Ivan Reitman: Why We’re Still Talking About ‘Ghostbusters’ 30 Years Later
Comedy may be the most subjective of genres, but Ivan Reitman knows what the people want. Over the course of his 40-plus-year career as a director, producer, and writer, the Slovakia-born/Canada-bred filmmaker has been a key player in some of Hollywood’s most iconic comedies — Animal House, Meatballs, and Stripes among them. But few films have amassed as passionate a following as one particular hit: Ghostbusters.
Originally conceived of as a space-set ensemble piece and starring vehicle for Dan Aykroyd (who wrote it) and John Belushi, the horror-comedy-sci-fi-family-film hybrid eventually morphed into something much different — and ended up becoming not just a blockbuster hit but a bona fide comedy franchise. As the newest big-screen installment of Ghostbusters hits theaters next week, Rolling Stone asked the director of the first two films (and producer of the newest one) to take us back to the summer of 1984, when special effects were hard to come by and audiences weren’t afraid of no ghosts.
Back in the early 1980s, Dan Aykroyd had written a 60- to 70-page treatment called Ghostbusters, for John Belushi and himself to do. But Belushi died before they could take it any further, so it sat around for a year or two. It was futuristic; I remember that it took place in outer space, that there were competing teams of Ghostbusters, and there was some kind of apparition or monster on every page. It was a very huge, and frankly impossible, movie to actually do. Particularly in 1980. [But] it had this really brilliant idea at its core, which is: Here are a bunch of people looking very much like firemen, doing this important job, and that ghosts existed and it was possible to catch them.
I had just done Stripes, and [Aykroyd] had already spoken to Bill Murray. Bill liked the idea, so Aykroyd called me and said, “Why don’t you read the treatment?” I read it and asked him to lunch at Art’s Delicatessen in the Valley in Los Angeles. I said, “It’s good, but it’s very hard to make what you’ve written so far. The movie I’d be interested in doing should be set today in New York. I think these guys should be people who are dabbling in parapsychology, probably at a university. They get into trouble, they get kicked out, and then they go into business for themselves. And it turns out it’s a good business.”
Aykroyd liked the idea a lot. I had worked with Harold Ramis a few times because he wrote Animal House for me as a producer; he’d worked on Meatballs and acted in and co-wrote Stripes as well. I knew I needed a different kind of writer to sort of fill it all out, and that there should be more than just two Ghostbusters … Aykroyd, generous as ever, said, “That all sounds cool. Let’s just do it.”
I had a meeting with Frank Price, who was running Columbia Pictures. He said, “I hear you guys have a movie you want to make.” I said, “Bill and Danny both want to do it. We want to bring Harold Ramis into it. They’re writing a script.” I gave him a description of the script, even though it didn’t exist. Stripes had cost $10 million; Ghostbusters was going to be way more elaborate, so I thought, let’s make it three times as expensive: $30 million. I was really just pulling a figure from the air. He said, “You’ve got a deal.” This was May, 1983; about six weeks later, Aykroyd, Ramis, and I all went to Martha’s Vineyard, where Dan has a house, and spent two or two-and-a-half weeks in Aykroyd’s basement, every day. [We] basically created the movie as it exists now on film.