Different things happen at the Bushwood Country Club. A caddy is trying to raise money for college, a club member has a real high temper, another member is a guru at golf, there’s a clumsy greenskeeper, another rich boy who is nothing but a clown and there’s a gopher.
Blaine: No one expected “Animal House” to be successful, but it became a surprising hit. Everyone who was involved in making “Animal House” made a name for themselves and a lot of studios wanted to work with the guys who made “Animal House”. Harold Ramis was one of the co-writers of “Animal House” and he was interested in directing the next project he was going to write. Douglas Kenney was Harold’s co-writter on “Animal House” and the co-creator of “National Lampoons”. Doug and Harold teamed up again for the next project they were going to do and Brian Doyle Murray joined in to co-write this project. Harold Ramis had two projects in mind, but they weren’t good enough. Douglas Kenney and Brain Murray thought they should make a movie that takes place at a country club. Brian was a caddy at a country club when he was a teenager and Harold thought it was a good idea because he too was one. Once Harold, Douglas and Brian had an idea they all could agree on, the three of them would write down notes in a small room. Like “Animal House” they wrote down what they experienced in life, only instead of college it was the experience they had as caddies at country clubs. Most of the stuff in the movie was from Brian’s life. Like at the beginning of the movie it shows a caddy’s big family and life was like that when Brian was growing up. The scene where Ted Knight gets hit in the crotch with a golfball was something Harold Ramis accidentally did once with one of the golfers. The main goal was to have the story focus on caddies.
Harold, Doug and Brian started to put together the script for “Caddyshack” once they got all the notes written down. They managed to write a 250 page script which was a problem because they didn’t want the movie to be that long. They had to cut it down to 150 pages and once it got down to an acceptable size, they sent it to Orion studios. The studio thought the script was funny, but they didn’t think it should be about golf because golf was considered to be boring. They also didn’t want Harold Ramis to direct the movie because he had no experience in directing, but Harold really wanted to direct a movie. The studio tried to get a better director behind Harold Ramis’ back, but they had no luck in finding one, so they had no choice but to allow Harold to direct the movie. Douglas Kenney and Harold Ramis focussed on casting after they got the approval to make the movie. Like “Animal House” it was about finding new faces to play the main characters. The studio wanted there to be a star in “Caddyshack” if it was going to lure in an audience. Douglas Kenney was good friends with Chevy Chase and he was already getting a lot of attention for being on “Saturday Night Live” and the hit movie, “Foul Play”. So Chevy Chase became their star. A lot of people wanted to be apart of “Caddyshack” because they heard it was done by the guys who did “Animal House”.
The main target was the lead character, at the time, Danny Noonan. Michael O’Keefe was suggested because he had just done “The Great Santini” with Robert Duvall and his performance in that was very impressive, so they trusted him to do well with this part. Lacey Underall had to be the attractive female a lot of boys couldn’t take their eyes off of. When Cindy Morgan was hired to play Lacey a lot of the young boys would be nervous to talk to her, try to impress her, suck in their guts and sweat just like what they do in the movie. So they didn’t have to act much. Danny’s love interest, Maggie, is an Irish exchange student working at the country club for the summer. Maggie was based on real life Irish women Harold Ramis knew at the country club he worked at. Sarah Holcomb was the underage daughter in “Animal House” and Harold Ramis loved working with her so he had her play Maggie. People in the audience would ask why Sarah was speaking with an Irish accent, but they didn’t know the Maggie character was based on real women.
Ted Knight wanted a lead role in “Caddyshack” and Judge Elihu Smails was perfect for him. Ted Knight wasn’t that different from his character on set. Ted always assumed the rest of the cast were stoned. He couldn’t understand everyone else and he got paranoid at times. Rodney Dangerfield had done a lot of television through his life, but he had never been in a movie before. Rodney’s character, Al Czaervik, was written for Don Rickles at first, but then Harold and Doug met Rodney and he was all they could think about after that, so they rewrote the part for Rodney. A lot of the things Rodney Dangerfield’s character says in the film was written by him. Rodney was a genius at comedy and he had a lot of ideas of how to make people laugh with his jokes. Rodney was nervous because he didn’t know how movies were made. He didn’t know what “action” meant whenever Harold Ramis shouted it for a scene they were about to shoot. It took some time for Rodney to get use to things on set. Chevy Chase on the other hand was good at obeying Harold and understood what he wanted.
