Ghostbusters

1984 was many things to many people, but one thing that was darn near universal to everyone alive at the time (pretty much anywhere in the world) was that it was the summer of Ghostbusters. I was just about thirteen when this movie came out, and I looked forward to its release in a way I never had with a non-Star Wars film before. Ever since the clever newspaper ad campaign in the movie section that just showed the iconic logo with the words "Coming Soon,” or maybe it was the tagline, “Coming Soon to Save the World," I was excited. What was this film? Maybe I knew something about it, as production on Ghostbusters had hardly been a secret. The New York-set picture was mostly shot in LA, like most movies, but the full cast and crew had spent many weeks shooting locations in Manhattan where they had practically shut down the entire city during multiple rush hours. That made national news, but I wasn’t reading the news when I was thirteen; I didn’t even watch Entertainment Tonight. Perhaps word of mouth from my hipper friends filtered its way down to me. I was certainly aware of Saturday Night Live; I had been watching that show off and on since 1978 when my family spent a late night in an airport hotel and saw the Christopher Lee/Meat Loaf episode, which featured horror movie spoofs like The Island of Lost Luggage and The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave. 

Ghostbusters was certainly one of the most anticipated hits of 1984. But while it might not have been a big surprise that a comedy starring Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd—the OG-SNL alums who had made the most successful jumps to the big screen—would be a hit, no one was prepared for such unprecedented run-away international success. For one thing, expensive supernatural comedies had traditionally performed badly at the box office. This story of three eccentric parapsychologists who start a business catching ghosts after getting fired from their academic positions at Columbia University was a quintessentially costly supernatural comedy featuring movie stars who commanded high salaries and the type of untried special effects that lead to ballooning budgets. One of the reasons films that blended fantasy and comedy faired so poorly in the 1950s through the early ‘80s was that the requirements of practical effects inhibited the comedic timing of performers, preventing audiences who just wanted to laugh from fully engaging. Such was not the case with Ghostbusters. The humor seems to emerge as organically from the comical actors reacting to unseen special effects as they would if they were just bouncing off each other. The film is a prime example of an ‘80s movie that turned out infinitely better than anyone, including its makers, thought possible. 

Ghostbusters combines a fantastic premise with comedic stars at the peak of their powers, a distinctive, mature ingenue about to explode into one of the biggest female actresses of the decade, a layered, elegantly realized screenplay, state-of-the-art special effects, fantastic music, and A-level production values. The film would be embraced by critics, audiences, and cultures worldwide, rapidly overtaking Tootsie to become the highest-grossing comedy of all time. It finished up as 1984’s second biggest hit (following Beverly Hills Cop) but moved back to #1 when it was reissued in 1985.

The project was the brainchild of Dan Aykroyd, who was obsessed with the paranormal (and a million other things) and whose great-grandfather was an Edwardian spiritualist. His Asperger’s mind retained all kinds of information and details about the minutia of paranormal research and history. He’d also grown up watching horror comedies of the 1940s like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Hold That Ghost, and, most significantly, The Ghost Breakers starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard. He hit upon the idea of updating those old 1940s ghost comedies for the modern era. Aykroyd wrote a mammoth script for himself and John Belushi to star in, possibly with rising SNL star Eddie Murphy as the third member of the team. The comic conceit was simple: there’s a type of pest control job called a Ghostbuster that people call when they have an infestation of spooks, specters, or ghosts. A Ghostbuster was to be a skilled blue-collar professional like an exterminator, plumber, or fireman. It was a fun concept, but in typical Aykroyd fashion, he had way too many ideas crammed into one script. His screenplay was hundreds of pages long and featured rival crews of Ghostbusters who engaged in intergalactic time-traveling to all kinds of obscure historical periods.

The mid-‘80s was also the era of the super-agent, whose lucrative packaging deals for their clients had almost eclipsed the power of the studio executive. Michael Ovitz, co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, and Bernie Brillstein, the legendary talent manager of Aykroyd, Belushi, Gilda Radner, Martin Short, Lorne Michaels, and Jim Henson, both read Aykroyd's script and loved it but said it would cost $200M (a sum that was not only outrageous but impossible in 1984). When Belushi died, Ovitz thought about a package with Aykroyd and Bill Murray and sent the script to Ivan Reitman, director of the Murray hits Meatballs and Stripes. It was Reitman who saw the key to making Aykroyd's unwieldy tome into a shootable film. He suggested the story be structured as a simple “going into business” comedy set entirely in present-day New York so that the supernatural elements would feel more unusual. He suggested Stripes co-writer/co-star Harold Ramis come in to rewrite the project into something shootable, and, in return, Ramis could play the third Ghostbuster. Ramis based his role on someone he saw on the front page of an architectural journal wearing a three-piece tweed suit, wire-rim glasses, and excited, thick hair that stood up on top of his head. One of Aykroyd's great strengths is that he’s an eager, open collaborator, and he had no objection to jettisoning 75% of what he’d written, especially since some of the funniest stuff, like New York getting attacked by a giant Marshmallow Man, would stay in this new, simplified vision of the movie. 

