REMEMBERING CADDYSHACK
The movie, Caddyshack, was a revolution. It brought underground comedy into the spotlight and became a training manual for how to be funny on film.
I remember seeing it at school and laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe.
Cut to a few days ago when my fondness for this loose and idiosyncratic film was reignited by reading Chris Nashawaty’s 2018 book, Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story. The book follows the journey of Harvard Lampoon writer, Doug Kenney – from co-founding The National Lampoon magazine and the National Lampoon Radio Hour, to co-writing the box office smash, Animal House, and finally co-writing and producing the all-conquering, Caddyshack.
One of the more engrossing threads in the book is Kenney’s friendship with Bill Murray and Chevy Chase and the difficulty in bringing the two actors together for the film.
You see, there was bad blood between Chase and Murray, stemming back to an episode of Saturday Night Live in 1978. Chase was returning to host the show after being one of its founding stars and had apparently pissed his castmates off by being rude during rehearsals. Murray confronted him. Chase verbally pushed back. Murray made fun of Chase’s marital problems, yelling: “Go fuck your wife, she needs it.” Chase made fun of Murray’s acne scars. And in the final few minutes before showtime, the insults gave way to pushing and slapping and punching, which led to the men being separated by John Belushi, which, in turn, led to Murray calling Chase a “medium talent” – perhaps the greatest insult in the history of showbusiness.
Nevertheless, Chase and Murray got over their differences and turned up to a golf course in Florida in the summer of 1979 to make Caddyshack with comedian Rodney Dangerfield. The shoot turned out to be 11 weeks of cocaine-fuelled debauchery where the original script was abandoned in favour of Kenney writing new scenes on the fly and director Harold Ramis indulging his love of improvisation. The result was that when they got back to Los Angeles, the first cut of the film was four hours long and had no story to speak of.
So Ramis, Kenney and a conga line of editors worked for months to rewrite the film in post – and that’s when they invented the gopher character to bring it all together.
Caddyshack opened to lacklustre reviews and medium box office takings which depressed Doug Kenney. So he went to Hawaii to try and pull himself out of his funk and shake his addiction to cocaine. He did neither. After a few days of being uncontactable, his body was found halfway down a 35ft cliff. Police ruled his death an accident.
“Some people say he fell, some people say he jumped. I thought he fell while looking for a place to jump,” said Ramis.
There were two mysterious things found in Doug Kenney’s hotel room after his death. The first were the words “I Love You” scrawled in soap on the bathroom mirror. Nashawaty wondered if the scrawling was an affirmation or a suicide note? And the other was a notebook of stray thoughts, which included a movie idea, random jokes and one enigmatic sentence which read: “These are some of the happiest days I’ve ever ignored.”
"Years after Doug died, my wife took me to a medium," Chevy Chase told Nashawaty. "Now, I don't believe in that stuff at all. But I said, 'I've never known how my best friend died.' I never gave her more than that. And her feet immediately started going up... sort of raising off the floor where she was sitting, and she said, "Slipped… slipped.” Then she said, ‘He's standing right there. He says, it was the stupidest way he could ever have died. And he left you a present. I said, ‘What do you mean, he left me a present?’ And she said, ‘His glasses.’ Well Doug's penny loafers and glasses were left at the top of the cliff in Hawaii. I mean, Whoa! That conversation absolutely convinced me that Doug's death was an accident.”
Caddyshack would go on to make $39.8 million at the box office (roughly $124 million today), transform comedy and be quoted by everyone from professional golfers to US Presidents.
Sadly, Doug never got to see any of it.