Press & Publicity

Moviegoer

Article by Stephen Faber

Photograph by Barbara Walz

Published - June 1984

His next movie is another wacky comedy, but this fall Murray's taking a big step into serious drama with The Razor's Edge.

For someone who is still a fledgling movie actor, Bill Murray has strung together a remarkable series of hits. Of his first five movies, four-Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes and Tootsie- have been huge box-office successes. His salary is now around $2 million per film, and all the studios are clamoring for his services. It would seem that Murray is the star who has found a comic niche and is set to make a long and lucrative career out of it. But Murray isn't about to settle into any golden groove, as one can see by comparing his two upcoming films.

Ghostbusters, which opens nationwide in June, is a fairly typical Bill Murray comedy. In the film, he stars with Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, two guys who have done a lot of cutting up with Murray on TV and in the movies. The three play flaky parapsychologists who must exterminate the assorted demons that are plaguing residents of New York City. One day on location, when Murray, Aykroyd. and Ramis were wearing their ghostbuster outfits (which resemble oversized spacesuits), a New York passerby called out, "Hey, it's The Wrong Stuff!" The movie has been unofficially known as The Wrong Stuff ever since. This outlandish parody of The Exorcist and its ilk boasts a full array of the Bill Murray comic routines that made him a hit on Saturday Night Live.

Ghostbusters marks Murray's third collaboration with director Ivan Reitman, who made the actor's first film, Meatballs, and his smash-hit service comedy, Stripes. "Because we've worked together", Reitman says. 'Bill trusts me. He's willing to be lousy because he knows I'll cut it out. That allows him to be spontaneous. We have a number of catchphrases we've developed together. I'll say to him, 'Be smarter', or 'Be cheaper.' Or I'll name a certain game-show host, and immediately he'll know just what I want.

Murray tends to be modest about his work, but of Ghostbusters he says, "This movie is going to be a major social event." Certainly all signs point in that direction, But the film that Murray cares most deeply about is The Razor's Edge, which will open in October even though it was completed before Ghostbusters. He did it for no salary except a $12,000 fee for co-writing the screenplay. Adapted from W. Somerset Maugham's novel (which was first filmed in 1946. with Tyrone Power in the lead), The Razor's Edge is a most unlikely Bill Murray project. It is a deadly serious story about a World War I veteran whose tragic battle experiences propel him into worldwide travels in search of the meaning of life. Murray knows that he is taking a risk in going against his usual screen image, but as Reitman says, "Bill loves to be challenged. He gets bored otherwise."

In fact, the only reason Murray agreed to star in Ghostbusters was so that Columbia Pictures would make The Razor's Edge as well. He takes some pleasure in recalling that Tyrone Power used the same sort of ploy to make the original version of the film. According to Hollywood legend, Power agreed to star in one last Zorro movie for 20th Century-Fox if the studio would also let him play the idealistic hero of The Razor's Edge.

In Murray's case, negotiations on The Razor's Edge began when writer-director John Byrum (Heart Beat) bought the film rights to the novel and sent a copy of the book to Murray. He liked it and decided to work with Byrum on the screenplay. When they first discussed the project with Columbia, Murray and Byrum weren't able to stir up much enthusiasm. 'The original meetings were kind of quiet affairs" Murray notes dryly. John has a reputation for being a rebel, so all the executives kept staring at him to see if he was Svengaliing me. He hadn't slept the night before, and in the middle of the meeting he just sort of went comatose. So I started talking real fast.'

Columbia's indifference toward The Razor's Edge changed soon after Dan Aykroyd showed Murray the first 75 pages of a comedy script he was writing (Harold Ramis now shares the screen-writing credit) about a trio of ghostbusters. Murray thought it was funny and said he'd like to get involved, but he was reluctant to abandon The Razor's Edge. "As soon as people heard about Ghostbusters," Murray recalls, "every studio wanted it. But I still wanted to do The Razor' Edge. Finally Dan said, 'Tell whoever wants Ghostbusters that they have to take The Razor's Edge too,' We didn't have to tell them. They figured it out real quick. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to see what the deal was going to be. Finally the people at Columbia said, 'We're really nuts about that Razor's Edge. Now about this other movie…"

Murray knows he is risking the critics' wrath by remaking a film that many people remember with affection, but he believes that the new version of The Razor's Edge is actually superior to the Tyrone Power original. 'The lead character was kind of pious in the original " he asserts "so for starters we tried to give him sense of humor. My feeling is that someone who gets involved in a search of any kind doesn't necessarily lose his sense of humor, Most people in that situation end up with a better sense of humor, because they gain perspective." Byrum adds, "Bill supplies a freshness and energy that make this stylized Maugham piece very contemporary. If we had cast anyone else, it would have been so sanctimonious. But just when it approaches that, Bill breaks that feeling by saying something charming or clever. He humanizes everything."

Still, one cannot help wondering what triggered Murray's obsession with this somber tale of a young man's search for truth. One thing that appealled to him about The Razor's Edge, he says, was its novelty. Murray hates the idea of being typecast and he was becoming very bored with the scripts that were being offered him. It got to the point where I was getting the same script over and over again. There are certain kinds of things I can do in my sleep. People send me scripts and say. 'This is written for you.' Well, of course it's written for me-I wrote it! I've said half the lines before, on TV shows or in my movies. In Hollywood it's easy to get stuck in a rut, and when you do, you never get out. I don't want to be 50 years old and still be wearing a huge bow tie and saying, Hey look, here come Jennie and the kids!'"

