![]() ![]() “So that’s a relief.” But he turned the film down. “Ashton Kutcher is in,” he later told me dryly. “Interracial couple, big issues, and it would be my full fee,” Ramis said. Ramis had also been weighing an opportunity to direct “The Dinner Party,” a comic remake of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” starring Bernie Mac as the disapproving father. John Cusack had signed on as Charlie, with Billy Bob Thornton in a supporting role. This would be his first directing job in two years, and his first attempt to make a comic film noir. Ramis loved the material and had agreed to cut his regular directing fee-five million dollars-by more than eighty per cent. Although the film is set in Wichita, it would be shot in Chicago’s northern suburbs, close to Ramis’s house, in Glencoe, which he shares with his wife, Erica, and their two sons. The action takes place on Christmas Eve as Charlie, who is trying to skip town, gets trapped by a snowstorm, old relationships, and a series of double crosses. The “Ice Harvest” script, adapted by Robert Benton and Richard Russo from Scott Phillips’s novel, is about a lawyer named Charlie who just stole two million dollars from his boss. He loves to eat, and in recent years his gangly six-foot-two-inch frame has filled out, catching up to his size-14 feet.įocus Features had finally greenlighted the film the day before, after six weeks of haggling with actors’ agents over the lean fourteen-million-dollar budget. “It’s totally arbitrary.” Leaving Busch looking blank, Ramis moved to the buffet and piled his plate with lox. “There is no evidence that Exodus happened in the spring,” Ramis replied. Ramis’s line producer, Tom Busch, greeted him with a warning: “The schedule has us starting to shoot on April 5th, which is the first day of Passover.” Harold Ramis arrived early, wearing his standard uniform (titanium-rimmed spectacles, an untucked long-sleeved black T-shirt, and black pants) and his standard expression (the therapist scanning his waiting room). One morning in late February, the producers of a film called “The Ice Harvest” gathered in the banquet room of Forty One North, a restaurant in Northbrook, Illinois, for their first pre-production meeting. “Harold Ramis is the yardstick of what you want to reach for, of people’s bodies around you going into convulsions of joy while your brain is thinking and your emotions are deeply tied in to the characters, and you’re going, ‘Oh my God, This is the best two hours I’ve ever spent.’ ” The director Jay Roach says that the six films Murray and Ramis made together define a level of achievement he calls “extreme comedy.” “You would watch people in the audience just lose their minds,” he told me. GUS Well, now, that’s one I happen to agree with. ![]() PHIL (eyes gleaming) Oh, yeah-don’t drive on the railroad tracks. The car skids around and comes to a stop straddling the railroad tracks. Clean up your room, stand up straight, pick up your feet, take it like a man. PHIL It’s the same thing your whole life. Gus looks back at the police car chasing them. CADILLAC PHIL begins to accelerate, turning a fast lap around the square. In “Caddyshack,” the teen-aged caddy, Danny, asks his club’s best golfer, Ty Webb (Chevy Chase), for advice about life. Will Rogers would have made films like these, if Will Rogers had lived through Vietnam and Watergate and decided that the only logical course of action was getting wasted or getting laid or-better-both. They attack the smugness of institutional life, trashing the fraternity system, country clubs, the Army-even local weathermen-with an impish good will that is unmistakably American. These comedies have several things in common. And for Peter Farrelly, who directed “There’s Something About Mary” with his brother Bobby, it was “Animal House,” in 1978. For Adam Sandler, it was “Caddyshack,” in 1980. For Jake Kasdan, the director of “Orange County,” it was “Stripes,” in 1981, and, even more powerfully, “Ghostbusters,” in 1984. For Jay Roach, the director of the Austin Powers films, that movie was “Groundhog Day,” in 1993. There is childhood, ruled by bland Hollywood comedies such as “The Goodbye Girl” and “Oh God!” And then there is the glorious, unruly adolescence of the person they became after seeing a film that spoke to them in ways their parents didn’t-a film that moved them to emulation. The lives of many young comedy writers and directors are divided into two parts. ![]()
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