Still, Ghostbusters went into production with a script and production schedule far less structured than the finished film would turn out. The call sheet had Murray and Aykroyd playing multiple roles, the way Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall would in Coming to America. There was a subplot in which Aykroyd’s character becomes romantically involved with a woman who has been dead for a hundred years. This was another of Aykroyd’s many hat tips to paranormal explorers, several of whom had reported having sexual encounters with ghosts. But the lengthy sequence in which Aykroyd and Ramis are on an assignment in an old fort where Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz, dressed up in an officer's uniform in a historically persevered bedroom, is visited by a beautiful spirit who goes down on him, was fortunately excised from the film. That ghost-blowjob scene was filmed and edited into the picture's first cut, as were scenes with Murray and Aykroyd playing homeless men who comment on the narrative like a Greek chorus. The elaborate and expensive visual effects of the ghost seduction were fully produced, so Reitman turned the material into a dream sequence during the montage that covered the rise of the Ghostbusters' popularity. It's hard to imagine in the post-Judd Apatow era, in which comedy directors release sloppy, semi-improvised comedies that run more than two hours, but these filmmakers realized how much funnier their movie played the more they stripped it of the type of shtick and goofy set-pieces that characterized their earlier film work. The type of scenes that are the most memorable in a movie like Caddyshack ended up on the cutting room floor of Ghostbusters because the story and characters were so strong they didn’t need to indulge in zany antics to distract from the fact that there wasn’t much of a story. Ghostbusters has a great story.

Columbia Pictures was wary of the project because of its high cost. There was an unwritten rule in the 1980s that studio comedies should never cost more than $15M because there was a ceiling as to how much any comedy would make internationally. Columbia would only green-light Reitman’s ballpark budget of $25M if the film could be ready for release in June of 1984—thirteen months from when everyone signed on. Aykroyd had a home on Martha’s Vineyard and rented houses in his neighborhood for Ramis, Reitman, and their families, fully stocking the fridges and bars. The three collaborators settled in for a few summer weeks of day and night rewrite sessions to trim Aykroyd's epic into a filmable shooting script. These are the kind of behind-the-scenes stories I love almost as much as the movies they are about. I can picture how much fun it must have been for these talented folks, knowing they had a go-project with a significant budget and knowing exactly who they were crafting the characters around, spending weeks writing together in such an ideal setting as Martha’s Vineyard back when it was still the secluded island it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s. They had Aykroyd’s concept and several set pieces. They had Reitman’s overriding  “going-into-business” narrative focus, and Ramis came up with an easy way of organizing and differentiating the three leads: in the Ghostbusters trio, he would be the brains, Dan the heart, and Bill the mouth. Since Murray never fully committed to anything until the last minute, they made sure to give his character all the best lines so he wouldn't bag out at the last minute. 

For Dana Barret, the non-believer client whose ghost problem incites the supernatural action, they needed someone who would be a match for Murray, as she would also be his ostensible love interest. Sigourney Weaver was an inspired choice. The Yale Drama School grad had done plenty of comedy in her theater days, but it was highbrow, cerebral stuff by the likes of Christopher Durang. She’d only done two movies, Alien and The Year of Living Dangerously, neither of which showcased her comedic chops. But she impressed Reitman when she auditioned, proving she could be just as funny and game as the SNL/Second City/National Lampoon vets she’d be co-starring with. Bill Murray is a giant man, and his scenes of unusual, aggressive flirtation in movies like Meatballs and Stripes, though largely considered endearing at the time, can come off a little disturbing with petite co-stars like Kate Lynch and P.J. Soles. But the statuesque, classically trained,  6’2” Weaver feels like more than a match for Murray. Hell, after standing her ground with the Alien from Alien, the nutty Irish improviser was a piece of cake.

