It was an inspired concept. Take an all-powerful supernatural entity hell-bent on bringing New York to its knees, add generous doses of the best special effects money can buy and then put the whole package in the hands of a gifted director with a proven track record for blockbuster comedy. The result--a megahit of the first order...Ghostbusters.
But for Dan Aykroyd--originator of the concept--Ghostbusters was not entirely a laughing matter. A card-carrying member of the American Society for Psychical Research, Aykroyd had for years been interested in psychic disturbances and paranormal activity. His fascination, in fact, wsa firmly rooted--dating back to childhood recollections of growing up in an old farmhouse in Canada, where family seances and unexplained phenomenon were all but common occurances.
"That farmhouse has been in the family for five generations," Aykroyd recalled, " and I've come to believe that any place that has that much history is bound to have some degree of spiritual activity--so many people came through there and lived there and died there. My only personal experience was when a friend and I were sitting in the house one evening watching television and we heard knocking coming from upstairs. We went to the stairs and looked up and saw these ectoplasmic tubes of light--shimmering patterns of irridescent green light that passed in front of us. We were both so scared, we ran out of the house. But there were lots of family stories. My grandparents, apparently, were into holding seances, and my father would tell of being invited to participate as a medium and being put into trances. During one such seances, a trumpet reportedly flew around the room, talking and singing, until someone outside the circle walked in and it fell to the ground. My mother claims to have witnessed an apparition when she was nursing me. A couple appeared to her at the end of her bed in the old family farmhouse, and it shook her so much she was afraid to talk about it. But a couple of weeks later she finally mentioned it. Some other member of the family dug out an old family album and there, in one of the pictures, was the couple--they turned out to be ancestors. On another occassion, my grandmother on the other side of the family--who was a real practical, no-nonsense businesswoman--came to visit, and had the covers lifted off her while she was sleeping. She was thrown out of bed and bitten on the legs, ankles and arms by some kind of turbulent force--she even developed a rash."
With this type of family mythology imbedded in his psyche, it was perhaps inevitable that Dan Aykroyd should, at some point in his creative life, turn to the spiritual world for comedic inspiration. There were, however, other influences. Ghostbusters, I think, has its basic roots in American humor and American film. Abbott and Costello, the Bowery Boys, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope--everyone did a ghost picture. I thought it would be great to write one for this decade, updating the form by using the concepts of science and technology and by employing the kinds of special effects skills available today. In parapsycholgy, a lot of researchers and thinkers have developed a link between quantum theory and paranormal activity--there are even several books on the subject--but parapsychologists have long been plagued by the fact that only one person in ten ever reports a paranormal experience. I thought: :What if you advertised on TV or in the Yellow Pages and said: 'Hey, we believe you, we understand you.' I thought it would help. That was the birth of the commercial enterprise of ghostbusting."
Armed with a multimillion-dollar premise, Aykroyd set to work on his first draft script--an inventive blend of fantasy and high technology, with a pair of lead roles tailored specifically for himself and long-time friend and associate John Belushi. "My first draft was written in a way that your basic acceleration physicist might have enjoyed more than the mass audience," Aykroyd confessed. "I used a lot of technical words and phrases. Also, my original story was more eerie in tone, and it started right off with the crew busting ghosts. The first frame was the garage door opening up at the firehall, the Ectomobile roaring out into the night and the guys going on a bust." Other films and projects interrupted the screenwriting process, and John Belushi's sudden death put a further temporary hold on the work. "I'd been working on it, on and off, for a couple of years--always with the idea of having John involved. I was, in fact, writing one of his lines when I heard that he had died. It was a terrible blow, but eventually I came to realize that the picture really served any three guys."
Aykroyd presented his half-completed script to Bill Murray--a fellow Saturday Night Live expatriate and alumnus of the Chicago-based Second City troupe. When Murray responded favorably to the concept, Aykroyd took it to Ivan Reitman, with whom he had worked briefly--years before in Toronto--as a comedian and announcer for a live television variety show. Reitman--having subsequently produced the phenomenally successful National Lampoon's Animal House and directed Bill Murray in Meatballs and Stripes--was one of the few filmmakers in Hollywood whose comedy credentials were both well-honed and thoroughly bankable.
Dan had written only about forty or fifty pages at that point," Reitman recalled, "and frankly, I had no idea how I would go about making it into a film. For one thing, it was set in the future--not far in the future, but far enough--and it took place on a number of different planets or dimensional planes. And it was all action. There was very little character work in it. The Ghostbusters were cathcing ghosts on the very first page--and doing it on every single page after that, without respite--just one sort of supernatural phenomenon after another. By the tenth page, I was exhausted. By the fortieth or fiftieth page--however many there were--I was counting the budget in hundred of millions of dollars. And there weren't really that many laughs. Although I could detect a comic attitude, the whole thing was written rather seriously. In the end, I just kind of set it aside and forgot about it."
Dan Aykroyd, however, did not. When the script was finished some months later, he submitted it to Reitman once again--complete with conceptual illustrations and a quickie videotape of himself in a jumpsuit based uniform embellished with makeshift nutrona wands and a proton pack fashioned from styrofoam and old radio parts. With several projects stalled in various stages of development, Reitman--champing at the bit to get a film into production--decided to give Ghostbusters a closer look.
