Bullets, Sand and Bill Murray: Inside ‘Rock the Kasbah’
Being friends with Bill Murray has had some drawbacks for Mitch Glazer. Since the former SNL MVP, poetry aficionado and part-time party crasher doesn’t have an agent or a manager, total strangers call Glazer up to see if he will convince the man to be in their movies. And it also means that Murray calls him up whenever Road House is on TV, to deliver a play-by-play commentary on the scene where Patrick Swayze has sex with Kelly Lynch (Glazer’s wife). But it also means that the writer-director gets to make crazy dreams come true — like, say, the idea that Murray should star in a movie as a washed-up rock promoter who gets stranded in Afghanistan when his client flees a USO tour. The result is Rock the Kasbah, Glazer and director Barry Levinson’s comedy which opens this Friday.
“It was everything I’ve ever wanted to see him do, including sing ‘Smoke on the Water’ to Pashtun tribesmen,” Glazer says. “The genesis of it was when Bill had done, I think, Broken Flowers. His acting was so powerful and minimal, but it wasn’t every arrow in his quiver. And then I had a conversation with him, and he’d been talking to a mutual friend, [film critic] Elvis Mitchell, about exactly the same thing: Maybe it was time for him to do something funnier, but was also about something and had heart to it. I’ve been writing for Bill’s voice since 1987. I know what he likes and how he sounds and how he reacts — so when he gets the script, he thinks he’s improvised it, which is the ultimate compliment.”
Before becoming a Hollywood mover and shaker, Glazer started off as a rock journalist: He wrote features for Rolling Stone in the early Eighties on Roman Polanski and Peter Sellers. That background informs the casual insider tone of Kasbah, whether Murray’s character, Richie Lanz, is talking about working with Eddie Money back when he was still Eddie Mahoney, or spinning a tale about convincing Stevie Nicks to go onstage. “I’m a complete rock & roll relic,” Glazer confesses. “There are times [when] I looked at Bill, and he had let his hair grow long, he was wearing a denim shirt and he had these turquoise beads on — and I wondered: Is he making fun of me?”
The script was finished seven years ago, but it kept running into studio resistance: a comedy set in Afghanistan made executives nervous, even before ISIS started beheading people. But eventually the movie got a green light and Levinson came on board to direct it, with a minimal $15 million budget and a shooting schedule of just 29 days. Calling from his lunch break on the set of an HBO movie starring Robert De Niro, Levinson says (after apologizing for having a mouthful of ribs), “Some directors are really smart about the business. One director told me, ‘You don’t want to make an inexpensive movie — you want to spend so much money that the studio has to spend a lot of cash to get back their money.’ That’s true, but [then] what movie would I be making that I would care about?”