Cleanin' Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters (2019) Movie Script

1
[soft orchestral music]

[alarm buzzing]
[hissing]
[beeping and whirring]
[intense rock music]

- You can never tell
if a movie's
going to do well or not.
- We knew we had it;
it was a good idea.
But no one knew
we had a phenomenon.
- A love letter to our common
condition and to New York.
- Ivan decided to add
a hundred shots.
- The date that it's gonna open
is in, like, 3 1/2 weeks.
- You never know,
in this business,
how long something's going
to last
and whether it's just
going to me a trend, a fad,
or have some
enduring impact and, um,
as certainly as we see today,
it does.
[whooshing]
- You know, I had a kind of
feeling that it was unique.
- In America, something
very unexpected happened.
"Indiana Jones" was outstripped
at the box office
by a picture called
"Ghostbusters."
- It's all the more surprising
when you realize
that Steven Spielberg had
nothing at all to do with it.
- That kind of comedy, with
those kind of special effects.
- To quote "Variety" again,
"Gags and special effects
scare pic misses its mark."
Well, I certainly wouldn't
go along with that.
It hits its mark, all right,
and turned out to be the
biggest jackpot of the year.
- And that crew,
that was so hot at that time.
- Did you expect "Ghostbusters"
to be as popular as it was?
- Yes.
[audience laughs]
- When that came out,
suddenly I was famous.
- I think anybody would have
to be very arrogant and say,
"I'm gonna do more than
$200 million
when only five films
had done that previously."
- So it gives you some idea of
how major a phenomena it was
and then repeat it
in subsequent summers.
- This was a real movie.
- And no one had done a comedy
on that scale.
- I didn't even know
what a BAFTA award was.
- "Ghostbusters."
- I don't know about winning.
I didn't think
I was gonna win.
I'm sorry if I'm not as calm
as some of the other winners.
It always seems like it goes to
the other guy, you know?
- I think we fully believed
that we were gonna carve out
a little niche in film history.

- It all starts with
this gentleman.
Dr. Samuel Augustus Aykroyd,
my great-grandfather
who was a dentist
in Kingston, Ontario.
Great-grandfather Sam,
as well as being a dentist,
was a psychic researcher
in the tradition of
the British Psychical Society
and the American Society
of Psychical Research, and um,
he, throughout his life,
was interested in the survival
of the consciousness
in mediumship, channeling,
afterlife voices,
where the dead really are
living, in terms of a presence.
You could go to Lily Dale
near Buffalo New York
and my great-grandfather was
the reviewer
of all the psychic acts
that rolled through town,
whether it be a channeler,
a mediumship,
whether it be a precipitated
painter like the Bang sisters
or the Campbell brothers.
And every Sunday,
these big, black cars
would pull up
and men and women
all dressed up
would come just like Sunday
to church.
There was an impresario,
my great-grandfather,
there was a showman,
Mr. Ashurst,
who became the family medium.
He was a gifted medium--
really, really gifted.
He could speak in Chinese
and Hungarian
and he made trumpets
fly around the room.
So my great-grandfather
watched
and he wrote about them,
whether they were genuine,
hoaxes,
whether they were
appealing or not,
and we found a trunkful
of his letters.
So his letters, his journals
were always in the family
when I was growing up,
and after I made my living in
comedy, I thought, why not mix
the real world of psychic
research, using the real work
of Dr. Wohl
and the Maimonides Dream Lab
and Duke University's
Parapsychological Department,
and use what was
really going on
in the science in terms of
researching
whether there is survival
of the consciousness
and whether there are, in fact,
such things as materializations
and apparitions and, you know,
take that jargon
and that knowledge
and make a good, old fashioned
ghost comedy.
[dramatic music]

- I don't believe in ghosts.
[eerie music]
Or do I?
[music fanfare]
- The property
got the enthusiasm first
of Bernie Brillstein,
my agent, God rest his soul--
there's a voice I would like
to hear from the past.
[imitating Brillstein]
How ya doing, kid?
Hi, kid, hi, hi, hi!
[normal voice]
Also got the enthusiasm
of Michael Ovitz, the famous
agent who founded CAA.
Those two guys looked at this
and said, "This is, you know,
"we really have something here,
so let's package it
the right way and get
the right people involved."
- "Ghostbusters" started as
this sort of
very famous treatment
that was written by
Dan Aykroyd.
- I know Ivan from years--
he hired me as an announcer
on a television station
in the '70s
in Toronto, so I know him
for many years,
and the fact that Harold Ramis
had worked with him.
- The concept was so strong.
He had written it
in the early '80s
and it was set in 2012,
I think.
- It was a much
different kind of movie.
Danny always imagined
that John Belushi and he
being part of this
for a science fiction movie.
- Eddie Murphy, myself,
and John
were supposed to be
the original Ghostbusters.
- You know, it took place
in outer space,
sometime in the future.
- For a variety of
technical reasons,
there was a hole torn
in our reality envelope--
this is all in
a little prologue.
- We rip the fabric of our
dimension with the EMF waves.
That was the original premise
of the first movie,
that all of this electronica
around us is yielding a rift
in the interdimensional veil
between our dimension
and the next one.
- And the ghost energy that
flooded into New York City
giving rise to a new
profession, Ghostbusters.
- I was working with Ivan
and Danny Aykroyd sent over
a script, which was very long.
And my memory is that there
were a lot of Ghostbusters
and they were
sort of like plumbers.
- I can't believe I work for
a company called Ghostbusters.
- Sort of a blue collar job.
- And the team
in the movie was
just one of
many Ghostbuster units
and they thought of us
as like the Orkin men...
- To control your pests
Orkin is best
Call the Oslo the Orkin man
- To show up
in this marked truck
and exterminate
the ghosts and leave.
- Had the proton packs,
had a Marshmallow Man--
mind you, it was one of
50 large illusions.
- Which necessitated
the Ghostbusters travelling
interdimensionally
into another world,
and that other world
would be
entirely a world
of special effects.
Like, the whole
last third of the movie was
one huge special effect.
- This was sort of
this extravaganza
that he had concocted.
- Fighting ghosts
- Ghostbusters.
- Danny came to Needham
and they went to Art's Deli.
- I said to him, Dan, there's
a great idea here, but we--
you know, I really think
it should take place today,
you know,
in a contemporary time,
it should be in a real city,
on Earth, i.e. New York.
All this fantastic stuff
will be much more impressive
set against the reality
that we knew.
- But also it seemed like the
real comedy heart of the film
was in the juxtaposition
of these ghost janitors
taking the supernatural and
making it completely mundane
and setting it in a place
as grounded and gritty
as New York City.
- But that basic idea,
that wonderfully
brilliant idea, was there.
- Ivan had known me
since the Lampoon days.
Ivan said to Dan, "You know,
why don't we get Ramis?
"You guys can
rewrite the script
and he can play
one of the Ghostbusters."
And since John had passed away,
Dan had developed a friendship
with Bill Murray
starting way back when Bill and
I were in the Lampoon together.
- We said we gotta
get Murray in on this,
and we gotta give it to Murray,
we gotta give him the lead
and let him be the greatest
romantic lead that the world
has ever seen and he did do
that for us, he pulled it off.
- I was having a pretty
good time with the studios.
My first three movies were
"Animal House,"
"Meatballs" and "Stripes."
I called up the head of
Columbia Pictures
and I said, Frank,
I have this great idea
and it's gonna have Bill Murray
and Dan Aykroyd, it's called
"Ghostbusters," I want to bring
Harold Ramis in as a star
as well
and as a cowriter with Danny.
He said, "Well, come on in
and tell me about it,"
and literally a half hour
after this conversation began,
he said, "Well, how much
do you think it'll cost?"
And I had no idea
what it was going to cost
and I just picked
a very big number.
- I remember Ivan holding it up
and saying...
- I think we could do it
for about 30 million.
- He said, "You have $30
million, as long as you can
deliver it by June of 1984,"
and this was about May 1983
when this conversation
took place.
- We sort of dropped and said,
"Sure, yeah, sure."
- What we were facing suddenly
was here, in May of 1983,
was having to write
the screenplay,
basically find
an effects house
who could actually pull
the visual effects off
and cast it
and put it together,
and we had really zip,
we had to reconstruct
a script from scratch.
[typewriter clicking]
We went to Martha's Vineyard
together, Harold Ramis,
Dan Aykroyd and I,
and our respective families.
- Dan had a house on Martha's
Vineyard, he and John Belushi
when they'd gotten successful
each bought a house
on the Vineyard.
And driving up, when you hit
the edge of his property,
there's a military checkpoint.
I remember there was a barrier
that came down and it was
painted in military colors and
everything, and up in his house
he said, "Well, let's work
in the basement,"
which was painted camouflage,
the whole basement was camo.
- And so we would meet in the
basement every day from about
11:00 in the morning to about
7:00 or 8:00 at night,
and then go back
to our families
who were having
a great vacation.
- When you have a great idea,
when you really know
what you're doing
and you feel confident
about it and you're laughing
to yourself and it feels
really fresh--
I'm not saying these things
write themselves,
but there's just
a real easy flow to it.
So our first draft together
was written
in a relatively
short amount of time.
- And we just basically
pounded the script out
over a two week period.
- Very exciting and very
entertaining to play
in that area, as we did.
- It was so much fun and
it was so funny, but we had--
one of the first big changes,
which Ivan and I came to quite
independently
was that we wanted
the audience to experience
the journey from skepticism
to belief
because I'm a skeptic
and I thought,
well, if I were this character,
I'd need to be convinced
that these things were real,
and no one had any conception
yet of who those Ghostbusters
were because Dan's script
was very technical
and very abstract.
So if you'd read it
at the time,
you wouldn't see
much differentiation
or real specific
personality
among the Ghostbusters.
So the fact that they were kind
of really neutral was good
because it allowed us to put
our own character imprint
over each of them.
- You know, most scientists and
physicists from the '30s
and '40s and '50s, you know,
a lot of them are Germans
and Swiss and Spengler,
Stanz and Venkman seemed to be,
you know, us Swiss
and German Americans.
Americans, though, please,
absolutely, yeah,
new countrymen,
new countrymen.
- Ivan one day turned to me
and said,
"What if the Ghostbusters
were college professors?"
And I said, hey, I get that, I
used to teach at a university,
I understand what that would be
like, that's a great idea.
- So instead of making them
just janitors
or the guys who come
and get the termites out
of your basement,
we thought we'd make them
scientists.
- [bleep] off, man,
I'm a scientist.
- Bill's specialty
was kind of psychology
and Dan was really into
the ghost stuff.
I was a theoretical physicist,
and we'd been hoping to see
something real and it seemed
like a great way to start,
by seeing that first
real manifestation
and the way we experienced it
and then providing
practical explanations
and creating the business.
It looked like it was going
to be funny and beyond that,
it looked like it was going
to be really fun to do.
- I think we'll take it.
- Good.
- You know, I was just looking
for the very best people
that could deliver this movie
that was much bigger than
anything
I had done in the past.
- I was already working
for Ivan,
my first film
was "Heavy Metal,"
and he came to trust me
as a producer,
and I was teamed
with Joe Medjuck
and we made a good team,
focusing on different areas.
But most of my focus in
"Heavy Metal"
was design and animation.
- A trip beyond the future
to a universe
you've never seen before.
- By the time "Ghostbusters"
came around, because animation
and special effects
are often...
- And we actually as a result
began working
in special effects
while the guys were still
writing the script.
- Ivan was making a comedy
first, not an effects movie,
so getting the effects work
together was
difficult in this time period
because Ivan was promising it
in almost half the time that
anyone at that time
was spending
on a special effects movie.
We had never done a special
effects movie, and there was
no special effects house
in town who could take it on.
- What we did was we went
Richard Edlund who had been
at ILM, we knew he wanted
to set up his own company.
- I was in hospital,
getting a back surgery
after having just lost
a project with Ridley Scott
that he'd gone to England.
I got a call
from Don Shay first
and then Michael Gross
to do "Ghostbusters."
Within a day of that,
I'd gotten another call
from Peter Hyams
to do "2010."
- He already had
an Academy Award
and he already had the skills.
Two studios kicked in the cash
and built a studio,
including building some cameras
from scratch.
- So it was very funny;
whenever we were visiting
they would cover up
all the stuff on "2010."
- I'd worked for Richard
on "Poltergeist"
and then "Return of the Jedi."
When we worked on that film, he
had asked, you know, "I'm going
to start a company,
would you like to join me?"
Which was, of course.
- They rented a space
down in Marina del Rey
and Michael hired
a lot of conceptual artists
and comic book artists
to start drawing ghosts.
- And because of my history
with "Heavy Metal,"
I said we could do
the same thing here.
Let's tap resources that have
no film history, and then
we'll figure out if they can
be implemented for film,
on top of which is a comedy.
So, should there be
funny ghosts?
Richard had these drawings
and concepts submitted to Ivan
and said, "No, not that way,
no, not that way.
Look at this way."
Then we'd bring
in the effects people
and say, we went further
with this.
How would you
make it a reality?
So implementing those
was very much my job.
- I mean, the first thing
I was trying to do was
to build the technology up
real quick so that we could
actually produce the movie.
And I had made a deal with Doug
Trumbull to take over a studio
in LA which had a lot of
65-millimeter equipment,
but it was just kind of
laying around
and it was like a parts bin.
- Right.
- And so I had to bring in
engineers, machinists.
- The animation department
was
basically
just a big warehouse.
