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Ghostbusters II 2019 Blu-Ray
Filmmaker Commentary

This audio commentary features Ivan Reitman, Dan Aykroyd, and Joe Medjuck. I e-mailed my contact at Sony, Jeremy Glassman, who told me that they recorded the commentary on Thursday, January 31, 2019 on the Sony lot. The two new commentary tracks were recorded one after the other.

Here are some of my favorite segments of the audio commentary.

Ivan: Hi. This is Ivan Reitman. I directed and produced the second Ghostbusters, and it's a great pleasure to be here and talk to you guys.
Dan: I'm Dan Aykroyd, one of the cowriters and costars of the film. And it's just great to be able to see these wonderful performances again of Sigourney and Rick, Annie Potts, and Ernie. And so looking forward to the experience. Who are you, sir?
Joe: I'm Joe Medjuck. I was one of the executive producers on the movie. And it's great to watch it again. It brings back many memories.


Joe: I was once watching TV where they showed both movies back to back. And when the credits for one were still rolling in the upper left-hand corner, "5 years later" came on and number two began.
Ivan: Yeah, we probably should've started a little earlier, but we had a hard time trying to figure out what we were gonna do. We took a lot of crap for this movie, didn't we? I think it had to do with the timing of it in terms of when it came out and the shift of the zeitgeist. People seem to like it now.
Dan: Oh, no. Hey, they liked it when it came out, you know? They came and saw it.
Ivan: You know, it came out a week before the new Batman came out -- which was a much darker movie -- and this was kind of a funnier, lighter version of things.


Image
Ivan: And, of course, a famous cameo now of a great new young director.
Dan: [laughs] This is so funny.
Boy #1, in-movie: I thought it was gonna be He-Man.
Winston, in-movie: Hey, hey, I know. Why don't we all sit down and we'll have fun.
Ray, in-movie: Yeah!
Boy #2, in-movie: You know, my dad says you guys are full of crap.
Mom, in-movie: Jason.
Ray, in-movie: Well, some people have trouble believing in the paranormal.
Boy #2, in-movie: No, he just says you're full of crap and that's why you went out of business.
Ivan: He has a deeper voice now. Jason Reitman.
Dan: Jason Reitman.
Mom, in-movie: Come on, everybody!
Ivan: Who's now planning the next Ghostbusters as both a cowriter and director.
Dan: So, it's passing it on to the next generation of family. That's the way I look at it.
Ivan: I do, too.
Dan: Who better to be selected for the job?
Ivan: And what an ironic thing for him to say here at the front of the second film.


Image
Joe: Hey, it's another Reitman.
Ivan: Yeah. I love bringing my children in for these cameos.
Joe: But look what it did. Now she's a writer, too.
Ivan: That's right.
Joe: An actress with her own series.
[...]
Joe: Awww, look.
Ivan: Catherine Reitman.
Joe: Catherine Reitman.
Ivan: She now has two little dogs. But it took us--
Joe: And a hit TV show and two sons.
Ivan: It took a long time to get over this scene.


Image
Joe: The first of many appearances of Kevin Dunn in Ivan Reitman movies.
Ivan: I started working with him in Dave.
Joe: No, Dave is actually after this. I think this is the first time you used him, I think.
Ivan: Really?
Joe: Yeah.
Ivan: Thank you, Joe.
Joe: He's obviously--
Ivan: I don't remember anything.
Joe: [laughs]


Peter, in-movie: So your alien had a room at the Holiday Inn, Paramus?
Joe: Whenever I pass the sign for Paramus, going to the airport in New Jersey, I laugh.


Image
Vigo, in-movie: ...the sorrow of Moldavia, command you.
Janosz, in-movie: Oh! Command me, lord.
Ivan: This feels like a scene out of the Wizard of Oz.
Joe: Right. The floating head.
Ivan: It's the big floating head and Dorothy talking to the wizard, just before she discovers who it is.


Image
Peter, in-movie: [grunts] I always hated this part of the business.
Dan: Always hated that part of the business. He did not like the weight of those packs.
Ivan: These packs were really heavy.
Dan: Yeah, so we built rubber ones, and in the shots that you couldn't tell, Billy always wore the rubber one. I always wore the real one.
Joe: The real one.
Dan: You know, just to... torture myself.


