“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”
A question for the ages.
And also a line from 1993’s “Groundhog Day,” which screens 7 p.m. Wednesday at the ArcLight, 1500 N. Clybourn Ave., along with a conversation with the film’s producer Trevor Albert, kicking off the monthly series “Second City, Second Wednesdays” that features movies from Second City alumni.
One of the more enduring comedies of its era, “Groundhog Day” is also being developed into a stage musical, set to debut next year from the duo behind the Broadway hit “Matilda.”
The film, of course, bears the comedic DNA of writer-director Harold Ramis and star Bill Murray. It was their sixth movie collaboration (filmed in Woodstock, Ill., which stands in for Punxsutawney, Penn.), and it became, somewhat notoriously, a project that severed their longtime friendship. That friendship began so many years earlier at Second City, which on Tuesday announced it is launching a film school named for Ramis (who died in 2014) and to be run by Albert, who is based in Los Angeles.
“I was asked last year by Harold’s wife, Erica, to help Second City launch the school,” Albert said. “Harold was my pal and my colleague for 25 years so it seemed a special opportunity for us to celebrate him and a new generation of comedic voices.”
Before he climbed the ladder to producer he began as Ramis’ assistant on 1980’s “Caddyshack,” when he first got a glimpse of Murray at work.
Ahead of Albert’s appearance Wednesday (where he will be interviewed by Kelly Leonard, a longtime producer at Second City who has since launched his own production company), we spoke about the origins of “Groundhog Day,” the challenges in getting it made and his cameo in “Caddyshack.”
Q: Your first movie jobs were on the iconic comedies “Caddyshack” and “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” both of which were directed by Ramis. Was that how you met?
A: It was. I was working on “Caddyshack” as an assistant to a producer named Jon Peters (whose credits include “Flashdance,” “The Color Purple” and “Man of Steel”). He was a very big shot in Hollywood and I was 21 years old and he wanted me to be his assistant. So he sent me to Florida (where “Caddyshack” was filmed) and then he never showed up. So I was in Florida trying to figure out what my job was, and at about the same time Harold was looking for an assistant and he saw me wandering around and he said, “Hey, what about you?”
Q: You had a front row seat for the making of what would become an iconic film.
A: I certainly did, including having to be in some of the shots as the gopher. They were looking for somebody who was low enough down on the totem pole to go into the tunnel they had dug into a sand trap, with a furry puppet on the end of his hand. And I was the guy. So in two or three of those shots, I had to hold that little gopher up through the hole — having no idea at the time, of course, that anybody would remember who that gopher was.
So Harold and I worked on that, and we went on to work together for almost 25 years.
Q: What were your initial impressions of Bill Murray on “Caddyshack”?
A: Totally unpredictable. I got to witness the beauty of improvisation. So there was that spontaneity. And Harold and him had that relationship where they understood each other, so Bill could do it without throwing Harold off.
On the other hand, the unpredictability and spontaneity can be terrifying. You just didn’t know what Bill was going to do. So I was both impressed with his wit and his comedic sensibility, but also there was a certain quality to him that was like a wild animal — you didn’t know what he was going to do.
Q: How did “Groundhog Day” come about?
A: Harold and I had done “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” and what happens is, if you make a certain style of movie the studios want you to continue doing that thing that was successful. And the agents are encouraged to keep sending you that sort of material. So I remember getting inundated with scripts that were very similar to the one we had done before. So literally people were sending us comedies about families traveling cross-country in a Winnebago instead of a station wagon, to give it a different spin.
And I remember going to an agent, Richard Lovett, he’s now the head of (Creative Artists Agency), and he was at that time a young agent and I was a young, up-and-coming producer looking for material. And I said to him, “Do you have anything that’s totally just the other extreme? Totally off the wall? That will not fit the mold of all the things we’ve been sent?” And he said, “I don’t represent this script but maybe this is what you’re looking for.”
