A look at Dan Akroyd’s original script for ‘Ghostbusters’
With October 31st fast approaching, many of you will be revisiting old Halloween favourites. For me, it doesn’t get much better than Ghostbusters, in which Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson star as a wayward band of paranormal exterminators trying to cleanse New York of a rather nasty ghost problem. Dan Akroyd’s script is the stuff screenwriter’s dreams are made of. But it wasn’t always so cohesive. Here, we take a look at the first script Akroyd penned for what was then known as Ghost Smashers.
Akroyd had always been fascinated with the paranormal. His father had written a book titled A History of Ghosts; his mother often claimed to have seen a ghost; his grandfather experimented with using radios to contact ghosts; and his great-grandfather had been a revered parapsychologist. Clearly, it was in his blood. In 1981, Akroyd read an article on the link between quantum physics and parapsychology from the American Society of Psychical Research, which he would later claim gave him the idea that ghosts could be trapped. He’d already been thinking about modernizing the paranormal comedies of the 1940s and ’50s, so it was the kick he needed to start work on the first draft of Ghost Smashers, in which he intended to star alongside fellow SNL alumnus John Belushi and Eddie Murphy.
Ghost Smashers takes place in the future, 2012, to be exact. Peter Venkman and co. are already seasoned ghost hunters working for an established business. In fact, they’re just one of the countless teams (some good, some bad) competing for the same clients. The original Ghostbusters is a time capsule of 1980s Manhattan, but Akroyd’s first script would have seen the Ghost Smashers travelling through time and space to take on different ghosts. As the opening prologue explains, by the time we meet the gang, a mesh of microwave radiation has “torn a hole in our reality envelope, and spirits and entities from the other side were entering our reality through these holes.” In reaction to the onslaught of paranormal entities slipping through from other dimensions, ghost-hunting has become big business.
In Akroyd’s first script, there are three key characters: Stantz, Venkman, and Ramsey. When we first meet them, they’re leaving their Firehouse HQ in the ectomobile. They’re responding to the call from the Greenville Guest House, where the Ghostbusters capture Slimer. Although, in this early draft, he’s described as a “free-repeating vaporous phantasm” called Onionhead. On capturing the ghost, they place him in a containment unit kept at a deserted Sunoco gas station in New Jersey. When the ghosts are eventually released, a 25-acre sinkhole opens up, which then disrupts an inactive fault line, somehow turning New Jersey into a ball of fire. Zuul is still present, but the name refers to the Terror Dogs.
The Zuul are Gozer’s (the omnipotent ruler of the sixth dimension) favourite pets, and he’ll do anything to recover them. But one of the biggest differences between Ghost Smashers and Ghostbusters is the crew’s equipment. The crew still wear Janitor-style boiler suits and gloves but with in-built wands instead of particle throwers. Each Ghost Smasher has one wand for each hand, which are activated by a toggle switch of the backpack.
Following John Belushi’s death, Dan Akroyd took his first draft of Ghost Smashers to Bill Murray, who liked the premise but said that it would need a rewrite. Akroyd then pitched the story to producer Ivan Reitman, who also liked the premise but was worried about budget constraints. In an attempt to make the film cheaper, Akroyd simplified the script. After another meeting with Reitman at Art’s Delicatessan, the 180-page redraft was given yet another overhaul. And with that, Ghostbusters was born.
