Bill Murray

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“I Love The Soup Cans”

October 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

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To celebrate the 1975 film release of Tommy, a gigantic underground party for 1,000 guests was given at closed-down, cleaned-up New York City subway stop. Bill Murray, an unknown then, managed to sneak in and said the dumbest fucking thing to Andy Warhol.

The party was described by gossip columnist Earl Wilson, who was of such a different era that his title for a time was “Saloon Editor“:

New York, N.Y. — A midnight supper dance in the subway was one of the great evenings of the generation. Though it was a promotion for the film, Tommy, everyone had something to say, such as “Does this party stop at 14th St.?”

“What time do we get mugged?” asked one party guest, Fred Robbins.

“You know what I miss–the graffiti,” declared Milton Goldman the agent because the subway stop’s walls had been washed down scrupulously before the party.

About 900 lo 1,000 people were dancing, eating and drinking after the big opening at the Ziegfeld. “How many tokens is this?” I asked. About $50,000 worth, I was told. The film company paid for the 50 to 100 extra security cops.

“I met one of my husbands in the subway and never went back,” actress Sylvia Miles said.

Ann-Margret and Elton John were of course the ones being protected. They danced together. I tried to cut in. Nobody paid me any mind, Elton John said his real name is Reginald Dwight and he pinched Elton from a musician buddy.

Angela Lansbury paid tribute to the food, said she had joy that was “excruciating,” only regretted that she had to walk through horse manure from the police horses to get from the theater lo the subway station.

They were still at it at 2. “This is like the subway’s 5 o’clock rush hour,” Tommy De Maio said. It was probably true that there were people there who’d never been in a subway and actually wondered what it was like down there.•

From Murray’s new Reddit Ask Me Anything:

Question:

What was the best party you’ve ever crashed?

Bill Murray:

Well, we crashed a famous party called the subway party to celebrate the premiere of Tommy, in the 70s. It was Gilda Radner, Belushi, Harold Ramis, Joe Flaherty, Brian Doyle Murray, and we were all plus 1, probably. It was biggest party ever in NYC at the time. You couldn’t get into this party. It was an inner circle thing. It was at an enclosed subway stop, it was a roar. It was a scream. If you made an airport movie with everyone on the plane is a celebrity, it was like that times 10. We were doing a show in the restaurant cabaret, the guys catering were the same guys who gave us left over french fries, we went into the backdoor to the subway with everyone. Everyone saying hi, hello. And we felt like we didn’t belong at all. It was so fantastic. I have compassion when people say dumb stuff to me. I said to Andy Warhol “I love the soup cans” and he looked at me like “You don’t belong here.” What a time that was.•

eltonann

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‘There’s A Pride In What I Do That Other People Share Because I’m Local”

February 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Videos | Permalink

On the heels of Sid Caesar dying, another comedy legend, Harold Ramis, has passed away. He died at the relatively young age of 69 from a rare autoimmune disease. The greatest comedy screenwriter of his era, Ramis was an SCTV alumnus who penned Animal House, Groundhog Day (which he also directed), Caddyshack (directed this one, too), Ghostbusters, Stripes, Analyze This and Meatballs, among others. Hollywood comedy from the late ’70s forward poured from his pen, although he always considered himself a Chicago guy and moved back to the Second City in his 60s.

My first thought when I head about Ramis’ passing was that I hope he and Bill Murray, his great collaborator from whom he was sadly estranged, had made amends. But that’s an unfair demand we put on famous people that we don’t put on ourselves. I think of people who were important to me at one point who I’m estranged from, and no one makes a big fuss about that. Changing and growing–and growing away, sometimes–is a natural part of life. Death makes us wish it wasn’t true, but it is.

The opening of Ramis’ obituary in his hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune:

“Harold Ramis was one of Hollywood’s most successful comedy filmmakers when he moved his family from Los Angeles back to the Chicago area in 1996. His career was still thriving, with Groundhog Day acquiring almost instant classic status upon its 1993 release and 1984’s Ghostbusters ranking among the highest-grossing comedies of all time, but the writer-director wanted to return to the city where he’d launched his career as a Second City performer.

‘There’s a pride in what I do that other people share because I’m local, which in L.A. is meaningless; no one’s local,’ Ramis said upon the launch of the first movie he directed after his move, the 1999 mobster-in-therapy comedy Analyze This, another hit. ‘It’s a good thing. I feel like I represent the city in a certain way.’

