Ghostbusters II (1989)
Ghostbusters proved so successful in its opening week that talks immediately began on creating a primetime “Ghostbusters” TV show with a different cast. However, when profits skyrocketed over the summer, Columbia wanted a film sequel. As early as November of 1984, stars Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray, along with director Ivan Reitman had meetings to lay out plans for Ghostbusters II. They discussed ideas as wild as extraterrestrial ghosts, and other potential Murray/Aykroyd starring vehicles, like a remake of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.
By March of 1985, Aykroyd announced he’d be writing Ghostbusters II while on location filming Spies Like Us. However, Aykroyd was exhausted by the size and scope of Ghostbusters, deciding to remain in Europe to complete smaller-scale comedies like his spoof of Dragnet and the Royal Canadian Mounties’ comedy Law of the Yukon (another opportunity to work with Murray) until scheduled to the States to film Armed and Dangerous.
Murray also had done back-to-back films without stopping, including his passion-project, The Razor’s Edge, which failed miserably. He took time off, moving to France where he avoided committing to any movies, especially Ghostbusters II, proclaiming that sequels are based on greed and diminished the appeal of the first film.
In mid-1986, Aykroyd and Murray got together for Ghostbusters II ideas. One included avoiding sequelitis by the actors coming back as completely different characters rather than the Ghostbusters. They took baby steps by agreeing to co-star in a Martin Ransohoff remake of His Girl Friday with Debra Winger instead.
On his own, Aykroyd eventually completed a first draft script. Because the first film’s climax took place atop a New York highrise building, his new concept was to set the film in Scotland. Dana Barrett gets get kidnapped and taken underground through a fairy ring serving as a portal to a vast underground druid civilization. The Ghostbusters would come to the rescue, including a battle with a frightening banshee foe. As with Aykroyd’s first Ghostbusters script, his story ideas were too ambitious and inaccessible for mainstream audiences. One concept involved the Ghostbusters traveling in a tunnel for three days through a pneumatic tube 2,000 miles long.
Reitman called a series of meetings to get Aykroyd’s script into shape. Ramis and Aykroyd agreed to account for the passage of time between movies. Ramis felt that five years forward, the Ghostbusters would be a worldwide chain. In their revision, Peter and Dana married with a baby that eventually would get possessed by a ghost, then begins walking and talking like an adult. Eventually, they determined that centering the story so much on Peter wasn’t good for the balance of the story, marginalizing the other three Ghostbusters. They rewrote it so that Dana left Peter due to his lack of commitment. She’d married someone else (presumably”the stiff”, the violinist who uses the nasal spray from the first Ghostbusters), and now she was divorced with an infant boy.
Around this time, David Puttnam became the chairman and CEO for Columbia Pictures. Puttnam determined that talent agencies were squeezing on studios, escalating budgets. Puttnam refused to entertain expensive star-studded packages where they had little creative control. In an off-the-record British-American Chamber of Commerce luncheon speech, Puttnam asserted that he wasn’t interested in catering to the takers who don’t give anything back to the industry. Bill Murray was specifically called out as a taker. Puttnam didn’t know that Murray’s lawyer was in attendance. Word leaked to talent agent Mike Ovitz, who counted Murray among his clients (as well as Reitman, Aykroyd, and Ramis), and it then appeared in Page Six within the New York Post. Murray vowed never to make any further movies for the studio, and the other actors followed suit. They pulled out of His Girl Friday, after which Puttnam put it into turnaround, then later repackaged it for a 1988 release as Switching Channels.
Nevertheless, Coca-Cola, which owned Columbia, put pressure on Puttnam to make Ghostbusters II happen. He considered proceeding with Ghostbusters II with a mostly black cast headed by Bill Cosby, Coca-Cola’s spokesman newly signed to a film contract. However, Cosby was more interested in developing his own story idea, Leonard Part 6. Under pressure, in April 1987, Puttnam told the press that Ghostbusters II would be in production by November. This came as a surprise to Reitman and company, who reasserted that they wouldn’t work with him. In September 1987, with few successes to tout, Puttnam was pushed out of his position, making way for Dawn Steel, who made Ghostbusters II her top priority.