They were literally building
and with Thaine and the guys
were building tables
at night and shelves
and animation discs
and various...
[both talking at once]
The camera wasn't computerized,
it was a giant Oxberry, I mean,
it was just--it was, like he
said, it was just parts.
- And while the lawyers were
skirmishing, we had only
10 months to go until release,
and at that time, in '83,
it was budgeted at $5 million
for visual effects,
which was a really big effects
budget in those days,
and we were working with
incredible talents
like John DeCuir who was like
one of the great production
designers of all time
and Laszlo Kovacs
who became my lifelong friend.
- Laszlo was a dream, he was
a wonderful, wonderful man,
very kind, very generous,
came over here
in the Hungarian Revolution
in 1956,
and has a warmth about him
that's irreplaceable.
- We got started before we
were supposed to start shooting
and we said, let's go to
New York and do some scouting.
- I remember the first day was
technically a pre-production day
because I was trying to get
decent weather
in New York City in Manhattan.
Our official start of
principal photography
was the end of October.
I thought, well, let's do a few
days of pre-production shooting
while we have most of the cast
and crew around anyway
and we're doing
costume fittings,
we're doing rehearsals,
you know, people are going out
and buying equipment and
the designers are setting up.
Let's just get out on
the street and do some stuff.
- Someone's doing a standup
newscast in the street
and there's a guy behind him
playing with his beard,
and I think that was
the first thing we shot.
- The first day shooting was
a car crash because
some skeleton-like ghost had
taken over a taxi cab,
so we did a stunt
the very first day of shooting.
- The animatronic cab driver
wasn't even done at Boss Film.
It was basically my audition
because when I met
Richard Edlund and all
the higher ups at Boss Film,
they said,
"Okay, we got two weeks--
"we have to be in New York
City on location filming
"a fully animatronic
zombie cab driver.
"You go away and make it,
"and then go to New York
and shoot it
and if it works,
you could do the job."
And so I really did everything
on my own, I small printed,
I did the engineering on it,
I did the hair work,
I did the paint,
I did everything,
and it went really well--
it was actually a lot of fun.
I went back and they said,
"Okay, now you have a year of
torture ahead of you."
[laughing]
- And part of that day of
shooting, I said, well,
let's get a shot
for the montage
where they get more successful.
- I had never worked
in the heart of Manhattan.
So there they were,
all set up,
and I got into the jumpsuit
for the first time
and went out there and,
wow, this is really cool, I
mean, we kind of own the city.
- So I'm busy sort of setting
up some cameras, and I look up
and suddenly coming at me
are the three Ghostbusters
in full regalia,
and it was such a startling
image and it was such
an original image,
and I just got
this wonderful shiver
down my back.
It was just a great
first moment on the movie.
- I actually,
in all honesty,
had never really produced
a movie before.
- Here I am, associate
producing "Ghostbusters."
I had never been on
a movie set before,
and because my first film
was animated,
I didn't entirely know
how it all worked.
I'm fessing up to this
for the first time.
- I remember at one point I was
on the street with 300 extras,
yelling "Ghostbusters,"
and I thought I better learn
to do this really fast.
- And I came on the set,
having to pretend
I knew everything,
and it says "Producer,"
and I see my chair and my name,
you know?
And I go, mm-hmm, and I--
I'm looking around
and I didn't know
where to stand, I didn't know
half their jobs.
And somebody came to me and
said, "Tell me something that
has to be done,"
and they said,
"You better tell the First
Assistant Director,"
um, well, do that.
And I had to find out how
I could find out who and what
a First Assistant Director was
without letting on
that I had no idea
what I was doing.
- Probably had I understood
how big it was
and how difficult it was,
I would've been more effective
than I was because I'd never
done it before, I thought, hey,
this is what movies are like.
You always have thousands of
extras and special effects
and a deadline to make.
- I had more than one producer
who never knew his ass
from a hole in the ground,
and I know there were people
on that film who went,
"There's the asshole producer
who doesn't know
what he's doing."
But, fortunately,
I got through it.
- The very first note
of music you hear
is the blaze
of light from the star...
[musical note rings]
There was a revolutionary
synthesizer being released
at that time called the DX7
and it was the first
fully digital synth,
and the very first note
is a factory programmed sound
on this DX7, they're impossible
to get, and we managed
to procure one of
these synthesizers--
God only knows
what had to happen.
- Elmer Bernstein is a genius,
he did a beautiful job
on the score.
- That particular
"Ghostbusters" theme
that he wrote...
[vocalizing theme]
...was a style that he
had been tinkering with,
so because I had been
along for the ride
on a number of films,
I got to see
that particular style evolve
into a full-blown
thematic piece.
- He created this
very special classical sound
for that broad comedy science
fiction film that has this
sort of very historical,
romantic,
full orchestra score to it.
I don't think the movie
would've worked
without his score.
- My introduction
to this whole escapade
was the audition...
Square.
And I looked to this side of
me and there was this actor
chewing gum, just wildly
chewing gum, and I was like,
"Do you have any more gum?"
And he goes, "Yeah."
Little did he know
he handed me the part.
- I got the script
and I read it
and the ectoplasm
and the blood,
whatever, and the Stay Puft
Marsh--I kind of was like,
what the heck is this movie?
- They called me in
and we're doing the scene,
and the gum flies
out of my mouth.
[electric shock]
And the whole room erupts
in this thunderous laughter,
but uncontrollable laughter,
and I am biting my tongue
so hard to not laugh--
I am digging into
some holy place within to
not crack up, because they're
all laughing, I'm in tears.
- The university, as everyone
now knows, is Columbia,
we saw
these Columbia landmarks,
but Columbia wouldn't
let us use the name.
- I arrive and I'm looking
around and I'm going, okay,
there's the table
and I'm looking for, like,
where's the electronic
equipment to shock me?
I don't like this.
And I'm like, what the hell
kind of budget film is this?
- I got up that morning, I knew
we were shooting that day,
and went to the set
and I was dressed in just
the clothes I'd worn,
and they were like,
"Oh, you look fine.
"Oh, you look great, yeah,
you don't need your hair done,
you don't need makeup,
you don't need wardrobe."
And I'm like, really?
- I basically, like, pinched
the hell out of myself
every time
that we had to do a shock.
I go into the restroom
and I basically got, like,
the continent of Africa
in purple...
all up my leg, with a big,
blue River Nile vein
moving right through it.
- So I-I've always wished
I had blow-dried my hair
better that day.
- And Laszlo walks in,
and he goes, "Good God!"
- It's amazing
how many people remember me
from being that librarian.
But--oh, I remember
the real librarian came around
and she looked at me
and she said,
"Oh, they always make us
look like that."
Isn't that terrible?
- We played with different
openings for a while
before we settled
on the library opening;
we played with
different versions of that,
all of which were promising
and kind of funny,
but the library
was really good.
I think I can take credit
for that.
- I hope we can clear this up
quickly and quietly.
- I was actually working
in the New York Public Library
on a writing project
and I looked up
and saw Bill Murray and Ramis,
they were scouting
the location,
and I remember looking at them
and thinking, I wonder
what they're doing here.
- I know how I got it too--
it was my scream.
[screaming]
I had a wonderful scream.
They said, "Suppose a ghost
were coming at you.
What would you do?"
and I screamed.
He laughed and said, okay,
the part's yours.
- The call time was about
5:30 in the morning
and I was in the makeup trailer
with Bill Murray
who obviously had not been to
bed,
and when I told people
about it was--
and I swear this is true--
they were much funnier, I mean,
what was going on between
those guys
from the minute
that you open up the door
to the makeup trailer
until, you know,
the end of the day,
was so hilarious.
And that's almost
intimidating,
that they were able to be
that connected to each other,
and of course,
that's the relationship between
the librarian and the
Ghostbusters, anyway.
- The idea was we could
only shoot in the morning
before it really opened, and
so we were supposed to be in
from six to 10 for two days
in a row,
and Ivan was really on a roll,
we completed all that
in under four hours
and didn't know
what to shoot, so I think we
broke for lunch and then shot
a scene we were supposed to
shoot a couple of days later.
- We shot the exterior first
when we were in New York,
and we used the reading room
of the New York
Public Library.
So the scenes where we just
entered and, I guess,
Egon is, for some reason, under
a table with a stethoscope,
listening at a table
for God knows why.
- They were stopping traffic on
Fifth Avenue to do this scene,
and there was a guy
who's like a street preacher
who was praying all morn--he
had this--he was standing on
a soapbox and he was going,
"All you Hollywood
are going to hell!
You're going to--"
and, you know, they made--
the production had to go
and pay him off.
- And then you wait weeks
to pick it up in Los Angeles
in the Los Angeles
Public Library,
which was us going
into the private spaces
of the library where
the public are not allowed.
Movies always have
that kind of discontinuity
when you're shooting them.
- And Ivan Reitman, of course,
the director on that,
when I was supposed to see
the ghost for the first time,
you know, he's not a scary man,
he was trying to scare me,
so he'd just go like that.
- Ivan's directions were
simple and concise--
look scared
and look more scared.
- You know, that's acting.
- An awful lot of the effects
in that sequence
are practical effects,
they're not opticals.
- You know, like the cards
flipping out
and the slime coming
down the walls.
- So the cards are actually
sent off into the air by little
air jets that were hidden
in all the drawers,
so the drawers open
and the air jets came on,
books going back and forth
from shelf to shelf,
those were hung on wires.
- You know, when they find
the vertically stacked books,
that was an idea Ivan had
on the way to work.
I think Danny
came up with the line.
- Symmetrical book stacking--
just like the Philadelphia
mass turbulence of 1947.
[whispering]
...do exactly as I say.
Get ready, ready--go!
[screaming]
- The librarian
was a really interesting task
because in one shot, and I guess
ultimately it was supposed to be
about 36 frames--
a second and a half.
- It's the first big scare of
the movie and I think it was
imperative to have a good scare
versus a comedic scare.
- [screaming]
- An Old One transforms into
the most hideous, scary beast
that any of us there
could imagine.
Like, how do you do this?
Well, I'll make
the change over thing.
Take a replica of a human
and actually put
pneumatic devices in it
and make it distort.
Everything I did on that film
I wanted to walk a tightrope
between utter failure and
soaring success, so I thought,
okay, I can try it my way
and completely fuck it up
or just not try it at all.
- In ways I was like
a maitre-d at a restaurant.
That it was my job to make sure
everything went okay and that
all of the people at the table
had what they need to have
a good time.
I had to set up an environment
where they could do
the best work they could.
- Most of what I did to start
with was to build a mock-up.
We had the Foametix skins and
I would take a simple PVC pipe,
bend wooden sticks,
glue wooden screws,
and put something together
with our first rough skins
on a mold,
which were copies
of the original actress.
- I want her head to lower,
I want her shoulders to rise,
I want her deltoid or her bicep
to elongate from here
to her wrist, to elongate,
her fingers to grow.
I want her mouth to get bigger.
I want her head to flatten,
I want to do something again,
specifically,
for this six frame shot,
I mean, come on,
you're not gonna get it
if it's just going...
- Rolling,
do your bad thing.
- As we're building it,
I thought,
we cannot control this,
you know,
probably have to
have 30 puppeteers,
yet those 30 puppeteers
have to hit their marks when
the director says "action,"
for a second and a half
they have to do it exactly
and then it would never work,
I knew that wouldn't work.
- I actually had to go outside
our group of people
to get someone to mechanize--
- And I said, look,
here's our problem,
I want all these things
to happen,
but they have to happen
really quickly
and they have to happen
in tandem, in concert,
like a symphony.
- The mechanic,
John Alberti,
gave him the mockup and said,
"This is what Steve wants.
You can see how far this
pushes, how far that raises."
- It has to be the way you
and I worked it out
for months ahead in advance--
this has to change them,
this has to turn that,
this has to do that.
- And he then could then take
measurements and then base
his mechanical understructure
to move the rubber,
based on that.
- The eye was genius.
He figured it out so that
you--that one puppeteer,
one puppeteer--you could
sit back with a beer, smoking
a cigarette, and the director
would say "action"
and just go...
There's your librarian ghost.
- [screaming]
- There was going to be a second
stage to the transformation
that would push out her muzzle
and there was these sharp,
like, monster-y teeth.
There's a lot of stills
around of me
sculpting the arms of
this demon coming forward
and then Steve Johnson
had sculpted the head
for that based off of
what we had done
for the first part
of the transformation.
- And then Richard was like,
"No, no second puppet.
No second puppet, don't break
the bank, Stevie, boy."
And I'm like, but it's almost
done, it'll be so much better!
He's like, "This is 36 frames,
leave it, just leave it."
- It was the right decision
because it's a great moment,
it happens fast and it has
the effect it needs.
[spooky music]
- We were working on this film
for quite a long time
and someone said, you know,
there's a TV show called
"Ghost Busters"
which I didn't know.
- We're Ghost Busters
- I'm Spencer, he's Tracy.
- I'm Carl.
- The title was owned by
a company called Filmation
that mainly made cartoons.
When we started shooting,
Columbia didn't want to make
a deal with them,
so we thought it might be
called "Ghost Breakers."
- Ghost Blasters?
- Blasters.
- Blasters.
all:
Ghost Blasters.
Ghost Stoppers.
We're ready to believe you.
- Now we're good, keep your
focus right on the lens.
- We're dying!
- For a while we had all these
stamps we were supposed to use
for lab reports
and stuff like that
and we had all these
different names.
