A film that looks like pure invention is actually packed with material that was drawn directly from real life. The golf comedy that became a cult classic was built on the genuine experiences of caddies who had lived the social hierarchy they put on screen. The version audiences eventually saw drifted far from what the writers originally intended. A coming-of-age story about teenage caddies kept losing ground to the adults behaving badly around them.
Casting choices nearly went another way, a star was contracted for barely a week, and an assembly ran so long it had to be rebuilt from scratch. The pecking order at Bushwood came from Indian Hill Club in Wilmetka, Illinois, a private course north of Chicago, where six brothers spent their teenage summers carrying clubs. Brian Doyle-Murray, who co-wrote the screenplay, did most of the remembering, having worked that caddy yard as a kid, as had his brothers Bill and John. The elderly couple who can barely move the ball forward were based on a real pair of longtime members.
Harold Ramis first met Bill Murray on an Illinois golf course as well, where the future Carl Spackler was working a concession stand. The script ballooned to 199 pages. Ramis, Doyle-Murray, and producer Doug Kenney locked themselves in a room to pour out everything they could remember about caddy yards until the draft had swelled. The story was a coming-of-age piece about Danny Noonan, with the adult golfers built in as extended cameos.
One detail captures how unfinished the thing still was. The name Carl Spackler appears nowhere in it. A draft that size could not survive contact with a shooting schedule intact, and the real shape of the movie would be found in a cutting room long after the shoot. When casting began, Ramis originally wanted Don Rickles for the role of Al Czervik, the loudmouth developer who tears through Bushwood.
The character existed on paper for months before anyone connected it to Rodney Dangerfield, and the role had barely any lines in the early draft. Johnny Carson changed things. Dangerfield was midway through a long run of guest appearances on the Tonight Show, and Ramis kept watching a comic who worked at a completely different tempo. Once producers saw the first footage from Bushwood, they told Ramis to give the character more room, and a minor part grew into one of the loudest presences in the film.
Danny’s scholarship was real. In 1963 at Northwestern University, a former caddy started classes on money he had earned carrying other men’s clubs. That caddy was Ed Murray, eldest of the eight Murray children, who had been caddying at Indian Hill since the age of 10. What he won was an Evans scholarship, a full ride reserved for caddies with good grades and years of service.
Brian Doyle-Murray took that piece of his own family history and handed it to a fictional teenager. Ed turned up in the released film too, visible as an extra in a driving range shot for which he was paid $37. Ramis directed his first movie. “I walked on the set and made a total fool of myself,” he wrote in a letter to his daughter later published in her book about him.
An assistant director asked where the camera should go. Ramis pointed. The assistant asked whether he really wanted the generator, the catering tent, and all the trucks moved out of frame. His practical grasp of how a film set operates was close to zero, and the crew figured that out within an hour.
Ramis said afterwards that the rest of the shoot went smoothly because of it. Once everybody accepted that he knew nothing technical, he was free to do the thing he was actually good at—watching funny people and knowing when to stay out of their way. The Baby Ruth gag really happened. Brian Doyle-Murray remembered a chocolate bar being dropped into a swimming pool at his high school.
The reaction was immediate, and nobody stopped to examine the evidence before clearing the water. Ramis and his co-writers inflated that into a full-scale disaster sequence, shot and scored as a straight parody of Jaws. Two young actors were in serious contention for the caddy at the center of the script. Ramis had Mickey Rourke in mind but decided he could not sell the goofy kid next door.
The job went to Michael O’Keefe, who had a problem of his own. Asked at his audition whether he could play golf, he said yes, which was untrue, and then crammed lessons with the head professional at Winged Foot before shooting began. The caddying half needed no faking, as he had carried bags at that same club as a teenager in the early 70s. Bill Murray was contracted for less than a week of work.
Carl Spackler was originally sketched as a silent presence in the Harpo Marx tradition, a figure who wandered through the background without a line of dialogue. Murray was a full-time cast member on Saturday Night Live, filming in South Florida during the season. The production kept inventing reasons to bring him back. Ramis would describe a physical situation, hand Murray the space, then let him fill it.
Murray flew down from New York repeatedly as filming continued, shot more material, then flew back. By the end of the shoot, a background figure with no dialogue had become the character audiences would quote for the next 45 years. Florida had to pass for Illinois. Photography was scheduled for late autumn, and nobody was going to get 11 weeks of usable golf weather out of a Chicago November.
Ramis needed a course without palm trees because one in the background would break the geography instantly. Rolling Hills in Davie fit because its architect had grown bored of subtropical planting and filled the property with oaks and pines instead. The choice was partly by default, since most good clubs had no interest in closing mid-season. What Davie handed back was noise.
Construction ran nearby, aircraft descended toward Fort Lauderdale overhead, and rain washed out whole days. Visually the course held up, while getting a clean audio take cost the schedule time nobody had budgeted for. Something was wrong on Rodney Dangerfield’s first day. He delivered his lines.
