Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (16 page)

Now, leaving aside the fact that it isn’t, last time I checked, only women who produce bodily fluids, I can (just about) see Berlatsky’s point – but he’s wrong. Damn wrong! To accuse
Ghostbusters
of sexism is to apply a very basic algorithm to determine its sexual politics. This means, then, that the subtle and very sweet ways
Ghostbusters
subverts the sexist tropes of male-led comedies, made both in the eighties and still very much made now, are overlooked. There is a reason, in my personal and objective experience, why women love this film as much as men, and it isn’t because they’ve been possessed by Zuul and turned into dogs.

First, there’s the depiction of male friendship. The three primary Ghostbusters – Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) – are all friends. Good friends. They like each other, they’re amused by each other and they stick together when they’re fired at the beginning of the film from their university jobs. There’s nothing eroticised about their friendship, no overcompensation of macho-ness, no competitive banter. No cruelty, in other words (although Venkman is a little cavalier about making Stantz mortgage his parents’ house to fund the business). Nor is there any suggestion that male friendship is so special it must be protected from all outsiders who threaten it – namely, women.

In
Ghostbusters
and
Ghostbusters II
, Ray and Egon are nice to Dana: they welcome her into their group and they try to protect her from Peter’s excesses. Compare this to the treatment meted out to the female love interests in modern-day equivalent movies such as
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
,
Anchorman
and
Knocked Up
, or less broad bromance films such as
Sideways
, in which the male friends are all, without fail, horrible to the women (read: INVADERS). While Venkman might tease some of the women in his orbit (mocking Janine for her ‘bug eyes’, lusting after Dana), he always immediately apologises, and neither the film nor his buddies praise him for his foolishness. This strikes me as a lot more significant than the gender of ghosts.

The Ghostbusters also never fall out with one another. This, too, is appealing and makes them rarities in the world of male friendship in movies. In today’s more recent male-led comedies, such as
I Love You, Man
and
Anchorman
, the male friends always fall out at some point, followed by an emotional reunion. That’s because, in those films, the friendship between the male leads has become so celebrated that it is a (barely) platonic romance and therefore the trajectory of the friendship is like that of a clichéd film love story: boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets boy back. The Ghostbusters never fall out with one another, because they are friends – just friends – and they are grown-ups. I’ll return to this point later.

Just as the overly close friendships in
Top Gun
were a reflection of the one between the filmmakers off-camera, so the relationships in
Ghostbusters
were an expression of those behind the movie. The original idea for the film was born out of one particular friendship: the one between Aykroyd and his best friend and former
Saturday Night Live
fellow castmate, John Belushi. By the time Aykroyd sat down to write what would be the first draft of the movie, the bearishly sweet but wildly self-destructive Belushi had been flailing around in film flops and drug addiction since the pair’s last film, 1980’s
The Blues Brothers
, and Aykroyd pictured his ghost film as the dual project his best friend needed: ‘Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis – everyone did a ghost picture,’ Aykroyd said. And yet, despite those comic precedents, Aykroyd did not envisage the film as a comedy.

Instead, he saw it as a semi-serious look at the paranormal and parapsychology, an idea that makes a tiny bit more sense when one takes into account that Aykroyd is a spiritualist and member of the American Society of Psychical Research. In fact, some of his ancestors were mystics and his father wrote what
Vanity Fair
describes with an apparently straight face as ‘a well regarded history of ghosts’. For Aykroyd, this was a deeply personal project on several levels: on the one hand, he was exploring what he calls ‘the family business’; on the other, he was trying to rescue his best friend. But on a warm and bright March afternoon in 1982, just as Aykroyd was at home in New York writing a line for his friend, the phone rang. It was Belushi’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, calling from Los Angeles: Belushi had died in the Chateau Marmont after overdosing on cocaine and heroin. He was thirty-three years old.

