Following the power failure, the Ghostbusters find themselves on trial for not only puttting New York in the black, but also for violating a court order retraining them from acting as paranormal exterminators. The presiding judge has little sympathy for the defendents and hands down his ruling with a vengeance. The verbal tirade that accompanies it has an unusual effect on the slime sample that Ray snagged out of the river and which now sits in a beaker on the evidence table. As the judge continues his diatribe, th gooey substance starts bubbling up and expanding until it finally explodes, unleashing the angry ghosts of two brothers the judge had sent to the electric chair.
"The Scoleri brothers sequence was one of those nice discoveries," Ramis noted. "At one point we committed ourselves to having the Ghostbusters fight their way back to being Ghostbusters rather than starting out with them as successes. With this in mind,, we were working toward a courtroom scene, but we did not know exactly what should happen there. Meanwhile, the ghosts themselves were very llosely based on the fact that my father was a storekeeper who was once robbed and assaulted by the Scoleri brothers. The whole point of our trial was that the legal system of New York was completely skeptical of the supernatural. At some point, the idea of the courtroom and the Scoleri brothers came together. We thought, what better way to reinstate the Ghostbusters than at the moment of their sentencing to have two ghosts appear in the courtroom? It was one of those nice discoveries that brings ideas together and says what you want to say. It also connected with the notion that negative human emotions have an impact. The judge is angry--a tyrant in his own courtroom--and he pays the price."
The sequence begins with the slime sample which slowly bubbles up and explodes. "The bottom of the jar was cut out, " said Gaspar, "and we had a plexiglas tube that fed into the glass from below the table. To drive the slime upward, we filled an air piston with additional slime. We also had an air feed to create the bubbles. The jar was sitting on a piece of foam rubber that was inlaid into the top of the table and we had two litle motors below to make it shake. Then to create a sense that the slime was coming alive, we had lights under the table that reflected upward. As the slime slowly rose up, we increased the light. For the shot when the Scoleri brothers actually emerge from the slime, we put a big red flash behind the jar and set it off at the correct moment."
The two figures that emerge from the jar are anything but normal death row inmates. Both are free-floating specters who first appear strapped into electric chairs. As electricity arcs around them, their eyes suddenly light up and they break free from the chairs to soar around the courtroom. "The Scoleri brothers we deliberately made slightly cartoonish in their design and actions," said Michael Gross. "At one point Ivan got a little worried about this and asked me, 'Do you think we've gone over the top!' I said: 'We need it in the picture at this point. Given how scary some of the other sequences are, it would be good to go over the top with these characters.' I thought it would lighten the moment. It was the first time we saw full-scale ghosts in the film, and I thought we really needed them to be as wild as they were."
To bring the Scoleris to life, Reitman and Gross turned to storyboard artist Thom Enriquez--another Ghostbusters veteran--to first lay out the basic action in the scene. "On the first film I boarded the capture scene in the banquet room," Enriquez recalled, "and that was the toughest scene I had to do. I had the same problem with this--how do you make the action interesting in a room that has four walls and a ceiling? Also, Ivan was really busy finishing Twins, so he was not around a lot when I was boarding the scene. It became even more difficult when I was told that, because of time, the courtroom set was being built at the same time I was boarding the action and they needed the boards to match what the expense account could afford for special effects. For instance, there were only a certain number of chairs that could be thrown about in the scene because the rest were rented and they did not want to touch those. So I had to board the scene keeping in mind that I could use only fourteen chairs. I could also only blow up four pillars and break one wall of glass."
During production, Chuck Gaspar and his on-set crew--headed by Joe Day--oversaw the physical destruction of the set. "Everything that was blown up inside the courtroom was made of balsa wood," Gaspar noted. "The railing, the walk-through hinge doors, the judge's box and even the defense table were made so they could easily be blown up or moved. We had to pick the defense table up and fly it across the room for a scene where the brothers uncover the cowards hiding underneath. They pick it up and slam it into the back wall of the room. We had that table on a flying track and just pulled it on a compound cable to slam it into the wall as hard as we as we could. We also had to throw fourteen visitor chairs across the room, explode the jury box, shatter a glass partition and rig walls and pillars with explosive charges to simulate strafe marks created by the Ghostbusters' guns. We had parts made for three takes of everything so we could reset easily."
