The ‘SNL’ movie starring Bill Murray that will never be released
Writer Tom Schiller might be best known for the 11 years he spent writing and making short films for Saturday Night Live, the iconic American comedy variety show once famously starring the likes of Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Eddie Murphy and a swathe of other significant comedy names.
Many of the actors who featured on Saturday Night Live would go on to have brilliant careers, but few perhaps enjoyed as much success as Murray, who undoubtedly became the face of American comedy for much of his career, performing in classic movies like Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and giving a handful of dramatic performance too, like in Lost in Translation.
Murray is no stranger to a film not making onto the screen, though, as there is a movie he was involved in that relates back to his time on Saturday Night Live that never managed to see the light of day. It was, in fact, directed by Tom Schiller and also featured fellow SNL actor Dan Aykroyd.
Nothing Lasts Forever is a combination of science fiction, comedy, and drama genres, starring Zach Galligan and Lauren Tom in the lead roles. Taking place in an alternate universe, Galligan plays Adam Beckett, a young artist with aspirations to become a classical pianist.
After failing his New York Symphony audition, Adam journeys to a strange underworld part of Manhattan. Here, the young man stumbles upon a strange society that lives its life according to a peculiar set of norms and values, including its leader, Bill Murray’s Mr O’Brien, and a young woman with whom he falls in love.
There’s a clear nod to the classical age of Hollywood in Schiller’s film with its black-and-white visual aesthetics and its playful mood. Fantasy and familiarity come together in creating a nostalgic trip back into the cinema age of yore, elevated by a brilliant orchestral score by Howard Shore. However, despite its quality, the film never actually made it to its theatrical release.
Just before Nothing Lasts Forever was set to be released, MGM announced that the film was being pushed back but never gave it a theatrical release date. In fact, the only time Schiller’s movie was shown in a cinema back in 1984 was in September at the Harkins Cinema in Thomas Mall, Phoenix, Arizona. In the mid-2000s and into the mid-2010s, Murray and Schiller took the film around a series of American cinemas and screened it for wider audiences for the first time.
It’s equally never been made available on home entertainment systems, though it was screened in 2015 on TCM. Nothing Lasts Forever also managed to get broadcast across Europe: in the UK, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Warner Bros, who now owns the rights to the film after acquiring MGM, has stated that it cannot be released on DVD because of legal problems. In fact, when Nothing Lasts Forever made its way onto YouTube in 2011, it was swiftly taken down.
Still, the film has become wrapped up in the history of cult cinema and the lore of Saturday Night Live. Schiller managed to weave in the comedy motifs he became known and loved for during his time writing for SNL, but the film also possesses a romantic yearning and tenderness that showed another side to the writer and his actors.