Another stroke of luck was that John Candy turned down the role of Lewis Tully. Lewis is a key supporting character—Dana Barret’s neighbor in the Manhattan apartment building that becomes the epicenter of spiritual turmoil and the gateway to the potential apocalypse the Ghostbusters must prevent. Candy's star was on the rise, and he wanted to start playing leads. He read the script and came in with a concept for the character that was all wrong for the movie. He wanted to play Lewis as a broad caricature of a German with huge pet German Shepards, which would conflict with the dog motif Akroyd has established in even the earliest drafts of the screenplay. Seeing that he would be unable to do what he wanted in the picture, Candy passed and made his big splash in Splash, which came out two months before Ghostbusters. Candy’s then less famous SCTV compatriot, Rick Moranis, thought his buddy was crazy to turn down such a great role and told Reitman he’d love to do the part. Moranis’ concept for Lewis, a nerdy accountant with a crush on Dana, was just as broad as what Candy wanted to do, but it fit so much better into the screenplay that was now gelling into something vastly superior to the loose outlines that served as scripts for so many of the projects these actors and filmmakers had done in the past. In addition to being the total opposite of Murray—small, skinny, lacking in verbal charisma—Moranis was a totally different type of nerd than Ramis’ Egon Spengler. Aykroyd’s concept for the third act involved Dana’s body being taken over by a demigod named Zuul, a servant to Gozer, the god of destruction. But the shapeshifting Gozer can only reenter our Earthly domain when Zuul, the Gatekeeper, hooks up with another entity, Vinz Clortho, the Keymaster. Having Vinz possess the nebbishy neighbor Lewis was funny on a purely visual level, as Moranis is about half of Weaver’s size and just about as unsexy as she is alluring.  

Rounding out the cast was Ernie Hudson, an actor whose biggest credit to date was as the heroic space soldier in the deservedly forgotten 3D sci-fi adventure Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone with Peter Strauss, Molly Ringwald, and Michael Ironside. Hudson plays Winston Zeddemore, the only member of the Ghostbusters team with no prior awareness or belief in the paranormal; he’s just a guy looking for a steady paycheck. He’s interviewed for the job by the company's only other employee—the unflappable receptionist Janine, played by the wonderful Annie Potts, who made her film debut alongside Mark Hamill in his first picture, Corvette Summer. For the film’s primary, non-supernatural antagonist, Ramis created the role of Walter Peck, a district inspector for the Environmental Protection Agency who uses his tiny amount of official city power to investigate the questionable business practices and environmental hazards of the Ghostbusters' fly-by-night operation. Peck is played by the hilarious William Atherton, who starred in Steven Spielberg’s first feature, The Sugarland Express, as Goldie Hawn’s sympathetic incarcerated husband and went on to become a go-to character actor for obstreperous, power-hungry little men in ‘80s pictures like Real Genius and Die Hard.

Ghostbusters is basically another slobs-vs-snobs comedy along the lines of Animal House, Caddyshack, and Stripes, but everyone involved (except Bill Murray) took the job far more seriously than they had any prior picture. There is an attention to detail and cinematic storytelling that’s simply not present in any of the previous movies of this ilk. The way New York City is utilized is wonderful. The film was made during the city’s transition from the near-bankrupt, forgotten urban dystopia known as much for crime, violence, sanitation strikes, teacher walkouts, and a crippling blackout as for being the epicenter of hip-style, high art, and Punk, New Wave, and Hip Hop, into the sanitized wealthy playground of Wall Street masters of the universe and Upper West Side socialites. This was the period between the “fun city” of Mayor John Lindsay and the “no-fun-city" of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. No longer the grimy New York of Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Shaft, and Saturday Night Fever; it was now the gritty New York of After Hours, Desperately Seeking Susan, Beat Street, and Moonstruck. Ghostbusters was made in the ‘80s New York of directors like Jonathan Demme and Woody Allen, not the ‘70s New York of Paul Schrader and Sydney Lumet. The film walks a fine line between romanticizing the city and complaining about what an inconvenient, corrupt shithole it is. The recurring motif of New York's many giant statues, like the great stone lions outside the main branch of the public library in the opening shot, demonstrates how much actual thought went into the mise en scene of this goofy comedy. The urban statuary represents something that seems eternal in a city that is constantly reinventing itself. 

