Caddyshack Page 16
Soon, Dangerfield was inviting the younger cast members back to his room to get stoned and listen to tapes of his stand-up act. “Rodney smoked more pot than anybody,” says John Barmon. “He would get really stoned and walk around the halls of the hotel in his bathrobe with a towel wrapped around his neck and he’d see you and say, ‘Hey, I want you to come listen to some of my set.’ And you’d sit there in his room and he had one of those old cassette players and he’d be really interested in your reaction. I’m just some nineteen-year-old kid! He was so paranoid it wasn’t funny. And then it would happen again the next night. And the next night. After about a week of this, you’d see him coming down the hall and you’d take off in another direction!”
Trevor Albert had the unenviable job of waking up the cast members each morning, making sure they got to the set for their call times. He quickly became the most unpopular man on campus. “It’s not like everyone went back to their rooms after the day wrapped and practiced their lines,” he says. “Well, they practiced lines, but a different kind.” Albert says that the hardest person to rouse was Kenney, who raged harder than anyone. Being a producer didn’t turn out to be the creatively fulfilling experience he’d hoped it would be.
“I had one experience with Doug hanging out in my room one night for about an hour,” says Peter Berkrot. “I remember him taking out his Screen Actors Guild card. He said, ‘I got this when I did Animal House. It’s the most meaningful thing I own. It’s the one thing I’m the most proud of.’”
There were days when Kenney was happily rewriting scenes on the fly with Brian Doyle-Murray or huddling behind the camera with Ramis, cracking up like schoolkids and discussing which particular take of a scene should be printed. But for the most part, he had frustratingly little to do. And he filled those long, idle stretches of downtime and boredom by taking on the role of the film’s social director, driving around in a golf cart facetiously asking if he could get anyone a Fresca. When he didn’t have a task to attend to, he’d just skulk off and indulge his coke habit—on the sly at first, then more openly. In fact, in one split-second shot in the film, you can see Kenney, playing one of Al Czervik’s crass country club cronies, doing a line of coke in the background of a party scene. He wasn’t trying to hide anything. Later, he would say, tongue only partially in cheek, “I discovered the only thing a producer has to do is stand in back of a gaffer with his hands in his pockets and find new ways to say no.”
Not surprisingly, the easiest person to roust and escort to the set every morning was Ted Knight. He was in bed by eight every night and up at six. Perhaps due to his recent cancer diagnosis, Knight would become almost evangelical when it came to lecturing his costars about the benefits of healthy living, telling them that the Sweet’N Low they were using caused cancer in rats. He would constantly take fistfuls of vitamins and even brought his own juicer to Florida. “People like Doug were snorting coke and smoking out of bongs on the other side of the wall from where Ted was mixing his alfalfa-sprout smoothie,” says Trevor Albert.
It wasn’t just Knight’s lifestyle that made him feel like a square peg. He’d simply learned a totally different process of acting. For a performer, film and television are related, but they can often seem like distant cousins. Acting on a drum-tight sitcom for seven years with its rat-a-tat daily work pace gave him both crack comic timing and a stubborn, marrow-deep commitment to sticking to what’s written on the page. The script is sacred. In television, there’s just no time to ad-lib. Knight learned his lines to the letter and expected the same from everyone else.
“Ted was from television, where everybody is prepared to do exactly what they have to do,” says Rusty Lemorande. “Being on TV is like being a trapeze artist. You have to be prepared and work together—each one can make or break the other’s performance. And that’s not really how film works. His training was so different from everyone else on the movie.”
Sharing scenes with Dangerfield would become especially maddening for Knight. He didn’t sign on to play the straight man. And you could argue that that slow-burn frustration he felt in real life actually elevated his performance. Whether Al Czervik is heckling Judge Smails on the tee or mocking the size of his yacht, The Flying Wasp, the smoke that seems to be coming out of Knight’s ears isn’t just the illusion that comes from fantastic acting. It may not even be acting at all. On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Knight got used to being the actor with the killer punchline. Now he was the playing the flustered foil to a jittery, wild-eyed lunatic saying whatever the hell he wanted. “Ted was trying to do his job and he’s holding the script in his hand, and meanwhile Rodney is just running around saying whatever the heck popped into his head and Ted’s trying to follow him. Ted was really angry,” says Cindy Morgan.