- We were doing one scene
where we had to put a sign up,
it said "Ghostbusters"
and then "Ghostbreakers,"
and that's when I phoned them
and said, we can't do this,
we'll never finish the movie.
You gotta clear that title.
So they paid some money
and cleared the title,
but gave Filmation the rights
to use the name "GhostBusters"
in a cartoon show.
- Starts Monday at 3:30,
only on channel 11.
- Hey, does this pole
still work?
- The firehouse,
we knew we wanted
a decommissioned firehouse.
- The firehouse was found right
on the edge of Soho in New York
in the beginning of Tribeca,
there's an intersection
at Varick and North Moore.
- It turns out
that's a style of firehouse
and the exterior of the
firehouse is in New York
and people are
very proud of it,
they drive by it all the time.
But the interior is actually
a very similar firehouse
in downtown Los Angeles.
- Built in the exact same year
as the New York firehouse,
so it was an excellent match.
- The Ghostbusters logo,
for instance, was easy.
[dramatic music]
- Coming to save the world.
- I didn't create that,
I just got it done,
and it was in Danny's script.
For me, it was just getting it
implemented, and it wasn't
a matter of doing a major logo
for a major film
for their ad campaign--
it was to do something
to put on their shirts
and on the sign
on the side of the car.
And we had a team of artists
already been working
in the effects house.
I went to the one
I knew the best.
- Greg Boats designed the logo.
- And I said, give me versions
of this logo.
And we just handed them over
to the art department.
- We wrote this character
of a neighbor
to whoever the woman
was in the building.
- We did want John Candy
in the movie, we loved John
and we'd all worked with him,
starting back at Second City.
- In fact, I have storyboards
that I did for John.
The party sequence where
the terror dog breaks through
the wall and I drew John Candy
through the whole sequence.
- He was a real favorite
of mine
and a good friend
and I remember
calling Candy up and saying,
okay, John,
I've got a great part,
and I sent over sort of
the first rough draft
that we threw together
so quickly.
He called back and he said,
"Well,
"I'm thinking of doing him in
a German accent
and he's gotta have dogs."
I said, dogs?
"Yeah, big German shepherds."
I said, but John, you can't
have German shepherds,
you can't have dogs at all
because part of the plot is,
you know, there's these dogs
on the roof and people
are gonna get confused
and the story
is complicated enough.
And he just got adamant that
he had to be a German person
and he had to have
German shepherds.
- John wanted too much money.
[laughing]
He kind of got agented
right out of the movie.
- And Rick Moranis, who was
working with him on SCTV
and who I knew
because I'm Canadian
and we all know each other,
I called him up and I thought
he might be a very good version
of what we were writing,
which is a more uptight kind
of nerdy kind of character.
Rick Moranis read it
in 24 hours
and called me back
and he said, "I'm so happy.
"This is the greatest script
I've ever read;
I want to be in it."
- Yeah, ghosts scare
the pants off me.
The polyester pants off me.
- Rick was there and great
and brilliant
and really had a great take
on that character,
so he became Louis Tully.
I'd say Sigourney was the
biggest surprise in the movie
for us and had
the most profound impact
on the finished product.
- You know, we had been
writing so quickly,
there was no female part,
really.
We knew there was a woman
in this building
on Central Park
that Bill Murray
comes to check out
because of stuff
that was going on there,
and we had the effects,
we didn't really have
any character,
we had no real role for her.
- We've been accused for years
of not writing good
female characters
because comedy at the time
was very much a boys club.
- Really met some wonderful
actresses for this part.
- Don't you remember me?
I'm Peter Venkman
from Ghostbusters?
- I am Zuul.
I am the Gatekeeper.
- My psychiatrist thinks
I'm losing my mind.
My friends think
I'm taking LSD
and I haven't even had the
nerve to tell my parents yet.
- Finally,
Sigourney Weaver walks in,
all six-eight feet of her.
- You know, I'm not sure
how they thought of me, um,
because I really hadn't done--
I'd done a lot of comedy
in the theater,
but not in movies.
I then had to meet
Ivan Reitman.
I remember I went out to LA
and I auditioned for him.
He filmed it,
which was the first time
I'd ever been filmed
in an audition.
- And she's talking about it,
and she finally says,
"You know, I should get
possessed in this movie."
And I thought, oh, my God,
am I gonna have another
John Candy conversation?
- I remember that I so wanted
to get the job that
I then became a dog toward
the end of the scene,
I'm supposed to become
a terror dog,
and so I was jumping
around and...
grabbing the cushions.
- Sigourney in kind of a short
dress and it's kind of sexy.
And she's baying to the moon
and I was so knocked out
that the woman who knocked off
the Alien was there
baying at the moon
in my office.
- I think I frightened him,
he said later
he would never show the tape
to anyone.
- And I turned around
and I remember calling up Dan
and Harold and saying,
you know, she was saying
she should be possessed and,
you know,
it sort of makes sense.
- And I did really feel that
I could do a good job as Dana
because I love the script,
I thought it was just
such a love letter
to our common condition
and to New York.
- Sigourney, she's this
very beautiful, statuesque,
very intelligent woman,
but she really is also kind of
a Margaret Dumont-like presence.
She has that kind of regality
that Margaret Dumont had
with the Marx Brothers, and I
thought, yeah, she could work,
she's certainly
an extraordinary actress,
but beyond that you know,
she would have the strength
and presence to just
not get bullied over
by the likes of Bill Murray.
- So she took it and
it made us want to be better,
just raised the whole level
and made Bill want
to be better.
And he came up with the idea of,
"I'm gonna prove myself to you,"
you know, the idea that she was
way too good for him,
which was so apparent
in everything they did
and said to each other.
- I am madly in love with you.
- I don't believe this.
Will you please leave?
- And the idea that he needed
to prove himself
was very important,
because it gave us
some rooting interest
in his character,
actually, winning her over.
- No kiss?
- I remember at the time
I had a Brazilian nanny
who was really cute
and she had
a very whimsical way of putting
herself together,
and I said, I've got
this funny audition
and I'd like you
to dress me for it.
So my Brazilian nanny
dressed me for it
and I went in and got the role.
- There's a scene where Egon's
working under her desk,
maybe she has eyes for him
a little bit,
she's trying
to be flirtatious.
- I bet you like to read
a lot too.
That may have been a bit of
an addition that we found
that there was a little
chemistry thing there,
it was like, well, why not?
- We actually explored
that relationship
in the original script.
- I want you to take this.
- What is it?
- It's a souvenir
from the World's Fair
in Flushing Meadow in 1964.
- And there's a little,
tiny bit of it in the movie,
but I started to feel it was
really wrong for Egon
to suddenly become
emotionally involved
in any way in the movie.
But Annie Potts
was so lovely to work with
and was so much in the spirit
of it, just really got it.
She's kind of a Southern girl,
but she put on that kind
of fake Bronx-Brooklyn thing
for the character
and it worked so well.
- A lot of casting people
wouldn't see me, they'd go,
"Oh, no, too, too New York,"
um...
And I was...I'm from the South,
I put on that accent.
I was--I was actually acting.
- She was really just a--
just a lovely part of
the team, I thought.
- We got one!
[buzzer ringing]
That line will probably be
on my tombstone.
- A call!
[song starts playing]
- We had this song and
my manager took this over
to Ivan Reitman, said,
"Do you want to do this movie?
There's a song, we think
you could do it."
I said, sure,
it sounds good.
I said,
let me see what's up.
He said, "I have no time
for that--
"I need you to take a look
at the lyrics,
"figure out
some appropriate changes
and fax this over to me."
He says,
I have about 30 minutes.
And, you know, you learn
in this business,
the first answer
is always "yes."
Then you hang up the phone
and figure out
how you're gonna do this.
[laughing]
So I finish what I'm doing
in 45 minutes or so
and fax these changes
over to Ivan,
and Ivan goes,
"Yeah, this works."
I thought the way they used
the song was brilliant.
You know, the Bus Boys
were all about and still are
a working class
thought process,
and the fact that they used us
right at the point they
finally got some work
I thought was like,
pure genius.
[song playing]
Huh.
- The Sedgewick Hotel was
shot at the Biltmore Hotel
in downtown Los Angeles.
- I was actually put up
for the man from the EPA,
the part that
William Atherton played.
And then my agent
rang one day and said,
"Would you like a booby prize?"
- Across from the Biltmore
Hotel in Los Angeles
is just a park,
but when you look out
the doors there you'll see
a whole cityscape
that was created.
What we did was we took over
part of the street and built
some storefronts that
we then saw through the doors.
- It was a sequence that should
have taken two, three days,
but they were working on
a deadline and had to get it in
that amazingly long night.
It was a very
difficult camera move,
and it required
precise timing.
Well, I was mister ex-RSC,
London Academy of Music
Dramatic Art prepared actor,
knowing my lines backwards
and forwards,
and timing it all out,
but then they put me down
with those guys.
- Did you ever report it
to anyone?
- No, heavens, no!
- No.
- And I'm just sort of
guestimating
when they're going
to finish riffing
and we would continually
be wrong.
And finally Ivan Reitman
got very annoyed,
in fact,
he yelled at me.
I can't remember now whether
it was Dan or Bill
who piped up and said, "Back
off, Ivan, it's our fault,
don't go on his case."
And to this day I think
I was a surrogate
for some frustration
because if I was Ivan Reitman
I wouldn't want to be yelling
at my stars either.
- I hope we could take care of
this quietly, tonight.
- John Daveikis and I designed
the movie in terms of
just the props in the car.
Of course, we had a fantastic
professional crew
of Hollywood props
designers and costumers,
but the basically ideas
for the pack,
the ecto,
that was Daveikis and myself.
He is a college friend of mine
and we drew up
all my concepts for me.
So when we walked in we had
the ecto, we had the packs,
we had the wands, the had the
technology of all those props,
we had the jumpsuits,
we had the whole look
of the industrial cleaners.
- In the script they were
shooting beams called
Nutrona wands
because you had a pack,
you had some sort of device
that went down to your wrist,
and these would come out,
they would--
you would press a button
and you would have
two beams go up.
- One of the lines is,
"Okay, make them hard."
So a physical prop had to be
able to click--
and then the thing
had to have an erection.
- A tube would pop out
at the end.
[clicking]
all: Ready!
- Which seemed to simulate
some kind of techno erection.
- And they are phallic, so...
- Right, exactly.
And it was not a film
that there was going to be
a subtle aspect of it.
- People always question the
yellow hose that was connected,
came out of the proton pack
and ran into a flanged valve
on our thighs.
And I don't know,
for some reason they made
the rubber tube yellow,
which suggested
that it was some kind
of catheter, I don't know.
But the proton packs,
there were several versions.
Whenever we were going to do a
physical stunt, it was actually
a rubber model of the proton
packs you could fall on
and not hurt yourself,
but nothing on it worked.
Then there was
the full version
which had all
the batteries in it
and powered up
the whole pack
and that probably weighed
over 25 pounds.
That got Murray
complaining a lot.
Bill's the--he's cranky
and he just would complain
all the time about
lugging those things around.
So whenever possible
they would--as soon as we were
done with the heavy ones
they would switch them out.
[machinery humming]
And they put a nice, deep hum
into the soundtrack
as the proton pack
kind of fires up.
- It shouldn't sound like
a light switch, it had to sound
like it was expensive
and heavy duty
and when it made its sound...
[machinery humming]
...something was
going to happen.
The idea that,
okay, they turn this on
and it actually takes time
to charge up, like,
the energy that they have
isn't available instantly.
- There's this really
nice set-up
that the equipment
had some danger,
some occupational hazard
associated with it.
And of course,
when we open on the poor maid.
- I was on the set
at that time.
We had loaded that cart
fairly heavily,
and we said we had to go
tell the lady
what was going to go happening,
and the director said,
"No, let's just do it."
- The first test of that,
she walks out with the cart
and when the guys shoot,
there's such a huge
sort of pyro explosion.
[explosion]
Scared the hell out of her.
- She ducked and covered,
which is fairly prudent,
and then she looked up
and said...
- What the hell are you doing?
- "What the hell
are you guys doing?"
- [laughs]
- Which is in the film.
- That was a natural reaction.
- The biggest problem with the
proton packs was--it was with
the wands as well--
was trying to figure out
how the beams would work.
They had to be animated,
we knew that,
and there weren't a lot of
animated effects around
other than a ray gun.
- This is all film-based
as opposed to
digitally-based
special effects.
- They had it easy, digitally.
But it wasn't,
it was all hand animation.
- In order to make the shot
work, you have to figure out
how to distract the eye
in an artful way.
- And we did all these boards
and everything,
and when Dan came in it was
like, starting about
the Nutrona wands and it was
like talking to a child.
And he started talking
about it, he said,
"You know, it's not a laser,"
he goes, he goes, "Imagine like
"an eight-year-old kid grabs
a firehose and turns it on
and just starts whippin' him
around the room."
- When you pull the trigger
for the first time,
the photo flashbulb at the end
of the wand would go off,
which the special effects guys
used as a reference
for when the beam came out.
- I wanted strobe lights
and interactive lighting
to tie things
into a physical set.
- So everybody had
these dramatic shadows
and the place was blowing up.
- Because you don't want
to have to animate,
you know, kind of flare--
you can do that,
but it's not as successful
as shooting the real thing.
- It's a bonding agent.
- So that's part of
understanding
filming tricks and cheats.
- The scene would be
storyboarded,
it would be five beam shots.
Ivan would cut together this
footage and it was funnier
and better and suddenly
there were 11.
