Being heroes is not easy. Take the Ghostbusters, for instance. After saving New York City from the forces of Gozer the Gozerian and the Stay-Puft marshmallow man, our boys in overalls found themselves broke and disenfranchised. The city fathers, ever grateful, decided to skip out on their ectoplasmic cleanup bill and the local courts ruled busting ghosts illegal. Illegal or not, when an ominous river of slime starts to flow under the metropolis and a bloodthirsty tyrant from the Middle Ages tries to make a comeback, who but the Ghostbusters can save the city from yet another supernatual shakedown?
Being filmmakers is not easy either. On the original Ghostbusters, director Ivan Reitman and his production team agreed to deliver the film in less than a year--on a film that in some ways was even more demanding than the first. Caught in the maelstrom were production designer Bo Welch, cinematographer Michael Chapman and visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren of Industrial Light and Magic. "I guess the first Ghostbusters set the trend for short production and postproduction schedules," observed Muren, "and this one was worse. Ghostbusters II had by far the shortest schedule of any film I have ever worked on. We had nearly a hundred and eighty shots to complete--and considering they were still shooting with the actors two months before the film opened, it was definitely tight!"
Reassembling the original cast was considered essential to the project, and all of the principle players agreed to participate. As the primary Ghostbusters, Bill Murray reprised his role as the endearing con man Peter Venkman, Dan Aykroyd returned as the enthusiastic innocent Ray and Harold Ramis appeared once again as the stoic egghead Egon Spengler. Returning also were Rick Moranis as nerdish accountant turned incompetent lawyer Louis Tulley, Ernie Hudson as ghostbusting team member Winston Zeddemore and Annie Potts as their ditzy receptionist Janine Melnitz. Even Sigourney Weaver--whose career has skyrocketed since the first film--was back as concert cellist and now single parent Dana Barrett.
Ghostbusters II begins five years ater the original adventure and finds the former spirit exterminators fallen on hard times. Peter Venkman is hosted a tired talk show for psychics; Egon Spengler is researching the environmental impact of positive and negative emotions; and Ray Stantz is running an occult bookshop while moonlighting with Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters regalia at children's parties. To say they have all hit rock bottom is an understatement. Their collective fates begin to change, however, when Dana Barrett's baby Oscar takes an unpiloted ride in his carriage and ends up in the middle of a busy New York thoroughfare. A covert investigation by the former Ghostbusters leads to the discovery of a subterranean river of slime feeding on the negative energy of the city. Even more startling, they encounter evidence that a centuries old tyrant--Vigo the Carpathian--is attempting to return from the dead and transform the Big Apple into a psychic cesspool.
The idea for the original Ghostbusters came from Dan Aykroyd who developed it into an initial script. Then Harold Ramis joined the project and together the two reworked the concept extensively into what would become the most successful movie comedy in history. For the sequel, Aykroyd once again wrote the initial script--a story in which Dana was kidnapped and taken to Scotland where she discovered a fairy ring and civilization underground. "My first draft was really too far out," Ayrkoyd reflected. "It was probably too inaccessible, though at the time I wrote it that it was the direction we should go in. I wanted to leave New York City behind because I thought we had done that. But New York is really the greatest arena for our kind of ghost story, and staying in the city gave continuity to the second film. One idea that did stay in our script was the notion of having things occur underground. We went skyward in the first film--up to the top of a skyscraper--so I thought for the second one it would be nice to see the underbelly of the city. But my original concept for going underground was different. It involved a pneumatic tube two thousand miles long that they traveled in for three days. It was like a primitive mail chute."
As with the first film, Harold Ramis became involved and the story gradually moved in a new direction--one that eventually introduced the river of slime. "We started out with the moral notion that negative human emotions have consequences," Ramis explained, "and that in big cities like New York and Los Angeles bad vibes can build up. What we were working toward--and it took awhile for it to develop--was that it would get to the point where everybody in New York would have to be nice or else the city would be destroyed. We did not know by what at first , but eventually we created a tyrant motivating all of this--Vigo the Carpathian."
"The concept of negative energy really just reflects the nature of human behavior today," Aykroyd added. "Cities everywhere are dangerous. Life has become cheap. You can go to Westwood in Los Angeles to see a movie and get machine-gunned on the street. That really happened. We wanted to show that you cannot be bad to people without having it go somewhere other than just being absorbed by the person your anger is directed at. Negative energy has to find a place to settle, and it is directly linked to human behavior. It seemed to us that this idea was more grounded than the last film where we were dealing with mythic gods."