Murray was desperately seeking a change of pace, but there may be something beyond the search for a challenge that drew him to The Razor's Edge. John Byrum believes that Murray identified very strongly with the leading character in Maugham's story. Bill is at some kind of crossroads in his life" he observes. "I think that's why he responded to The Razor's Edge. It's the story of someone who is disillusioned with worldly things. The character in the story is traumatized by the war, and in a way, making it in Hollywood is like going through a war. I don't think Bill is comfortable with his success. I've seen people come up to him in restaurants and say, 'Hey, give my wife a noogie!' It's a horrible invasion of his sensibility. He resents it. He's looking for a higher purpose. So I think this was a very personal film for him."

Although it may be hard for outsiders to imagine, Murray seems somewhat disdainful of the rewards that Hollywood has to offer. He's perplexed by his fame-by the intrusions on his privacy and the attention he doesn't quite feel he deserves. Despite his image as a madcap prankster, off screen he is a very serious man who claims that stardom is far from an unconditional delight. "People hate it when you bitch about being famous," he says. But no one can anticipate what it's like. The work itself is fun. If it were all done in masks, it would be great. But being a celebrity is not as good as it's cracked up to he. It changes everything. You just want to be able to get lost sometimes, I can be walking down the street deep in thought, and somebody will come up to me and say, 'Hey, whatever happened to that gopher? And at the time, the last thing on my mind is that in Caddyshack I had a life-and-death struggle with a puppet gopher."

Fortunately, better things awaited him. Murray's movie career took off in July 1979 with the release of Meatballs, a comedy about camp counselors that was made on a budget of $I million and that has grossed more than $55 million. His second film, Where the Buffalo Roam (1980), in which he played gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson was his only commercial failure. Stripes and Caddyshack, which together earned well over $100 million, more than made up for that Faltering step.

After all that success, Murray felt the need to broaden his audience a bit, so he signed on for a supporting role in Tootsie. In the film, he played Dustin Hoffman's roommate, a frustrated playwright. "I thought, 'If only somebody would hire me to be a second banana so I could play straight, then they would see that I can act, he says. "I ended up at a birthday party for the wife of Frank Price [the former chairman of Columbia Pictures]. I got her some earrings. I don't know if she ever wore them. And I was sitting next to Dustin Hoffman at the party. I gave him and his wife a ride home, and then he recommended me to Sydney Pollack [Tootsie' s director] for the movie.''

The part of Hoffman's roommate barely existed on paper, so Murray filled it in with improvisational rifts during shooting I had no lines in the script." Murray says. In that sense it was like Caddyshack. The only difference was that this time I was working with Dustin Hoffman, a really incredible actor. He has all sorts of energy. Every take he does is amazing, and they're all different. When I came into the movie, it was already a month behind schedule and $5 million dollars over budget. Everybody was attacking everybody else. But it became a lot of fun. Nobody had any idea how big the movie was going to be."In spite of his major contribution to the film, Murray asked that his name be excluded from the movie's advertising and even from its opening and closing credits. According to director Pollack. "He felt it would he misleading to bill him, because the audience would come expecting Stripes or Meatballs."

As that display of modesty indicates, Murray takes his greatest pleasure in seeing an audience respond to his work. There nothing more exciting," he says, than sneaking into the back of a theater to watch your movie and hearing people laughing out loud. I remember the first time that happened, when I was at a screening of Meatballs. You get an electric charge through your whole body It's great to hear the waves of laughter, because you never get a laugh while you're shooting a movie. If anyone laughs on a movie set, it ruins the take. But seven or eight months later, you go to a theater and get this huge laugh for a comic bit that you'd forgotten all about. It's like finding lots of money in a big bank account that you didn't know you had.'

Even so, he points out, the success that comes from those big laughs can be more intimidating than gratifying: 'It's actually a terrible thing to happen, because when you're in a big hit movie, you feel that you can't possibly top it. I saw Dustin after Tootsie, and the guy was a wreck. That's why he went and did a stage play. He couldn't dream of making a movie more successful than Tootsie the next time out.' Murray doesn't feel any of that anxiety; he's confident that Ghostbusters will be very successful. But when he thinks about the reception The Razor's Edge will get this fall he admits, "I'm terrified. But maybe when people see the movie, the possibilities for me as an actor will be different."

Regardless of how The Razor's Edge does at the box office, Murray is determined to keep taking chances in his work. Although he wants to take a rest after making two movies back to back, he has an idea for a biographical drama that he wants to do next.

John Byrum believes that whatever Murray does in the future will be out of the ordinary. "I can't see him doing a cop movie or a Neil Simon comedy," Byrum says. He's got to do Ghostbusters or Hamlet. He really can't do anything in between." Byrum feels that Murray's discomfort with his career stems from the fact that he is a very moral man in a business not known for its high ethical standards." You have to remember that Bill was raised by Jesuits in a Catholic school" Byrum points out. "Now he's a celebrity, and he sees that celebrities in America are sort of beyond the law. I don't think he's comfortable with that. There are two ways of dealing with celebrity. John Belushi took one way; Bill is at the other extreme. He's the most uncompromising individual I've ever met.'

Byrum's comments about Murray bring to mind a noble comic star of a different era. In the '30s and '40s, Jimmy Stewart worked with director Frank Capra on a series of distinctly moral, very funny comedies that included You Can't Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It's a Wonderful Life. Murray just might turn out to be a latter-day counterpart to Stewart, playing American innocents who are a little loonier, to be sure, but who retain the same inner integrity. In that sense, his interest in The Razor's Edge may not be as bizarre as it seems at first glance. Says Byrum, "If Frank Capra had taken a little acid, he probably would have come up with Bill Murray."