The filmmakers clearly knew they were making something special, as did Columbia Pictures. The budget enabled A-list talent behind the scenes like cinematographer László Kovács, the great Hungarian-American cameraman who had been a key member of the New Hollywood wave of the 1970s, lensing such classics as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Paper Moon, New York, New York, and Inside Moves. Richard Edlund, the visual effects pioneer, inventor, and founding member of Industrial Light & Magic, was hired to oversee the complex special effects. Edlund had been part of the original team put together by John Dykstra to create the space shots for Star Wars, and the even-tempered artist had gone on to lead the FX teams on The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Poltergeist. Still, the challenge of Ghostbusters was just as formidable as any of those groundbreaking films. In part because Edlund understood that as critical as the FX were to the picture's success, they could never come at the expense of the humor. This was to be a comedy, first and foremost. Much of the special effects had to occur in broad daylight, in practical New York City locations, and in ways that didn’t inhibit the timing or improvisatory nature of the actors. These circumstances were far less forgiving than those found in films like Raiders or Return of the Jedi. Edlund was also working against the clock and had to deliver final shots that were essentially tests, but for which there was no time to perfect and redo. As a result, not every special effect in Ghostbusters looks great, but it just doesn’t matter. The visuals are scary when they’re meant to be scary and funny when they’re meant to be funny. 

The combination of Kovács and Edlund’s talents makes Ghostbusters one of the best-looking comedies of its era (or any era). The recent remakes and reboots should be ashamed of how ugly and cheesy they look despite their effects being more “consistent.” Edlund's other big film of 1984 was his spectacular work recreating the look of much of what Stanley Kubrick achieved in 2001: A Space Odyssey on a much tighter budget and timetable for Peter Hymes' 2010: The Year We Make Contact. And Edlund would perfect many of the techniques he developed for Ghostbusters on his next project, Tom Holland’s great homage to classic vampire movies, Fright Night. Indeed, the monstrous woman with a huge mouth full of teeth that graces the poster of Fright Night was a character created for Ghostbusters that Reitman deemed far too scary for the comedy, but dang, she works beautifully in Holland’s film.

The legendary Elmer Bernstein, known for such classics as The Ten Commandments, Sweet Smell of Success, The Magnificent Seven, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Great Escape, had been scoring comedies ever since director John Landis asked him to write music for Animal House and treat it as if it were a serious film. The success of the Animal House score led to an industry-wide rethinking of the goofy or flinty music typical of Hollywood comedies up to the point, and Bernstein went on to do the iconic soundtracks for Meatballs, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Stripes, and Trading Places. For Ghostbusters, Bernstein went against the straight aesthetic he brought to all those prior comedies and composed much more light, playful, and comedic music. He also devised effectively chilling stings, motifs, and melodies for the scenes of supernatural events—which are credited as “scary music.” Reitman also capitalized on the ‘80s trend of putting pop songs into a film to give it a kick as a chart-topping soundtrack. Many scenes in Ghostbusters are set to original songs commissioned for the film. One particularly great cue is the bridge in the song “Magic” by Mick Smiley, which plays under the sequence in which all the ghosts trapped by the Ghostbusters are released when Walter Peck shuts down the protection gird at the Ghostbuster’s fire station headquarters. The synthy, percussive instrumental break works amazingly well with the Richard Edlund effects shots of the liberated spirits taking over Manhattan while Moranis and Weaver's possessed characters prepare for the coming of Gozer. other memorable tracks include "Cleanin' Up The Town,” performed by The BusBoys, and "Savin' the Day,” performed by Alessi Brothers, which each provide ideal underscoring at key points in the picture. 

Of course, the main song on the Ghostbusters soundtrack was the title track written and performed by Ray Parker Jr. This tune, featuring the oft-repeated refrains of “Who ya Gonna Call,” taken from one of Murray's lines of dialogue and “I ain’t ‘fraid a no ghost,” which was Parker’s invention, became an interminable ear-worm during the entire summer of 1984. This is why I say the film was inescapable that year, regardless of what part of the world you lived in or if you’d even seen the movie. The song, the logo, and the mania were a worldwide phenomenon. The story behind “Ghostbusters” is also amusing in that it was one of the only unpleasant aspects of the production, and the unpleasantness was pretty minor. Reitman wanted Huey Lewis and the News to write a title song, as their hit "I Want a New Drug” was the number one chart-topper as the film was being made. Reitman and editor Sheldon Kahn used that song as temp music for the montage, which eventually used “Cleanin' up the Town,” and wanted to hire the band to write a tune with the same tempo. Lewis was not interested, and Reitman began looking for alternative songwriters but wasn’t happy with anything they came up with. At a very late hour, he was introduced to Ray Parker, Jr. and asked him to write something similar in tempo and upbeat catchiness to "I Want a New Drug.” Parker obliged, dashing off the “Ghostbusters” theme and recording it in a couple of days. 

