undertones that would delight commentators on the right, but while Reagan believed in the power of the free market, he didn’t screen movies based on their ideology. That’s not what our movie nights were about.
They were the opposite: an escape from politics. Movie nights were a diversion from the business of governing—or the business of campaigning—and a chance for the Reagans to relax and enjoy the art form that brought them together in the first place.