The river of slime was actually the first of two ideas that made the sequel come to life for Aykroyd and Ramis. "The second," said Ramis, "was an effect I once thought about of an infant not yet able to walk who suddenly wakes up one day with adult agility and focus. I had originally thought o it as a horror story, but then I decided it was just too horrible for a movie. The baby idea did tie into something we were playing around with--that Bill and Sigourney had gotten married after the first movie and had a child and that it was going to be their child that got possessed. Having them married, however, proved to be a real dead end for us character-wise, so we dropped that notion. But we stayed with the baby and gave it a different father whom Dana had married and then divorced. Gradually, our story evolved. We came pretty far from our original ideas except for what we perceived to be the core of the film thematically--which was that negative and positive emotions affect the way we live."
Once the story started coming together, co-executive producer Michael C. Gross began coordinating the special effects effort. The original Ghostbusters had featured effects created by Richard Edludn and Boss Film Corporation. For teh sequel, however, Reitman and Gross turned to Industrial Light and Magic and Dennis Muren. "I thought the first movie was just wonderful and very fresh," Muren explained. "I have always admired Saturday Night Live and been fascinated by the improvisational comedy approach--and that was one of the reasons I wanted to work on the sequel. Actually, I was interested in Ghostbusters II for two reasons. First, I wanted to see how Ivan makes comedy films--how he directs and controls situations to get the best moment of humor out of his actors and then how he edits them. Doing the sequel offered an incredible opportunity to watch a comedy film in creation and to work with top creative talent. That aspect appealed to my filmmaking side. The second reason appealed more to my special effects interests. What I wanted to do with the film was to try and create ghosts that nobody had ever seen before. Going in, we knew we had to match the look of nutrona beams and of the Slimer character from the first film; but beyond that, we had the opportunity to create a whole new array of ghostly images."
"When I went up to ILM the first time," Gross recalled, "they asked what Ivan was like to work with. 'Well, I said, 'the thing that will be hard for you is that you're hardly ever going to see him. He's never going to come up here.' They were pretty surprised. 'Wouldn't he like to see our facility? Wouldn't he like to meet George?' I explained that he was really too busy finishing Twins and that he was not as interested in other directors might be in the technical side of how effects are created. As it turned out, Ivan did in fact go up to shoot bluescreen for three days, but that was it. The schedule just woudn't allow for anything more. But the communication between Ivan and Dennis was so good that it didn't matter."
Ghostbusters II begins when Dana Barrett pushed her baby carriage over a dab of slime that has oozed up from a crack in a New York City sidewalk. When she stops in front of her appartment to talk with her building superintendent, the carraige--with baby Oscar inside--slowly starts moving off down the sidewalk. Dana tries frantically to stop it, but the carriage speeds up, dodging through traffic and then coming to rest in the middle of the street. To create the wild ride, physical effects supervisor Chuck Gaspar--a veteran of the first film--built five radio-controlled carriages. "We placed DC motors inside the buggy baskets. To drive the wheels we used a drive shaft from a drill attachment that could work at right angles to the motor. We also used some three-inch chrome drive shafts to attach to the wheels themselves. These shafts were tied in with the chrome carriage to conceal what was driving the buggy. They looked nice and they were not too bulky. We then designed a steerig system and ran cables throught the tubes of the carriage frame and into the basket part where they were operated by another big servo. We also used a servo to operate a braking system we installed. Actually, there were two braking systems--the original brakes which automatically locked the wheels and our own brakes which allowed us to slow the buggy gradually."
A regular on the Clint Eastwood production team, Gaspar drew upon his most recent experience with Dirty Harry to execute the sequence. "To steer the buggy, I brought in Jay Halsey who is a two-time national champion driver of miniature cars. I used him on The Dead Pool to drive the little black Corvette that races underneath real cars in San Francisco traffic. For Ghostbusters II, he had to steer the buggy from as far away as seventy-five feet and make it maneuver in and out of traffic without tipping over or slamming into any cars. The sequence ended up being much more elaborate than in the original script. For one shot,, we had to tilt the buggy up on its side on cables and go on two wheels down the street. Jay also had to steer it past huge busses without hitting them. He was great with the controls--so good he could make the buggies do wheelies."
