Harold Ramis: The good-time movie for me has been every single one of them, without exception. I don’t say that as a Pollyanna, because there have been nightmare situations. I thrive on disaster. I’m very excited when things go wrong. I’m really attracted to outlandish and excessive human behavior. Any experience with Bill Murray is better than any other experience because he does things no one you know would ever do. Every ride with Bill is a potential adventure. I say this with love and considerable distance, because I don’t talk to him and I don’t see him, but the memories of doing those films with him or even doing a film like Vacation—it’s kind of the best of all possible worlds for a social person, which I am, because you assemble everyone you like, and if you’re lucky you pick a beautiful place to make a movie or a real interesting place, and then you’re with them for months with nothing else to do but focus on the work. It’s like an excuse: “Can’t drive the kids to school. Can’t help you with your homework. I’m working.” I know a director, Marty Brest—even when he was shooting in L.A., he’d move out of his house. He’d just say to his wife, “I’m not going to be any use to you anyway while I’m making this movie.”
Judd: My wife is so onto that. She considers all work play. If I’m not working and I say, “I’d like to go to the movies with my friends,” she’s like, “You goof off with your friends all day long.”
Harold: I had the same thing with my first wife. I said to her, “I’m working so hard for you….Blah, blah, blah…You don’t appreciate…” She said, “You love your work. Don’t ever claim this is hard for you.”
Judd: What was the first movie you directed?
Harold: Caddyshack.
Judd: So you started at a very low level.
Harold: It was a low level. We were already kind of corrupted by the initial success of Animal House, which I’d written. I had been professionalized for ten years before Animal House. I’d been paid for writing and performing starting in 1968. So 1978 was when Animal House came out, and I felt I could always support myself. I was through the job-struggle period, and things were happening just as I thought they should. I went from improv comedy on the stage to doing television stuff, and then the treatment for Animal House gets bought, the movie gets made, and it’s a huge hit. Producers literally waited outside screenings to meet me, Doug Kenney, and Chris Miller, and they asked, “What do you guys want to do next?” It was like a dream. So I said, “I want to direct the next thing I write.” Jon Peters, best known as the hairdresser who married Barbra Streisand and a fine producer in his own right, looked at me and said, “You look like a director.” I was wearing a safari jacket and aviator glasses at the time.
Judd: Did you guys all get money from Animal House, or did you all get screwed?
Harold: Well, we didn’t get rich. I got $2,500 for the treatments, and Chris, Doug, and I split $30,000 for the final product, $10,000 apiece. They slipped me another two grand because I did the final polish. We shared five net points of the movie, 1.6 each. There were no gross players in the film, and it was relatively low budget. When the movie came out, we did a quick calculation and thought, “We’re going to make some money.” I think we made in the under-$500,000 range, but in 1978 that seemed like a lot of money. I literally went to the bank in Santa Monica with the review and bought a house.
Judd: Tell me a little about Doug Kenney, who is a National Lampoon legend, and also a little bit about your thoughts on having a group of people that’s doing a lot of work together but separates as the years pass. What was that social world like for those people?