Dangerfield’s idea of a practical joke was inserting a line of dialogue that he knew would be way too dirty to make the final cut of the movie, but that he knew would get a laugh from the crew anyway. He was especially fond of blow-job jokes. Meanwhile, Knight’s idea of a practical joke was having his name stenciled on the back of all of his costars’ chairs so he could react in mock fury when they sat down to take a break. Those under thirty just rolled their eyes.
It wasn’t just Dangerfield who felt Knight’s wrath, though. John Barmon recalls shooting a scene in which Knight and Michael O’Keefe are having a conversation and Barmon’s character, Spaulding, is in the background. Ramis thought the scene was a little too static, so he told Barmon to pick up a golf club and start swinging at a ball on the ground and missing it. Ramis told the young actor: “I need you to do something funny here.” That’s it. After each swing and miss, Barmon yelled, “Turds!” or “Double turds!” Ramis didn’t mention any of this to Knight. “Ted saw the dailies and he was pissed,” says Barmon. “Ted said to me, ‘I understand you’re a young actor coming up, but that’s very unprofessional trying to upstage somebody.’ I’d only been on the set for a week and Ted Knight was pissed at me! Harold liked to stir things up and see what would happen.”
Ramis later admitted that he probably could have handled things differently with Knight, that he could have made a better attempt to bridge the generation gap, but ultimately he got precisely the performance he wanted out of him. “Look, Ted was a very traditional actor,” said Ramis. “He’d learn the script and do it perfectly every time. But most of us had an improv background, so I felt comfortable letting actors ad-lib. The whole atmosphere down there was alien to him. Young people running around in South Florida being crazy. I tried to give Ted plenty of support and positive feedback, but he just thought everyone on the set was stoned all the time.”
He wasn’t far off. Especially by the time Chevy Chase showed up.
10
The Pizza Man
CHEVY CHASE COULDN’T WAIT to get to the set of Caddyshack. He’d spent the previous two months stuck in Montreal with the only-in-the-’70s triple threat of Omar Sharif, Jane Seymour, and the mangy mixed-breed daughter of the original Benji. To this day, Chase still has no idea why he agreed to do the film.
“I was just told by my agent to do something, anything,” says Chase. “The whole time I was in Canada, I was thinking, I guess I’ve really moved on to greater things.” In the back of his mind, he must have wondered: Is this why I left Saturday Night Live—to be in a crappy Benji movie? When the film wrapped, Chase couldn’t get to Florida fast enough. It was time to have some fun again.
About a month into the Caddyshack shoot, Doug Kenney’s agent, John Ptak, was hanging out in his client’s motel room. Ptak had become Kenney’s agent right after Animal House came out, but he was also more than that. He was a trusted friend who, as a UCLA film school graduate, could talk about movies on a level beyond wheeling and dealing, back-end points, and box office grosses. As the two were talking and laughing, there was a knock at the door. They asked who was there. The voice on the other side said, “Pizza man.” When they opened the door, Chase walked in with a square-sided attaché case in his hand.
Ptak recalls that Chase looked more like a door-to-door salesman than a pizza deliveryman in a sports coat and tie, both of which he immediately took off as he began to make a big production out of rolling up his sleeves and unlocking the case that he’d placed on the desk. Ptak was intrigued, but a smiling Kenney already seemed to have a good idea about its pharmaceutical contents. Chase opened it very slowly to drum up the suspense. It was empty. But then Chase reached into one of its dividers, grinned, and said, “I’ve got everything you need for every occasion.”
By the fall of 1979, Chase’s marriage to Jacqueline Carlin was in bitter pieces. Like Kenney, he was living the revved-up, hell-raising life of a man who’d fallen into fame rather early and unexpectedly and was now grappling with how to make sense of it. For him, reuniting with his partner in crime, Kenney, to make a lighthearted golf romp was just what the pizza man ordered. He could relax and cut loose. “It was pretty fucking nuts on that set,” says Chase. “You’re in Florida and the crew possessed whatever you needed. It was the time when things were considered benign. John Belushi was still alive. And smoking pot had been going on forever.”