Ramis, a longtime North Shore resident, was surrounded by family when he died at 12:53 a.m. from complications of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a rare disease that involves swelling of the blood vessels, his wife Erica Mann Ramis said.

He was 69. Ramis’ serious health struggles began in May 2010 with an infection that led to complications related to the autoimmune disease, his wife said. Ramis had to relearn to walk but suffered a relapse of the vasculitis in late 2011, said Laurel Ward, vice president of development at Ramis’ Ocean Pictures production company.”

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Ramis with David Letterman in 1983:

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“Murray Acts As A Kind Of Father Figure To The Saturday Night Live Alumni”

February 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Bill Murray’s interview with Charlie Rose a couple days ago was a nice complement to his recent Ask Me Anything. I thought the most interesting part was when he explained to the host how he caught “Oscar fever” at the time of Lost in Translation. Murray, of all people, being disappointed in not winning an Oscar was a disappointment in itself, so it’s great he has more perspective now.

The opening of “The Rumpled Anarchy of Bill Murray,” a 1988 New York Times Magazine article by Timothy White, which misunderstood the comic’s cerebral nature for a Zen-like one, and opens with the first-ever reunion of SNL alumni:

“AS HOLLYWOOD parties go, the one in full swing this past spring in a handsome, Georgian Revival home off Sunset Boulevard was an anomaly.

No agents circulated, no studio executives haunted the hallways. The food was lasagna and fried chicken; the beverages, Mexican beer and bottled seltzer – with the seltzer proving the more popular. Instead of dizzying references to ‘gross points,’ ‘back-end deals,’ scripts ‘in turnaround’ and multimillion-dollar movie deals, the talk concerned the fortunes of Chicago sports teams and New York rock bands, and the only ‘creative products’ under scrutiny were baby pictures.

If any aspect of ‘the industry’ was being bantered about, it was the return to the employment ranks of the party’s co-host, Bill Murray, who had, earlier that day, finished filming for Scrooged – an outlandish adaptation of the Dickens Christmas classic that will be released on Wednesday. Coincidentally, three other film comedies featuring other former Saturday Night Live regulars were then nearing completion: Coming to America, starring Eddie Murphy; Caddyshack II, starring Chevy Chase, and My Stepmother Is an Alien, starring Dan Aykroyd. To celebrate this serendipitous event, Murray and Peter Aykroyd, an actor-composer who is Dan’s younger brother, had decided on this first-time-ever gathering of Saturday Night Live alumni.

A picture of genial abandon in rumpled khakis, football jersey and sneakers, Murray was urging Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman and Chevy Chase to drop their ‘reserves of cool’ on the dance floor and ‘get down!’ Murray’s warmth is disarming. Chase, for instance, once considered Murray a rival, and the feeling was mutual. Murray was hired at Saturday Night Live in January 1977, just five weeks after Chase left for a movie career. The pressure Murray felt in trying to supplant his predecessor flared into backstage fisticuffs when Chase returned as a guest host for the third season of Saturday Night Live. Now, the two are thoroughly at ease with each other. Even Eddie Murphy, a Saturday Night Live latecomer whose box-office magnetism eclipses that of most of his associates, is meek in Murray’s presence.

Bill Murray is considered by his colleagues to be a man who has made peace with any private demons he might have had, someone who has brought his personal life and his career into enviable concord. Slightly disheveled and projecting what Richard Donner, the director of Scrooged, calls ‘a woolly Zen wisdom,’ Murray acts as a kind of father figure to the Saturday Night Live alumni.”

 

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“Albert Einstein Was A Pretty Cool Guy”

January 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In order to promote The Monuments Men, which has received a coveted February release date, Bill Murray, a complicated man, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

If you could go back in time and have a conversation with one person, who would it be and why?

Bill Murray:

That’s a grand question, golly.

I kind of like scientists, in a funny way. Albert Einstein was a pretty cool guy. The thing about Einstein was that he was a theoretical physicist, so they were all theories. He was just a smart guy. I’m kind of interested in genetics though. I think I would have liked to have met Gregor Mendel.

Because he was a monk who just sort of figured this stuff out on his own. That’s a higher mind, that’s a mind that’s connected. They have a vision, and they just sort of see it because they are so connected intellectually and mechanically and spiritually, they can access a higher mind. Mendel was a guy so long ago that I don’t necessarily know very much about him, but I know that Einstein did his work in the mountains in Switzerland. I think the altitude had an effect on the way they spoke and thought.