And we said, we don't have
time, we don't have the money--
do it.
And John Bruno
was smart enough,
realizing the deadline
ahead of us,
to come up with a concept
that he knew
those people could deliver.
And if there was one thing
we kept adding to the movie,
it was beam shots.
- To come up with a look,
it was like rubberized light.
It was a signature look
to Ghostbusters.
- You know, how are we gonna
get four guys
to point these things
in the right direction?
- And it happens very quickly,
it's hard to see,
but if you look at this stuff
slowly you actually realize
often that there's
a blast at the target
and it shoots actually
into the gun,
so the energy's going out
and coming back in
at the same time.
- When they decided to actually
see the ghost, then it would be
difficult to shoot in
the corridors of the hotel
because it would be hard
to get as much light in there
as they would need for
some of the special effects.
So subsequently
they built those corridors
at Warner Brothers.
- Well, Slimer, you know,
started off as drawings.
[carnival music]

And then Steve Johnson
sculpted it.
- The thing that was amazing
about getting the opportunity
to work at Boss Film
was that for the first time
there was a whole other
tool chest--optical effects.
You could do so many things
that were never, ever possible
on some of the films
I worked with people
like Rick Baker
and Rob Butina.
- The visual effects work
was done in 65 millimeter
where Laszlo was shooting
35 millimeter camera
and then that image would be
composited and then reduced
down to 35 in
an optical printer.
Each time you go a generation,
the quality drops,
and so when you do make
these dupes and copies,
the quality comes out to be
about as though
it was original at the time.
- John Bruno is a really
good friend of mine,
and John always wanted to push
for more and more and more
and more and it drove me nuts.
Whoopie!
It drove me out of my mind,
I'm like, really?
Seven sculptures? Seven full
scale
before you're gonna
say this is enough?
Now there's seven.
- Don't we have to actually
make the creature?
At some point we've got to
actually make it.
- Well, he looked
like a potato.
- He's an ugly
little spud, isn't he?
- I think he can hear you, Ray.
- But what John was pushing for
on the Slimer character
because he knew it was going
to be double exposed,
a lot of the detail's
going to go away because
it's double exposed
in the film.
He was gonna art direct that,
he was gonna control that,
so the first few sculptures
of Slimer were subtle,
they were much more realistic,
and John just kept
coming over, he said,
"How can you make it
more insane?
"How can you make people
look at this
and have their eyeballs
pop out of their heads?"
And I loved working with John,
but he was
a tough taskmaster.
- Sort of a lime
fluorescent green.
It was kind of a color we came
up with so we could see
in this art directed room.
- I, to this day, credit
Richard Edlund coming up with
the technique to actually pull
that off, to get an amorphous
blob that's incredibly
cartoony and animate it,
to fly it around and do
all of these things.
I, you know, being this crazy
artiste wanted to do it
an almost impossible way.
I originally wanted to do it
with these really long,
skinny arms that were
mechanical, it wouldn't have
any performer inside it,
so it would not at all
look like a human.
Richard just looked at me
and goes,
"You're out of your... mind.
"Stick a guy in a suit
and let his legs come out?
We'll film him
and use his real arms."
Now, the thing that was really
interesting about that
was I thought,
okay, if Richard said
that we can remove
his legs optically,
that means...
I can make other things black
and stick them all
around the character and he'll
just have to remove them too.
But I sat there
and I thought to myself,
I knew what the movie
was about,
I mean, it's about insanity,
it's about cartoon characters,
it's about Tex Avery,
and so I thought,
well, you tie a string
to a piece of rubber
and you pull it with a cable,
it's 12-feet long,
you're just gonna get that.
And I thought to myself,
a cartoon character,
when they smile, no,
no, no, no, no,
their faces actually deform
and inflate
and their heads flatten
and all these insane things
happen, and so I thought,
we're gonna put him
in front of a black stage.
If we can remove his legs, we
can remove as many puppeteers
as we can get around him.
The way Slimer worked is there
is a performer, a guy named
Mark Wilson who was actually
in charge of doing
the mechanical aspects
of pulling it all together.
- Do that slime stuff, Mark.
[laughing]
- They did a life cast on me
to sculpt the arms over
and to position and figure out
the proportions of the head
and where my head would fit
inside the costume.
- He looks through the mouth,
there's mechanical eyes
up here.
His arms come through
the stomach of the thing,
wearing rubber gloves,
and then his legs
just stuck out of the butt.
- So it's almost like
a Japanese Go theater
where everyone's in black
and this is
shot against
the black background
so you could only then see
the green Slimer rubber.
- And I wore a black duvetyene
skirt for about month
which I have grown beyond.
- So what we ended up
doing is
I designed
all of these wrinkles
concentric and going back,
you know, and his huge smile,
and then a performer in
a black suit could go behind
the character
while we're filming,
and reach his arms into handles
on his cheeks and go...
[roaring]
And you'd just get
all these free muscle.
- Okay, Mark,
just more--
cartoon animated
kind of quick, jerky.
It looked really good
like that.
- I had a strap under my chin
which went into
a fiberglass helmet.
So by moving my head,
then I could make the Slimer's
head change direction.
- In order to keep it
from just drooping
on the performer's body,
we'd put a series of
concentric spring steel bands.
What that also did was
an amazing bonus
that we didn't
necessarily expect--
he would make his body
just jiggle around
like a cartoon character
might do.
- [laughing]
- And it also didn't kill Mark,
so that was good.
- [roaring]
- ...just bring your hands
forward, don't flail them.
- All Slimer was shot at the
Boss Films shooting stage,
which was, I think,
just one door over
from where we were
building the costumes.
- This was pre-radio controlled
server motors,
these were
all cable controlled.
- There'd be cables
coming up under the costume
and those cables go to about
a half a dozen puppeteers
who have levers that connected
the cables, and they're
pulling on those levers to make
the various things work.
Well, these people
have to work in unison,
it's almost like a band.
- It wasn't until we actually
got on the stage
and started shooting him that
we realized how funny it was.
- Shake your butt, turn around
and shake your butt.
Turn all the way around
like you're digging
in the room service cart.
- Slimer was intended to be
the spirit of John Belushi,
kind of to complete the team.
John Belushi had died
by that time.
- Definitely that's John,
no doubt.
- The guys said, "Do you want
him to look like John Belushi?"
No, no, no.
- I was writing a scene
up in the hotel scene,
what became the hotel scene,
it originally was a guest house
in Greenville, New York,
like a bed and breakfast
with this couple
that was terrorized
and we had to go up there,
upstate, you know,
and I was writing John's line
when I heard he died.
- We watched
John Belushi movies
and we watched "Animal House"
on video, in particular,
and watched all of
his facial expressions,
and they're actually
in the performance,
and there are things, you know,
that Belushi would do
with his eyebrows in the early
scene, things like that,
and I loved that, so I managed
to get the eyebrow expression
as the puppeteer.
[crew laughing]
- Some tricks on Slimer
is he rarely moved.
He is on a big cart
and along with him on the cart
are the various other
puppeteers.
- Even though I might
be moving and gyrating,
the option was either
to move all the puppeteers
and the puppet
or to move the camera.
It was obvious that moving
a camera on a dolly track
became much simpler.
- And higher!
- Because Richard
basically pioneered
the motion control thing,
the way you get
a spaceship to move,
you don't move the spaceship,
you move the camera.
- Hands out more, Mark.
More wide--good mouth,
great mouth.
Cut! Whoa!
- I do remember that
on the stage
Ivan actually voiced
that creature.
- That's going to be
[indistinct].
- I was shoved in right behind
the puppet with my arm
through the back of his head
into the tongue.
Mark, totally blind, because
he's hidden inside the suit.
He had to pick up this plate,
dump it into the creature's
mouth over the tongue
while I do these tongue things,
and all of this food is going
down, dropping onto the back
of Mark's neck, all this slimy,
chilly, jelly food.
And we get the shot,
we're all cracking up
and we hear from inside
the puppet...
[muffled]
"Get me out of here!"
- Since it was
such a frantic project,
we were cutting corners
and doing things as fast
as we possibly could,
and one of the shots that
we needed was for the ghost
to fly around the chandelier.
- I did sculpt a miniature
Slimer, like this big.
- And so instead of using
the big one,
Gary shot a couple
of scenes with it,
they cut the film together
and they wanted another shot,
and all of a sudden we couldn't
find the little guy.
- We were all sitting
in the room, talking,
what could we do,
what could we do?
- We're sitting there, looking,
and there's a bag of peanuts
and we're sitting there,
munching on one.
Gary picks up a peanut
and looks at it,
and the next thing I know,
we're spray-painting it green
and he's shooting a peanut
going around, and I'm like,
this is... this is either
gonna work or we're gonna lose
our jobs when we try to
pass this off.
We shot it, we didn't say
anything, we went to dailies,
cut it into movie, Ivan looked
at it and it was great.
- I went through the garbage
when they were throwing
stuff out and I have that
peanut, that green peanut.
- Slimer, by the way,
got the name Slimer
when he says,
"It slimed me."
That kind of stuck.
It was the Onionhead
until that moment.
- The original script,
it was a much bigger role,
the character came at the very
beginning of the movie,
he was really
a part of the team.
He had just gotten
out of the Air Force,
he was a demolitions expert,
a Major at the Air Force.
So he had all of
this background history
which was really kind
of cool and I was really
looking forward
to playing that.
- What happened was we wanted
to bring in a new Ghostbuster
midway through the film.
- We wanted a character
that was not experienced,
who was naturally going to come
into the story a little later
and would function
for the audience
to answer the questions
of what was going on
in New York.
- To revive the audience's
incredulity, you know,
someone who represented
the audience,
couldn't believe
all this was going on.
And we wanted him to
be actually more physical,
more competent than we were,
like in a military way.
So we created a character
who had all kinds of
military training.
And then we thought, let's make
him African American,
it just seemed like, you know,
it just--I don't know why--
our social conscience,
in a way.
It just seemed right.
If the movie was going to be
widely seen we thought,
you know, this represents
a kind of inclusiveness
that we wanted to express.

You know, when you can make
statements, why not?
- I first heard about
"Ghostbusters"
on an elevator
at Cedar Sinai Hospital
in Los Angeles and I had went
to visit a friend
and I got on the elevator
and Ivan Reitman was on
the elevator,
and we had, like, 12 floors
to sort of travel together
in that silence after "hello"
and so he says,
"I'm doing this, um,
this movie 'Ghostbusters'."
- I said, oh, great,
you know?
Then he said, "But there's
nothing in it for you."
And then later on I found out
there was a part
that they were casting
a Black actor in,
but I think he thought I was
all wrong
for the part because I'd done
a movie the year before
called "Spacehunter,"
but that character was
sort of bigger than life.
My head was shaved,
the voice was kind of
very demanding
and commanding, you know,
it was a very different
character and I think
he sort of saw me that way.
- He had come in earlier
and just auditioned
and there was this sweetness
to him that I just loved
and I just cast him.
- He seemed like
the perfect guy
and physical and fit,
which none of us really
were supposed to be.
- It wasn't until we got ready
to shoot the movie
that had been rewritten,
and it totally changed.
- We wrote, like,
the best lines for him.
He was turned on, he was like
the best written part
in the movie, had so many
funny things to say.
And when we turned
in the draft,
Ivan Reitman, he said,
"You can't give all these lines
"to the fourth guy, you know,
"you gotta give these
to Murray, you know,
distribute these lines among
yourselves, you know?"
And a lot of it went to Bill's
character, I have to say.
- And somebody dropped
the script off at the room
I was staying in at the
Mayflower Hotel in New York
and it was actually the night
before we started shooting.
You know, the character
originally comes in page six
and now he's on page 68,
which is really hard to--for me
to sort of come to grips with,
I mean,
I wrestled with that a lot,
and I was shocked
because we had rehearsed
for about three weeks.
And the next morning
I went to the set
and talked to Ivan about it.
The PAs on the set
didn't recognize me,
so they didn't know that I was
in the movie and I was sort of
in a hurry to get to talk
to Ivan, and so--
but they wouldn't let me on the
set because they wanted to know
if I was working on the movie,
so it started off
being a little frustrating.
[laughing]
And...
but it all worked out.
The first week was difficult.
- Yeah, there was a lot of sort
of kind of silly, cynical talk
about, um, why he was
in the movie,
but he was in the movie
because he was really good
and he functioned perfectly
for the story needs.
- Harold Ramis was
my sort of saving grace.
Harold, throughout the filming
of "Ghostbusters,"
whenever there was things that
I had difficulty understanding,
and there were times,
Harold was always the guy
I'd sort of go to and go,
man, what is--and he'd go,
"Ernie... it's okay."
And I think I learned a lot
from Harold, in the many years
since I learned how to just
sort of go with the flow
and things may not turn out
the way you think they will,
but sometimes you just have
to ride it out
because things will be fine.
- Welcome aboard.
[crowd cheering]
- How are ya?
We're the Ghostbusters!
- Ghostbusters! Ghostbusters!
- We didn't have a music
supervisor in those days.
Gary LeMel, who was head
of music at Columbia
at that point, did a lot
of this with us.
So we needed a theme song
and we tried a couple
that didn't quite work, there
was one we even had, it was
a teaser-trailer that came out
around Christmas.
- Ghostbusters--Coming to save
the world this summer.
[theme song]
all:
We're ready to believe you.
- And Gary LeMel said, "I'm
going to bring in this guy,
Ray Parker,
and show him the movie."
