You may already know your favorite moments from Caddyshack, which turns 35 years old today, by heart. But after reading this list, you’ll be a lock for membership at Bushwood Country Club.
1. CADDYSHACK GOT MADE BECAUSE OF ANIMAL HOUSE.
Caddyshack director and co-writer Harold Ramis were also a co-writer of the 1978 National Lampoon comedy classic Animal House, along with eventual Caddyshack co-writer and producer Douglas Kenney. Held to only a $3 million budget, their film of frat-house shenanigans went on to gross $141 million at the box office.
You would think that box office success would afford the filmmakers carte-blanche privileges for any follow-up project, but that wasn’t the case. Ramis pitched two ideas to Orion Pictures (the now-defunct production company
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that would go on to make Caddyshack): One was a dark satirical comedy about the American Nazi Party in Skokie, Illinois, and the other was what Ramis dubbed a “revisionist Marxist western.” Both ideas were swiftly rejected, but another idea—a comedy about caddies at a country club, pitched by Kenney and co-writer Brian Doyle-Murray as “Animal House on a golf course”—was given an immediate green light.
2. THE SCREENWRITING PROCESS WAS (ALMOST) ENTIRELY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.
To write their screenplay, Ramis, Kenney, and Doyle-Murray locked themselves in a room and tried to recall everything they knew about or experienced at golf courses and country clubs growing up—most of which came from Doyle-Murray, who caddied at Indian Hill Country Club in the suburbs of Chicago as a kid.
Doyle-Murray’s sizeable Irish Catholic family even served as the inspiration for scenes and characters in the film. His brother Bill played head greensman Carl Spackler. Memories of living with their eight other siblings (including three sisters) inspired the opening scenes with main character Danny Noonan’s overcrowded house of siblings. Danny, who sets out to win the caddy tournament scholarship, was based on Doyle-Murray’s older brother Ed, who won a similar prize when he was young. The lumberyard that employs Danny is borrowed from the real life of Doyle-Murray’s father, who was an executive at J.J. Barney Lumber Company. The infamous “Baby Ruth in the pool” scene was culled from the Murray kids’ real-life high school exploits.
Ramis drew from real-life experience while writing as well. He admittedly had only played golf twice in his life before directing the film and recalled that he nailed someone in the nether regions with one of his first practice shots taken to prepare for the film. Naturally, he made use of this tale by contributing the scene where Judge Smails (played by Ted Knight) gets hit in the crotch with an errant golf ball.
3. THE STUDIO WOULDN’T MAKE THE MOVIE UNLESS THEY GOT A STAR.
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The finished Caddyshack script was a whopping 250 pages in length, more than double the average screenplay. Studio bosses immediately demanded that it be cut down, and added a second stipulation: No star, no movie. First-time director Ramis offered them three, though the first two were untested as far as the studio was concerned.
The filmmakers originally envisioned actor Don Rickles as the slobbish condo magnate Al Czervik, but they settled on comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who’d garnered success in comedy circles and on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Caddyshack would be his first big feature film. Bill Murray was fresh off of three years on Saturday Night Live and had appeared in Meatballs (co-written by Ramis) and Where the Buffalo Roam. The studio finally went ahead when Ramis and company secured Chevy Chase to portray the film’s pompous-but-well-meaning playboy Ty Webb (whom they had written the part for anyway, unbeknownst to the studio).
Chase was the biggest catch of the three, having received a Best Actor Golden Globe nomination for the 1979 box-office hit Foul Play. Ramis had Mickey Rourke in mind for the leading role of Danny Noonan, but felt that he couldn’t convincingly portray the “goofy kid-next-door.” Filmmakers ultimately settled on actor Michael O’Keefe.
4. RAMIS DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HE WAS DOING FROM DAY ONE.
By 1980, Harold Ramis was already a comedy heavyweight, having garnered success live (with the Second City comedy troupe), on the radio (the National Lampoon Radio Hour), and on television (SCTV). He’d also co-written Meatballs and Animal House, but Caddyshackmarked his first attempt at directing. Conflicting accounts from cast and crew say that Ramis looked through the camera lens instead of the viewfinder on the first day, and
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also mistakenly called out “Cut!” instead of “Action!” on early takes. The veracity of these jokes is uncertain, but it is true that the studio was so skeptical of Ramis’s abilities that they asked associate producer Don MacDonald to submit a list of directors who could be quickly brought in as on-the-fly replacements if needed. Luckily, Ramis figured things out, later directing such comedy classics as National Lampoon’s Vacation and Groundhog Day.
5. THE FILMMAKERS GOT OUT OF L.A. TO AVOID PROBLEMS BUT FOUND NEW ONES.
Orion Pictures wanted the production to be filmed in Los Angeles, but Ramis knew things would be better out from under the thumb of studio execs. He convinced the studio to look elsewhere since the Illinois setting of the fictional Bushwood Country Club wouldn’t include Southern California’s palm trees. But the chosen site was Rolling Hills Country Club (now Grande Oaks) in Davie, Florida—which had palm trees! Rolling Hills was one of the few golf courses away from L.A. that would allow the production of a movie on its grounds.
Production was held up both completely (by Hurricane David) and sporadically (by the noise from flights leaving and entering nearby Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport). The cast and crew took advantage of the hurricane delay by holding a huge indoor party at their hotel next to the country club.
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