The movie Bill Murray hated so much he walked out: “I despised it”
Whether or not it makes them a glutton for punishment, many people can’t abide either switching off or walking out of a movie before it’s finished: when they’re in, they’re in. Bill Murray is not one of those people, and he hated an Oscar-nominated film so much that he abandoned ship well before the end.
It’s been a contentious subject among cinephiles for decades: if a movie is awful, is it better to persevere or give up? There’s always the lingering belief, or hope, that it’ll get better, but then you feel like an idiot when the credits start rolling and it didn’t. Or even more alarming, it got worse.
The other school of thought is that if a picture is irredeemably bad, then it’s better to cut the losses and do something more productive instead. Murray has always marched to the beat of his own drum, for better or worse, but what makes his walkout unusual is that a completely inoffensive feature tipped him over the edge.
Then again, trying to predict how he’ll react to anything is a fool’s errand, with the former Saturday Night Live favourite one of Hollywood’s foremost eccentrics. Is he going to physically assault a director? Throw a producer into a lake? Crash someone’s party? Give a briefing at the White House? Sing karaoke with Clint Eastwood? Get an entire production shut down for inappropriate behaviour? The answer is yes.
Universal would have at least hoped he paid for his ticket to attend a screening of Primary Colors, because not many others did. The 1998 dramedy, liberally inspired by Bill Clinton’s ascent to the presidency, starred John Travolta as a fast-rising politician who finds his wayward personal life encroaching on his ambition.
Mike Nichols’ tanked at the box office, despite receiving strong notices from critics and earning Oscar nods for Kathy Bates in the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ category and Elaine May’s ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ nomination, but Murray loathed it from start to finish. Or, to be more accurate, he loathed it from start to whenever he decided he’d had enough and fucked off.
When asked by Empire to name the last time he walked out of a screening, the ‘Murricane’ kept things short and sweet. “Primary Colors,” he replied. “I despised it.” It didn’t live up to the pedigree of its cast and crew, or the hot-button topicality of a 1998 release date that placed it smack-dab in the middle of Clinton’s increasingly controversial second term, but Murray couldn’t have cared less.
Apparently, he knows a wretched film when he sees one, and he saw at least part of one when he made the mistake of watching Primary Colors. He made it perfectly clear that he didn’t stick around for the whole thing, and it’s a shame that he didn’t elaborate, because who doesn’t want to know why a by-the-numbers hybrid of thinly-veiled biopic and political drama pissed him off so much?
Sadly, Murray isn’t one for long-winded explanations, but history will always remember him for randomly despising the movie.