Joe: Now, Danny, did anyone ever do anything like this before you created this idea?
Dan: I-- This is the only system I know that looks like that. [laughs] In a movie called The Entity-- I think Ron Silver was in it and Barbara Hershey-- They tried to freeze a ghost using liquid nitrogen. That was the-- They trapped the ghost in kind of a house, and they used liquid nitrogen to freeze it. So that was kind of a technical approach to trapping them.


Image
Dan: Him with the baby's priceless. Are you kidding me? That's-- There should be a whole movie of him with babies.


Image
Ivan: This was the apartment of Marc Glimcher that we used.
Joe: I didn't know that.
Ivan: It's a famous building, really, on the Upper West Side that has a very distinctive architectural form.
Joe: I never knew that this was--
Ivan: Marc Glimcher is a famous gallery owner.
Joe: The Pace Gallery.
Dan: Oh, no, she cleaned. [laughs]


Image
Joe: There's Ivan Reitman crossing the street.
Ivan: Was that me?
Joe: That was you on the right.
Ivan: I didn't even see.
Joe: Yeah.


Image
Ray, in-movie: That's the river of slime. [photos catch fire] What?
Joe: I have a feeling that this was done during reshoots. We wanted to add a moment of danger that we didn't-- Seemed to be missing. When we did reshoots, at one point... You added--
Dan: Well, it's logical in the story.
Joe: Yeah. It fits perfectly.
Dan: Psychometric disturbance.
Joe: Absolutely. That's usually the case. Winston to the rescue.
Ivan: Well, I think there were-- Particularly, I was focusing so much on the relationship in these scenes... between Venkman and Dana that, I think, what we realized when we first put and edited the film together that we needed to bump up the scares, and bump up the Ghostbusters story, which sort of got placed in a secondary place. And we did a lot of reshooting. And it basically starts here in the sort of second half of the movie where we started adding scarier sequences and complications in the plot to build up the tension.


Image
Joe: Now, this was shot in a nightclub that had this set up.
Ivan: Yes--
Dan: Yeah, the Tunnel nightclub.
Ivan: Yes, it's in Lower Manhattan.
Dan: On the West Side.
Ivan: This is one of the additional scenes that we did very quickly, and I'm quite proud of it.
Joe: But you did something very smart I didn't know about. You just turned them around, switched sides.
Dan: So we didn't have to relight it.
Joe: You didn't have to relight 'cause it looks the same in both directions.
Ivan: It's a tunnel into darkness.
Dan: That was a real train track that they used to deliver goods into the city.
Joe: Oh, is that right?
Dan: Yeah.
Ivan: I mean, this is on the sort of Lower West Side down by the docks.


Deep Disembodied Voice, in-movie: Winston.
Ivan: I think that might be me.
Joe: I think that's you. You always do those voices.
Ivan: I always did the deep voices.


Image
Movie Audio: [Bobby Brown's "On Our Own" plays]
Ivan: And perfectly 1989, MC Hammer doing a song for us. And he was nice enough to do a cameo.
Joe: No, Bobby Brown.
Ivan: Bobby Brown. Jeez. Excuse me.
Joe: There he is, Bobby Brown. Right there.
Ivan: You did a very good job, Bobby.
Joe: Yeah.


Vigo, in-movie: Bring me the child, that I might live again.
Joe: I think the voice... Isn't this the voice of Max von Sydow?
Dan: It sounds like Max von Sydow from The Exorcist.
Joe: Yeah.
Ivan: It is Max von Sydow. He came in for one day, did this quickly for us, and it was amazing.
Dan: "I command you," remember? From The Exorcist.


Image
Joe: My memory is that a couple of-- This montage piece and the movie theater were originally written for Ghostbusters 1...
Dan: Yeah, that's right.
Joe: ...and we never used 'em.
Dan: The fur coat.
Joe: Yeah.
Ivan: Good memory, Joe. Thank you.


Dan: A really good companion piece to the first one, you know. Characters expanded. New hardware. Great sets. Made the city look great.


Image
Joe: Twin Towers still standing, of course.
Dan: Look at that, the Twin Towers. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Joe: Still there.
Dan: An innocent time in the world.