Brian Murray wrote the caddy master for himself because he wanted to be in the movie. The last person who was cast in “Caddyshack” was Bill Murray as Carl, the assistant greenskeeper. Bill Murray was becoming very popular after people saw him on “Saturday Night Live” next to Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Gilda Radner, and he was being offered a lot of movie roles because of that. Bill’s schedule was very busy, so Harold could only have him for six days. Bill was supposed to make a cameo and his character hardly talked in the script. As they were shooting “Caddyshack” a lot of things changed. Bill was starting to become more of a main actor than a cameo. A lot of the main characters weren’t caddies anymore. The film was focussing more on Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield and Ted Knight, the more they shot it and hilarious ideas were coming from Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield. Bill Murray had a lot of ideas for what his character could say and he thought of them fast. The only problem Bill had was shooting a scene with Chevy Chase. Bill and Chevy didn’t get along so well ever since Chevy returned to host “SNL”. But they both were able to make it look like they got along with each other while the cameras were shooting.
The studio was pleased with the ensemble of actors, but they still were concerned about having a first time director make this movie. Finding a country club to shoot the movie at wasn’t easy. Harold and the others didn’t want palm trees because it was supposed to be a summer place. They wanted to do Chicago, but they scheduled to shoot the movie from late summer to the fall and that wouldn’t work out. They were running out of time and they still hadn’t found the right location, but then they lucked out because the Rolling Hills Country Club looked like everything they wanted the country club to look like. Problem was the golf corse was very close to an airport and airplanes would be flying by a lot and make noise. The cast and crew would stay at the country club hotel. Everyone had a good time while making “Caddyshack” and whenever they weren’t working they would have parties and get drunk. They may have done drugs as well. They had bad luck when principal photography began. A hurricane happened and it flooded the first floor of the hotel. Some of the sets got damaged and shooting was delayed until they repaired them. What amazed everyone was how calm Harold Ramis was even though things were going down hill. This was also his first directorial debut and he wasn’t feeling any pressure.
A lot of funny stuff, that wasn’t in the script happened while they were shooting the movie. Editing the movie together was tough for Harold Ramis because he had to decide what should be in the movie and what should be left out. There was so many things on that footage. A lot of the scenes were getting shorter and then a gopher was added into the film. When they shot the movie, the gopher only showed up in one scene where he is fighting Rodney Dangerfield. Then they shot scenes of the gopher at war with Bill Murray. So Harold decided to add the gopher scenes into the film and make him a main character too. Some of the young actors were upset that their scenes got cut out and replaced with a gopher's.
They shot some new scenes of the gopher and they decided to go with a puppet because a real gopher wasn’t working out. For one the gopher had to dance in order to express itself. Harold had to figure out what song the gopher would dance to. A lot of musicians weren’t interested in writing a song for “Caddyshack” because they didn’t know how it would turn out. Kenny Loggins was interested in taking a look at the footage and it made him laugh so hard that he wanted to write a song for it. So he wrote “I’m All Right”. Bill Murray blows up the golf course to kill the gopher and they couldn’t blow up the real golf course because the people who owned it didn’t want that. So a fake one was built next to the real golf course. They only could shoot one take of the fake golf course because they were destroying it. People from miles could see the explosion and an airplane was landing when it happened.
“Caddyshack” wrapped on October of 1979 and everyone was exhausted after doing nothing for two months but working and partying hard. Harold Ramis didn’t party until the wrap party. Because Harold was the director that meant he was the man in charge and he had a lot of responsibilities. So he had to stay sober and focus on the work he was doing throughout production. During the wrap party, Harold got so intoxicated on alcohol that someone had to carry him home. Doug Kenney was unhappy that “Caddyshack” had become something else from what it supposed to be. He was even more disappointed when the film got terrible reviews after it’s release. Doug passed away two months after the release of “Caddyshack”. His body was found at the bottom of a cliff in Hawaii. Doug didn’t get to see the film's popularity rise. The press assumed Doug’s passing was a suicide because of “Caddyshack’s” failure, but those were just false rumors. “Caddyshack” wasn't so successful at first, but the reviews didn’t stop people from seeing it and laughing hard as they watched it. “Caddyshack" became popular as the years went on. Fans got the humor. Michael O’Keefe was touched when a fan told him that before her father died, they watched “Caddyshack” together in the hospital and it was one of the only times the father was relaxed. Harold Ramis’s career changed after that. He showed the studio that he was capable of directing a film for the first time as long as he knew what he was doing. And he continued to direct other successful comedies like “National Lampoon’s Vacation” and “Groundhog Day”.
My rating on “Caddyshack” is four and a half out of five stars