Harold: Having Second City as my first professional experience was great. Second City is so different from stand-up. In the world of stand-up you really talk about killing, not just killing the audience but killing the other comedian. It’s a competition every night. You want to be better than anyone else. But the whole thrust of Second City is to focus on making everyone else look good because in that process we all look good. It’s more than collaborative. Your life onstage depends on other people and on developing techniques for creating cooperative work. We have rules, guidelines, games, and techniques that teach that. It fosters a spirit that exists to this day. Anyone who’s ever worked at Second City can run into any other generation of Second City players, and they instantly share a language and an approach to their work. John Belushi got hired from Second City. We were in a show together, and he got hired to do National Lampoon. They did a big Woodstock music festival parody called Lemmings—it was a big breakout show for John. Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest were discovered in that show. John was able to write his own ticket at the Lampoon, and when the Lampoon wanted to do a nationally distributed radio show, they let John be the producer. John brought me, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Brian Murray, and Joe Flaherty from Second City. We all moved to New York and had this great, cohesive Second City spirit. Doug Kenney was a really sweet guy, a hippie dropout from Harvard that started the National Lampoon and then took a year off to live in a teepee in Martha’s Vineyard. He’d written a book called Teenage Commies from Outer Space, and he was their resident adolescence and puberty expert. He did the High School Yearbook. He did “First Lay Comics” and “First High Comics.” So we did a stage show from Lampoon, John, Gilda, me, Bill, Brian, Joe. We took it on the road, then we did the Radio Hour for a while, and then Ivan Reitman saw us perform in Toronto. He wanted to do a movie with the Lampoon, so I said, “What about a college movie?” He said, “Who do you want to work with at the Lampoon?” I thought Doug was the smartest, funniest, nicest guy, so Doug and I teamed up, and then later we brought in Chris Miller. Doug was always really elegant. He wanted to be Cary Grant. He wanted to be Chevy Chase, basically, but he didn’t have the performing chops. He was as smart as could be. Doug used to do a thing where he would stand at my bookcase in my house, close his eyes, pick a book, randomly flip to a page, start reading from that page, and at some point start improvising. You wouldn’t know where the book ended and Doug’s improv began. He could do it with any book on the shelf, just his little parlor trick.
Judd: So those were the salad days, socially, for that group? It wasn’t like, “Oh, no, the group broke up because…”?
Harold: Not then. After Animal House was successful, Doug and I joined with Brian Murray and wrote Caddyshack. Doug produced it, I directed it, and Brian acted in it. We were so arrogant and deluded that we thought Caddyshack would be as big as Animal House, but to have your first movie be, what was then, the biggest comedy ever sets the bar a little high. Doug was already troubled, already wrestling with self-esteem issues because of family problems and substance abuse issues. We had a horrific press conference for Caddyshack. It was one of the worst public events I’ve ever attended, and it was kind of my fault. I said, “Wouldn’t it be great to get Chevy, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, and Ted Knight on the stage to talk to the press?” Well, they scheduled it at nine-thirty in the morning. None of those four had ever been up at nine-thirty in the morning. Doug showed up at the press conference drunk, stoned, coked up, and sleepless. He hadn’t gone to bed the night before. Chevy was rude to the press. Rodney was totally out of it. Bill was crude and off-putting, and the press was hostile. At one point, Doug stands up and tells them all to fuck themselves, and then passes out at the table. Chevy concludes his last TV interview of the day with Brian Linehan from Toronto, and Brian says, “Chevy, what would you say about so-and-so?” Chevy says, “What would I say? Can I say, ‘Fuck you, Brian’? Could I just say, ‘Fuck you’?” This is a televised interview. The next day someone sends me a clipping that says, “If this is the new Hollywood, let’s have the old Hollywood back.” So Doug was depressed, and I get a call—I don’t know why I’m being so self-revealing. Doug says, “I’m going to Hawaii with Chevy for two weeks to clean up.” You do not go anywhere with Chevy to clean up. I thought, This is a potential disaster. I cannot go on this trip. Chevy came back. Doug did not. Doug fell from a high place on the island of Kauai, and his body was found a couple of days later. It was beyond tragic. I’d been in a room with this guy eight hours a day for two movies. He’s like my brother and best friend. And he’s much loved by a great number of people. It was sobering, but in a way it became like a Rorschach test for each member of our group. Some thought suicide: Doug was a victim of his own substance abuse, his own depression, whatever. Some thought accident: He was careless. It was just fate, an existential accident. Others thought he was murdered by drug dealers on Kauai. There was no evidence for any of it. It just depends on how you see the world. We eventually concluded that Doug slipped while looking for a place to jump. Same with John Belushi. John died two years later of an administered overdose, but it’s not suicide when you let a stranger shoot you up and you don’t know what’s in the needle. If you’ve even gotten to the point of putting a needle in your body, it’s a form of suicide. John Belushi—as a nice segue from Doug Kenney, just to really perk up your morning—was pulled twice from a burning bed. If it happens once, it’s kind of a wake-up call. If it happens twice, you start thinking, Maybe I have a problem.