Prior to working on 1993’s Groundhog Day with one another, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis collaborated on five other comedies that have gone on to be considered some of the greatest of all time: Meatballs (1979), Caddyshack (1980), Stripes (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), and Ghostbusters II (1989). With a track record like that, you would think that things would’ve gone pretty smoothly when the two got back together again for their sixth and final film as a team. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case this time around, as the pair reportedly clashed almost immediately over the script for Groundhog Day.
According to a 2004 profile of Ramis in The New Yorker, Murray was having marital troubles at the time and had been acting erratically as a result. Screenwriter Danny Rubin recalled that Murray and Ramis also had different ideas about the movie’s tone; Murray thought it should be more philosophical, whereas Ramis envisioned it as a comedy. “At times, Bill was just really irrationally mean and unavailable; he was constantly late on set,” Ramis explained. “What I’d want to say to him is just what we tell our children: ‘You don’t have to throw tantrums to get what you want. Just say what you want.’”
The Beloved Comedy That Caused a Decades-Long Rift Between Bill Murray and Harold Ramis
In her 2018 memoir Ghostbuster’s Daughter, Ramis’s daughter Violet Ramis Stiel said that her father’s creative differences with Murray got so intense that Ramis even grabbed Murray by his shirt collar one day and threw him up against a wall. With the exception of a couple of brief exchanges at a wake and a bar mitzvah, the former collaborators didn’t speak for more than 20 years. Some speculated that part of the issue stemmed from Murray resenting how much Ramis had to do with helping create Murray’s persona.
On a positive note, Murray and Ramis did get a chance to resolve their issues shortly before Ramis’s death in 2014. At 7 a.m. one morning, Murray showed up to Ramis’s house unannounced with a police escort and a box of doughnuts. Murray ended up doing the majority of the talking, however, because Ramis had mostly lost his ability to speak by then. The subject of Groundhog Day never came up, and the two instead decided to hang out for a while and share some laughs.
Ramis died on February 24, 2014, due to complications from autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis. Six days later, Murray unexpectedly paid tribute to his longtime friend at the Academy Awards. You can check out the impromptu segment for yourself below.
The post 33 Years Ago, This Beloved Comedy Caused a Decades-Long Rift Between Bill Murray and Harold Ramis appeared first on VICE.