Kenney and Chase’s brotherly bond went beyond just the consumption of drugs, however. Kenney looked at Chevy and saw all the easy self-confidence he lacked. He’d been wildly praised and repeatedly rewarded ever since he graduated from Harvard and launched the National Lampoon. He’d managed to become a millionaire not just once, but twice. Yet he constantly seemed to question whether he truly deserved that success. Deep down, he felt like he was getting away with a fast one, and the fact that he was getting away with it so easily made him even more suspicious. He felt like an impostor. If Chase had those same doubts about himself, he never displayed them. That was what was so seductive about him. On the surface, at least, everything was a joke to him. “Being with Doug was like being with a girlfriend, but not gay,” Chase says. “He was my best friend.”
Kenney thought of Ty Webb as he did of Chevy—as the person he wanted to be. But as the character developed and took on new layers it became clear that Ty was the person that Chase already was. In Florida, the two friends would huddle and discuss how to play the character as Kenney brought Chase up to speed on how the shoot had been going. Chase thought it sounded like a mess. But as one of his generation’s most natural improvisers, Chase was used to walking into a mess and spinning it into something immaculate and polished.
Kenney described the character of Ty Webb to Chase as being “of the establishment, but not in it.” Even after a sixth revised draft of the script was completed in mid-October, Kenney was writing new lines for Chase on the spot and feeding him kernels of motivation before his scenes, such as the idea of quoting (or rather, misquoting) the seventeenth-century Japanese philosopher Basho. Like Ramis, Kenney had always been fascinated by Zen Buddhism and had read enough about the subject to offhandedly inject its esoteric teachings into the film, albeit with a comic twist. According to Bill Murray, it was Kenney’s idea to have Chase make the mystical “Na-na-na-na-na” sound when he was putting.
“Doug had an idea for a putter with electromagnetic sensors that would signal you to putt when you’d reach alpha state,” he said. When Chase was told to make a spiritual noise while he was sinking all of his trick shots on the green, he opted for something less Zen, channeling the signature bionic “Na-na-na-na-na” sound-effect from the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man. Chase’s “Be the ball” speech was already in the script.
Chase came to the set every day ready to fool around in the hope of making something spontaneous and great. Having done two fairly conventional, just-hit-your-mark-and-say-your-lines studio jobs in a row, he felt like he was back in Studio 8H, or on stage with Belushi doing Lemmings. Each day, he would goose his dialogue (which was still a bit lifeless in the script) with wild riffs of improvisation that Ramis didn’t just abide, but openly encouraged. “I called it guided improvisation, not just ad-libbing,” said Ramis. “It was ad-libbing with a purpose. You could give Chevy an idea and he could just go.”
Take the classic “Do you take drugs?” advice scene between Chase and Michael O’Keefe that appears early in the film. This is how the exchange appeared in the screenplay:
TY WEBB:
Danny, can I ask you a question–do you do drugs?
DANNY NOONAN:
No.
TY WEBB:
Good boy.
Now, here’s how it appeared after Chase and O’Keefe put their “ad-libbing with a purpose” twist on it …
TY WEBB:
Do you take drugs, Danny?
DANNY NOONAN:
Every day.
TY WEBB:
Good … so what’s the problem?
Like Dangerfield, Chase was bringing the Caddyshack script to life in real time. And even though his costar O’Keefe was less experienced and more classically trained, he returned every serve that Chase hit over the net. O’Keefe found it both liberating and slightly terrifying. “Harold gave Chevy carte blanche,” he says. “We rehearsed it and sorted it out and Doug and Brian and Harold would sort of shape the premise and Chevy would just start spouting stuff. It was fun to try to match wits with those guys. I’m not in their league. I don’t have the same skill sets they had. So with Chevy, I would just try to keep up. It was nerve-racking and challenging, but also exhilarating.”
