How Bill Murray almost ruined his movie career before it began: “He wouldn’t say yes”
Throughout his career, Bill Murray has always been notoriously difficult to talk into making a film. In fact, most of the time, people who want him to be in their movies can barely even reach him to make an offer.
To the casual observer, this sounds like something an actor would do only once they’ve reached a certain level of fame and fortune. It’s unusual for them to make themselves difficult to hire, unless they’re genuinely the cream of the crop.
Murray, though, has always been a uniquely awkward customer, and Ivan Reitman, the man who directed him in Stripes and Ghostbusters, once revealed that the actor played the long game over his first movie role. Indeed, if Reitman hadn’t been utterly convinced he was the only man capable of playing the lead role in 1979’s Meatballs, Murray could feasibly have ruined his film career before it even got off the ground.
The relationship between Murray and the long-suffering Reitman began when he produced an Off-Broadway production of the National Lampoon Show. That show was almost like a proto-Saturday Night Live, because it featured Murray, John Belushi, and Gilda Radner, as well as Murray’s future friend and Groundhog Day director Harold Ramis.
After working on that production, Reitman cast Belushi in National Lampoon’s Animal House, which was shot in 1977, and tried to repeat the same trick with Murray in Meatballs, his directorial debut. He offered Murray the chance to play laconic summer camp counsellor Tripper Harrison in the summer of ’78, which he thought would be exciting for the young comic, who wasn’t long into his SNL tenure at that point.
“This summer he was busy mostly playing golf and baseball,” Reitman recalled, although that mightn’t actually be true, considering Murray began to feature more and more on SNL between ’77 and ’78. Either way, Reitman called him and said, “Come on, Bill, this is a funny script. It’s a great idea, we’ll have a great time, we’ll be at a real camp. And you’re not doing anything”.
To his shock and frustration, Murray didn’t seem remotely excited about the prospect of being in a motion picture. Instead, he treated the offer with the same semi-ironic remove that he did everything else in life. “He just wouldn’t say yes,” Reitman recalled, “It’s not like he was a big star or anything. He had never been in a movie. He had barely been on television”.
With the benefit of hindsight, you could say the situation wound up serving Reitman well in the future, because he learned very early in his career how “iconoclastically difficult” Murray could be. However, at the time, the actor’s reluctance forced Reitman into an unusual tactic as the shoot’s start date loomed closer and closer: he played the waiting game.
Amazingly, Reitman refused to hire another actor for the part because he “couldn’t think of anyone else who could kind of fill those shoes”, which left the ball in Murray’s court. He hadn’t said yes to the project, but he also hadn’t said no. If legend is to be believed, the nerve-racking situation played out until the night before production was slated to begin (with no lead actor). Finally, Murray called Reitman and told him he’d do the movie, and he eventually turned up on the second day of filming.
“It was really touch and go all the way,” Reitman insisted, “but when he got there, he was absolutely committed. He was brilliant. He helped rewrite the script, as he usually does. It was the start of his career, and he was certainly responsible for the start of my directing career.”
All in all, it’s enough to make you wonder how different comedy history could have been if Murray hadn’t been dealing with Reitman, an inhumanly patient man who also believed wholeheartedly in his talent.