To aid actors and crew in the courtroom, full-scale cutouts of the ghosts were placed in appropriate positions around the set. One of the most difficult physical effects had no visual references. "We had to fly the prosecutor upside-down through the open doors of the courtroom and then out into the hallway beyond. That was kind of a trick because Ivan wanted to see the grille work above the door. When you hang somebody, you have to have a track way up above the door, we had to find some way to move the wires through the grille work to fly the stuntwoman out into the hallway beyond. The way we solved that was to build a hinge in the grille work itself. The grille work was made out of iron, but in the area that we wanted to pass the cable through, we replaced the iron with foam rubber made to look like iron. Behind this rubber we placed small steel spring slips so that when the wires hit the grille work, they would go right through and then the foam rubber would spring back into place." Later on, the images of the ghostly brothers would be composited over the wires to help cover the effect. Also matted in was a miniature lintel and frame above the door. "The stuntwoman in the scene wore a pair of flying pants and a vest, and the cable ran up from her leg to the ceiling track above. Ivan wanted wer to have one leg free so it could dangle--which made things more difficult. All the weight was on her shoulders when she was upside down, so that was not a problem--but she had to try to hold her leg out and kick and flip it around. There were also all these chairs underneath, and her head was just missing the tops of the ones that we had not already blown out of the way."
While cast and crew were demolishing the courtroom set, Tim Lawrence and his team were constructing the Scoleri brotehrs which would later be filmed at ILM. "In the first draft of the script that I saw, the description of the characters was quite vague--as is often the case with fantasy characters that have not yet been fully designed. I believe the script read something like, 'Big in life, even bigger in death, the Scoleri brothers sweep into the courtroom.' Knowing that Dan Aykroyd had written this bit, one of hte first images that came to me was the Blues Brothers--and it was this idea of a tall thin guy and a short fat guy that colored my thinking as I developed the characters. I began by generating some rough drawings in my very cartoony style, and then I involved a longtime friend and collaborator, Henry Mayo, to help me firm the concepts into something that was more realistic, yet still broad in intent. It seemed to me that the original draft of the script was 'monster shy' and the ghostly apparations that did appear were very much of the see-through person variety. There was no marshmallow man, no terror dogs--just a variety of vaporous people.. I could not imagine a Ghostbusters movie without any creature-type ghosts, so I very consciously began pushing the concepts for the Scoleris into a broad caricature direction. I took my cues from the script and extrapolated my own interpretation along lines that I felt would represent the brothers' internal evilness rather than merely suggest what they looked like in life--hence the very exaggerated ghosts that appear in the movie. Both Ivan and Michael were enthusiastic about this approach, and so I hoped to generate further characters of this type of work progressed. Ultimately, the Scoleri brothers would be the first ghost designs in the show to be green-lighted."
It was apparent to Lawrence that the two brothers--fat Nunzio and skinny Tony--could have been realized in a number of ways, and indeed several options were considered before a body-suit approach was finally selected. "My original concept for the brothers' movement through the courtroom had them taking steps where their feet would pass through the floor, causing an explosive rapture and leaving a smoking, splintered hole at each step. As their feet lifted--losing contact with the earth and thus their electrical ground--the leg that was in the air would become less distinct as an appendage and more like a flaring electrical bolt until contact with the earth again restored its character. The Scoleris were also to have lip-synched some Italian epithets. So with these two basic ideas in mind--walking and lip-synch--we took a full-size approach over a miniature puppet approach to avoid duplicating sculptures in two scales which would have been necessary to accommodate a closeup head. Our schedule was incredibly tight."