- Part of it came about
because I was dating this girl
that worked for Gary LeMel...
[laughing]
and I knew Gary LeMel from the
Barry White days because I did
all the Barry White records--
I played guitar on them--
and then I got a call
from Gary
because there was just gonna
be one segment in the film
at the library scene,
I think it was
20, 20 seconds long, and they
just needed like a theme song,
opening number with the words
"Ghostbusters" in it.
Now, it's unfair now because
you've heard the song,
but if you could imagine
writing a song...
[singing]
Ghostbusters, we wanna--
...it just really
doesn't sing well,
it's a horrible,
horrible word to sing to.
I think I recorded maybe
a minute and 15 or 20 seconds
of it and it took me 2 1/2,
three days, which is all I had,
and it was one of those things
where you get your money
if we get some music
in two or three days,
otherwise, the deal's off.
And so I was completely worn
out tired and I turned it in.
- And I remember we were
adding the music at the time,
we put this song on
and we went nuts, we said,
that's it, this is perfect.
- I remember
the hardest part for me
was putting the words
in the song,
and I remember the part of
the "Ghostbusters" movie
where they had a solicitation
with a phone number.
all:
Ghostbusters.
- And the night before
I turned in the song,
I was half asleep and on the TV
comes this insect commercial,
like these... exterminator
guys who were gonna
get rid of insects for you.
And if you just
close your eyes like this
and you're real sleepy,
the insect guys looked to me
like the Ghostbusters guys.
And they had the phone number
on the bottom, but I was like,
whoa, that's it,
it's a commercial, you just go,
"Who you gonna call?"
And the people scream,
"Ghostbusters."
- Ghostbusters.
- Dan drove the Ectomobile,
we followed in a follow truck.
We didn't have any permits,
we put the guys in and we just
said, we're going all over
the city and doing schtick.
[siren wailing]
- We had all of this material
that was shot in New York City
and around, and we had
to figure
a way of making it a montage.
- They'd just jump into the car
and they'd go to
Rockefeller Center.
- I came up with this idea
of using these newspapers
and magazine as ways
of transitioning from
one live action shot
to the next live action.
It's a part of the creative
process of putting together
a montage and you try to make
it as difficult as possible.
- The guy walks by and stares
at him, and that's me.
- Driving around that city
in those ridiculous outfits
with the logos everywhere,
and in that ambulance.
- And we only had one
Ectomobile.
And just having one of them--
and it was an old car,
it was insane.
- Ours was not
the best running car.
- It didn't even dawn on me,
you know, you gotta have
two of everything, you know?
And we left our AD
Peter Giuliano,
and he did the helicopter
shot on the Ectomobile.
The car conked out
going across the bridge.
- So we're pushing it,
you know,
pushing this thing down
Seventh Avenue and, you know,
so you're running around,
getting everything set up,
you know, pulling back for
an action, helping Rudy push
the Ectomobile and then
running back to Ivan's side,
it's just sort of coasting--
it was supposed to be driving
but it's coasting
down the street.
- I think we just fixed the car
enough to just do this.
We need to get this shot
and get it running for this.
- And when you make the shot
in a car, you only have
a certain amount of street
that you can control.
But once you've done the shot,
then you have to drive
all the way around to come back
to where you started
and in the city of New York,
it's all one way streets
everywhere.
- And Ivan tells you,
"Get in and drive the Cadillac
"out of the firehouse,
come around the corner
and give me two passes,"
I mean... you know.
- So we did a lot of driving
around in that ambulance
as the Ghostbusters with Danny
driving with no cameras around
anywhere, so no one was even
aware a movie was being made,
but they'd see that ambulance,
"What the hell is that?"
- The Ectomobile, I came up
with that fairly early on
that was on the little preview
reel I made up for Ivan
in the early part of
the picture.
The thing went...
[imitating klaxon sound]
Yeah, it has that vaguely
European sound to it.
I made that
from a leopard howl
that was edited and then
reversed and played backwards
and the speed was changed,
I mean, keeping in mind
that there was no digital
manipulation in those days,
it was all razor blades and
splicing tape sort of thing.
[siren wailing]
- Our philosophy, sort of,
on the movie, was to combine
the physical effects
with the optical effects.
- Dan Aykroyd's asleep
and suddenly his belt buckle's
being undone and his pants
are unzipped.
- That was a Stuart Ziff job,
wasn't it?
- Yeah.
Be careful how you say that.
- What?
[both laughing]
Yeah, but I mean--
- You don't want to call that
"the Stuart Ziff job."
- Stuart Ziff was the rabbi
of the group.
- Yeah, he was.
- We worked very hard on that--
that was added on--
I had to hire someone, Al
Coulter,
to make that whole mechanism.
- Little bits of wire
and some strap springs
that curl up
and pull apart, bend it
and tweak it and yank on it
kind of stuff and then,
of course, condoms,
air inflation device
and that's,
I guess, important to the gag.
- That was a long sequence,
that was not meant to be
a dream sequence.
We built that set
and worked out a whole scene
with a voice prompt.
- Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson
drive out to Fort Detmerring
and they trying to find
the Fort Detmerring ghost.
- And there's
a Revolutionary War ghost
and Danny gets the blowjob
and the whole thing.
- As they're looking around,
it's late at night,
and Dan Aykroyd falls asleep
and then this ghost appears,
you know, bathing him
in magenta pink light.
[eerie music]
Wakes him up
and unzips his pants
and makes him cross his eyes.
- I'm not sure what was going
on, I mean, he was having
a wonderful time with a ghost.
If you're gonna be haunted,
that's the kind of ghost
you want to be haunted by.
And because my insecurity is,
how come he gets to be the--
hang out with the ghost?
What about me?
So I got over it, I'm okay.
- Once the film started on
that ascent up, if they gave
that the amount of time
they originally thought,
it would've broken that pace,
it would've broken that ascent.
So consequently,
it just got edited down.
- And once we were cutting it
and knew it was going to be a
montage,
it was like I had to run back
to the tech house and go,
you can cut four scenes,
you can cut four scenes!
- I don't know where they get
these guest conductors.
You know, I always felt like
each partner I had
in a scene was, was so
brilliant at what they did.
- I don't think that
my character is good
with competition, at least
the way I played him.
He's pretty in touch
with his inner child.
- It was one of
the first scenes I shot,
I think it might've been
the first scene.
Having it sort of start at
Lincoln Center
was a wonderful place
to begin.
We had a good time
and I thought Timothy Carhart
did a great job,
you know, snuffling.
- I didn't know how cool the
movie was going to be because,
you know, they don't say,
"Tim, come to the set,
you know,
"a month before your turn
and we'll show you everything,"
they don't do that.
You just show up
when your job is.
- It was a fun place to do a
scene and it was the beginning
of what I feel is one of
the great things about
"Ghostbusters," which is such
a love letter to New York.
- Sigourney's
a real straight shooter
and of course Bill is so not.
I shot a couple of days before
I did my first scene
with Bill.
It was like, well, isn't Bill
supposed to be here?
What time is Bill's call?
Anyway, Bill missed his call
by some hours,
so much so that we had to
start shooting that scene
with a stand-in.
And then he came in
and he clearly didn't know
what the scene was,
he hadn't looked at it.
Bill was very willing to just
improvise that scene.
But you can't now improvise
the scene because we've already
shot half of it, so you kind of
have to do the lines.
He was a little embarrassed
about having been that late,
so he was amusing everybody,
but not me so much.
He was like, "What's wrong?
What's wrong, Annie? Come on."
Ghostbusters,
what do ya want?
I said, nothing's wrong,
I would just like you to stand
on your fucking mark
and say your fucking line!
And then I'll be fine.
And as I recall,
the crew applauded.
- It's a good job, isn't it?
- I'm Walter Peck.
I didn't do any deep
background work
on the juvenile life
of Walter Peck.
I felt I had my own juvenile
life that was perfectly fine
to draw from,
I didn't need anybody else's.
I lived in New York
and I went and I met them.
I'd kind of known them
peripherally
because I'd worked with
Gilda Radner in New York.
So I'd met all of them then
and it was a ver--
I mean,
they were iconic comics.
When I talked to Harold
about it
and I talked to Ivan about it,
I knew that I can't
compete at being funny,
I have to play this--I have to
play this like "Antigone,"
you know, I have to be
a male Margaret Dumont,
that's how I thought of it.
I certainly wasn't a comedian
and I wasn't going to be able
to compete with them
on that stage,
which would've been stupid.
And so they taught me
the character, essentially.
The character's part of
the architecture of the story.
They need a foil, a bad guy,
or some kind of antagonist.
Theoni Aldredge, who was
a great costume designer,
I'd known her from
the Public Theater,
and so we sat down
and she said,
"Well, what do you want to do,
what do you want to look like?"
And I said, well, I wanted to
make it visually significant.
I wanted a dark blue kind of
suit, I had a little
Phi Beta Kappa pin that's very
hard to see but it kind of
anchors you, and Theoni helped
me a great deal with that,
just kind of putting
the right kind of pinstripe,
the right kind of tie,
and I grew a beard for it.
And I took a deep breath
and I hoped
it would kind of work out
and I'm the scene stealer.
You could have it your way,
Mr. Venkman.
[majestic music]
- Sigourney Weaver,
she's in her apartment,
various things happened,
she sits in the chair,
this hand breaks through
and grabs her and, like,
another hand breaks through
and grabs her over here.
Well, the shooting of that,
puppeteers underneath
with these claws
would reach up.
- There were three puppeteers,
very techy guys.
I had to really kind of
encourage them to not be afraid
of hurting me or, God knows,
they would not offend me
if they grabbed me here,
they had these big,
rubber puppet hands anyway.
- Of course this is
Sigourney Weaver, and they just
wouldn't do it with
the right amount of force.
- What happened in the first
couple of takes was...
You know,
try to find where they could
grab her without being,
you know, rude.
- She looks down at the
puppeteer in the middle of
the thing and she goes,
"Go ahead, make my day."
- And then the next take,
wah, grabs her leg.
Ah, the other arm
grabs her breast.
It was a take that went
into the next shot.
- They were all so sweet
and so like, "Oh..." you know.
- But there was something
very powerful, particularly for
the actors because they really
did experience what finally
the audience was going to see
to a great extent.
- [screaming]
- [growling]
- Those were a problem.
They were called terror dogs
almost arbitrarily because
they could've been lizard
creatures or gobbledygooks,
I mean, they had things
they had to do
like run around
and be terrible.
So it had restraints,
it had to exist on the ground,
it wasn't a floating
ecto-whatever,
so they had to be scary,
they couldn't be silly
like the Onionhead.
Because the laughs
of the scenes
were not based on it
being silly.
- I think
the biggest thing was
are these damn things gonna
work was the big question
with regard to the terror dogs.
- So we kind of took the
"terror dog" term literally.
I took it to some artists
and said,
interpret it as a mad dog,
and then we kept on moving
through that and they just
morphed into something
that's a cross
between a lizardy creature
but acts sort of like a dog.
- By the time I got to
"Ghostbusters" a lot of
the concept drawings had been
done already and I think
everybody was pretty much
snow-blind with all these
really good but totally
diverse interpretations
by Berni Wrightson
and by Tom Enriquez
and by a few other people.
It was like going though
the Louvre.
They finally settled on one,
a design by Tom Enriquez,
which looked like a bit like
the "Forbidden Planet"
Id monster,
but with four legs and horns.
As a concept, very good.
Then they made a maquette
of that which Michael Gross
presented me as something
that was animatable
and I didn't think it was.
It was very cartoonish,
I mean, it was
a totally legitimate
interpretation of
that initial concept sketch
of Tom's.
I was asked what my design
would be, and so I sculpted
my interpretation of it,
which is
more anatomically valid.
A few notes were given
and I made some changes insofar
as the anatomy was concerned,
not much.
Richard wanted him to be more
muscular, more weightlifter-y.
I think the original maquette
was a little better but--
because I think I made him
too, like so many Americans,
he got too big,
you know, he got too fat,
he's a little chubby.
But that's okay,
'cause it's a comedy.
So it looks part Tom, part me,
part, you know, Harryhausen.
- I definitely
asked to be shown.
Of course, my first
conversation with Ivan
about the terror dogs was that
I could just put on a suit
and be a terror dog.
He thought that was about
the silliest idea in the world.
But I was from the theater,
you know, so,
"I can be a terror dog."
- The terror dogs
were made in many scales.
Whenever the terror dog
would run,
that was a stop-motion puppet,
and the original one
was sculpted by Randy Cook
and ultimately he did
the stop-motion animation.
- But I, you know, oversaw
the sculpture of not only
the small one,
which I sculpted myself,
but the big one,
which Mike Hosch led off on,
that he and Linda Frobos
were working on at night,
and I remember the last
two or three nights
before it had to be molded,
everybody weighed in--
Steve Johnson and Linda Frobos
and Mark Wilson and myself,
maybe Billy Bryan, I don't
remember--a lot of people
started, you know, doing
the final detail on the face,
and the way we made
that work was
Polaroid camera,
little model,
stop-motion model,
big model.
And I just kept taking
Polaroids, matching Polaroids
of the two until I couldn't
tell the difference
and then we were done.
- And they had to somehow be--
look like something
that could be in a statue.
- It's supposed to be that
the stone statue came to life,
but the only way
we could do it in a hurry
was it was in there
and claws its way out.
- And this is actually
what you see underneath.
