[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 ♪
♪ 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.