Aykroyd was devastated. Photos from Belushi’s funeral on Martha’s Vineyard show a shocked-looking Aykroyd leading the procession on a motorcycle – and a young Bill Murray, who revered Belushi, grimacing while placing a flower on the dead comedian’s coffin. Aykroyd soon after decided that his fellow
Saturday Night Live
castmate, Murray, should play the part he had written for Belushi, and it was the part that ultimately truly made Murray’s name, just as Aykroyd once hoped it would make Belushi’s. But he would still keep his late friend in the film in his own way: Slimer is a direct homage to Belushi who, like the green blob, would steal food off room service trays in hotel hallways and generally cause chaos. More obliquely, the movie would be made by Black Rhino Productions, which is Aykroyd’s production company – named in honour of a dream he had after Belushi died, in which his friend’s face was on a charging rhino.

It’s easy to overstate the influence of Belushi on 1980s American comedy, just out of sentimentality and sadness for his premature death. But it’s equally easy to underplay it because he died so young and so long ago. But the impact of it heavily affected the movie that would soon become the most successful comedy of all time, giving it a sweetness that other comedies from that same era, starring the same actors and made by the same director, do not have. ‘Belushi’s death was the soul of the film for Danny, and it played into my own sensibilities of friendship and humanity,’ says the film’s director, Ivan Reitman. ‘I went in knowing that what was important was that the audience had to care about these guys, they had to want to be friends with them and to care about their friendship.’

Aykroyd’s original script, which he showed to Reitman, was set in the future, on various planets and over several dimensions. ‘My first draft,’ Aykroyd later said, ‘was written in a way that your basic acceleration physicist might have enjoyed more than the mass audience.’

‘Danny’s first draft,’ Reitman recalls, ‘was basically unfilmable.’ But Reitman loved the script’s basic premise: a bunch of guys acting like firefighters but catching ghosts. So he took Aykroyd out to lunch and suggested some changes, such as setting it in present-day New York (‘It became my New York movie,’ Reitman says with a smile). The always amenable Aykroyd agreed to all the changes. Murray had already told Aykroyd that he liked the script and made characteristically vague noises about maybe committing to it. Reitman then suggested hiring Harold Ramis, with whom he’d made the 1981 army comedy
Stripes
, which also starred Murray. After getting Columbia to commit to a $25 million budget – which was seen then as an obscene amount of money to invest in a comedy – Ramis, Aykroyd and Reitman decamped to Martha’s Vineyard to rewrite Aykroyd’s script. All these men were already old friends and would soon become even better ones. ‘Those weeks on Martha’s Vineyard,’ Reitman recalls, ‘were two of the most fun weeks of my life.’

First, they created the different character traits for the three Ghostbusters who before had, in Aykroyd’s original script, been pretty much interchangeable: ‘Put [the characters of Peter Venkman, Raymond Stantz, and Egon Spengler] together, and you have the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man,’ Aykroyd said.

‘For actors, especially in group comedy, those kinds of archetypes always seem to work,’ said Ramis.

They also used character traits from each other, with Venkman taking on Murray’s already well-honed sarcastic outsider tone and Stantz becoming the paranormal nerd, just as Aykroyd was and is. It is impossible not to take delight in watching an actor play a role that he was seemingly born to play, whether it’s Clark Gable as Rhett Butler or Humphrey Bogart as Rick. With
Ghostbusters
, you get that three times over: Murray as the wise-ass, Ramis as the egg-head and Aykroyd as the lunkish geek. From then on, any time any of them branched out of these types – Murray as the depressed father in
Rushmore
, Aykroyd as the southern good ol’ boy in
Driving Miss Daisy
, Ramis as the stoner dad in
Knocked Up
– it felt to me both daring and unsettling, as though I’d caught my father cross-dressing.

Next, they jettisoned all the inter-planetary time travel from Aykroyd’s script, wisely cutting out all the spiritual woo-woo stuff but keeping in all the geeky science: the proton packs, the containment units, the streams that must never be crossed. Geeky science was already becoming one of the defining characteristics of eighties movies, particularly in male-led comedies, and would feature in films such as
Mad Science
to
Short Circuit
(aka E.T. as a robot) to
Batteries Not Included
to Bill and Ted’s time-travelling phone box in
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
to the greatest eighties film science experiment of them all, the DeLorean with the flux capacitor. This is my kind of sci-fi, and my kind of masculinity: gleefully, nonsensically, sweetly nerdy.