This is the full text transcript of everything that Ivan Reitman, Dan Aykroyd, and Joe Medjuck said while watching the film back in 2019. The transcription was done by MrMichaelT.

IVAN: Hi. This is Ivan Reitman. [giggles] I directed and produced the second Ghostbusters, and it's a great pleasure to be here and talk to you guys.

DAN: I'm Dan Aykroyd, one of the cowriters and costars of the film. And it's just great to be able to see these wonderful performances again of Sigourney and Rick, Annie Potts, and Ernie. And so looking forward to the experience. Who are you, sir?

JOE: I'm Joe Medjuck. I was one of the executive producers on the movie. And it's great to watch it again. It brings back many memories. I was once watching TV where they showed both movies back to back. And when the credits for one were still rolling in the upper left-hand corner, "5 years later" came on and number two began.

IVAN: Yeah, we probably should've started a little earlier, but we had a hard time trying to figure out what we were gonna do. We took a lot of crap for this movie, didn't we? I think it had to do with the timing of it in terms of when it came out and the shift of the zeitgeist. People seem to like it now.

DAN: Oh, no. Hey, they liked it when it came out, you know? They came and saw it.

IVAN: You know, it came out a week before the new Batman came out in--which was a much darker movie--and this was kind of a funnier, lighter version of things.

JOE: Oscar, played by twins. There were two actors playing Oscar.

DAN: [chuckles] Nice driving.

DAN: Look at that. That's moviemaking. Close the street, fill it with stunt cars.

IVAN: [laughs] Yeah, in those days they still let you shut down avenues in New York. Much harder right now.

JOE: I love this transition 'cause you always presume they're going to save her. They're-- [stammering] That this is in response to what happened.

DAN: Now, that would get a ticket for air pollution today, that car.

-[Reitman laughs]

DAN: And rightfully so. Look at that blue smoke, man. That thing needs a ring job bad time.

JOE: And it's still Ecto-1 here.

DAN: [laughs] It's fun--That is Bob Zemeckis's ex-wife, Mary Ellen.

JOE: Late wife.

IVAN: And, of course, a famous cameo now of a great new young director.

DAN: [laughs] This is so funny.

IVAN: He has a deeper voice now. Jason Reitman.

DAN: Jason Reitman.

IVAN: Who's now planning the next Ghostbusters as both a cowriter and director.

DAN: So, it's passing it on to the next generation of family. That's the way I look at it.

IVAN: I do too.

DAN: Who better to be selected for the job?

IVAN: And what an ironic thing for him.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: Ray Stantz is always the optimistic one.

DAN: Mm-hmm.

IVAN: Yeah.

DAN: Columbia should have a building named after the Ghostbusters. [chuckles] I mean, that is the campus of the Ghostbusters.

IVAN: I remember on Ghostbusters -- They finally gave us permission, but they said you can't ever tell anybody this. This was Columbia University.

IVAN: It's hard for me to look at this and not have Harold with us right now.

DAN: Oh, Jesus, was he great.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

IVAN: I love this idea of, you know, setting up the anger of New York.

DAN: Right. That's 'cause we'd all had experience living there, and it was really a perfect story for the city. And it's true. Negative energy, you know, it does fuse itself in a big ball.

IVAN: Yeah.

JOE: Hey, it's another Reitman.

IVAN: Yeah. I love bringing my children in for these cameos.

JOE: But look what it did. Now she's a writer too.

IVAN: That's right.

JOE: An actress with her own series.

-[Medjuck and Aykroyd laugh]

JOE: He's doing the test on her. [laughs]

JOE: Aw look...

IVAN: Catherine Reitman.

JOE: Catherine Reitman.

IVAN: Who now has two little dogs. But it took us-- It took a long time to get over this scene.

JOE: Spengler rarely smiles.

DAN: [chuckles] This is funny.

IVAN: Yeah, this scene just made me laugh every time.

JOE: I know.

IVAN: No, no.

DAN: Any.

JOE: Two actors who didn't take credit in the movie, Chloe Webb and Kevin Dunn.

IVAN: Yes.

-[Medjuck laughs]

JOE: The first of many appearances of Kevin Dunn in Ivan Reitman movies.

IVAN: I started working with him in Dave.

JOE: No, Dave is actually after this. I think this is the first time you used him.

IVAN: Really?

