Ghostbusters

The film Ivan Reitman directed is not the film first written. Dan Aykroyd drafted it for himself and John Belushi, set in 2012 and roaming across planets and dimensional planes. Reitman has said that by the fortieth page he was counting budget in hundreds of millions. After Belushi died in 1982 the script was rebuilt and everything brought down to present day New York. That reduction is also the comic technique. The first half is flat on purpose: a bank loan, a leased building, a television advert, a quarrel with officials. The later the extraordinary arrives, the funnier it lands, and the climax’s giant marshmallow figure is credible only because of that earlier realism. Skipping ahead to the ghost material dismantles the machine. Nothing here was made comfortably. Reitman pitched the studio in March 1983 and took a June 1984 opening with no finished screenplay, no effects house and no start date. Eighteen foam marshmallow suits were built at twenty five to thirty thousand dollars apiece and seventeen were burned. Bill Murray’s improvisations were kept, which is why Venkman speaks a different language from his colleagues. Who it’s for: anyone wanting half a film spent on a loan application and municipal paperwork, jokes included. Who it’s not for: viewers hoping this subject will unsettle them.