Murray soon met with Aykroyd, Ramis, Reitman, and Ovitz to hear their pitch for the story they had thus far. It started as a gripe session for all of the resentments they felt since the last time they met, mostly aimed at Puttnam. After clearing the air, Murray listened to and liked their ideas, much better than the ones he’d heard from Aykroyd alone. Murray had just made Scrooged and while he didn’t feel good about returning to acting, he felt good making something with a moral. Irked by Puttnam’s accusations that he only cares about himself, Murray wanted Ghostbusters II to mean something more than just fat paychecks. He wanted the Ghostbusters to reflect their reality by joining forces for the greater good.
Ramis and Aykroyd built their next revision with the Ghostbusters being broken up and having to get back together to save the world one more time, with the moral that humans should treat each other with kindness. Ramis came up with the notion that negative energy built up over time. New York must be sitting on reservoirs of residual negativity underground, making it a place where evil spirits would dominate, leading to a climax with a Statue of Liberty possessed by one of the spirits. To defeat this evil, New Yorkers would have to be nicer in unison. Ramis joked that the Statue of Liberty should end up lying on Wall Street as a satirical commentary.
Making each other laugh through the four-hour lunch meeting, Murray missed the good times with these funny guys. Ghostbusters was the most fun he’d ever had making a film, and he could use the laughs. He softened in his stance on returning but the studio would have to make it worth their while. He wanted $10 million to return and that his co-stars get the same., but the struggling Columbia didn’t want to spend $50 million just to get the talent back on top of the costly effects work.
Negotiations began between the studio and the main talent and an agreement was reached: the actors would work for scale in exchange for large percentages of the gross – 15% for Murray, 10% Reitman, 8% Aykroyd, and 5% Ramis – if they could get the film in theaters on the Fourth of July weekend in 1989. The shooting schedule two weeks shorter than Ghostbusters, and grew more hectic when the release date moved up to June 16 to get the jump on Tim Burton’s Batman, releasing June 23. Reitman had to juggle postproduction on Twins while handling preproduction on Ghostbusters II.
One snag: Sigourney Weaver insisted on making as much as her costars. They contemplated recasting Dana with a less expensive actress before retooling the character for a different single mother love interest for Peter named Lane Walker. They wrote a cameo part with Dana Barrett but Weaver declined. Meanwhile, several actresses read lines with Murray for the Lane Walker role but Murray urged them to pay Weaver what she wanted.
Several screenwriters, including Elaine May, Lowell Ganz, and Babaloo Mandell, provided advice to fix issues relating to the family-oriented aspects. In their early drafts, negative feelings manifested into the rise of insects. Reitman suggested a “mood slime” concept, though Murray acquiesced on condition he not be slimed again. However, this was too abstract as a main villain so they concocted a powerful sorcerer, Vigo, who could channel its energy. Vigo used The Statue of Liberty as a minion. However, as Lady Liberty was a symbol of New York’s ideals, they felt she should be a positive force, leading to a “good slime” angle where the Ghostbusters took control.
Meanwhile, Weaver, an Oscar nominee for Aliens, grew hot after for her turns in Working Girl and Gorillas in the Mist (indeed, she’d be a double Oscar nominee in 1989). With Murray on a four-year hiatus, Aykroyd in several middling efforts, and Ramis writing two failed comedies in Armed and Dangerous and Club Paradise, Weaver was the only actor who had sure-fire box-office bankability among them. Negotiations began on how to find a way to get Dana back into the film. They offered her a profit percentage but Columbia never gave her a percentage for the first film citing no profits. Claiming they would need to do a legal audit to back up their claim, she accepted a $1 million flat fee for Ghostbusters II.
The completed plot: Five years after the events of Ghostbusters, the heroes are zeroes again, bankrupt after getting sued by the city for the destructive aftermath of clearing out the city of spooks. There’s also a Federal restraining order prohibiting them from continued ghostbusting. Peter Venkman is now the host of a cheesy local cable talk show called, “World of the Psychic.” Occult bookstore owner Ray Stantz gets side work with Winston Zeddemore, cosplaying as Ghostbusters fir childrens’ birthday parties. Egon Spengler is back at Columbia University, investigating how human emotions affect psycho-magnetic energy. Dana Barrett is a single mother after leaving Venkman for his inability to commit, having a baby, now eight months old, with another man. Louis Tully applies his knack for accounting to become a tax lawyer.
