The Making Of Caddyshack: Chaos Behind The Cameras

The 1980 film Caddyshack starring Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Ted Knight and Rodney Dangerfield has been hailed as one of the funniest sports movies of all time. But in his new book, Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, author Chris Nashawaty reveals that this is a movie that should not have worked at all. To begin with, the stars were plagued with bitter jealousies, fragile egos, and lots and lots of drug use.

WFDD's David Ford spoke with Nashawaty ahead of the author's visit to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem this weekend.

Interview Highlights

On the tensions between actors during the making of Caddyshack:

You know, Bill Murray and Chevy Chase were both coming up in the 70s. Now, Chevy Chase was the breakout star of the first season of Saturday Night Live, and he moved on to a movie career. And a lot of people who were left behind in the cast of Saturday Night Live felt that he had sort of gotten a swollen ego and were a little resentful of this immediate success that he had had. And Bill Murray was actually his replacement in the cast of Saturday Night Live. And in 1978 when Chevy came back to guest host the show, Bill Murray as the new guy sort of took it upon himself to be the sort of vehicle of all [these] grievances, and they got into a fistfight backstage. And it was pretty sour between them. It couldn't have been sort of more tense.

And so, when they were both cast in Caddyshack, I think a lot of people on the set of that movie sort of thought, "Jeez. How is this going to go?" You know I think a lot of people were walking on eggshells when they both arrived on the set. It wasn't the biggest concern because they didn't have any scenes together in the original script. But when the producers saw how good Chevy's scenes were and how good Bill's scenes were, they said, "You know, we're idiots here. We've got two of the biggest stars in comedy and we don't have them in a scene together. Let's write a scene and put them in a scene together." So, here we go. Finally, these two people have to overcome whatever hostilities and issues they have to do the scene together. It was mostly ad-libbed—like all of Murray's scenes completely improvised—and they had that famous scene in Carl's shack. And when you go back and look at it now, you can see both of them trying not to laugh. And both of them told me that it was really the moment when the ice sort of melted between them and they sort of reached a bit of a detente in their relationship.

On how much of the scripts for Caddyshack were ad-libbed:

Chevy [Chase] actually had some scripted lines. He would juice them up with his own sort of topspin and then he would make the lines better by improvising and adding to them. But Bill Murray's character, Carl Spackler, the sort of demented assistant greens keeper, he was not in the original draft of the script. It was a character that was added much later. And they knew that Bill was such a gifted improviser that they didn't even bother writing any scenes for him. 

And Bill Murray was so talented at that point in his career – he was the first to admit that that was really when he could improvise about anything and just nail it. All of his scenes are completely just off the top of his insane brain. And it's remarkable. They knew he could come up with stuff that was better than they could write for him, so they just let them go.

On how Nashawaty assesses the film today after hundreds of viewings and with all of his behind-the-scenes knowledge:

Well, you know here's the thing. In knowing the back stories to a lot of the scenes I think sort of helps you appreciate just how miraculous this whole thing is. This is a movie that should not have worked, because they were throwing the script in the trash. They were making up lines. You know, there was a ton of drug use on the set of this movie. They were shooting it in Florida in 1979, which was pretty much the gateway into the country for cocaine. This was not – this Exhibit A on how one should make a movie. And I think if you make a movie under these circumstances, 99 times out of 100, you're going to get just total garbage. I think they got lucky and I think it's a minor miracle. You know, I'm not going to fool myself into saying that Caddyshack is the greatest film of all time. It's pretty sloppy, and most scenes don't have anything to do with the scenes that are before them or after them. But to me it's the movie's imperfections that sort of make it perfect. I think it sort of just captures the spirit, that anything could happen, that I adore.

Author Chris Nashawaty is a Senior Writer for Entertainment Weekly. Friday night, he'll be discussing his new book, Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem.

Editor's Note: This transcription was lightly edited for clarity.