And the eye, if you notice,
there are wires here,
this was the actual prop
and there was
also a little push rod
operated via air, and it would
push through this little hole
and that's what broke away
the plaster.
- Sometimes the simple stuff
works even more effectively
than more elaborate things that
we're used to seeing right now.
- And because that was Randy's
gig, I just really wanted
to go see if he was
gonna fuck up or not.
- The terror dogs in the temple
were one of the first things
that we had to shoot,
long before the mechanics
could be done for
the inside of it.
So I suggested to production
that we build dummy dogs,
basically no substructure
at all--
"dogs," we call them--
these, these puppets
had no eye movement,
they had no mouth movement,
they had nothing.
- And then an electric carving
knife like you'd carve
a turkey carved out the inside.
- So that a puppeteer could
get inside each from below.
I reasoned that we could
get our wide shots with them,
and then they could go in
later when the proper puppets
were made and do inserts.
- You know, there are
these big mass of rubber,
as they were kind of forklifted
on to the location.
- The puppeteers had to get
inside these things
and find out if they could
breathe and if they wouldn't
get poisoned by
the residual urethane aroma--
"bouquet," we call it.
- There was a male and female,
or a large horn, I guess,
and a little horn.
- We had two puppets
with interchangeable horns
that were otherwise
virtually identical.
- So he asked me, he said,
"You know, you're a girl,
"you're a female puppeteer,
and I know this is gonna be
"a little bit weird,
but do you think
"if I put a female puppeteer
in the temple dog
that Sigourney turns into that
it will be more feminine?"
Well, just so you know,
the answer is "yes."
- They had a little TV set
so they could see
what they were doing--little,
tiny, itsy-bitsy TV sets,
the finest Radio Shack
could provide.
- When you climbed into it,
you were strapped into it
like a racecar harness.
- You could actually lean into
them and pilot them, you know,
turn the heads
and have them lean.
- It took a lot of
upper body strength.
- The floor of the actual set
was built four feet
off the ground,
so if the director said, "Hey,
I want the terror dog over
there," the grips would cut
a hole in the floor and
the puppeteer would come from
the bottom and we'd put
the sitting terror dog on it
and also cables went under
the floor to all the people
with levers to operate
the cables, you know, to make
the cheeks move or whatever,
the eyebrows move.
- And the first time we
reveal it, he opens the door
and throws the jacket and it
lands on this thing.
Well, I'm the guy
that was throwing the jacket
and it kept missing.
Ivan was there and he was
getting really mad.
I did a lot, I mean,
to the point where,
"Okay, if you can't make it,
somebody else is gonna do it,"
and with the last shot
I got it.
I think I did it like 15 times
because I kept missing.
It seemed easy.
- Because we had him really
shaking it off, and he goes,
"No, no, no, no, we want it--"
Randy would say, "No, I want it
more of a head--"
like that kind of a thing.
- The movements were very
minimal, which was
sort of echoed in
the animation as well.
- Stop-motion animation is
you gotta be nuts to do this.
- Then it was on to
the animation stage.
Doug Beswick made the armature
based upon the creature
which had already been built.
It's always better to build it,
you know, build the armature
first and the creature after,
which our drawings were quite
accurate because we used to do
elevation drawings,
right top and side and front.
- Why don't you go over and
pet him on top of the head?
- Gunnar Ferdinandsen did the
mold, which was a work of art,
he was the preeminent
mold maker of, you know,
in every shop in the business.
I'd grown up
making my own mold,
you know, I made my own molds
and boy,
those are sloppy stuff,
but he and Richard Ruiz,
you know, did it right.
[dog growling]
I remember
the Central Park thing
because I wasn't there
to oversee it.
No measurements were
taken of the thing.
- This was one of those cases
where we had to just
shoot something that wasn't
there and make that work.
- And that was a nightmare
because it took a long time
to figure it out because we
had no dimensions, it wasn't
match moved,
it was we had to make up
a match move,
complicated thing.
- You only had one crack at it
because it took him at least
a day to shoot it and it took
him a couple of days
to sort it out.
- We had no time left,
didn't know
how it was gonna turn out.
We get back the next day
for dailies...
The whole set has been struck,
the terror dog's there,
the blue screen against which
he was shot
has gone off to Metro
for "2010,"
no retakes
and the film didn't--
wasn't to come back for
another couple of hours
so I was... nervous.
As it worked out,
it was okay.
I would've done it over for
the simple reason
that the blur
of the camera cancelled out
the blur of the puppet,
so it's got that flaw to it.
Well, what are you
gonna do?
- There was never a situation
where we said,
we can't deliver that,
we have to cut it.
- I think we only had 140 shots
was the original number,
and then when we had about
three or four weeks left,
Ivan decided to add
a hundred shots.
- The time constraints,
the changing of the schedule.
We had people working
seven days a week,
I remember they rented some
condominiums across the street
from Boss Films
so people could see
their families occasionally.
- It's great when you work on
the weekend because you get
paid overtime, but if people
work too many weekends
they get completely burned out
and then the quality of work
goes down,
mistakes are made.
- When Ivan came over
to add these shots,
I met him in a parking lot
with a samurai suit.
- Is that true?
[both laughing]
- I said, Ivan, we need to do
the samurai cut.
You know, we can't possibly do
a hundred more shots, you know,
you have to be reasonable here,
you know,
I mean,
the guys are bleeding already.
And then we went over
by $700,000, you know,
then they started griping about
that, even though they had
added all these shots
in the last minute, I mean,
there was blood in the shoes
of the optical department.
- We actually shook everybody
up in the business
and they cut six months off
your post production schedule,
which is, well, if they could
do it, anybody could do it.
- Considering what
they could do then
and what they could do now
with the limited resources
that they had back then
was beautifully pulled off.
- [screaming]
- [growling]
[glass squeaking]
[harp glissando]
- What I loved was that Dana,
you know, was this sort of
"normal" person
and then becomes Zuul.
It was the kind of thing
I'd done in theater,
sort of transforming
completely,
um, within 10 seconds,
but in movies you're not
usually encouraged to do that.
I had a brilliant
makeup artist
and we worked for a long time
to get my hair... like that
and lots of kind of
phosphorescent makeup.
He did just a great job
and finally, I did look like
I'd stuck my finger
in a socket
and turned into someone else.
Between the wind and the light
and the makeup and everything,
my beautiful dress
that Theoni Aldredge
had made for me, this sort
of orangey, flamey dress,
I felt quite possessed
and it was a lovely feeling.
And then every now
and then Ivan would say,
"Just, you know, do a little
bit less, you know?"
[guttural growling]
If you give the editor stuff
like that, grotesque stuff
like what you're doing,
he's gonna want to put it
in the movie.
- When we shot it,
that first day,
it was shot in City Hall
and it was either the Mayor's
office or an alternate office,
I remember Mayor Koch came in
to visit for a moment,
he was then the Mayor
of New York.
- Every once in a while Bill
would get on a roll and that
unity that they have, and you
really can feel outside of it,
and so trying to jump in
the middle of all that improv,
and they had worked together
in that sort of medium.
I came from strictly acting,
I mean, I came from theater,
but they were,
you know, just...
let it roll and see
what happens.
- Bill Murray said, "You know,
they should know each other
and they should be on a first
name basis, the Cardinal,"
and he said,
"Your name is Lenny,"
so that was improvised,
that was not in the script.
And the Cardinal and me
being pals, which was such
a New York thing, you know,
that was Bill Murray's
inspired notion.
- They gave me the line about,
"I've seen shit
that would turn you white."
I think they were doing me
a favor, I'm not sure.
I get that a lot,
"Hey, Ernie Hudson!
"Say that line, you know,
in the Mayor's office,
you know,
you know, you know."
And then they won't say
the bad word
because they want me
to say the bad word.
I have seen shit
that'll turn you white.
I love the line that Bill
Murray has where he refers to
Bill Atherton as dickless,
which Bill, I'm sure,
has really learned to
appreciate over the years.
- Years later I see William
Atherton, and I say, you know,
uh, God, you know,
"Ghostbusters" was amazing,
right, I mean, you know?
I said, I walk down the street
and people yell,
"Yo, Egon! Hey, Brainiac!"
Really big effect
on all our careers, right?
And he said, "Yeah."
- I'm walking down 46th street
and the Criterion Theater's
there and they were--
and "Ghostbusters" was playing,
and all these buses
are out in front
and all the kids
are coming in from camp.
So I'm walking by the buses
and about
800 really young kids
leaning out the window, going,
"Hey, dickless!"
[laughing]
- Not so good for Bill.
- Then I started to laugh
because, um, it wasn't true.
- Gratefully,
Mr. President.
- It was kind of like Barnum
and Bailey, they were like,
we were all grounded in the
room, there were a lot of us,
we were all yelling, and we
just--I remember Bill just
kind of riffing and just
playing off the camera.
It was kind of like,
well, you're on the Titanic
and all of a sudden Abbott and
Costello were there, you know,
and what are our last minutes
on earth going to be like?
- I was just
going with the text.
The text always begins
everything,
and there was something
so New York about it,
and I remember Ivan Reitman,
the director, suggesting that
I do certain very broad things,
you know,
and I said, no, I said,
they're the comedians.
I should be
as realistic as possible
because I'm the base,
I'm the reality base,
I am the skeptical one.
I am the New Yorker,
"Who are these Ghostbusters?"
I mean, come on.
- It was a lot of fun,
but it was like throwing it all
up in the air and just
kind of going with it.
So it was terrifying
and wonderful at the same time.
- We had this massive location
on Central Park West between,
I think it was 66th and 67th
streets, and so it's also
where the traffic not only goes
north and south in the city
but east and west.
The city, when they finally
realized what we wanted to do,
panicked and revoked
the permit.
When they did it, it was
the day we were shooting
at City Hall
and all of a sudden
we couldn't find
Bill or Danny,
and for an hour we couldn't
find them.
And then they reappeared and
they said, "We just talked with
Mayor Koch because we're at
City Hall," so they went to see
the real Mayor
and he's gonna fix it
and we're gonna be able
to shoot.
It was fantastic.
- The location was 55 Central
Park West, which is just
up the street
from the Mayflower Hotel
where I was staying,
so I could just
roll out of bed and walk
up to the set.
I think in the movie we changed
it to 550, which doesn't exist.
- And that building had
graduated color, as if you look
at it from a crowd
in the park,
it starts darker and gets
lighter as it goes up.
It's really a beautiful
Art Deco building.
- We realized that every time
we were in front of
the real building,
in New York, looking up,
we had to put a top on it.
And then if you were
looking down on it,
it had to be a matte painting,
so there were all these ways
we had to deal with
the top of the building.
- Then we had this big crowd
scene and were all the extras
in New York, they're very
professional people,
it was all
this theater people.
- And all the different kinds
of New Yorkers
selling t-shirts and all that,
it was,
it was a very
meaningful scene.
I grew up in New York and I was
born here, and I have to say
that I can't watch
that scene without crying,
just to see all the different
New Yorkers there.
[crowd cheering]
- I like that shirt.
- Ghostbusters! All right!
- It had been the first movie
that I did extra work on,
I think it was four days,
there were two night shoots
and two day shoots.
Bill Murray
was a clown, he was--
came and talked to us
between takes.
I was very much into the New
Romantic kind of movement,
and my roommate and myself
sort of fancied
that I looked a little bit
like Tom Bailey
from the Thompson Twins.
I literally looked like
I had put a bowl on my head
and cut it around there
and my roommate at the time
would color it for me
this bright, crazy red color.
The name of the color
was Red Penny.
It was the '80s!
[laughing]
- What was interesting
about the movie is
we kind of had to do
the ending first.
- John DeCuir
designed the set piece,
this sort of post-wreckage.
- We never broke ground
in Manhattan.
In other words, we had
a street, couldn't dig a hole.
So when you see the scenes
where there's a half a cop car
in a hole and a bunch of
cement coming up, whatever,
that's all built above ground,
and it worked perfectly.
And the amazing thing is
New Yorkers who were going by
thought it was real.
- And the person who was
meeting me for brunch
came in and said, "Are
you guys shooting here?
"You got a real problem because
there's been some sort of
"cave-in on the street,
the police are here,
I don't know how you're gonna
be able to shoot."
So I thought, well,
that looks realistic.
- We discovered how you could
paralyze New York
by chopping two trees down
at the right place.
- [laughing]
- We had to stop the traffic,
move the set dressing out,
shoot two takes,
put the set dressing on,
open up the traffic.
- Closed New York down,
that whole section,
it was a nightmare.
- The horns were honking
back to infinity, I mean...
- I was thinking, my God, they
really were able to do this.
Who's the location manager
for this? Who has he bribed?
This is New York.
Who's just got a lot of money?
You know?
Somebody's done
very well for this.
- At one point
we shut down traffic
in three-fourths of Manhattan.
The traffic would back up all
the way across Central Park
to the East Side and all the
way down to Columbus Circle,
which would then create a
traffic jam on Eighth Avenue,
Broadway and Seventh Avenue
and 59th Street,
which are major
traffic arteries.
So people down past 35th Street
in Manhattan would be stopped
for no reason
they could figure out.
The word would spread out,
"Ghostbusters."
[videogame music]
- So what John DeCuir did,
quite brilliantly,
is back in LA reproduced
the front of the building.
- The front of Sigourney's
building on the street level
was just incredible because it
was made to vibrate and shake
as if it's in an earthquake.
- And we had a big pit
with hydraulic lifts.
- So that whole sections
of pavement would tilt up.
- And then we just
had to match it.