They reunite after being approached by Peter’s ex, Dana, who reports a strange occurrence involving her baby’s carriage traveling on its own. They discover rivers of mood slime running beneath the city, converging on the Manhattan Museum of Art, where Dana works as an art restorer, including a life-size portrait of Medieval sorcerer warlord, Vigo the Carpathian. Vigo’s spirit lives within his portrait, and to enter into the realm of the living, he needs a baby to be his vessel to come to the mortal realm and continue his reign of terror. He makes a deal with Dana’s boss, Dr. Janosz Poha, to secure her baby, Oscar, in exchange for a date with her.
In the original script, Peter MacNicol’s Janosz Poha was a generic Ghostbusters foil named Jason Locke. MacNicol had no interest in playing a forgettable creepy boss role, but Then it struck him that he could reinvent the character as someone who had a connection to this ancient ruler of the fictional Carpathia as being from Central Europe. Doing a wildly exaggerated impression of an acquaintance he knew from a Romanian travel agency; he hung visited the agency to nail down the inflections. MacNicol rewrote all of his dialogue to fit in with this new character and background mythology he channeled. MacNicol also wanted to wear a Beatles wig to suggest Beatlemania was finally hitting his remote region, but Reitman nixed it because the film already had too many brunettes.
Kurt Fuller, who plays the mayor’s assistant, Jack Hardemeyer, quit his day job in real estate after Ghostbusters II, which was a part reshaped when William Atherton couldn’t return as Walter Peck. Ramis saw Fuller in a play recommended by his wife and recommended him to Reitman.
Max von Sydow dubbed the voice for Vigo. Norbert Grupe, aka Wilhelm von Homburg, who was sometimes unintelligible, and, according to producer Michael Gross, he was a “crude, bigoted asshole”. Reportedly, Von Homburg was unaware and stormed out of the screening when he realized he was being dubbed.
A scene with Eugene Levy playing Louis Tully’s dermatologist cousin, Sherman, getting the Ghostbusters out of the psych ward was cut. A romance was struck between Janine and Louis because they felt it made the most sense for those two to be together. Annie Potts had to wear a wig to cover the hairdo she used on “Designing Women”.
The special effects house changed to Dennis Muren and Industrial Light & Magic, hired once the first revision was completed. Muren says Ghostbusters II was the shortest production schedule he’d ever worked on. Nearly 180 optical effects to make, including ones that couldn’t be done until the shoot ended. In addition, the script kept changing, including new ghosts. Reitman wasn’t a technical director, only making suggestions and giving the crew carte blanche. Muran wanted to create ghosts unlike any done before. The Scoleri Brothers were loosely based on criminals who robbed Ramis’s father’s store when he was a kid, as well as Archie Goodwin’s Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie comic book characters, combined with elements of The Blues Brothers.
Replacing Laszlo Kovacs, who had shot the film with more eye for scope, for cinematography was Michael Chapman, who had just shot Scrooged with Murray, who emphasized more tight close-ups. Replacing the gothic look of John DeCuir for production design was Beetlejuice‘s Bo Welch, who made it more cartoonish. Randy Edelman, who worked with Reitman on Twins, replaced Elmer Bernstein’s mix of horror and comedy with a definitively more comic emphasis. The soundtrack has bigger talent this time, with two hit songs from Bobby Brown (who makes a cameo appearance), Brown’s former group New Edition, Elton John, Glenn Frey, James Taylor, Oingo Boingo, Doug E. Fresh, and a rap reiteration of the Ray Parker Jr. song done by Run-DMC.
