![]() Then one day, he turned to me, and I still remember this, and he said, “What if the Ghostbusters were university professors?” Ivan didn't want to blow it off, because he thought there was something there. But it did have the concept of Ghostbusting, and it did have the marshmallow man. They were kind of blue-collar guys and half of it took place in another dimension. ![]() It was set in the future and there were lots of Ghostbusters. We loved the idea of it, but the film seemed impossible to make. We loved the name Ghostbusters, which we didn't own. Joe Medjuck associate producer: We loved the idea. I just thought, "Let's do a comedy ghost movie, but let's base it on the real research." From that, I wrote a script, which is much darker than what was seen and was less accessible. I took that from my family history, my family business, and married it with the ghost comedies of the 1930s-Abbot and Costello, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, and the Bowery Boys. Rhine and Roll and the Maimonides Dream Lab-real scientists who were into this. I originated Ghostbusters based upon reading that material and the real work of J.B. It's about mediumship and transmediumship and the afterlife and survival of the consciousness after death, so that was the kind of stuff I was reading as a kid. My great grandfather was an Edwardian spiritualist. But anyway, it was my family business, the paranormal. Now, superstring theory-23 different dimensions, 11 different dimensions, what's in the 7th or 8th? We live in four. He sent it to me and said, ‘Look, do you think this would be something you'd like to direct with me and Bill?’ I read it, and it was sort of a futuristic thing and it was competing groups of Ghostbusters and out in space.ĭan Aykroyd co-writer, "Ray Stantz": It never went to outer space. ![]() Then Belushi passed away and the script sort of sat dormant for a couple of years. Dan had written a treatment for something called Ghostbusters for himself and John Belushi. Ivan Reitman director/producer: I was always a big horror and science fiction fan-as much as a comedy fan-and I had always had this dream of doing a movie that successfully combined both, comedy and scary stuff. All four of the core creatives-Aykroyd, Reitman, Murray, and Ramis-would go on to better, if not bigger, things, but Ghostbusters remains the moment when their brand of humor and our culture crossed streams, and invited all of Hollywood to the other side. Ghostbusters wasn't as massive as Star Wars at the box office, perhaps, but it represented something just as seismic by validating the new craft of comedy that had been knocking for nearly a decade. "Rarely has a movie this expensive provided so many quotable lines." "This movie is an exception to the general rule that big special effects can wreck a comedy," wrote Roger Ebert. But whereas Stripes and the Harold Ramis-directed Vacation appealed to the red-eyed college-kid demographic, Ghostbusters surprised everyone, including its creators, when virtually everyone, kids and grandmoms, began singing its theme song. Stay Puft? Terror dogs?-that seemed like the inhabitants of an epic ’shroom trip. In fact, they went even further, with a B-movie plot that was both ludicrous and stuffed with images-Mr. When Columbia gave Ghostbusters a green light, though, they handed the keys to the kingdom to an irreverent creative dream team that refused to flinch or be reined in by a bigger budget. Still, those hits were safe bets: raucous thumb-nosing comedies that mostly consisted of slobs outrunning or outsmarting Nixonian snobs. Saturday Night Live had yet to celebrate its 10th anniversary, but the seeds of SNL and Second City sketch comedy had already begun to bear fruit in Hollywood, with movies like Animal House, Caddyshack, and The Blues Brothers scoring at the box office. Dan Aykroyd was just 31 and director Ivan Reitman was 37. In June 1984, when the film opened in theaters, Bill Murray was only 33 years old. Ghostbusters has been such a huge part of our popular-culture for the last 30 years that it's easy to overlook what it represented at the time.
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