LUCIDMEDIA

Ghost Busters: 25 Years Later

Written by Barrett Hooper Tuesday, 16 June 2009 19:51

The summer of 1984 was a great time to go to the movies. Beverly Hills Cop, Temple of Doom, The Karate Kid, Gremlins, Footloose, Police Academy, Sixteen Candles, The Last Starfighter, Revenge of the Nerds, The Search for Spock and a little comedy gem called Ghost Busters.

What marvels about Ghost Busters isn’t the humour – which was smartass and hilarious – or the fact that every character is played by an actual adult – not a single WB-aged hottie in the mix. It was that director Ivan Reitman and his motley crew of comedy misfits, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, were able to take a ridiculous premise about ghost exterminators and turn it into something that’s equal parts funny, silly and completely thrilling.

Today, genre mashups are commonplace, even preferred by high-concept-driven Hollywood: the alien invader/buddy cop comedy (Men In Black), the zombie rom-com (Shaun of the Dead). But 25 years ago the idea of mixing comedy with the supernatural was pretty out there. What could’ve been a bad Saturday Night Live skit stretched to feature film length was in fact a carnival fun ride, with Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis like your school buddies (only older, hairier, but not necessarily wiser).

If you look at Ghost Busters today it still holds up, still entertains us with its tale of oddball spook chasers, laser-spewing proton packs and a scenery-stomping Stay-Puft marshmallow man. But at its core it’s actually a romantic comedy about Murray’s slightly abnormal paranormal psychologist who is puppy-dog in love with a hot cellist (Sigourney Weaver) – who just happens to be demonically possessed.

It’s the same old story: boy finds girl, boy loses girl to 8,000-year-old Sumerian demi-god from another dimension, boy saves girl in an explosion of toasted marshmallow and smartass remarks. The rest – haunted libraries, bleeding walls, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria – is all just window-dressing on the yellow brick road to getting these two crazy kids together.

Murray, who reportedly improvised much of his dialogue, is never upstaged, even in the face of a slime-spewing green snotball from the great beyond (you try acting opposite mid-80s lo-fi special effects and making it believable and funny). It’s his greatest comedic performance after Groundhog Day.

But it was more than just a performance. Murray’s Dr. Peter Venkman is the prototype for the Judd Apatow-style leading man, the scruffy smart-alecky underachieving immature charmer who somehow manages to bed the hot babes. All that’s missing is a bong in his hand and references to boobies and/or “scoring vag.”

In fact, Murray, with his lovable loser trifecta of Venkman, Meatballs camp counselor Tripper Harrison and Stripes army ne’er-do-well John Winger, paved the way for guys like Seth Rogen and Jason Segel to be shlubby slacker smartass leading men today (not surprisingly, Rogen’s name has been bandied about for a role in the long-gestating Ghostbusters threequel in which Apatow is also said to be involved, and which will undoubtedly possess some of the youth factor missing from the original). 

So it’s strange to think that Murray wasn’t the first choice to play Peter Venkman. He didn’t even want to make the movie and thought it was silly. Aykroyd, who played Dr. Ray Stantz, co-wrote the script with his Blues Brother John Belushi in mind for the role. After Belushi’s death he offered it to Murray, who only agreed to play the part on the condition that the studio making the picture, Columbia, agreed to finance his remake of The Razor’s Edge.

But Murray wasn’t the only second-stringer to suit up in Ghostbusters.

Murray’s Stripes sidekick Harold Ramis, who co-wrote the script with Aykroyd, only stepped in front of the camera as brainiac Egon Spengler after a string of bigger names turned it down – Chevy Chase, Michael Keaton, Christopher Walken, John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd and Jeff Goldblum. Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddemore was written with Eddie Murphy in mind, but Murphy decided to replace Sylvester Stallone in Beverly Hills Cop instead. John Candy turned down the role of geeky accountant Louis Tully (and demonic alter-ego keymaster Vinz Clortho) that went to fellow SCTV vet Rick Moranis. Peewee Herman himself, Paul Reubens, was supposed to pull his hands out of his pants long enough to play big baddy Gozer the Gozerian (aka Gozer the Destructor, Volguus Zildrohar and Gozer the Traveler), a role that went to the far more fetching Yugoslavian model Slavitza Jovan.

Seems Aykroyd was the only actor interested in actually being in the movie. Hell, even Ray Parker Jr., who sang the annoyingly catching theme song, only came aboard after Huey Lewis and Lindsey Buckingham turned it down. Even then, Parker was so embarrassed – he saw writing a song for a strange sci-fi comedy that no one was going to see anyway strictly as a pay cheque gig – he refused to sing the word “Ghostbusters” in the song.

Ghost Busters captured lightning in a bottle, which the lackluster sequel proved. Recognizing that the Venkman/Dana Barrett relationship was the heart of the original, Ghostbusters II repeated the storyline, having the pair broken up at the beginning and Venkman trying to win her back from the ghost of a 16th-century tyrant named Vigo Von Homburg Deutschendorf. Likewise, the Ghost Busters have split up, only to reunite to save New York with the help of a walking, fighting Statue of Liberty (which mirrors the Stay-Puft ending of the first film).

While I don’t have much hope for a decent third adventure, I do sometimes wonder how the first film would’ve turned out if any of those original actors had taken the roles offered them (although I think Walken as Venkman – hell, Walken as anybody! – and Murphy back when he was the funniest man on the planet as Zeddemore could’ve been brilliant).