The buggy ride was filmed at the beginning of the production during two weeks of location shooting in New York. "The city was very good to us," Gross recalled. "At one point we were shooting adjacent to Second Avenue and they had a lock on the avenue for forty blocks because it was the week Gorbachev was in the city. But they did not stop us from shooting--which I thought was amazing. We shot all over New York. We were there pre-Christmas and we were in the middle of the streets--and we had no problems."
Despite the cold New York weather, the production crew found the public reception very warm--due not only to the phenomenon of the first movie, but also the subsequent popularity of the hit Saturday morning cartoon series, The Real Ghostbusters. "Shooting anywhere in New York in Ghostbusters gear is wild," Ramis explained. "The people love it. They bring their kids and hold them up to us like offerings. One woman said: 'Egon, he's got all your action figures. He's even got the underwear.' The strange thing is that the cartoon characters have been immortalized in plastic, so a lot of the kids only know us as the cartoon characters. They look at me and they go, 'Your hair isn't blond.'"
"When we had those uniforms on we were above the law," Bill Murray joked. "We could do anything and people really responded. There's something about those uniforms and walking in New York. Even on the first film when we first put those suits on, people went crazy. I remember one black guy seeing us and yelling: "Hey! The Wrong Stuff!' But it was not just the uniforms. After we came back from New York, we shot for many weeks on the studio lot before going out to shoot on the street with the car. I was really looking forward to getting off the lot for a while. As it turned out, I had more fun that day than I had with any other day during the production. We all had a blast weaving in and out of traffic, screaming out at people from the car and having them cheer and yell at us."
One aspect of shooting on the streets that the actors did not much enjoy was wearing the bulky proton packs established in the first film. "We ended up not wearing the backpacks that often on the sequel," Murray continued. "On the first film, we had to wear them all the time and the effects guy did not come up with lighter models until right near the end of the shoot. Those original backpacks were really heavy. After that film, we all had to have our spines straightened--our spines looked like Mulholland Drive by the time we were through." To the actor's relief, the lightweight models were more commonly employed on the sequel. "The actual operational backpacks weighed about fifty pounds," Ramis observed, "but they were almost twenty pounds lighter if the batteries were left out. Fortunately, for the second film they made a lightweight model--only about twenty-eight pounds--that did not light up as much but still looked good."
Realizing that a self-steering baby buggy is more than a bit odd, Dana quickly seeks out the only men she knows can help--the former Ghostbusters. An investigation leads them to the street where the incident happened and the subsequent realization that something paranormally powerful is brewing beneath the asphalt--something that could be very dangerous. Meanwhile, at the Manhattan Museam of Art where Dana now works as an art restorer, an ancient painting of Vigo the Carpathian comes to life and zaps her boss, Janosz Poha (Peter MacNicol). Vigo explains that he needs a new baby so that he can be reborn in this century and continue his reign of terror. The spellbound Janosz agrees to search for a suitable candidate.
"The biggest problem we had on the film was the Vigo painting," Gross recalled. "I literally did not know how we were going to do it, what the painting would look like or if it would even work until the day we shot it. And that scared the hell out of me. A lot of people were involved with it at different stages. ILM did concept versions of it for months, and then we had one that we thought was right and we were refining it one day and Ivan looked at it and said: 'I don't like this at all. It's too Conan the Barbarian.' After that we tried an artist in New York--but his painting did not quite work either for what Ivan wanted. So there we were without a painting, yet the deadline was coming up to build the foreground and Vigo's costume--neither of which had been resolved. Finally we approached Glen Eytchison and 'Pageant of the Masters' in Laguna Beach. Each year they present sixty classic paintings that they bring to life with people standing in costume and in settings that look like the original artwork. We got them involved, and they came up with a painting that started to work. Their people worked on it, and I went down and worked on it too. Eventually we shipped it to ILM. At that point, not everything was quite resolved, but we had to shoot it in two days. We worked on it and changed it up until the very last possible minute and got it on the set just in time. Fortunately for us, everyone involved was just fabulous. Bo Welch's people were great and so were the guys in the painting department at Burbank Studios. They did a lot to make it look like a real painting."