- The idea of a rooftop temple
came to us--we didn't really
know where the final
confrontation was gonna
take place and I remembered
a book called
"Rooftops of New York,"
and New York has the most
extraordinary rooftops--
there's temples and there's
chateaus, you know,
architects--it was
a little conceit, I guess,
during the great era
of the skyscraper building,
was to put something
kind of interesting on top.
And I remembered
a skyscraper in St. Louis,
where I went to college,
that had a replica of
the Temple of Halicarnassus,
one of the wonders
of the ancient world.
So I thought, well, why can't we
have this incredible rooftop,
you know, as the setting,
and it looks like a mock temple
but turns out to be
a real temple.
- John DeCuir liked to build.
John DeCuir
really liked to build.
John DeCuir had built
half of Rome
three times for "Cleopatra."
He liked to build.
This didn't frighten Ivan,
it frightened me.
- It was his design
of the gates, you know,
and what happened at the top
of the building.
None of that was really clear
in the screenplay.
We had ideas of sort of stuff
going on and gargoyles
at the top of the building,
but he was able to bring it all
together very quickly.
- So Ivan, on one hand
didn't want to spend the money
that John DeCuir
wanted to spend to build,
on the other hand, Ivan hated
having to depend on how
those special effects locked
him down so he couldn't turn
the camera around because every
time it's another effects shot.
If he could build it,
it gave him a lot more freedom
in shooting.
- And the freedom was
very important with people
like Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis,
Bill Murray,
these remarkable,
inventive actor-writers.
- And there was so much shooting
to be done up there, Ivan felt
if we could build this thing,
throw in some razzle dazzle,
special effects later, if we
could build the heart of it
so I could shoot from
all angles,
and John DeCuir
took on that challenge.
- It was in one of the largest
stages in Los Angeles,
Stage 16 on the Burbank lot.
Shelly Kahn, actually, the
editor, once told me a story
and I didn't believe him,
where he said, you know,
that stage got so big because
William Randolph Hearst was
doing a movie and they took
an existing stage
and they lifted it up
and built underneath it,
and I thought, this is the
silliest story I ever heard,
and then about two days later
and I was watching a documentary
on television about Hearst
and it showed them doing it,
there was newsreel footage
of them lifting this stage
and making it a story higher.
- This tremendous sound stage
is too small to hold the big
ensembles planned by Warner
Brothers for "Cain and Mabel,"
a new musical production,
so they're making it
35 feet higher.
- So now the stage is 96 feet
taller and he filled that--
that set went right to the top.
- The first time we walked on
that set was like, wow,
really spent some money
on this thing.
- Even Steven Spielberg
came down to look at this set,
which was very unusual
because he was used to
working on his own
humungous stages.
- I've got a press release
for the set,
I mean,
it was an amazing set.
- That was a peak day, to look
at what they built and it
just got me,
you could write anything
and they'll build it,
huh, yeah.
All it takes
is time and money.
- Man, I've never seen anything
so ambitious in a movie,
I mean, it was so beautiful,
first of all, and I thought,
wow, I'm really
in a movie here, you know?
- I just remember climbing up
because we had to shoot
some of the electricity plates
and climbing up,
like, a wooden ladder.
It was initials and dates,
and I said, oh, if you're
up here to you get to carve
your initials and dates?
And the person, the stagehand,
who'd take us up gave us
this huge, dirty look
and he said, "You know, those,
"those are initials of people
that have fallen
out of the perms."
- So it was a very big set,
filling up a stage,
there was almost
no room to move.
On top of that, we were always
smoking it up and adding wind,
so it was a desperate place
to be sometimes.
[eerie music,
loud footsteps thumping]
- They wanted to bring
the Statue of Liberty
out of the East River,
for one thing,
which they wound up
doing in the second one,
and instead it was
the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
- Yeah, I mean, come on,
the Marshmallow Man--
I don't even know how Danny
thought that up.
- Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
was there from the beginning.
- The Marshmallow Man occurred
halfway through Dan's
original draft and things got
bigger from there.
- When I actually
started on the picture,
there was a number of drawings
done already.
So there was kind of an idea.
We know he's a sailor, we were
going with the idea of a guy
in a suit, which I think made
Ivan really nervous.
- Linda Frobos had gotten
a job on "Ghostbusters,"
she was sculpting,
and they asked her if she knew
someone who could build
a Marshmallow Man and play it.
She knew I'd done Shakespeare,
so it was an obvious lock.
The drawings
were already done.
The designer's head developed
images and they knew
how they wanted it to look,
they had me do some maquettes.
- The sculpting made it
look kind of silly
and we made it fatter, I mean,
we thought the fatter it was,
the funnier it got.
- And the first suit that we
made was soft foam throughout.
The whole crew was
very excited
about that first test
because it was
80 percent there, but there was
one little problem that
as it walked toward the camera,
my legs were squeezing
the foam together
and it looked like a vagina.
We had to change that,
so we spent some time thinking
about ways to firm it up.
John Bird came in as a
consultant and he recommended
that we make
a fiberglass body,
and that frightened me--
I didn't want it to be
a fiberglass body, I didn't
want to wear a fiberglass body,
I didn't want to have to have my
arms straight out to the side,
cutting on the edges
and things like that.
So I worked with
some other foams
and we got some
and we developed it.
The L200 internal structure
that we eventually used,
that was the right one.
- We showed the test that we all
thought was great, but remember,
this was like a Styrofoam,
yellow foam caked suit
with the head on it,
which wasn't painted,
it wasn't finished
to look like marshmallow,
and that's when Ivan said,
"I can't believe it.
I'm basing my whole movie
on this thing."
I remember he was nervous a lot
of the time because nobody
had ever done
anything like this.
- It was risking a joke
on something very different,
and though his career
wouldn't end,
but he would be judged by it
if it didn't work.
- It's either gonna work or
we're never gonna work again.
- There was only weeks before
doing it in which we were going,
crossing our fingers, saying,
let's hope this works,
because if it doesn't work...
- And I gotta give him credit,
they're committed,
it's gotta work.
- There was a discussion
about how big
should the Marshmallow Man be?
- Yeah. [laughs]
- We really--it was
a big mystery, you know,
how big the Marshmallow Man was
supposed to be and going to be.
- 150 feet, 200 feet.
- Somebody had said 125
and somebody had said 100.
- You know, Ivan just said,
"Okay, I'll tell you
how tall he is.
He's 112.5 feet,
that's how tall, that's it."
- When you get artists
together,
you just start to
work off each other,
which is the beauty of
Team Marshmallow Man.
We had Linda Frobos, who did
most of the sculpting of
the faces, and then myself
and a couple of other
really great folks
that were to assist Bill
in the construction of it.
- And there were just
these sheets of foam,
just big sheets of foam.
People were cutting the foam,
they were drawing out lines,
and they were cutting them
in specific angles
to get the right,
you know, spheres,
so it's almost like
pattern making,
like you pattern make a dress.
- It had to have a zipper
so that the performer could get
in and out, so the zipper was
always on the off-camera side
so that at any angle that
they shot, he looked seamless.
- So there were all these
multiple suits
and there were layers
and layers of foam,
which when people were
exhausted,
they would go and sleep on,
I guess we'd been
working all night.
- I looked out through
the mouth, so it was about
6-1/2 feet tall
because I'm only 5'8."
If I were taller I would have
had to use more foam.
- The inside of the real head
was made out of fiberglass
and there would've been the
eyes in those and mechanisms,
you know, to make
the cheeks go up
or maybe make the mouth open.
- The really fun thing was
I puppeteered
the Stay Puft Man's mouth,
so that was the really
coolest job.
- Discovery face,
eyes to the right.
One and two and three and go.
[laughter]
- There was a foam spring belt
inside that, when I moved,
there was a little bit of action
transferred to the outside.
- I was always talking with
the DPs about, you know,
how to make sure that
that Stay Puft Man...
loft looked just right.
- The direction is, "We need
you to look really heavy
"because you're really big,
but really light
because you're a marshmallow,"
so I said, what?
- As I was walking, I would
say, "Boom, boom, boom,"
in order to time it properly,
you know, and we were
over-cranking so that when
played back it looked slower.
They would tell me how fast
they needed it, take that down
by X percentage and then
I'd try to translate that
into a version of
"Boom, boom, boom."
- Filmed this guy
at 72 frames a second
where we ended up
with something that
an animation walk cycle
called a double bounce walk,
something that
Mickey Mouse did.
It looked really silly,
sort of...
sort of a '30s cartoon thing.
- When we were in the thick
of it and deadline was just
coming down and it was
very stressful, like,
are we gonna make it,
are we gonna make it?
I'm driving down Crescent
Heights towards Sunset
and I see a "Ghostbusters"
billboard,
and the date that it's gonna
open is in, like, 3 1/2 weeks
or three weeks, maybe, I don't
know, it was really soon,
and we still hadn't shot
the street scene, we still
hadn't shot Stay Puft
on fire, and I'm pretty sure
we hadn't shot the building
blowing up,
and there was the billboard
and it was like,
how is that gonna happen?
- I was afraid it was gonna be
ridiculously hot inside
the suit, and it was,
except that because
it was hollow and flexible,
when I waved my arms,
I got air in and out
of my mouth.
- Imagine that you got a big
sheet of foam
like in your mattress
and you have to live in there
under hot, hot, hot lights,
and it's a giant foam thing
and then you have to walk
and sort of dance in it,
and you have to do that
over and over and over again
and it's foam and you sweat
and you're inside this thing
day after day after day.
- Look at some of
the backstage photos,
sometimes you'll see my--my
assistants like this.
[laughs]
- And Bill was a very
well kempt guy,
you know, but... you know.
- So there's a scene of me
going, ooh, dear, you know,
like this, like pretending
it's really bad, really foul,
but it wasn't.
- He would take that
"Ghostbusters" head off
and it was like, whoo, baby!
And they did actually
some really great things
on "Ghostbusters" where they
made it safe for him
by putting air conditioning,
like, literally we would
shove an air conditioning tube
up his butt, you know,
to make sure that he was cool
inside the suit.
- So the interesting thing,
for me, about the size
of the Marshmallow Man
was setting the scale of
the miniature so we could
build the environment
around him.
We built a miniature
of Central Park West
with the road and a bit
of park beside it
for the Marshmallow Man
to march up.
- And there was a split down
the middle of that set
and it was a big set,
very long street set,
and so as Bill walked down
that street,
the cables followed him,
and we were pushed
underneath the stage
on a little wooden dolly
that they'd made for us
with a monitor
that also
had the cable running down,
and we were puppeteering
as they rolled us down.
So it was very sort of
low-tech, did the job and it,
quite frankly, is one of
my favorite movie memories,
I think, because there we
were, you had your monitor,
it was happening above you
and you could hear Bill
stepping above you and, and you
could see it and you were,
you know, puppeteering
and you really felt like
you were in it,
and somebody was pushing you.
It was just--it was fun,
you know?
- There was a storyboard that
was originally drawn for it
that showed a police car
getting crushed
and we were ready to do that
and we had actually started
on that but decided
not to do it.
We were also joking about
maybe the Marshmallow Man
could pick up his foot
and you'd see
the squashed police car
embedded
in the bottom
of his foot, you know,
it would've been
kind of funny.
[people screaming]
The only time I could really
remember in my career
where the production designer
of the film--in this case
John DeCuir--provided
construction drawings of
the miniatures to be built and
it was up to us to create it,
and we had to create
the upper two-thirds of it
but we didn't build it down
to the ground--
enough for the Marshmallow Man
to climb on, basically.
- And you look in the window
and you can see--actually they
had characters in there
and they were doing
very interesting things.
- And if you look
in this window,
you could see two people
gettin' it on.
If you look over here, look at
that, look what's in there!
We got a picture of... the
agent that they hate the most,
his picture's in the window,
"That's the part that's
gonna blow up first!"
- It is a moment that we all,
in those days, looked for.
Our own little private
set decoration moment.
- No, you can't see it on film,
but that's how they got
a lot of the pressure off.
- Well, during
the earliest phases,
I was hoping that
we weren't really
going to have to burn
the suit.
I thought there's going to be
some artificial way
that we could simulate it.
Richard kept saying, "No,
we're gonna light it on fire,
what do you think?"
Now, I didn't do the burns,
we had stuntmen.
We only made 18 costumes
and we only burnt 17 of them.
- Thaine Morris had come up
with some sort of scalable fire
that only lasted
for two seconds.
- I was so busy at that time
that I hired Joe Viskocil
to help me with Stay Puft.
We worked out a way
to load him and coat him
with flammable material.
- It was the start of some sort
of chemical reaction and it was
a slow, little, tiny flame
so the first two seconds
would actually work in scale,
because fire doesn't scale.
- Well, the actual EPA came in
and talked to us about
the different
environmental hazards
of everything we were doing,
and it put the fear of God
in me, I mean, foam on fire
is a dangerous thing,
you know,
and there's a guy inside the
suit and we had been taught
by the EPA that the fumes
that were going to be
coming out of the suit
were dangerous.
- It really set off
some really noxious gas.
- But the guy in the suit,
it was very frightening.
- That's--it's a hard thing
to do, is to get in there
and to volunteer
having yourself be
put ablaze.
- First person inside the suit
that was just kind of stunt card
Thaine was working with.
- That's right.
- So we had him on a scuba gear
with a hose running up
his pant leg.
He was quite safe
inside this suit.
- The guy had never
done this before.
They lit him on fire
and he just sort of got scared
and fell to the ground.