But I would like to know about Mendel, because i remember going to the Philippines and thinking ‘this is like Mendel’s garden’ because it had been invaded by so many different countries over the years, and you could see the children shared the genetic traits of all their invaders over the years, and it made for this beautiful varietal garden.”

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Question:

Do you still talk to your deaf/mute assistant? If so, does he pretend like he can understand what you’re saying?

Bill Murray:

Well, we didn’t part well. I don’t communicate with her, she was a she. I was sort of ambitious thinking that I could hire someone that had the intelligence to do a job but didn’t have necessarily speech or couldn’t quite hear or spoke in sign language. She was a bright person and witty but she had never been away from her home before and even though I tried to accommodate more than I understood when I first hired her, she was very young in her emotional self and the emotional component of being away from her home was lacking. I tried my best, but I was working all day. She was lovely and very smart, but there’s a lot of frustration when you meet people who can’t speak well. Being completely disabled in that area causes a great amount of frustration, and this was going back 30 years or so before ether were the educational components that there are today. It didn’t go particularly well for me, but for a few weeks she really was a light and had a real spirit to her. She was like one of your own kids that never had a job, and then they get a job and realize that certain things are expected, and you can’t react to everything you don’t like or care about. So the first time you have a job and someone says ‘you have to do this’ – it was more complicated than she imagined. We were both optimistic, but it was harder than either of us expected to make it work.

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Bill Murray:

Someone asked “what movie was the most fun to act in” and deleted their comment, so here goes:

Well, I did a film with Jim Jarmusch called Broken Flowers, but I really enjoyed that movie. I enjoyed the script that he wrote. He asked me if I could do a movie, and I said ‘I gotta stay home, but if you make a movie that i could shoot within one hour of my house, I’ll do it.’

So he found those locations. And I did the movie.

And when it was done, I thought “this movie is so good, I thought I should stop.” I didn’t think I could do any better than Broken Flowers, it’s a film that is completely realized, and beautiful, and I thought I had done all I could do to it as an actor. And then 6-7 months later someone asked me to work again, so I worked again, but for a few months I thought I couldn’t do any better than that.

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Question:

What do you think of the current SNL cast?

Bill Murray:

They’re good. I don’t know them as well as I knew the previous one. But i really feel like the previous cast, that was the best group since the original group. They were my favorite group. Some really talented people that were all comedians of some kind or another. You think about Dana Carvey, Will, Hartman, all these wonderful funny guys. But the last group with Kristen Wiig and those characters, they were a bunch of actors and their stuff was just different. It’s all about the writing, the writing is such a challenge and you are trying to write backwards to fit 90 minutes between dress rehearsal and the airing. And sometimes the writers don’t get the whole thing figured out, it’s not like a play where you can rehearse it several times. So good actors – and those were really good actors, and there are some great actors in this current group as well I might add – they seem to be able to solve writing problems, improvisational actors, can solve them on their feet. They can solve it during the performance, and make a scene work. It’s not like we were improvising when we made the shows, but you could feel ways to make things better. And when you get into the third dimension, as opposed to the printed page, you can see ways to solve things and write things live that other sorts of professionals don’t necessarily have. And that’s why I like that previous group. So this group, there are definitely some actors in this group, I see them working in the same way and making scenes go. They really roll very nicely, they have great momentum, and it seems like they are calm in the moment.

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Question:

How do you feel about recreational marijuana?

Bill Murray:

Well that’s a large question, isn’t it? Because you’re talking about recreation, which everyone is in favor of. You are also talking about something that has been illegal for so many years, and marijuana is responsible for such a large part of the prison population, for the crime of self-medication. And it takes millions and billions of dollars by incarcerating people for this crime against oneself as best can be determined. People are realizing that the war on drugs is a failure, that the amount of money spent, you could have bought all the drugs with that much money rather than create this army of people and incarcerated people. I think the terror of marijuana was probably overstated. I don’t think people are really concerned about it the way they once were. Now that we have crack and crystal and whatnot, people don’t even think about marijuana anymore, it’s like someone watching too many videogames in comparison. The fact that states are passing laws allowing it means that its threat has been over-exaggerated. Psychologists recommend smoking marijuana rather than drinking if you are in a stressful situation. These are ancient remedies, alcohol and smoking, and they only started passing laws against them 100 years ago.