JOE: Yeah.

IVAN: Thank you, Joe.

JOE: He's obviously--

IVAN: I don't remember anything.

JOE: [laughs] That's not true.

-[Aykroyd snickers]

IVAN: This is Chloe Webb. Spectacular actor.

JOE: She had just done Twins.

IVAN: Yeah. Played Danny DeVito's girlfriend in Twins.

JOE: People were reshowing this clip on YouTube on New Year's Eve 2016.

IVAN: I can't believe we're doing a take right into camera. But Bill Murray was very good at that.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: Whenever I pass the sign for Paramus, going to the airport in New Jersey, I laugh.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

-[Medjuck laughs]

IVAN: And that really ties into the opening scene for Venkman in the very first movie-when he's doing those psychic--

DAN: The cards, yeah.

IVAN: Psychic cards.

DAN: Which were--That was the work-- William Roll was doing that kind of work. And you can buy a deck of those psychic cards with his name on it from that period. Cards for ESP testing.

JOE: David Margulies who just went by played the mayor in both films.

IVAN: Having the bureaucratic villain was kind of a real staple for Ghostbusters. Certainly the first one, and we follow up here with the mayor's assistant...and it's always a delicious thing.

JOE: There he is, Vigo. Peter MacNicol once in an interview said he got his accent from Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice, which he was in as a young man.

DAN: Sure, sure.

IVAN: Well, I think we needed to do something with this role as it was written. And I was auditioning all kinds of actors, and Peter MacNicol came in and said, "Look, I got a wild idea. I can do it straight for you, but let me just try something." I said, "Sure. Hey, we'll do both."

DAN: Yeah.

IVAN: And he started doing this voice.

DAN: But how great was he in Sophie's Choice too? I mean, what a terrific actor.

IVAN: But he just made me laugh right at that audition, and he continued making me laugh through the entire shooting. He just had such a delicious way of rolling the language. You know, many of these odd turns of language that he does in the part were just things that he invented as we were doing it, where he took the script, and he did these sort of inversions and--

DAN: Mm-hmm. He's a very talented actor. I mean, both movies attracted the highest caliber of actor across a range of drama and comedy. The best people are in these movies. [Aykroyd laughs]

IVAN: Let's not forget about Vigo.

JOE: Oh, yeah. It's a great effect.

IVAN: Our supernatural villain. And Mr. Stantz's special place.

-[All laughing]

DAN: Are those pre-rolled joints there? It looks like a cannabis shop.

IVAN: Yes. Well ahead of its time.

DAN: Yeah.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

DAN: Look at this. See, that's great to see them in that setting all together.

JOE: Stantz is smoking a pipe here. In the first Ghostbusters, the guys are smoking all through it, and within five years, things had changed enough that you don't smoke at all in this one, except that time you're smoking a pipe.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

IVAN: This is from the Three Stooges school of comedy.

DAN: Absolutely.

JOE: We didn't forget that she has to practice her cello.

IVAN: [Reitman laughs] Yeah, just trying to stay consistent.

JOE: The production designer was Bo Welch, who went on to direct movies. Did a wonderful job of catching the characters.

DAN: [laughs] There he is. "He tortured me."

IVAN: You know, the relationship between Dana Barrett and Peter Venkman in the first movie was a really important component in the rhythms of the comedy that made really, I think, Ghostbusters really work. And I really wanted to pursue that idea further in this film, and... I see this as my sort of way of dealing with Bringing Up Baby as a Ghostbusters movie.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

DAN: Well, they had great, great comic chemistry, and you could see the affection they had for each other in real life.

JOE: And we didn't realize that Sigourney had done a lot of comedy work when she was in college.

-[Aykroyd snickers]

IVAN: We did about five versions of this scene with this poor child. This is Henry, I think, and--

JOE: You remember which is which? I'm impressed.

IVAN: Um, one of the twins was just a little bit more responsive.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

-[Aykroyd laughs]

-[Reitman laughs]

IVAN: I just love their relationship in this film...and it's just a delicious undertone for the whole movie.

DAN: Well, Murray was the greatest comic leading man of our generation.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

IVAN: It's those little throwaways.

DAN: Oh, yeah.

DAN: Wow. Murray with a baby. There's a formula.