Notably, this kind of sci-fi and accompanying special effects – the nerdy nonsense kind – has endured a lot better than the more grandiose visions of, say,
Star Wars
, with all those tediously phallic lightsabers. At times the film makes fun of its shonkiness, such as Egon using a colander to read Louis’s (Rick Moranis) mind. But with the exception of the demon dog that crashes Louis’s party, which was done using stop-motion puppets, the special effects in
Ghostbusters
still look just as good today as they did in the eighties, just as they do in
Back to the Future
,
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
and the grievously underrated
Young Sherlock Holmes
. And this is at least partly why these movies have lasted so well and why they still attract viewers who weren’t even born when DeLoreans were being manufactured.

Murray, meanwhile, was in India filming another movie. The day he arrived back in New York, Reitman and Ramis met him at LaGuardia airport and took him out to a restaurant in Queens to show him the script. But Murray trusted his friends so much he barely looked at it, said ‘about two words about the script’ Ramis later recalled, and flew back out again. ‘It was trust.
Ghostbusters
was the first film he committed to without fighting like crazy,’ Ramis said.

But of course,
Ghostbusters
does not only star the Ghostbusters themselves. Other actors and actresses had to work within this already existing strong friendship. When Aykroyd wrote the script, he envisaged a role for John Candy, and Reitman approached him to play Louis. When Candy suggested playing the role with a heavy accent and two dogs, Reitman decided he was going too broad, even for
Ghostbusters
. So instead, he cast the Canadian comedian Rick Moranis, then little known to American audiences.

‘My career was completely luck,’ says Moranis.
‘Different things would come up and I would pick what I felt was the most fun and who would be the most interesting to work with. I wasn’t being offered a lot of the Schwarzenegger parts: you have a round Jewish face and you don’t wear contacts and you’re five foot five, you’re going to get certain parts. People always thought of me as the nerdy guy, even in non-nerdy parts.’

Because the part of Louis had been written for Candy, Moranis set about shaping it more to his image: he suggested that Louis be an accountant and be more nerdy and less lecherous over women, as they’d written originally. ‘Ivan let me work with my character, which was wonderful. They were all extremely friendly and supportive guys and really encouraged my input, even though they’d all known each other for years and I was really the outsider,’ says Moranis.

Sigourney Weaver also ended up shaping her role to the benefit of the film. She came in to audition for the part of Dana, ‘which I know sounds ridiculous – we made Sigourney audition, when she’d already done
Aliens
and
The Year of Living Dangerously
,’ says Reitman with a laugh. ‘But she’d never done comedy. Little did I know that comedy was her true love.’

Weaver proved her comedic skills by opening her audition with the suggestion that Dana become a dog in the movie, and she promptly climbed up on Reitman’s coffee table, got down on all fours and howled.

‘And I was just fascinated – it was so goofy!’ says Reitman, sounding very much like he’s still recovering from the encounter over thirty years later. ‘And I thought, you know, that’s a good idea, we should look at it.’

Weaver also suggested that Dana be a musician instead of a model, as was originally written in the script, and she made similar suggestions throughout the shoot in order to make her character more than a cipher. In the scene when Venkman first goes to Dana’s flat to check out her haunted refrigerator, Dana was written as very passive in the script: she doesn’t get it when Venkman is making salacious come-ons to her, and she seems scared of him, threatening to scream at one point. In the film, Weaver rolls her eyes at Venkman and clearly just finds him ridiculous and, in doing so, makes the scene a lot less creepy than it could have been – after all, Venkman is basically sexually harassing Dana in her own apartment. But because Dana stands up to him, and Murray himself looks and acts like such a tongue-tied nebbish next to Weaver’s patrician, cool glamour, the power tips more in her favour. The scene becomes sweet instead of stupid, therefore proving the rarely acknowledged fact that when female characters are allowed to be stronger than a wet rag, it does everyone in the movie a favour.