The silly number was so perfect that the filmmakers used it in several places in the picture, and it became a massive radio hit. Huey Lewis and the News sued Parker and Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement, accusing them of “stealing” the fundamentals of their song. Despite the fact that “Ghostbusters" is less similar to "I Want a New Drug” than hundreds of pop songs that sound like each other but are considered entirely original compositions, they had a strong case with all the documentation of the producers courting of Lewis to score the film, the use of their song as a temp track, and way Parker came to compose the tune. Columbia and Parker settled with The News out of court for an undisclosed amount of money on the condition that the band not publicize the settlement or speak of the case. However, decades later, when VH1 profiled Huey Lewis and the News for their Behind the Music series in 2001, Huey and other band members told the story. Unlike literally every other band in the history of VH1’s Behind the Music, there were no hard times for Huey Lewis and the News. The band didn’t fit the show’s formula of coming together, scoring their first hit, achieving fame and notoriety, the downward spiral of egos, drugs, and the ravages of celebrity tearing everything apart, and the inevitable comeback. Huey Lewis and the News had no dark side; there were no “bad years” for that band. They weren’t as famous as they had once been by the time of their Behind the Music, but they never broke up and were still enjoying a great ride as a touring band. The only “dark chapter” in the life of Huey Lewis and the News, until Huey lost his ability to sing post-COVID, was this Ghostbusters lawsuit, so they told that story in detail to VH1, figuring time had gone by and it was water under the bridge. However, in doing so, they violated the explicit conditions of the settlement, and Parker sued them for breach of contract, winning back the money he’d lost in the first place!

Like many popular ‘80s pictures, Ghostbusters was so successful it spawned a franchise featuring a sequel, an animated series, video games, an all-female remake, and a legasequel reboot. But, like its ’84 contemporaries Romancing the Stone, Beverly Hills Cop, and The Terminator, it was a perfect little gem of a picture that should never have been expanded into a series or franchise. The temptation was so great to capitalize, not only on the financial windfall of Ghostbusters but also on the fun everyone had making it, that the entire cast and production team returned five years later for Ghostbusters II. That was a big deal, as Murray, Aykroyd, Reitman, and Ramis had all been courted to participate in the sequels made from every one of their previous hit films and, up to this point, had always refused. Ghostbusters II was not a disaster, either artistically, critically, or financially, but it's a lackluster film with bloated set pieces, hollow pop songs, an overcrowded cast, and a fairly dull plot. It does manage a number of decent laughs, looks, and feels like a semi-worthy follow-up, but it's sill just one of those sequels you watch wishing you were just rewatched the original again.

The 2016 remake made the smart choice to retell the story in a fresh way with an all-female cast of new, young SNL and SNL-adjacent comedians. Unfortunately, the reins were handed to the wildly overrated director of Unaccompanied Minors, Bridesmaids, and Spy, Paul Feig, who took a $144M budget and made a movie that looked like it was shot for the budget of a McDonald's commercial. After its shoddy trailer dropped, that film was viciously attacked by toxic fanboys who found the very concept of an all-female Ghostbusters repugnant and poured as much hostile negatively into the release as possible. The movie still made money, but it was an early and gross example of toxic internet culture. Those same virulent fans seemed to have no problem with Reitman’s son, Jason, rebooting the series in the 2020s, this time as a kiddy movie. One would think a little kids' remake would piss these guys off even more than an all-girl version. However, since most of these grown-men fans never advanced out of adolescence, and since all the surviving original Ghostbusters returned to play their original characters, the fanboys ate it up. They were even moved that the late Harold Ramis was brought back from the dead in a CGI deep-fake that went on well past the point of good taste.

Fortunately, Ghostbusters will always be remembered for the cinematic event it was in 1984 as much, or more than, as the progenitor of a questionable film franchise. The movie is a remarkable time capsule of New York at the end of the first Ed Koch administration and America at the end of the first Ronald Regan administration—a time when society was attempting to spruce itself up a little before selling its soul. It captures this era with a satirical bite mixed with a sense of wonder, coming at a time when a movie comedy about anti-authoritarian slackers could have a decent budget and a significant amount of polish and finest without undercutting its irreverence, and long before budgets ballooned out of control and lazy, slipshod filmed improv became the gold standard for “funny" pictures. Ghostbusters was and remains one of the greatest films of one of the greatest years for movies.