Resolving the overall appearance of the painting was not the only problem associated with the portrait. The other involved how the painting should come to life when Vigo needed to address Janosz. "The concept of bringing the Vigo painting to life went through a major change right at the end of production," Muren recalled, "and I think it was wonderful that it happened. Originally the painting was going to come to life with the guy talking in a setting--or we were going to do clay animation or an animated cartoon of his face talking. During production it just became more and more clear that this was not going to be very exciting and I think it was a major improvement."
To make the image work, actor Wilhelm von Homburg was filmed in front of a bluescreen and then matted over a miniature of the corridor built by the ILM model shop. "The slime corridor was a forced perspective set that was pretty straightforward," model shop supervisor Bill George explained. "Both columns and bricks along the sides had to be built in forced perspective, and they were all sculpted out of foam. There were arches between the columns and beyond those we had light coming in. The only unusual aspect was that the producers wanted slime oozing out of the columns, which meant that we ahd a major cleanup after each take. It was really no big deal--just a big mess."
For the slime corridor--and most of the live-action scenes as well-the ectoplasmic ooze was made from the same ingredients employed in the first film. Central to the formula was methocel--a thickening agent marketed by Dow Chemical--mixed with water and nontoxic food coloring. To create even more viscosity when needed, a supplemental thickener called separan was added. "The usual formula to create thirty-two gallons of slime," Chuck Gaspar explained, "was about eight cups of methocel to four-and-a-half cups of separan. Then we would add about fifty cc's of red food coloring and thirty-two gallons of water. You could actually eat the stuff. It would not have any taste, but you could eat it. The grade of methocel used is also used in pie thickeners and salad dressings."
While Vigo is giving Janosz a personal pep talk to lure him over to the dark side, the erstwhile Ghostbusters return to the site of the runaway carriage incident and jackhammer their way through the pavement. Several feet beneath the surface they find a manhole covering leading to the abandoned Van Horne pneumatic subway station. When Ray is volunteered to be lowered on a rope to investigate, he discovers a river of slime flowing through the tunnel. While the slime river was of course a fabrication of Aykroyd and Ramis, the Van Horne station was actually based on an unusual chapter in the history of New York City's mass transit system. "The real station was not called Van Horne," noted Bo Welch, "but there really was such a station. Around 1870--long before the current subway was constructed--a man named Alfred Ely Beach built a pneumatic subway tunnel. It was one of the first ideas for a subway. He did it illegally; so when he excavated the tunnel, he had the dirt carried out at night through a department store. I think he built about a quarter of a mile of tunnel. The track was short, but the station was grand--and the train was run by air. When it was unveiled to the public, it was really well received; but the local political powers interpreted it as a power play and eventually squashed it. There are sketches and old drawings, but no photographic research. The actual design would not in reality have lent itself to our scenes, so my design combined what I imagined the station might have looked like with adjustments needed for our particular scene content."
For shots of Ray being lowered into the station, and later scenes with the Ghostbusters on the set, Welch built only a small section of the setting--a curved background wall, steps leading down into the station and a partial platform. This set piece was subsequently combined with matte paintings of the rest of the station rendered by Ysei Uesugi and with a miniature rrepresenting the river of slime. Like many other concepts in the picture, the look of the slime river took a while to develop. Dennis Muren and effects art director Harley Jessup were intimately involved in the process. "One of the first problems we had to deal with was the color of the river," said Muren. "We did what was essentially a color animatic on 35 mm film because Ivan did not know what the river should look like. Should it be blue or should it be green like the Slimer character that was in the first film and would reappear in the second? Is the slime from Slimer? We had thousands of questions. Finally, when we were filming plates in New York, Chuck Gaspar came up with numerous colors and some practical stuff that was really wonderful, and from those Ivan was able to choose what he liked. Once we had the color down, we worked on an approach we were developing where we did tests on a very small scale of what the actual river should look like."
Tim Lawrence--who had been hired as creature and makeup designer for the film--was given the added assignment of devising a suitable slime formula for the miniatures. "Bill George made a plexiglass trough for us and then I assigned Ralph Miller to whip up a variety of mixtures involving methylcellulose, syrups, oils and colors until we had enough different things for Harley and Dennis to look at and narrow the focus for us. Alan Peterson calculated flow and volume for the delivery system we knew would be required and also determined what the weights at various loads would be. That was important in the construction of the scaffolding that would eventually support the dump tank and the model river trough. After we developed the first incarnation of the river in a reduced scale--including multiple densities of slime, contrasting colors, some solids moving along its bed and a few shadow projections from below--Ivan approved it and the model shop went to a larger scale with a very wonderful miniature of the Van Horne station. At this point I went on to other projects, but the river went through two subsequent changes in concept before it finally wound up in the film."
