Papa Vinyard wrote:We keep hearing how different this GHOSTBUSTERS will be, but this is the first visual evidence of how unwilling Feig is to simply turn in a gender-swapping retread. Aykroyd, Ramis, and Reitman had their world worked out, quite literally, to a science, and while I’m skeptical about whether Feig will retain that same level of interest in metaphysics and parapsychology, this makes me excited to see the new gear and gadgets his 21st-century GHOSTBUSTERS will be breaking out.
The Making of Ghostbusters: How Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and “The Murricane” Built “The Perfect Comedy”
Lesley M. M. Blume wrote: For the record, Dan Aykroyd really does believe in ghosts. “It’s the family business, for God’s sake,” he says from his family’s farmhouse in Ontario, site of Aykroyd séances for generations. Aykroyd’s great-grandfather was a renowned spiritualist; the family had its own regular medium to channel souls from the other side. His grandfather—a telephone engineer—investigated the possibility of contacting the dead via radio technology. His father authored a well-regarded history of ghosts; strange lights halo his daughter in photographs.
Yet Aykroyd was the first to turn the supernatural into a highly lucrative global franchise. Drawing on his spectral heritage, Aykroyd sat down one day and started writing Ghostbusters. The finished result catapulted a crew of already-famous Saturday Night Live and Second City comedians to international superstardom, and became a watershed in the industry, eroding the once insurmountable barrier between television and film actors. “Ghostbusters—one of Columbia’s most iconic films of all time—[also] basically invented the genre of special effects-driven comedy,” says Doug Belgrad, president of Columbia Pictures.
“Danny was one of the writing geniuses of our era,” says Ivan Reitman, who directed Meatballs and Stripes and co-produced Animal House. “He created the Coneheads, the Blues Brothers: all of this comes out of that wonderful brain.” Ovitz adds that Aykroyd “was an idea factory . . . the Mount Vesuvius of original ideas.” At any given moment, he recalls, “We probably had 10 Aykroyd ideas . . . in various phases of development.”
While sitting around the family farmhouse, Aykroyd says he read an article in a parapsychology journal and he got the idea about trapping ghosts. “And I thought, I’ll devise a system to trap ghosts . . . and marry it to the old ghost [films] of the 1930s,” Aykroyd says. “Virtually every comedy team did a ghost movie—Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope. I was a big fan of [them.]” He began hammering out a screenplay.
“[It was originally] written for John [Belushi] and I,” he says. The nascent project was immediately dealt a blow when Belushi died of a drug overdose in 1982. “I was writing a line for John, and [talent manager and eventual Ghostbusters executive producer] Bernie Brillstein called and said they just found him,” recalls Aykroyd. “It was a Kennedy moment. . . . We loved each other as brothers.”
Yet the screenplay that eventually became Ghostbusters would at least contain an homage to Belushi: the now-famous, green gelatinous ghost Slimer was based on “John’s body,” Aykroyd says now. “I will admit to having an inspiration along those lines.”