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Question:

What was the oddest experience you had in Japan?

Bill Murray:

The oddest… well, I was eating at a sushi bar. I would go to sushi bars with a book I had called “Making out in Japanese.” it was a small paperback book, with questions like “can we get into the back seal?” “do your parents know about me?” “do you have a curfew?”

And I would say to the sushi chef ‘Do you have a curfew? Do your parents know about us? And can we get into the back seat?’

And I would always have a lot of fun with that, but that one particular day, he said “would you like some fresh eel?” and I said “yes I would.” so he came back with a fresh eel, a live eel, and then he walked back behind a screen and came back in 10 seconds with a no-longer-alive eel. It was the freshest thing I had ever eaten in my life. It was such a funny moment to see something that was alive that no longer was alive, that was my food, in 30 seconds.•

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Bill Simmons’ Funniest Person Alive List

July 24, 2010 in Excerpts | Permalink

Dane Cook: I didn't make the list, did I? (Image by Lindsey8417.)

I just read Bill Simmons’ latest Mailbag on ESPN, and he veers off into one of his patented brilliant-idiot tangents about comedy. The sports and pop culture enthusiast offers up a year-by-year list, starting in 1975, of the Funniest Person Alive. The caveat is that he only gives the title to comics who have broken through to the mainstream rather than cult favorites (e.g. Bill Hicks, Mitch Hedberg, etc.). You can have a look at the whole list here (scroll down a little more than halfway in the column to find it). An excerpt of 1975-1985:

“1975: Richard Pryor

Best stand-up comedian alive (and the most respected). Also crushed his only SNL hosting gig ever with its first legitimately great show and water cooler sketch.

1976: Chevy Chase

SNL‘s first breakout star as it became a national phenomenon. He also made the worst move in Funniest Guy history by leaving the show as he was wrapping up his Funniest Guy season. Even The Decision was a better idea.

1977-78: John Belushi

Replaced Chase as SNL‘s meal ticket in ’77, then had the single best year in Funny Guy History a year later: starred on SNL (in its biggest year ever, when audiences climbed to more than 30 million per episode); starred in Animal House (the No. 1 comedy of 1978 and a first-ballot Hall of Famer); had the No. 1 album (the Blues Brothers’ first album). No. 1 in TV, movies and music at the same time? I’m almost positive this will never happen again. And also, if you put all the funniest people ever at the funniest points of their lives in one room, I think he’d be the alpha dog thanks to force of personality. So there’s that.

1979: Robin Williams, Steve Martin (tie)

Mork and Mindy plus a big stand-up career for Williams; The Jerk plus a best-selling comedy album plus ‘official best SNL host ever’ status for Martin.

Rodney Dangerfield: If you give me respect, that ruins my act, genius. (Image by Jim Accordino.)

1980: Rodney Dangerfield

His breakout year with Caddyshack, killer stand-up, killer Carson appearances, a Grammy-winning comedy album, even a Rolling Stone cover. Our oldest winner.

1981: Bill Murray

Carried Stripes one year after Caddyshack. Tough year for comedy with cocaine was ruining nearly everybody at this point.

1982-84: Eddie Murphy

The best three-year run anyone has had. Like Bird’s three straight MVPs. And by the way, Beverly Hills Cop is still the No. 1 comedy of all time if you use adjusted gross numbers.

(Random note: Sam Kinison’s 1984 spot on Dangerfield’s Young Comedians special has to be commemorated in some way. At the time, it was the funniest six minutes that had ever happened, and it could have single-handedly won him the title in almost any other year. It’s also the hardest I have ever laughed without drugs being involved. Sadly, I can’t link to it because of the language and because it crosses about 35 lines of decency. But it’s easily found, if you catch my drift.)

1985-86: David Letterman

Went from ‘cult hero’ to ‘established mainstream star,’ ushered in the Ironic Comedy Era, pushed the comedy envelope as far as it could go, and if you want to dig deeper, supplanted Carson as the den father for that generation of up-and-comers and new superstars (Murphy, Leno, Seinfeld, Michael Keaton, Tom Hanks, Howard Stern, etc.) … and, on a personal note, had a bigger influence on me than anyone other than my parents. One of two people I could never meet because I would crumble like a crumb cake. (You can guess the other.)”

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