"What I focused on, as I read the script again, was Dan's really brilliant initial concept--the idea of a group of men who work out of an old firehall and respond to emergencies much the way firemen do. The only difference is that these emergencies are supernatural in nature--and so what the Ghostbusters do is go out, trap ghosts and incarcerate them. Dan had come up with that concept, and had worked out the equipment and the car and all that sort of thing. He even thought of the basic idea for the Ghostubusters logo--the little ghost inside a stop sign. That was one of the few things in the original draft that I had actually laughed at. But it seemed to me that the overall concept was diluted by setting the story in the future and then introducing fantasy elements and going off into other dimensions. So I called Dan and we had lunch at Art's Delicatessen and I told him what I thought ought to be done."
Reitman's suggestions were firmly rooted in his own philosophy of humor. "My comedy has a very strong basis in reality--which is not to say that that's the only kind of comedy worth doing. There are lots of very funny people who do comedy that has nothing whatsoever to do with reality--the kind of comedy that comes from a more cartoon-like approach, with very broadly drawn characters who do things in a very exaggerated manner. Generally, I will have a couple of characters in my films that are like that, mainly as leavening. But for the most part, the principles are very real guys who say funny things and are in funny situations. And they respond to those situations the way you or I would if we were anywhere near that witty. So with that as a basic approach, I told Dan that I felt we should set the film in a modern American city and that we should tell how ghostbusting came about--how the guys invented their equipment and the story of their first really big bust."
Without hesitation, Dan Aykroyd expressed his agreement with the direction Ivan Reitman felt the screenplay should be taken. Reitman next suggested a writing collaboration between Aykroyd and Harold Ramis--an extremely gifted writer who had worked on scripts for all three of Reitman's previous hits. Another Second City performer, Ramis had just completed postproduction on his second directorial effort, National Lampoon's Vacation. "Right after our lunch meeting," said Ayrkoyd, "Ivan and I walked over to Harold's office--which, like Ivan's was on The Burbank Studios lot. At that time, Harold happened to be reading another script I'd written about the Canadian Mounted Police. I told him to put that script aside, and I replace it with the Ghostbusters one. After looking through the script and listening to what we had to say for about twenty minutes, he said, 'Okay, I'm in.'" Not only was Ramis to cowrite the script, but he was also to become the third Ghostbuster--a choice reunion with Bill Murray after their successful pairing in Stripes.
Later that same afternoon, Reitman called his agent, Mike Ovitz--who also happened to represent to represent Aykroyd, Ramis and Murray--and asked him to set up a meeting with Columbia Pictures chairman Frank Price. "There was really nothing for him to read. I didn't want to give him Danny's script because it really wan't relevant to where we were going, and it probably would have scared him. I just told him who was going to be involved and gave him a five-minute synopsis of the story--the way it was going to go--and he said, "Well, what's it going to cost?' I said I had no idea--there was no screenplay and no budget--but that it was going to be expensive. And he said, 'Keep it in the mid-twenties and you've got yourself a deal.' "The $25 million committment had only one hitch--but a big one. Columbia needed a major release for the summer of 1984. Reitman and his team had exactly one year to come up with a script, mount the production and complete the extensive and time-consuming visual effects--and his team at that point, aside from his writers, consisted solely of associate producers Joe Medjuck and Michael Gross.
The script, of course, became an immediate and preeminent priority. Sequestered in Ivan Reitman's suite of offices, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis set to work restructuring and rewriting, yet retaining the essential germ of the original Ghostbusters concept. "What I loved about Dan's first script," said Ramis, "was that he had taken things which have always been very chilling to me and made them seem perfectly mundane. The fact that the Ghostbusters encountered all these supernatural phenomenon with total casualness demystified a lot of it. But the original Ghostbusters were essentially $10,000-a-year janitors who worked for someone else and really had no technical expertise whatsoever. I thought that was a problem. For me, comedy always seems more dynamic when characters choose to do what they are doing, rather than being victims of circumstance. So we decided that the overall motivation woudl be much stronger if the Ghostbusters initiated the business themselves and were therefore captains of their own destiny."
Characterization also needed to be stronger. "In Dan's draft, you could not differentiate the characters," Ramis continued. "Stantz and Venkman and Ramsey--the character we changed to Winston--were all essentailly the same. That was fairly representative of Dan's writing at the time. He was very much concerned with story and structure and effects, but would sort of stay on the surface of his characters. So one of the first things we did --together with Ivan--was work out distinctive character traits for the Ghostbusters so that each would have his own internal motivation and personal style. In essence, that translated into one character being hipper and more verbal than the others--more of a huckster, the salesman of the team--someone who is weak on the technical side and probably didn't do all that well in school, but is smart enough to have hooked up with guys more intelligent than he is. That, of course, was Bill's character. Then it's always useful to have a mechanic--a nuts and bolts person--honest, straight-ahead, enthusiastic. And that really worked for Dan. For my character, we went for a human computer--someone who has no emotional life whatsoever, who only deals in facts and information--a 'New Wave' Mr. Spock. For actors, especially in group comedy, those kinds of archetypes always seem to work."