As designed, Nunzio appeared to weigh in excess of eight hundred pounds. To achieve this bulk--as well as othe specialty costume requirements for the film--Camilla Henneman was engaged to develop a fat-suit that Tim Lawrence himself would wear during the effects shoot. Using techniques akin to those she had employed to put similar poundage on Weird Al Yankovic for his 'Fat' video parody, Henneman constructed an assemblage of spandex pouches filled with a variety of gelatinous materials to simulate the undulating quality of fleshy masses. The finished suit was then sheathed in an appropriately singed prison garment. While the suit construction was in progress, the concept for the overall sequence continued to evolve as the brothers went from walking throught the courtroom to walking and sometimes flying to finally being totally airborne. By the time their all-flying status was settled upon, the costumes were too far along to abandone altogether and so flying harnesses were incorporated into the configuration.
Tony Scoleri underwent three successive stages of development. Where Lawrence and crew had gone for the impossibly fat Nunzio, they wanted Tony to be impossibly thin. "Our first approach was a full-sized puppet with an articulated head directly and analogously attached to a puppeteer. To develop this version, I secured the services of another longtime associate, Mark Wilson, and a prototype was quickly assembled and video tested against black. We achieved a very eerie look--a skeletal locomotion unseen outside of stop-motion, yet with more of a sense of gravity." Though Dennis Muren was impressed with the results, he determined that the rotoscope load for such an approach would seriously compromise the production schedule and so the character was redesigned to fit actor Jim Fye. "We attached the head to a skullcap that positioned it in front of and on top of Jim's own head. Then we lowered the collarbone in the emaciated torso sculpture--which elongated the neck--and styled the hair in such a way that it concealed Jim's head. We dressed him in oversized shoes so that when he was suspended he could direct the toes down or behind, adding a sharper pointed look to the legs. We tattered his prison suit and added extra lengths of cloth strips shich were blown about with a fan. We also added small details like finger extensions and droopy pants. All of these measures helped put over the illusion of a much more skeletal being than was actually there." A third-scale marionette was also made in prototype form , but abandoned when the costume approach proved fully workable.
To sculpt the body parts not directly fabricated by Henneman and her staff, Lawrence brought in Mike Smithson to fashion the heads, Bob Cooper to provide Tony's torso and Bill Foertsch to supply Nunzio's arms. Additional details such as tongues and teeth were handled by Buzz Neidig. To provide th broad articulation required of the Scoleri brothers, mechanical animator Al Coulter and his crew employed some nontraditional technology. "For the Nunzio character," said Lawrence, "I wanted a great gaping mouth. I also had an idea to divide the head into two separate units--the lower jaw to be attached to my shoulders and the upper head to rest on a skullcap, with the two joined together by a single foam latex skin. With this approach, the lower jaw could be sent mechanically in one direction while I turned my head in th opposite direction, thus creating a ghastly twisted cavern in the center of Nunzio's face. Al figured out how to do it using a series of proportionally controlled pneumatic cylinders to move the mass of the lower jaw with speed and precision."
To facilitate the lip-sync aspects of the sequence, Lawrence drew upon his prior experience in audio-animation to assemble a memory playback system for the mechanics. Though crude in many respects, the Synthetic, Neuro-Animation Repeating Kinetics module--dubbed the "SNARK" system--performed a number of functions and allowed for considerable flexibility of the characters. From parameters outlined by Lawrence, Coulter supervised the efforts of Tim Gillett in the construction of the electronics necessary to link the characters' servos and pneumatics to a computer. "The technology for this kind of control has been around for decades," noted Lawrence. "I worked with animation control systems more than ten years ago, and many of the people I count as valuable coworkers were first met in this Hollywood satellite industry. Only within the past few years, however, has the hardware and software approached an off-the-shelf availability, and we incorporated some of this available technology into an original contour with considerable custom interfacing to arrive at the system we used in Ghostbusters II. With the SNARK system, we could either perform the character totally live--as the information outputs were typical joystick conformation--or we could record the initial performance, keep the parts we liked, and then go back in and electronically edit the other functions a channel at a time until a complete and satisfying performance was in the memory. This could then be played back as stored, or speeded up and slowed down at the touch of a keystroke. There is also an override switch for each function allowing partial playback and partial live performance, as in an instance where an eyeline might be critical yet you would want to keep the animated lip-sync. It is all very similar to photographic motion control. The potential of this concept for creature work is immense."