Nobody made a sound. By his own account, he came close to walking away from the job, telling people he was doing badly and that somebody else should take the part. The explanation was simple. One audible laugh would ruin the take and cost everybody an hour, so the crew had all been suppressing it.
Dangerfield was the funniest thing on the property, and the silence he had been reading as failure was an entire unit holding its breath. Harold Ramis had been on a golf course exactly twice in his life. On the second of those rounds, he hit a shot that got away from him and struck another player. That memory went straight into the screenplay.
When Al Czervik’s tee shot catches Judge Smails and the judge folds up on the fairway, the beat is lifted directly from a morning at a municipal course in the Midwest. Somebody went through the shooting plan and noticed a gap that should have been impossible. The two biggest comedy names in the picture were never going to share a frame. Chevy Chase and Bill Murray had been booked into entirely separate halves of the movie.
Murray had replaced Chase at Saturday Night Live, the relationship had curdled into a backstage confrontation, and neither man wanted more contact. Ramis fixed it over lunch, and the three worked out a situation rather than a script. Ty Webb slices a ball through the window of the groundskeeper shack, walks in to retrieve it, then finds Carl Spackler at home. The dialogue was left entirely to the actors.
It remains the only film the two ever appeared in together. In early September of 1979, Hurricane David came up the coast as a category 2 system and shut the production down before it had properly found a rhythm. The pause was social. A cast and crew of mostly young people with no way to work got to know each other far better than a normal shoot would have allowed.
Much of the looseness in the movie dates from that week. Ted Knight fought the improvisation. He came out of an older tradition where scripts were locked and an actor arrived knowing exactly what the scene was. Here, Chase, Dangerfield, and Murray rebuilt their material out loud while the camera ran.
Knight had a legitimate grievance. His part had been written as substantial, and it kept shrinking as the comics around him expanded. The strange thing is what that frustration did on screen. Judge Smails works because the man is permanently one incident away from an aneurysm, hemmed in by people who will not behave.
Cindy Morgan, who played Lacy Underall, was legally blind without hard contact lenses that could not go near chlorinated water. For the diving board sequence, she was led to the ladder, guided up it, and placed. A professional diver handled the dive itself. Morgan was not a strong swimmer either, so the crew were managing two risks at once while she played the most self-possessed character in the film.
The longest scene in the movie came from one take and nothing written on the page. Scene 244 described a groundskeeper absently lopping the heads off bedded tulips while the sky darkened, with nothing to say. Bill Murray asked for the tulips to be changed to mums. Ramis offered a premise instead of a direction and let Murray take it wherever he wanted.
What came back was several unbroken minutes of a man narrating his own fantasy Masters victory while decapitating a flower bed, complete with yardages, club selection, and a hushed gallery. Murray supplied the voice, the pacing, the escalation, the ending, all in one take. The question Ramis asked was simple: “Did you ever do imaginary golf commentary in your head? ”
Almost nothing about the production behaved like a studio picture.
Orion had wanted it shot in Los Angeles under the eye of executives. Ramis argued them out of it. What developed at Davie gets described in similar terms by most people who were there: late nights running into early calls, a great deal of drinking, and substances circulating once the day wrapped. What complicates the anecdote is that the same looseness produced the film.
A tightly supervised set does not generate several of the most quoted sequences in American comedy out of nothing on the day. The first cut ran nearly four and a half hours. What reached cinemas runs 98 minutes. The rough assembly is raw material laid end to end in script order, and on a conventional production that might run 20 minutes long.
Here the arithmetic had gone wrong at source with a screenplay that swelled past 200 pages, then gone wrong again on location where Ramis encouraged people to keep going and rarely cut a take early. Murray’s flower bed monologue alone reportedly ran close to half an hour before anybody trimmed it. More than two hours had to come out. What went first was the story the film had been built around: Danny and Maggie, Tony D’Annunzio, the caddy yard politics the writers had mined from their own teenage summers.
Whole relationships vanished, and the planned ending for Danny went with them. Orion brought in additional editors, and what emerged had inverted itself into a run of comic set pieces with a teenager moving between them in a film where the teenager had once been the entire point. The shot worked, and the club took a while afterwards deciding how it felt about the state of its property. Every warning sign a studio watches for turned up on this one.
A screenplay nobody could carry. A lead storyline that quietly collapsed halfway through. A director who had never run a set. A hurricane.
A cast rebuilding their own material while the camera ran. What saved it was that almost everybody involved recognized at some point that the accident in front of them beat the plan behind it. Ramis let Murray talk when the page said silence. Peters looked at an unusable cut and saw a puppet holding it together.
The version that exists is the one they found in the wreckage of the one they intended, and 45 years on, people are still quoting a monologue that took one take and no writing at all.