That spirit of on-the-fly abandon bled into nighttime acts of improvisation, too. Although they had little to do with the movie they were making, they informed the mad, anything-goes anarchy of the shoot. One night, as everyone was sitting around at the motel getting high, someone suggested that they hijack a few golf carts and race them on the golf course. Kenney had a better suggestion. Sure, they could race the carts, but what if they got a little bit more violent and creative about it. An hour later, a fleet of golf carts was chewing up and destroying the Rolling Hills fairways with a re-creation of the tank battle between George Patton and Erwin Rommel.
The weekend that Chase arrived, Jon Peters sent Mark Canton down to the set to check on the film’s progress. Doug Kenney didn’t have a problem with Canton, but his innate rebellious streak resented any sort of parental interference with his party. In a playfully passive-aggressive bit of authority-tweaking, he had the driver who was assigned to pick up Canton at the airport tell Canton that he was supposed to bring him directly to that evening’s shooting location. The driver dropped the unwitting executive in the woods and left. After a very long fifteen minutes of standing in the pitch-dark in the middle of nowhere, another driver picked up Canton and told him he’d been had.
“When Mark finally showed up, he was great about it,” says John Ptak. “He just laughed and said, ‘You guys are great! Always funny! I’m a friend of comedy and love it!’” Canton knew that having a KICK ME sign put on his back and being hazed came with the assignment. And he knew the way into this crowd was to be a good sport and prove you could take it. He’d passed the test. Years later, when Canton became an executive at Warner Bros., he was so proud of having been the butt of a joke from the cool crowd that he put a sign on his office door reading: “Mark Canton: Friend of Comedy.”
* * *
For a few days in October, the Caddyshack cast and crew loaded up a convoy of grip trucks and headed to the nearby Plantation Country Club in Fort Lauderdale. As ideal as Rolling Hills was as a location, the one thing it lacked was a swimming pool. And Ramis had to shoot the Caddy Day sequence, including Lacey Underall’s high dive and the infamous fecal Baby Ruth Jaws parody.
During the filming of the swimming pool sequences at Plantation, Rusty Lemorande had the idea of turning what had been written in the script as a throwaway synchronized-swimming routine with the Bushwood caddies into a full-fledged Esther Williams–style water ballet. Ramis loved the randomness of the suggestion and quickly thought how they could score it to “The Blue Danube” waltz. He told Lemorande that he’d do it only if Lemorande could procure a crane for the shot by the foll
owing day.
It was also at Plantation that Cindy Morgan was finally scheduled to shoot her first scene in the film. The script had her character, Lacey Underall, walking along the edge of the swimming pool in high heels and a revealing black bathing suit past a group of teenage male caddies, like Jayne Mansfield swishing and shimmying down the street in The Girl Can’t Help It. The assorted pimple-faced pipsqueaks, mouth breathers, and droolers are so in lust for this goddess that they all suck in their guts and puff out their chests as she walks by. Lacey then slinks her way over to the high-dive board, kicks off her heels, climbs the ladder taking her sweet time, and executes a perfect swan dive into the pool. As movie entrances go, it’s an unforgettably steamy one—part Coppertone ad and part kitten-with-a-whip striptease. The only problem was, Morgan was legally blind without her contacts and she was afraid of heights. Also, she could barely swim.
Morgan was already insecure about her status on the film. During the casting process, she’d been given the role of Lacey only to have it taken away because it had been promised to Brian Doyle-Murray’s girlfriend, Sarah Holcomb. Then she had the role again and didn’t again until finally she did. This went on for about a week, until Holcomb decided that she would rather play Danny’s Irish girlfriend, Maggie. “I remember getting ready to do the dive scene in the bathroom, saying, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t see, I can’t dive. I’m not Lacey; I can’t do this.’”
Morgan had to do the scene basically sightless. It would have been too dangerous to dive from that height with rock-hard 1979 contact lenses. “They would have gone right through your eyes,” she says. “So I went up to the diving board looking like I meant it and I did the best that I could, but they ended up cutting to a stunt diver.” Morgan never left the diving board. She just walked up to the edge and turned right around.