How Bill Murray and Chevy Chase ended their feud with ‘Caddyshack’
Two of the most prominent members of the Saturday Night Live cast were Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, who famously fought one another prior to an episode. Chase was one of the show’s first season’s big hitters, and when Murray joined proceedings the following year, he was dubbed as “the new Chevy”, much to Chase’s distaste.
Eventually, Chase left the show, but when he returned to host an episode of season three, he found that the resentment for Murray had not subsided. Chase had come back with an air of arrogance, leading to several members of the new cast feeling very irate indeed, leading eventually to an actual punch-up between himself and Murray.
The feud ran until the 1980 film Caddyshack arrived, in which director Harold Ramis bravely cast the two SNL members together. Chase played Ty Webb, the son of a golf country club’s founders, who wants to become a caddy, while Murray played Carl Spackler, a deranged greenskeeper tasked with getting rid of a troublesome gopher.
In the book Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, Murray is quoted saying that the scene filmed in Carl’s rundown apartment, in which the pair improvise brilliantly with one another, was the one that helped bring the two actors closer together, ending the feud that had begun back on Saturday Night Live.
“I’d never really done anything with Chevy,” Murray said. “We’d always had sort of a… funny relationship. But it was like, ‘O.K., I liked that when you did that. Let’s just keep going.’ We kept going, and it was funny because Ty Webb’s not far from who Chevy is. So he was pretty comfortable in his space.”
He continued, “And I was comfortable as Carl. So he could be free to laugh at me. And if Ty laughed, Carl thought it meant, ‘Hey, he’s my friend!’ It’s a really fun, self-aware example of whatever the heck Harold maintains the movie is about – status.”
In fact, Chase himself also admitted in the book that Caddyshack played a big hand in ending the feud, saying, “We got over everything. The tension was short-lived. I have nothing but admiration and affection for Bill. He still can be a surly character, to say the least. But ultimately, he’s a good guy. Even though I’m the number one star in the movie under the title, I’ll always think of Caddyshack as Billy’s movie.”
Evidently, there was a level of admiration between the two stars that allowed such improvisational brilliance. They’d both clearly been the stars of the early seasons of Saturday Night Live, but it took a film outside of their usual setting to have them perform together in a moment of true excellence.