So he sent me the script and I started reading it and it was “Groundhog Day.” By page 10 I was like, “Oh my God, this unbelievable. This is fantastic!” The concept was revealed pretty quickly and it was smart and funny.
Q: The original script was apparently a little different.
A: In the original script, he’s already reliving the same day over and over again. So you don’t lead up to the point where he wakes up and then, “Oh my God, I’m reliving the same day.” So there was a more surreal quality to it. You sort of had to catch up to figure out — wait, what is he doing? How does he know to slug this guy? How does he know to do all these things? So there was a certain delightful mystery in those first 15 pages where you’re trying to figure it out.
I want to say there was a voice-over saying, “I don’t know if I’ve been here 20 years or 200 years,” something like that. And you see him going through these daily routines and you’re trying to figure out how he knows to avoid the puddle, those things.
So it was pretty cool, and I think if we had been in the independent film business back then, we probably would have made it that way. We would have kept that script.
But there were pressures to make it more accessible and more commercial with more of a universal appeal, so we rolled up our sleeves and looked at it and thought, “How can we make it better?”
The first instinct was to make it funnier. At that point it was sort of dryly funny, ironically funny. And it seemed like maybe there was room to push the comedy a little bit. And obviously that’s much more in Harold’s wheelhouse than Danny Rubin (the original screenwriter), even though Danny Rubin is a super talented writer, he wasn’t per se a comedy writer.
Q: When did it become evident that Ramis and Murray weren’t getting along?
A: When Bill agreed to do the movie we proceeded to start pre-production. And five or six weeks before we were going to start shooting, Bill sent a message to us that he wanted work done on the script. And we had spent a year-and-a-half on the script refining it, and obviously we were interested in getting input from Bill because he has to play it. But it was non-specific and unsettling because we were hurtling toward production. And that was the first time it got a little complicated.
And although I didn’t know it at the time, Bill was going through his own stuff in his personal life (including a divorce). I look back on it and think, “What the hell was going on? Why was that movie so difficult?” And people have sent me articles that have been written since that say he was having a hard time in his personal life, so maybe that was an explanation for his behavior. It was just difficult to communicate with him.
The Harold and Bill stuff, these things are subtle. It’s not like people are throwing dishes at each other. Some of the issues with them — I was there every second of the day on the set and I don’t even know what the subtleties were of their dysfunction on the movie, ultimately. And because they had known each other for so long, I never thought they wouldn’t talk again. Did I know it was personal between them? No, I didn’t. I just thought it was part of the creative push-pull.
Q: And yet when you watch the movie, you never pick up on any of that behind-the-scenes tension.
A: Of all the movies I’ve worked on, “Groundhog Day” is the one I’m most proud of.
But I might be prouder of a documentary I just did about Glen Campbell (called “Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me”). It’s on Netflix and iTunes. It sounds like a difficult movie to watch because it’s about Alzheimer’s, which is a brutal disease. I didn’t know much about it and wasn’t really interested in making a movie about it, but I got sucked into it because of the charisma of Glen Campbell and his family. And I only wanted to do it if we could find the comedy in the story, so it is kind of a joyous look at one life each day.
I bring it up because I spent about a year-and-a-half traveling around with Glen Campbell while he was touring and in the grips of Alzheimer’s. When he was behind the scenes and at home he was struggling with memory issues. But when he would get on stage, he was totally clear. So I ended up meeting neurologists and going to Alzheimer’s association meetings, and I would hear caregivers say, “My relative is living ‘Groundhog Day.’ ” Meaning, the repetition.
So it was just this bizarre thing I started hearing in my travels. “Groundhog Day” is about the distortion of time, and that’s what the disease does when you totally lose your short-term memory. So see the movie!
Postscript: A piece of trivia listed on the “Groundhog Day” IMDb page reads as follows: “Bill Murray was bitten by the groundhog twice during shooting. Murray had to have anti-rabies injections because the bites were so severe.”
Via email, Albert shot down that urban legend: “Not true,” he wrote. “What is true is groundhogs don’t make great pets.”
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