The accelerated shooting schedule quickly fell behind resulted in shortcuts to catch up, reducing the opportunities for improvisation. Preview screening audiences found the film lacked palpable conflict, the plot confusing, and the ending resolved too quickly. Last-minute reshoots took place to add more obstacles and narrative explanations, reshooting most of the final 25 minutes. Murray thinks that many funny scenes were removed to make way for new ones emphasizing effects. One moment where Venkman gets the crowd to sing “Kumbaya ” was jettisoned, having been done first in Troop Beverly Hills, orchestrated by Randy Edelman himself.
Slimer was supposed to have a bigger role, becoming friends with Louis Tully after the latter tries to apprehend him using food as bait in the firehouse, but the scenes were deemed by test audiences as distracting lulls. He makes a cameo appearance in the end credits. Slimer’s was more like he appeared in the “Real Ghostbusters” cartoon. Meanwhile, Louis Tully was supposed to use his accounting and lawyering skills to run the Ghostbusters business.
Just like the first Ghostbusters was plagued by questions on Bob Woodward’s book, “Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi”, so too was the release of Ghostbusters II dogged by questions on the movie adaptation of Wired, set to be released in August 1989. Aykroyd refused to sit for press interviews this time out, while Murray determined to dance around Belushi questions.
Critics gave Ghostbusters II middling write-ups, too innocuous to hate yet not nearly as innovative as the first effort. It opened to a record-setting $29.5 million but enthusiasm evaporated quickly, making only half of its predecessor in the US. Although its budget was only $37 million, the percentages are given to get the actors on board proved so costly that it is considered a flop for the studio. It didn’t help that Batman and Honey I Shrunk the Kids were released days later.
Unfathomable is that Ghostbusters II retains the core contributors to the success of Ghostbusters yet doesn’t replicate its appeal. Unfortunately, the creative minds behind it only begrudgingly consented to do this sequel and a half-hearted effort resulted.
One major story quibble is that the city views the Ghostbusters are hucksters who made up a bunch of phony ghost attacks. Anyone who has seen the first film knows that there is no possible way they could have wreaked the havoc that occurred all on their own. I mean, the Stay Puft Marshmallow man, anyone? How can you fake that?
Beyond the broader characterizations, the actors are hampered by the “family-friendly” emphasis. The creators were mindful that many kids expected the tone and style of the animated television cartoon, “The Real Ghostbusters”. Gone are scary ghosts in favor of more cartoonish ones. Gone are the gags like a ghost unzipping a man’s pants in the middle of the night or the ugly, horrific creatures that were actually nightmare-worthy. In their place are cute baby moments, dancing toasters, oddball characters with funny accents, and the normally-womanizing Peter only having eyes for one gal.
Perhaps worst of all, the witty banter and camaraderie that had seemed so effortless in Ghostbusters now feels forced. You can almost hear Reitman yelling at the cast, “We need more witty banter here — everyone act witty and start bantering!”
Not the worst sequel, Ghostbusters II ranks among most disappointing. Ghostbusters is one of my favorite comedies of all time, without any scenes I don’t find funny or characters I don’t love. I laughed so little for the sequel, and nearly every character was far less appealing this go-round.
Ghostbusters II is like one of the creepy apparitions featured in the film — a faded ghost of its former self. It’s so uninvolving, that if movie theaters showing this had a river of “mood slime” flowing beneath it, the emotions of disinterested audiences wouldn’t even have affected a ripple. The result is best exemplified in the scene where Ray and Winston try to entertain at a birthday party, but these kids clearly aren’t having it. I can’t blame them — I’d also rather see “He-Man” than a cuddly, watered-down version of the REAL Ghostbusters that came, saw, and kicked ass in the fantastic first film.
Qwipster’s rating: C
MPAA Rated: PG for some scary images and language
Running Time: 108 min.
Cast: Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Peter MacNicol, Ernie Hudson, Wilhelm von Hornberg, Rick Moranis, Annie Potts, David Margulies, Kurt Fuller, Harris Yulin, Will Deutschendorf, Hank Deutschendorf
Cameo: Jason Reitman, Bobby Brown, Cheech Marin, Brian Doyle-Murray, Ben Stein, Philip Baker Hall, Chloe Webb, Judy Ovitz
Director: Ivan Reitman
Screenplay: Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd