Bill Puftin' Murray

Join us today as we play another rousing round of…

OVER.

ANALYSE.

(things muttered by Bill...)

MURRAY!

Bill Murray. Bill Goddamn Murray. Bill Fucking Murray. Bill Mother Fucking Murray. Aloof, chillax, hilarious, impossible to nail down and never willing to out-right say “no”.

Since Aykroyd’s admission, twice, that “Murray will not do the movie”, Murray has, twice, made Aykroyd eat his definitive words. Murray gives a coy glimmer of hope in every appearance he makes, making the sting of a Murray-less Ghostbusters hurt a little less, and perhaps stringing us all along.

Murray was in Toronto this weekend, at a TIFF screening of Hyde on Hudson Park, where he walked the red carpet and took a few interviews. Watch him pretty much bring up Ghostbusters 3 on his own after being asked if people shout “Ghostbusters!” his way. He knows what the interviewer wants, even if the guy with the microphone won’t say it.

Interviewer: "How many times a day do nerds like me just shout out 'Ghostbusters!' to you!"

Murray: "Well, there's uh, some Ghostbusters hysteria over there, there's someone carrying around a giant, like a very large doll of a marshmallow man. So it comes up a lot, it comes up a lot, the idea of doing another Ghostbusters and you know, we'll see, there's another script in process and we'll see if it's good. It's got to be really good though, because, you know, the first one was so great." 

See, here’s where the trouble starts… from this interview we learn that Murray is aware... and being looped into reading... the new script in process. This marks the THIRD time now he has hinted involvement if a great script can be crafted and is the first word from him we've in the three full months since Etan Cohen was brought on board to rewrite. In our last post on this matter, we postulated that the Cohen-lead rewrite was commissioned to write Venkman out of the script... that may not be true. Considering Cohen salvaged Men in Black from it's cruddy second film and wrote up a great threequel, maybe Murray's ears are pricked? 

Murray’s syntax pins him as being involved with this production. When he says “we'll see, there's another script in the process and we'll see if it's good” rather than “they'll see if it's good”, his potential participation is implied.  When he says that “it's got to be really good”, he means that his involvement hinges upon that fact, otherwise, why would he care? 

So here we are again at square one. A hot writer on the script, Aykroyd cautious, Murray flippant, everyone else just waiting. It’s all on Cohen now, to somehow cobble together a script that tickles Murray’s fickle fancy.

Can he? Can he tickle Murray’s fickle fancy? This guy has been on and out of the movie more times than Slimer’s been in and out of the containment unit (that’s all I’ve got for “clever” Ghostbusters references this morning).  We’ll see what the next few months bring.

On a side note, how dreadful was the level of fast-paced Hollywood-lingo-speak from that interviewer at the start? It was worrisome how the annoyance was building to a Ghostbusters 3 question as the reporter strung-on-sentenced his way through telling Murray about his own oddball lawyerless, agentless, phoneless method of script selection. Awkward. But at the end, the interviewer reveals that he was aware of the stigma surrounding the GB3 question, of how he knows it is all Murray must get and how it simply must be asked none-the-less. Something about that made him a bit more respectable, that and how he quickly moved the conversation back to an Oscar well-wish for Murray. Classy. Chalk the rest up to nerves.