"What we ended up with was a mixture of methocel combined with mica dust topped with a layer of mineral oil," explained Harley Jessup. "Inside the river we had injectors and air bladders to bubble slime up and make it swirl around. We also had plexiglass baffles that we puppeteered to create different flows and currents and make it appear like something was alive beneath the surface. The mineral oil was important because it gave the river a greater sense of depth and mystery by creating very strange mercury-like shapes that raced downstream. It looked wonderful, but it was difficult to shoot. We needed a lot of puppeteers working from awkward positions because of all the water pipes, lights and other fixtures on the set . Marty Rosenberg and John Fante headed up the crew and guided the complex physical setup."
The river set was designed to work as a gravity flow system. A large holding tank was placed some fifteen feet up in the air. A track fed the slime down into the miniature river bed, which was tilted slightly to keep the flow going. The main river was one foot wide and ten feet long and featured a curve towards one end. At the lowest end of the trough was another holding tank to catch all the slime that flowed down from above. A large pump would then be used to direct the stuff back up to the upper holding tank so it could be recirculated. Several takes were possible before the colors in the slime became so homogenized that the whole set had to be emptied and then refilled with fresh slime. And a lot of fresh slime was needed. To prepare adequate amounts, four portable cement mixers were rented and a team of four under Ralph Miller worked several days just mixing up enough slime to the proper consistency to fill the large overhead holding tank.
In the sequence, Ray is lowered down close enough to take a sample of slime. As he does so, several small tentacles appear on the surface of the river and then suddenly a larger one lashed out at his foot. Both sizes of tentacles were created by relatively simple means. The smaller ones were slip-cast out of hot-melt vinyle and attached to sticks that could be manipulated from below the river. The larger one was a plastic mechanical tentacle that was filmed against a bluescreen as it fell away from a stand-in's boot. The footage was then employed in reverse.
When Ray is rescued and pulled up to street level by his cohorts, we accidentally knocks out an underground cable causing all of Manhattan to lose power. One of the people caught in the sudden blackout is Dana Barrett, who gets an unexpected visit from her solicitous boos. Dana gently brushes him off and closes her door. For a moment, Janosz stands silently in the outer hallway which is lit by a dim emergency light. Then, as he turns to leave, two bright beams of light shine from his eyes, illuminating patches of wall on each side of the hallway as he makes his way out of the building. Director of effects photography Mark Vargo suggested an approach to accomplish the effect. "First we shot the scene with Peter MacNicol walking down the dimly lit hallway. As he did so, he moved his head from side to side. Then to create the look of real light illuminating patches on the walls, we turned off all the lights on the set and did another pass. Michael Chapman held a 2K at roughly MacNicol's head height and walked down the darkened hallway, panning the light from one side to the other. We did a couple of takes like that--fast and slow--and then we did a couple more where we held the light on the right side of the wall and walked along and then did the same on the left side, just in case we had to pick up little pieces. Witht he lights turned out, you could not see Michael Chapman, and any evidence of the 2K light itself we just garbage-matted out later. All we were interested in were the puddles of light on the wall. Lining up the patches was achieved by editorially sliding the selected light passes to roughly correspond with Janosz' action. This aspect of the shot was less difficult than one might imagine because interactive light elements were next turned over to the animation department where the actual beams could be created. "Pat Myers on the motion control animation camera did a tremendous job defining the beams. He put in shards and a little bit of particulate matter so that they looked like real beams, and he lined the beams up so they tracked from MacNicol's eyebrows to the puddles of light on the walls."
Vargo--a former optical supervisor at Boss Film Corporation--was one of the few visual effects people to have worked on both Ghostbusters films. "I would say that the primary difference in the look of the sequel was the radical change in angles--and if we were not planning in a given shot, then we were usually in some oblique stance to the action. On the first Ghostbusters, the camera was locked off--largely because of the technology that we had at the time. On the second show, we were able to move the camera quite a bit and use a lot of different focal lengths. For instance, for one shot we were on a dolly in Central Park with a gearhead and an 85 mm lens and we were tracking an invisible subject that would later be added in optical. Our camera move was very crude and we did it in a very low-tech way--but optical can handle such situations today in ways we could not have done easily five years ago."