- We put him out,
ruined one $20,000 suit.
So we put him in the suit
the next night,
same thing happens,
he goes down.
Okay, so what's going on?
"Well, I can't see,
I'm afraid of fire."
Why did you sign up
to do this anyway?
- Actually, I think
he just couldn't hear.
- So that means
we're in a panic,
we've got one suit left.
So there's a guy in town whose
name is Tony Cecere.
Tony has spent his entire life
burning himself up.
- A friend of mine called me up
and said, "I've got this show
that we're doing down here
in Santa Monica," he said
it was a low-budget show
and he needed a fire burn on it
and wanted me to come down
and do a fire burn on the show,
and he wouldn't tell me any more
about the show other than that.
And I had done
some research on it
before I went down to see him
and found out
that it wasn't
any low-budget show
and we adjusted
my price accordingly.
- The suit was built for a guy
that was about 6-foot tall.
Tony's about 5'4",
he's a little guy.
- I was more concerned with
whenever you catch Styrofoam
on fire, it tends to completely
burn up all at once,
so before I got ready
to do the fire burn,
we took a piece of the foam
that the Stay Puft man
was made out of
and we set it on fire
and we'd seen that the stuff
wouldn't burn,
which made me feel safe.
So I put my fire suit on and
was inside the Stay Puft Man--
- The action is to walk over
to that apple box, step up on it
and slap the top of that church.
"Yes, sir."
- I had to rehearse several
times because they wanted me
to go up a building a certain
way and they wanted one hand
to hit here,
one hand to hit here.
- We were ready to go,
we light him up,
he walks over,
steps on the apple box,
steps up on the thing,
slaps the top,
backs off the apple box,
squats down,
stands up again, steps up
on the apple box,
slaps the top of the church.
- And I think it was the second
take, the head got hot
from the fire on the outside
of it and the head split open,
and inside of the suit where
I was at was on fire too.
- When we finally got him
to stop, the pink skull
under the Stay Puft was
all that was left on his head.
The suit had burned
clear through
to the polyurethane foam.
- What happened
on the inside,
the glue that they used to
put it together, all the glue
on the inside of the head
started burning.
- We just stopped, you know,
went over, put him out.
He goes,
"Well, I could've kept going,
I wasn't feeling any heat."
[laughs]
- Imagine waking up in bed
at two in the morning,
looking over at my wife
and saying,
he didn't have his tie on.
Joe Viskocil, the pyro guy,
he had the bib and he was
loading flashbulbs
into the bib
and putting squibs on it
and little spark generators,
and I said, he--you gotta
put that tie on there.
He said, "I just--
I don't want to mess it up,
I'm gonna lean on it and I just
don't want it messed up."
I said, okay, all right,
okay, we'll get it on there.
And then put the guy
in the suit, light him up
and then realize
a few hours later
that that one little step
got skipped.
We had just seen
the screening of that shot
and there was applause
all around.
I had to go to Michael Gross
to admit to him that
as nice as the shot looked,
there was a part missing
and we would have to
do it again.
- And he said,
"There's so much else
"going on in that shot--
we've got Nutrona wands,
"we got the guys standing up
there, we got flashbulbs
"going off--probably
no one will notice it.
"But if they do,
who should I charge
the $30,000 reshoot to?"
I pointed.
[laughs]
- When anybody makes a movie,
the first thing they're gonna
tell you is it's the most fun
if you get to blow stuff up.
- So we worked pretty closely
with Thaine Morris
on constructing a blast chamber
for them to go to
the temple to go up in.
- John had something
very specific in mind
and he had these photographs
where you saw these plumes
that spidered out
in these quadrants like that.
- Yeah.
- He drew that on
the storyboards.
- And it was made so
we could do multiple takes.
- The inside of it
and all of the framework
were quite strong steel.
- It was way overbuilt,
so there was really no chance
it was going to do anything
but blow the doors out,
which is what we wanted,
so Thaine could go up and put
his bomb inside and we'd just
stand back and watch him
blow up our building.
- There was four, not three,
bombs in that building.
- And so I said,
where's the best place to be?
- I said, behind me.
- I said, great, and we set
the camera up and we had
all this acrylic
that was for safety purposes,
didn't shatter and all that.
Here we are, we're getting
ready, camera's going,
"Speed!"
[vocalizing camera whirring]
And I'm pressing my camera
and everything explodes.
[vocalizes explosion]
I got smacked
right in the forehead.
- One of the few times
I've ever hurt anybody.
- This is where the blood just
starts coming down and, uh,
what had happened is that
this little bench blew up,
went in the air,
came right through the glass,
bounced over and knocked me
right in the head.
- The shot he got was
his camera was with terpene,
the crossing fireball
with the bench
right in front of the camera,
out of focus.
- When Ivan saw that he wanted
us to reshoot it because
he was--he was actually
really pissed.
He said,
"They'd have been killed,"
and I said, well, yeah,
isn't that the joke?
Because here's the drawing.
That's when everybody started
using storyboards
as documents--hey, we said
we were gonna do this,
it looks like that,
that's what we did.
And so sort of ended up
re-cutting the rooftop scene
just before it blows, each one
dives out of the way.
[explosion and screaming]
- There was a big bag of the
shaving cream and I was gonna
stand and it falls on me,
and I went, well,
you know, how much
shaving cream is in this thing
you're gonna--that's gonna
fall on me, and they said,
"Well, you know, I don't know,
you know, maybe 75 pounds,"
and I said, wow, that's a lot.
And they said, "Well, it's
shaving cream," and I said,
you know, I remember from
junior high school
that 75 pounds of feathers
and 75 pounds of lead
is the same 75 pounds.
Okay, Mr. Sensitive,
so let's get a stunt guy,
show him that it's all right,
and so they put the stunt guy
underneath and they open
the shaving cream and they
laid out on the stunt guy...
just laid him out.
And I said, well, that's what
I'm worried about for me.
- And Ivan and Joe were up on
a truck and they saw me coming
and he goes, "Gross, get up
here, this is gonna be great!
Get up here,
this is gonna be great!"
- And so they--they made it
a little less
and I went and I did it.
- I get up in the truck and
they drop the marshmallows,
it was unbelievable.
- And they dumped it on him...
once.
[laughing]
[people screaming]
- We headed for bed, we got the
shoot until I think it was 10:00
at night and at 10:00 at night
our best friends,
the New York City police,
became our worst enemies,
they said, "Yo, get this stuff
off here! Move it, move it!"
You know, just like...
[vocalizing switch]
- So we decided this movie
has to be screened.
We're testing cards,
just so the marketing people
know where its strengths are.
At this point,
regardless of that,
you got a finished movie
pretty much.
- At that time, Seattle,
Washington was the place
that everybody goes,
the studios.
- Screening is clearly we have
a hit, clearly we have a hit,
and we're scoring
in the 90s,
we're scoring unbelievable.
So we run back onto
our private jet,
we whiz it off
to go back to LA,
and everybody's got
a pile of cards.
So everybody's going,
"Here's one!
Best fuckin' movie
ever made!"
"Best movie ever, ever!"
It was--and we were throwing
them in the air, deliriously,
I mean, realizing,
this is good,
this is so good.
- It was wonderful to see that
first screening and to hear
the laughs and to
just know we had something
that the people
were gonna love.
- I really don't remember
the first screening
of "Ghostbusters."
I do remember
the wrap party, though,
we can't get into that here.
- What was cool was that we were
there and the crew was there,
but there's a lot of people who
hadn't seen any of the film--
there's administration--
- People that had worked on
the live action often have
no idea what the film
is gonna look like.
- I just couldn't believe how
good it was and how exciting
it was to be
a part of it, I mean,
you wait for the credits.
- And that's when we learned
that not everyone's names
were put in the credits.
- My wife at the time
turned to me and said,
"So where were you every day
for a year?"
I really--I went, I was there,
I worked on the picture.
- It was totally random--
I submitted a list of everyone
who worked in the film.
- There were 160 people who
worked on "Ghostbusters"
who were also at in
the Boss Film, of those
I think about a hundred
did not get credit who worked
on the film, and I mean, really
worked, like 20 hour days,
like six or seven day weeks.
- And people who did
major things were deleted
from the list and people who
did insignificant things
were on the list.
- For whatever reason,
the studio said you could only
have so many credits.
I don't know if they were
running out of letters.
- And then we had a wrap party
on a beach and Richard
tells me right there,
"I've taken out an article
"in 'Variety' and I've named
every single person
that worked on 'Ghostbusters'
whose name was left off."
You know, if he's apologizing
to me, he's apologizing
to every single person
that he left,
and I thought that took
a lot of integrity.
- But I didn't see the movie,
until, I think, we premiered it,
and I went to the premiere
and it was just real crazy.
- We were just so wide eyed
ourselves at--
couldn't believe it, I mean,
the Marshmallow Man
looked so real to us,
we were just like, oh!
- The big film of that time
that everybody was anticipating
was "Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom,"
so were kind of off the radar
and the word started to get out
on these test screenings
that it was funny.
We were shocked as anybody.
- You're driving down the street
in your Trans Am and Ray Parker
comes on singing because
everyone's digging your movie
and it was a great feeling,
it was a fun movie to work on.
- It was this rough edged,
"devil may care" picture
with a lot of great comedy
actors and crazy monsters.
- When you get people like
Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray,
Harold Ramis and Ivan Reitman,
all these incredibly
funny people that don't have
huge egos that just wanted
to win and make the best thing
they can.
They're thinking about
every detail, every nuance of
the story and the script and
the performance, the comedy,
and the highs and the lows
and the arcs.
So they get together
and they co-create,
and I think that group of people
co-created a masterpiece.
- And the whole town benefitted
from it--it was stimulating.
- We didn't really, I don't even
dare think that that year
we would be the biggest movie
of the year.
But we thought it was gonna be
good and I think, to be honest,
I think I thought
it was gonna be classic.
- At a certain point,
when I think we were number one
at the box office for,
you know, I think it went on
for five or six weeks
in a row.
- It was certainly a good way
to start out your career
in the movie business.
- Robert Goizueta, the ex
chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola,
he didn't like the movie
until he saw the $250 million
blip in their revenue
and he was very happy.
- You know,
it's hard for me to say
because it's so
incredibly competitive,
but I thought Ivan did
an amazingly good job.
- You know, mixing genres,
particularly with comedy--
horror-comedies, science fiction
comedies--are particularly
hard to do because one of the
genres tends to sort of weaken
the other one, and we happened
to get away with it.
- Even people in the industry
who were jealous of us
had to go,
"Oh, well, you know,
you gotta be happy
for these guys."
- The empowering message
of "Ghostbusters" is that
no matter what monsters
we create in the world,
that if we have the courage,
the tools and the technology,
the talent
and the fortitude, we can
deal with pretty much anything.
[whooshing]
- Are you troubled
by strange noises
in the middle of the night?
- Do you experience feelings of
dread in your basement or attic?
- If the answer is yes,
then don't wait another minute.
- Pick up the phone
and call the professions.
- Ghostbusters.
all:
We're ready to believe you!
[upbeat music]

Fighting ghosts
Proton blast
Zapping ghosts
We'll be fast
Fighting ghosts
Proton blast
We'll be fast
Take it slow
(Oh I could see you baby)
No no no
You can't see them,
you can't see them
No no no
You can't see them,
you can't see them
No no no
You can't see them,
you can't see them
No no no
You can't see them,
you can't see them
[upbeat music continues]

[roaring]
[whooshing]
[clanging]
[techno music]
- You're not giving me
enough chance
to drink between the shots.
[woman laughing]
Take it down a minute.
[laughing]
[techno music continues]
- Oh, my God, I'm worth
the price of New York!
- The guy in the hardhat
ended up being my son's
English teacher and my son ended
up getting into an Ivy League
school and majoring in English
because of that guy.
- Paparazzi guy, this guy Steve
Sands, who's sort of famous
in New York, he's--you know,
you confront him and he's just--
he knows karate
and doesn't really.
So he's really
giving me a hard time
on Central Park West.
There was an extra,
a fairly large man
dressed as
a Hasidic Jew who just got
fed up with Steve, grabbed him,
carried him across
Central Park West
and then threw him
onto the wall.
And then he came back and said,
"That man was very irritating,"
I said, "Yes, the man
was very irritating."
- Let's make some
[funky dance music]

- ...comes out and tells someone
or something like that
and he said, "No, you weren't!"
And then I go...
See?
All of a sudden they say,
"It's true, it's true,
you really were!"
[ukulele music]
- I'm a little Ghostbuster
Sigourney is my name
This picture cost
a lot of bread
So let's hope
it makes the same
I played the damsel
in distress
And we know
what that entails
An icebox put the moves
on me and I woke up in
Dog entrails
I was attacked
by leaping eggs
And molested by a chair
Levitated more than once
and I think that is fair
Blown away and barbecued,
devoured by a terror pooch
I crawled out of his
haunches and Pete Venkman
He gave me a smooch
I think in
every dangerous scene
I had some part to play
My thanks and my affection
to special effects
You really blew me away
You really blew me away
I've always felt
so much support
And humor in this crew
To each and every
single one of you
I'd like to say
"Thank You"
Our cast is an ensemble
Ernie's nice
and Anne's a honey
Ivan's always quick to laugh
but Bill Atherton and I
Are never funny
I have a crush on Harold
and Danny is a dream
Moranis is my demon
and Ivan
He always makes me scream
[ukulele music continues]
[whistling melody]
That will do.