Ghostbusters: 30 Amazing Facts About The Classic Comedy
It's headed back into theaters, for one thing!
Ghostbusters celebrated its 30th anniversary of release in 2014. And on June 8th of that year it was declared National Ghostbusters Day. It’s a time to celebrate the proton pack-wearing crew that came into our hearts in the 1980s and inspired a franchise still going today.
With that in mind, we wanted to look back at 30 amazing things you might not have known about Ghostbusters.
1) Ghostbusters is notoriously filled with ad-libs, including a good portion of what came out of Murray’s mouth as Peter Venkman. A few specific examples include the “Twinkie scene”; Dana comparing Venkman to a game show host (the original line was a used-car salesman); and almost all of the dialogue at Louis’ apartment party. Also, when Venkman mentions Egon’s earlier attempt to drill a hole in his own head, Harold Ramis ad-libbed the line, “That would have worked if you hadn’t stopped me.”
2) It’s hard to imagine the four Ghostbusters being played by anybody other than Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson, but the original script was written for Aykroyd, John Belushi as Venkman, and Eddie Murphy as Winston. Once Belushi died, other potential Venkmans included Chevy Chase and Michael Keaton (who also turned down the role of Egon).
3) Murphy turned down the Ghostbusters role so he could do Beverly Hills Cop. Had he signed on as Winston, the character would have played a much larger role, and it would have been Winston, rather than Venkman, who got slimed at the Sedgewick Hotel.
4) Christopher Walken, John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, and Jeff Goldblum were all considered for the role of Egon before Ramis, who was originally just co-writing the movie, decided to play it himself.
5) John Candy was originally cast as Louis Tully, but left over creative differences. Among other things, he wanted the character to have a German accent and a pair of dogs. After he bailed, the role then went to Rick Moranis.
6) Gozer, played in the film by Serbian model/actress Slavitza Jovan, was originally going to appear in the form of Ivo Shandor, who is mentioned in the final film as the founder of the Gozer cult. The Gozer/Shandor role was offered to Paul “Pee Wee” Reubens, but he turned it down.
7) And it wasn’t just the cast that changed a lot during development. Aykroyd’s original script was set in the future, in a world where there were multiple Ghostbusters franchises all over the nation. The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would have turned up much earlier in the movie, and there would have been several other large-scale menaces for the Ghostbusters to deal with. Director Ivan Reitman and Harold Ramis came up with the idea of making it more of an origin story for the group, and scaling it back in scope, since Reitman estimated it would have cost $300 million in 1984 dollars to shoot the original script as written.
8) During the initial release of the movie, they began running the Ghostbusters’ infamous TV spot on actual television, but with a real 1-800 number replacing the movie’s 555 number. Calling it got you a pre-recorded message from Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd. The number apparently got 1,000 calls per hour, 24 hours a day, for six weeks.
9) The people shouting “Ghostbusters!” during the iconic theme song are musician Ray Parker Jr.’s girlfriend and her friends.
10) Parker reportedly came up with the idea for the theme song in the middle of the night, after two days of trying to come up with something. He was inspired by a cheap commercial for a local business that reminded him of the Ghostbusters commercial from the script.
11) Prior to beginning work on Ghostbusters, Reitman were attempting to put together a movie version of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with both Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd being considered for the role of Ford Prefect. So in a parallel reality somewhere, we might have gotten a good Hitchhiker’s movie but no Ghostbusters. I don’t think that’s a trade I’d be willing to make.
12) Huey Lewis and the News turned down the offer to write the Ghostbusters theme song. Lewis later sued Ray Parker Jr., claiming his Ghostbusters theme plagiarised their song “I Want a New Drug.” They settled out of court.
13) Remember the librarian who said that she had an uncle who thought he was St. Jerome? St. Jerome is the patron saint of librarians.
14) Ghostbusters was the highest-grossing comedy of all time until Home Alone dethroned it.
15) A more frightening version of the librarian ghost was created but unused, and it later popped up in the movie Fright Night.
16) The scenes where the Ghostbusters are thrown in jail were filmed in a real abandoned prison, which was alleged to be haunted. The dailies shot there included mysterious scratches, but sadly they didn’t catch any full-torso apparitions.
17) Peter Venkman’s sadistic psychic experiment was based on a couple of real-life experiments: the Rhine Experiments and the Milgram experiment.
18) The words “Venkman burn in hell,” which were scrawled on his office door at the university, were a tip of the hat to a moment in the movie Carrie.
19) The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man was originally supposed to rise up out of the ocean next to the Statue of Liberty, to give the audience an idea of how big it was. Of course, the Statue went on to play a major role in the finale of Ghostbusters II.
20) Dan Aykroyd’s real-life reaction to seeing the pole in the fire station set was basically exactly like Ray’s in the story: he insisted they had to use it.
21) Here’s how actor William Atherton recalled to the A.V.Club the enormously satisfying sequence where his Walter Peck gets a truckload of marshmallow fluff dumped on him:
I went under the bag, and I asked, ‘How much shaving cream is in there?’ And they said, ‘Not that much.’ So I said, ‘Well, how much does it weigh?’ ‘It’s about 75 pounds, but it’s shaving cream.’ You know the whole thing about 75 pounds of feathers and 75 pounds of lead? It’s about the same thing. [Laughs.] So can we figure out what’s going to happen with this?’ So they put some poor stunt guy underneath to show the sissy actor ‘Okay, nothing’s going to happen.’ So they unleashed it, and it flattened him. So they took out half of the shaving cream, and I went in very happily and was slimed.
22) In one of the DVD commentaries, Reitman recalls being confronted by Atheron after the film was released. The actor complained that Peck was so despicable in the movie that people were accosting the actor in real life and trying to start bar fights with him. What higher compliment could you receive as an actor?
23) There was only one Ecto-1, which is surprising given that most iconic movie cars are actually several different vehicles which serve different functions. The Ecto-1 finally crapped out in the midst of filming on Ghostbusters II.
24) The shot of a possessed Dana levitating and then spinning above the bed was done practically on set, without any post-production effects. Reitman learned the effect from magician Doug Henning when the two worked together on Merlin the musical on Broadway.
25) The Ghostbusters’ proton packs were originally envisioned more like magician’s wands.
26) The term “proton pack” wasn’t actually used onscreen until Ghostbusters II.
27) Ghostbusters marked the film debut of Larry King.
28) For the scenes outside Dana’s apartment late in the film, the production shut down the streets at 65th and Central Park West, resulting in a massive logjam of traffic. In a quintessentially New York moment, Aykroyd noticed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, a New York native at the time, standing in the crowd watching the filming. When Aykroyd went to introduce himself, Asimov told him off for creating such a traffic jam.
29) Although the idea of “crossing the streams” was established as a very bad thing earlier in the script, they didn’t hit on the idea of using that to kill Stay-Puft until they were actually working on the climactic sequence on set.
30) It was Murray’s idea that Venkman should be the least covered by marshmallow fluff after killing Gozer. In contrast, Aykroyd kept asking for more.
