Dan Aykroyd Talks More Ghostbusters 3
The first rule of Ghostbusters: don't cross the streams. As even the most basic of aficionados knows, whenever New York supernatural vigilantes Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler and Winston Zeddemore allowed the Proton Streams from the Particle Accelerators to touch, calamity would ensue.
But as is always the way with the supernatural, there's always a chance that if you do do the undoable, something extraordinary might just happen. And this was just the case, when the controllers of the long-dormant Ghostbusters franchise allowed the streams of movie-making and game development to cross. Now, the Ghostbusting craze has now been reanimated - like the film's Stay Puft Marshmallow Man - into something more powerful than ever.
And who better to tell us this tale than Mr Dan Aykroyd, aka Ray Stantz, himself. Seated in an upscale hotel suite in Manhattan, aged and a little bit magisterial, these days Aykroyd spends most of his time overseeing his House Of Blues empire, and a new crystal-filtered Crystal Head Vodka venture. Yet he remains the biggest cheerleader and oracle for Ghostbusters and psycho-kinetic energy. "There was so much lore in my family. My grandfather was a Bell Telephone engineer and he read up on crystals ... they were about to design a radio that could reach the spirit world," he explains. "They passed all that on to me. I read an article in the American Society For Psychical Research about quantum physics and parapsychology ... what the physical and molecular make-up of a manifestation would be. What's the physics behind that? You find out and you'll be able to make yourself disappear. Which I can't do now, but you might want me to."
Instead of cracking the supernatural codes, he made a movie with the Ghostbusters story beginning in 1982. After enjoying soaraway success with The Blues Brothers, Saturday Night Live duo Aykroyd and John Belushi were on the hunt for a new vehicle. Aykroyd came up with a dimension-hopping escapade involving various chapters of ghosthunters all over the world, a story which he describes as "much darker, very much on the purple side of things". It was, of course, impossible to film, but when director Ivan Reitman came on board, he suggested that one segment of the story - the three firefighter-style dropout scientists operating in Lower Manhattan - would make a more workable movie. The project got the green light, but while Aykroyd and co-writer Harold Ramis were hammering out the script in a Martha's Vineyard basement, Belushi was hammering a speedball in a hotel suite in Chateau Marmont. He died on 5 March.
Belushi's spirit would still feature in the finished movie - in the form of the green ghost, dubbed Slimer, who later became a central character in the cartoon series. And so the part of rogueish Dr Peter Venkman went to Bill Murray. Legend has it that Murray paid only the scantest attention to the script. "I believe that 50% of Ghostbusters' success is due to Sigourney, Moranis, Ramis and my writing and Reitman's direction," says Aykroyd. "And 50% was Murray and his presence as a leading man - he's the greatest. He just brings such great energy and creativity and he brings the audience because they love that kind of hung dog who had such vulnerability. Really, I owe a lot to Billy."
Ghostbusters took $500m on its original release, becoming the 31st highest grossing film domestically of all time. "I think the movie touches on two resonant tones in our world culture," Aykroyd says of its success, "and that is the existence or not of ghosts and spirits. And then there's all the science fiction in our culture. We love Star Trek, we love Doctor Who, we love anything that takes us out of the world we live in. And then you put Bill Murray in ..."
A sequel followed in 1989 which nobody was really very proud of. And while Aykroyd and Ramis spent the next 20 years trying to get a third movie off the ground, the sticking point was always the biggest star - Murray went on to become a serious actor, and running around Manhattan busting spirits was not what a serious actor in the 1990s was supposed to do. "I don't blame him," says Aykroyd, wistfully. "He did I and II, but an actor wants to move on. I'm one of his great friends and he mine. I created this franchise, I'd love to do 10 of them but he didn't wanna revisit it."
So, while the ghost lay dormant, what Ghostbusters came to signify only grew in strength and stature. Reitman recalls how the craze was even welcomed by teachers' associations in the US because it encouraged kids to fight imaginary ghosts instead of each other. Meanwhile, Aykroyd's original vision inspired new Ghostbusters chapters as variations on the insignia sprang up across America and Europe. That "no ghost" logo sits alongside the Nirvana smiley face as one of the most iconic T-shirts of our age. Elsewhere, Ray Parker Jr's theme song, and the iconic phrase "Who You Gonna Call?" has embedded itself in the pop cultural lexicon and can currently be heard on the 118118 ads in the UK.
Yet despite this, Ghostbusters might have laid dormant forever, had the franchise not been given a shot of life by the long-developed next-gen videogame. Determined to make their product more than a crappy tie-in, developers Terminal Reality consulted Aykroyd about donating likeness rights. He ended up offering to write the script. "I saw it right away," says Aykroyd. "It took me two seconds to realise that this would be great."
Even Murray returned - not with a hatful of diva demands, but wanting an assurance that Winston Zeddemore, the underwritten black character from the movies, would be elevated to full status. And so to all intents and purposes, The Video Game is, effectively, Ghostbusters 3. A period piece, it takes place two years after the events of the second movie and sees Manhattan once again under threat. It's closer in scale to Aykroyd's original vision but in canon terms, it's the next chapter of the story.
And now for the supernatural bit: after coming together for the game, all the players have stated their intentions to go back, and a script is being written by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, writers on the US Office. According to reports the original cast will act as mentors, handing the company over to a new generation, likely to be from the Seth Rogen and Steve Carell class of actors who are filling up just the same space in Hollywood as Aykroyd and Murray once did. "There'll be a whole new generation that has to be trained and a leader that you'll all love when you meet her," says Aykroyd. "There'll be lots of cadets, boys and girls who'll be learning how to use the neuron splitter and the inter-planet interceptor - new tools to enable them to slip from dimension to dimension."
That is, of course, if they decide that movies are even the way to go any more. "I have what I think are two great cool science fiction stories myself right now and I think I'm gonna skip the movies altogether and find some gamers, maybe go with these guys again. I'll just give them the scripts and say, 'pretend this movie got made'."
But with sequels to the game already being thought about aloud, Ghostbusters' future looks assured - in whatever dimension.
source: guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/23/ghostbusters-videogame-dan-aykroyd
i remember reading an article either early this year or late last year about speculation of the 4 guys from 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN being cast as the new Ghostbuster. THAT, i wouldn't mind.
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