Bringing Nunzio and Tony to cinematic life meant that Lawrence and Fye had to wear the full body suits for hours at a time while hanging from wires in front of a bluescreen. Given the bulk of the suits themselves--Nunzio weighed close to eighty pounds--a great deal of acting and patience was required. "I've done a lot of these types of characters," Lawrence explained, "and I've learned that the trick to performing in suites such as these is to have in your mind a perfect mental image of what you look like in the suit. It takes a while to get that knack, especially since you cannot see yourself and often you cannot see a monitor when you're doing a shot. It's actually a lot like acting through appliances where you have to really move your face around behind them to get them to register. With a big foam suit, you have to move a lot and be exaggerated to have something come through. You also have to know how to temper your moves--otherwise it looks like just a bunch of waving around. Actually, with the Scoleri brotehrs that was kind of what the producers wanted--a lot of extreme motions."
When the brothers first appear, they are sitting in the electric chairs that ended their lives. In reality, the chairs were miniatures that were shot separately from the ghosts. To make the two elements merge, Lawrence and Fye had to hang in midair and pretend to be sitting. "In the Nunzio suit," Lawrence admitted, "it was very hard to pretend like I was sitting in midair. Fortunately, one of the crew members was underneath and helped me push my feet up so my legs were bent properly at the knees. Then on a certain count, he would duck away and I would pretend like I was bursting out of the chair and falling forward in a dive. To get the best negative, we needed the biggest image we could get--so we had to stay in the center of the frame. Therefore, if Nunzio was sitting and he had to burst out of his chair in an upward arch and then dive back down, I had to move my arms and feet accordingly, but I could actually swing through the frame. Sometimes if it was a particularly difficult shot, we would do a black-and-white test and make a quick composite to check our moves. Despite the complications, we actually shot the sequence really fast. We filmed on one brother in the morning and one in the afternoon, and we could usually get five or six shots a day of both."
Though the results were impressive, the essential concept for the Scoleri brothers sequence was ultimately altered and simplified to such an extent that the characters could have been achieved much more simply in other ways. . "By the time much of the work had been done," Lawrence reflected, "the concept had changed to the point that the brothers were now always in flight, never really spoke, were very transparent and also heavily augmented with roto effects. The facial animation--while excellent--was now all but superflous. The characters could easily have been done with third-scale marionettes on wires. You just never know how the stuff is going to be used until it is. With the script changing daily, all you can do is adapt and hope you are prepared for anything."
The movements of the Scoleri brothers through the composite frame were created later on a track camera by effects camereman Peter Daulton. At the same time he was adding moves to the ghost elements, Daulton was also incorporating an additional effect using mirror trickery. "In our efforts to make the ghosts look really different in Ghostbusters II, said Muren, "we decided we wanted to try and alter their shapes in unusual ways. Using mylar--or mirrorplex material--we could squish and squash the shapes like something in a funhouse mirror. To do this, we used very thin mirrorplex that was about a thirty-second -of-an-inch thick and very flexible. If you poke this material on the back with your finger, you get a bump, the image is distorted. By controlling how you move and shape the mirrorplex, , you can get different types of distortion. And if you put two pieces next to each other and push one and pull the other and line it up to a reflected image, you can make things twist."
For the Scoleri brothers, a predictable and repeatable means of distorting the imagery was needed. "Basically we rephotographed the images of the ghosts on a rear projection screen and then reflected that image onto mirrorplex that was motion controlled from the rear. The mirrorplex was in a very rigid frame, and behind it we had motion controlled rods that enabled Peter to recreate different distortions over and over. We could program the system to essentially grab the mirrorplex at any point and take the fat Scoleri brother and suddenly make his belly shake up and down, or make both brother's legs turn into tornado wisps so that they would not look like people or like any cartoon that anyone has ever seen. This way of visualizing was something I had worked out about two years ago in a project that never came through where we were going to do a lot of shape-shifting. At that time we were going to do it with computer graphics and go in and image process and be able to grab the image with a light pen and pull someone's head off to one side. The shape shifting in Willow also came out of this idea. The great thing about it in Ghostbusters II was that we could see that sort of shape changing through the camera and it seemed like something that ghosts could actually be doing."
