The one movie Bill Murray refused to talk about: “It was that tough”
In the 1980s, Bill Murray ascended to the top of the Hollywood mountain with alarming speed. After his breakthrough performance in 1979’s Meatballs, the Saturday Night Live star fired off Caddyshack, Stripes, Tootsie, and Ghostbusters in a four-year period. Suddenly, he was the biggest name in comedy, but then he retreated from the public eye for four years. By the time he returned for a big-budget star vehicle in 1988, he felt like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders – and had an experience so tough that he struggled to speak about it afterwards.
While Murray’s early ’80s comedies were a superb showcase for his laconic talents and were beloved by audiences, none matched the worldwide success of Ghostbusters. That film was a genuine phenomenon upon release, and Murray suddenly became indelibly associated with a character who was part of a merchandising empire. In a way, it was a case of “be careful what you wish for” because Murray struggled to deal with that level of fame and ubiquity at such an early stage in his career. So, he quit.
“Well, basically, I thought that Ghostbusters was the biggest thing that would ever happen to me,” Murray told Roger Ebert in 1990. “It was such a big phenomenon that I felt slightly radioactive. So I just moved away for a while”. The star relocated to Paris, where he studied philosophy and history at Sorbonne University. He then spent time with his family in the Hudson River Valley upon returning to America. Over a period of four years, he made only one film appearance – a small cameo in Little Shop of Horrors.
By the time he signed a deal to make his triumphant return to Hollywood as a leading man in Scrooged, his asking price had jumped to an eye-watering $6million. Depending on reports, the Christmas-themed comedy was budgeted at a similarly eye-watering $32-$35m, which is more than the first Ghostbusters cost to make. Murray, who already felt rusty having been away from Hollywood for so long, realised he didn’t have the likes of Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis to help him shoulder the burden of a big-budget movie this time – and it freaked him out.
“I don’t want to talk about Scrooged,” Murray admitted in 1989. “It was tough because it’s scary to be out there in a movie with all that money on the line.” When interviewer Harold Conrad pointed out that Ghostbusters II, which he made the year after Scrooged, had a similar budget, Murray reiterated that the ensemble helped mitigate those fears. “There aren’t that many people you’d want to get in bed with on a project with this big a nut,” he admitted. “But there’s one consolation—this bunch out there on the set, you know they can make it work. We’ve done this before.”
While Scrooged ultimately became an enormous hit, nixing any worries Murray had about losing money for the studio, he had a “miserable” time working on the film. He and director Richard Donner – famed for helming the likes of Superman: The Movie and Lethal Weapon – had creative differences over the movie’s tone. In fact, he bristled at Donner, pushing him to play every comedic moment more broadly than he felt comfortable with, grousing that the director “kept telling me to do things louder, louder, louder. I think he was deaf.”
For Donner’s part, he acknowledged that Murray was “superbly creative but occasionally difficult – as difficult as any actor.” He didn’t seem to have hated his experience working with Murray as much as Murray despised working with him, although Murray later indicated to Entertainment Weekly that neither man was happy with the film in the end.
“That’s a tough one; I still have trouble talking about it,” Murray mused. “I thought it was an extraordinary script, but I saw a different movie from what the director saw.”
