In praise of Caddyshack, the ‘glorious disaster’ that endured

And any request for cash, more often than not, will turn the wallet holder into a philosopher: “Oh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness … So you’ve got that going for you, which is nice.”

I am quoting from Caddyshack, the 1980 “slobs vs. snobs” comedy directed and co-written by the late Harold Ramis, starring Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield and Ted Knight as demented denizens of a private golf club called Bushwood.

But you knew this already, right? Lines from Caddyshack rank right up there with The Godfather and Star Wars for public recognition, so much so that former U.S. president Barack Obama paraphrased the “total consciousness” one in 2014 to affectionately eulogize fellow Chicagoan Ramis, when the actor/writer/director died of autoimmune disease.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In fact, it’s a miracle the movie even happened, as Chris Nashawaty amply illustrates in Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, an entertaining account of a “glorious disaster” that turned into a film beloved by regular moviegoers and critics alike. Caddyshack is now more quotable than National Lampoon’s Animal House, the film it was unfavourably compared to upon its July 1980 release.

Nashawaty talked to many of the cast and crew members who made the film, including Ramis before his untimely death.

Caddyshack isn’t a bad movie per se, and it wasn’t a flop — it grossed nearly $40 million (U.S.) at the North American box office, not a bad return on a $6 million budget. It ranked 17th for ticket receipts for the year, and 1980 was the year that also saw the release of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

But it’s often presumed to be less than what it is, as author Nashawaty, the movie critic for Entertainment Weekly, points out in his book’s prologue: “In the nearly four decades since its release, Caddyshack has become one of those rare contradictions: a mainstream piece of pop culture that, to its fans, still somehow manages to feel like a cult movie.”

The “Cinderella Story” subtitle is accurate and also another Caddyshack quote, taken from one of the many spontaneous riffs by Murray’s loopy greenskeeper character Carl Spackler, as he lops the heads off chrysanthemums while pretending to be a pro golfer.

Despite having a cast that included Saturday Night Live stars Murray and Chase, Mary Tyler Moore scene stealer Knight and retro stand-up icon Dangerfield, the film was viewed by many people — including some on the Caddyshack team — as a failed attempt to capture the magic of National Lampoon’s Animal House, the 1978 campus comedy that sparked a decade of smart-aleck laughers aimed at Baby Boomers, the desired Hollywood demographic of the day.

Ramis had written the script for Animal House with National Lampoon magazine’s Doug Kenney and Chris Miller, and Ramis had really wanted to direct that movie, even though he’d never directed a film before. He got his big chance with Caddyshack, which he co-wrote with Kenney and Bill Murray’s brother Brian Doyle-Murray, with a lot of the gags coming from the Murray clan’s memories of summer jobs at the Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, Ill., near their hometown of Evanston.

But when Ramis showed up at the set in October 1979, at a real Florida golf course, he had no real story, only a bunch of jokes with no continuity. The earliest versions of the script had only scant references to Bill Murray’s Spackler character and his ongoing war with a pesky animatronic gopher, which would later become the most popular bits in the movie.

Ramis also had sensitive egos to deal with in Chase, who considered himself a bigger star than he was, and Dangerfield, who had little film experience and still thought he was playing for immediate laughs in a nightclub. There was also the threat of major wind and rain from approaching storm Hurricane David, along with the “snowstorm” of freely available cocaine, the drug of choice for almost everybody in the Caddyshack cast and crew.

Yet somehow the film got made, although critics of the day generally hated the result.

The Washington Post called Caddyshack the “latest misbegotten spawn of National Lampoon’s Animal House,” The Hollywood Reporter compared it to “the aesthetic qualities of an outhouse” and Variety damned it with the faint praise of being a “vaguely likable, too-tame comedy” that — you guessed it — fell short of Animal House’s hilarity.

This sneering attitude was typical of movie critics of the era, Nashawaty says from New York. They saw themselves as being above the fascinations of pop culture. And while many of them deservedly praised Animal House for its brazen humour, they saw Caddyshack as just a cheap knockoff and not what it really was: part of a significant trend of smart, self-aware comedy.

“I think back then critics sort of felt they were rendering these verdicts from on high. There was a difference between being a middle-aged movie critic in 1980 and a middle-aged movie critic in 2018. It was so much easier then to be out of touch with what was going on in the culture, and the culture was changing so quickly. Whereas now you’re expected to be down in the trenches with the fans, because fan culture has become so powerful.”

Caddyshack belatedly benefited from the VHS boom of the late 1980s and ’90s. People brought the film home and memorized its many quotable lines.

“I call Caddyshack a mainstream success that feels like a cult movie because people can quote it to each other — it almost feels like you’re in a little tribe,” Nashawaty says.

Nashawaty’s book is loaded with strange things, not all of them funny. There’s also a revelation that sounds ripe for a #MeToo exposé: Caddyshack executive producer Jon Peters bullied actress Cindy Morgan into doing a nude scene, in her role of sassy heiress Lacey Underall, because he felt one was needed to appeal to the film’s target audience of men aged 18 to 25.

“She was definitely pressured to do the nude scene by me,” Peters told Nashawaty. “The producer side of me was like, ‘How can we not have a nude scene?’ I wanted her to get naked, absolutely.”

Morgan agreed to do the nude scene, but with the backing of Ramis, she successfully managed to fend off another of Peters’ demands: that a Playboy photographer be allowed on the set. She had her way, but Peters punished her by taking away her billing on the film. He also deleted her name from billboards and other advertising and “forgot” to invite her to the film’s New York premiere.

“I don’t have a problem with nudity,” Morgan told Nashawaty. “I have a problem with bullies.”

Nashawaty was shocked by Peters’ behaviour — and his candid admission of it years later — but he was seriously impressed by Morgan.

“I think the anecdote that’s in the book speaks well of Cindy Morgan. She really handled it with tremendous grace and asserted herself and stood up for herself and maybe at detriment to her career. But I think it’s a very timely anecdote in the story that happened nearly 40 years ago.”

She deserves praise now and total consciousness when she dies. So she’s got that going for her, which is nice.

Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.

FIVE OTHER ‘CULT MAINSTREAM’ MOVIES

Caddyshack isn’t the only “cult mainstream” movie going. Here are five others that meet the definition of quotable unlikely hits, as selected by Entertainment Weekly critic Chris Nashawaty and me:

• Meatballs (1979)

Director: Ivan Reitman

Cast: Bill Murray, Harvey Atkin, Kate Lynch

Logline: Zany shenanigans of counsellors and campers at no-hope summer camp.

Quotable line: “All right, virgins to the left, non-virgins to the right.”

• Airplane! (1980)

Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker

Cast: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen

Logline: In-flight emergency turns to hilarity as non-pilot takes wing.

Quotable line: “I am serious ... and don’t call me Shirley.”

• Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Mike Myers, Elizabeth Hurley, Michael York

Logline: Unthawed after 30 years, a 1960s spy finds his attitudes stale but his enemy still fresh.

Quotable line: “I demand the sum of one mee-llion dollars!”

• Office Space (1999)

Director: Mike Judge

Cast: Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston, David Cole

Logline: A trio of office drones conspire to teach a lesson to their obnoxious boss.

Quotable line: “Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler.”

• Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Steve Carell

Logline: Ron Burgundy is the voice of San Diego TV news — until a woman speaks up.

Quotable line: “They’ve done studies, you know: 60% of the time, it works every time.”