"Peter did some wonderful things after we shot the bluescreen plates," Lawrence asserted. "As he was motion controlling the photography to make Tony and Nunzio move across the frame, he was rephotographing the images off the mirrorplex to make them go around curves, stretch out at certain points and even bulge. He did a wonderful with Nunzio where he got a really good cartoon squash and stretch as the character moved up in the air, stopped and then dove back down into the judge's bench."
Once the Scoleri brothers burst onto the scene, the terrified judge suddenly changes his tune and reverses his decision banning the Ghostbusters from practicing their trade. Vidicated, the supernatural exterminators remove their proton packs from the evidence table, strap them on and unleash their nutrona beams on the ghosts. "The animated nutrona beams in the first film looked really good," said animation supervisor Tom Bertino, "and initially we tried very literally to duplicate that look. But then Dennis and Mark Vargo encouraged us to have fun with the beams. We all figured that since people have already seen what the beams could do in the first film, the surprise was off. We needed to take them in a new direction. For instance, in the courtroom, the beams act like cowboy lassos or fishing lines, reeling the ghosts in. The beams catch the Scoleri brothers around the ankles, then the ghosts slip through and and beams wrap around their necks. John Armstrong and Peter Crossman did a great job of animating these shots so that the beams almost seem to have a consciousness of their own. When first suggested these ideas to Dennis and Mark, they liked them. Then we sent pencil sketches down to Ivan and sat with our fingers crossed because we really wanted to get these ideas into the movie. We all felt gratified that nine times out of ten, the answer came back: 'Ivan loves it. Go full speed ahead.'"
"It was great that Ivan was open to such ideas," Muren remarked. "I think the lasso was a pretty neat concept that worked well with the squash and stretch effects we were creating with the mirrorplex. Then we thought that if we could line up the mirrorplex and squeeze the ghosts when the nutrona beams wrapped around them, it would show a more direct effect from the beams. One of our animators came up with the next step on that, which was a very obvious lasso that starts wrapping around one of the brothers and then pulls him tight, squeezing him in the middle. It was just wonderful. Anything that had that kind of character was something we really liked."
In addition to the nutrona beams, the animation department also expanded on the ghost traps that the Ghostbusters use to capture ectoplasmic pests. "Instead of just having ghosts get sucked into the traps and disappear," Bertino said, "we wanted the audience to get the feeling that everything that happened to the ghousts happened for a specific reason. So when these hunks of unearthly ectoplasm get sucked into the traps in this film, we created animation of them coming apart. We also added comets and lightning inside the trap cone field that appear to have a direct effect on the ghosts. For the scene when Tony and Nunzio finally get sucked into the trap, Mike Lessa devised a great staggered effect where Nunzio went in head first, leaving his shoes behind for just a second before they too dropped in. Then at Dennis' suggestion, we had Tony leave his leave his eyeballs behind for just an instant so that the last thing we saw were these two glowing orbs. We wanted to suggest that the ghost trap was literally pulling these guys apart."
With the Scoleri brothers back on dead (sic) row, the Ghostbusters reopen their fire station headquarters and find New York once again being overrun with apparitions. Among the entities they encounter in a rapid-fire montage is a ghostly jogger checking his pulse as he runs around a track in Central Park. In reality, the jogger was another incarnation of actor Jim Fye, who was covered in white makeup and then photographed against a bluescreen and matted into the live-action plates. "Developing the look of the ghost jogger was difficult." observed optical supervisor Tom Rosseter. "we photographed him one way and he looked very white and extremely bright. Then we decided to take him down a little and add more contrast. The ghost jogger became an interesting study in how to use contrast mattes and how to extract contrast from the negative when it is not really there. We fooled around with it quite a bit until we got a look that balanced just right with the background plate and the action in the scene."