IVAN: Hey, I just let the camera roll.

DAN: Yeah.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

-[All laughing]

JOE: Getting a little risque here with it.

DAN: That I've actually seen Murray do at Fifth Avenue and Seventh-- 57th. He will get out, and he will direct traffic, as the honker. Have you seen him do that?

IVAN: Oh, yeah, way back when we did our--you know--the stage show, the National Lampoon show. Totally unknown, he'd go up, chasing a lobster. "Watch out! There's a lobster loose."

DAN: Yeah.

JOE: And my memory is that we came back to New York to shoot this part. Sorry. Came back to Los Angeles.

DAN: [laughs] Look at them with the New York accents.

IVAN: Ray Stantz.

DAN: Yeah.

IVAN: Pulling off the New York.

DAN: Yeah.

JOE: The best Spengler can do is "Yo."

IVAN: You may notice we have a new piece of equipment there that they're using. We kept trying to update some of the things that were created in 1984. Of course, Danny Aykroyd gets to go down.

DAN: Of course I would volunteer.

JOE: There is no, as far as we know, Manhattan Museum of Art.

DAN: [laughing] Man.

JOE: The special effects in this movie were done by ILM.

IVAN: Yes. Dennis Muren was our effects supervisor.

IVAN: This feels like a scene out of the Wizard of Oz.

JOE: Right. The floating head.

IVAN: It's the big floating head and Dorothy talking to the wizard, just before she discovers who it is.

DAN: The painting's a great device though to get us in.

IVAN: Well, we had to change it up, I remember. We couldn't have yet another entity coming across some kind of cross-rip or portal.

DAN: More of a psychometric story in this one.

IVAN: Yeah.

DAN: Psychic activity associated with a particular object or thing.

IVAN: Yes.

DAN: Psychometry.

IVAN: But Peter MacNicol also developed his villainous side.

DAN: It's interesting. The Ghostbusters kind of talk in classic American standard cinema rhythm and cadence a lot. That's what they call the, you know, what people spoke as in the '30s and '40s.

IVAN: Yeah. I really feel a kinship to those-- to the style of those films.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: Isn't Van Horne-- Danny, you must've written that. Isn't that a place in Montreal or Ottawa?

DAN: Well, the Van Horne station--Well, down in Manhattan--Lower Manhattan, there's a couple of subway stations that aren't used anymore that were totally intact. That's where we kind of got the idea.

JOE: Going back to the Three Stooges.

DAN: Absolute license.

-[Medjuck laughs]

IVAN: Love this little scooper-duper.

JOE: Yeah. Another high-tech piece of equipment.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: I always loved this. Everything going off in the city.

DAN: Yeah, the whole city.

JOE: This is sort of classic horror movie though. The baby's in danger. We know someone's coming in who might be coming for it.

DAN: He's superb, Peter MacNicol. Just great.

IVAN: And as usual, Sigourney Weaver just playing it really straight, really legitimately through here, and not trying to sort of go for laughs, and making the whole scene a hundred times funnier as a result.

DAN: Yeah, I know. Yeah.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

IVAN: A low-tech effect, but, hey, we just had to make it come alive a bit.

JOE: A real courthouse. Harris Yulin.

IVAN: It was clear that Rick was such an important addition to Ghostbusters. We wanted to build something beyond him being the neighbor and the Keymaster. But he... We built a whole role for him that increased his involvement.

JOE: And he got to wear a backpack, which he wanted to do.

DAN: Oh, yeah, he's definitely the fifth--

IVAN: Ghostbuster.

DAN: Fifth Ghostbuster.

IVAN: Isn't that a neat way of getting the backstory in?

DAN: Yeah, no, it's great. Very effective.

JOE: This slime will become very important.

-[Reitman laughs]

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: He's feeding lines to his lawyer.

JOE: It's the witness leading the lawyer.

JOE: Because the judge is being mean, the stuff starts to bubble.

DAN: Yeah, that's right. The bad energy.

JOE: [laughs] Kitten!

IVAN: Much as we did in the first Ghostbusters, you know, I love to do the effects as practically as possible.

DAN: Yeah.

IVAN: So, yes, the actual Scoleri brothers, the ghosts here, are sort of visual effects. But as you can see, what they do--There's an enormous amount of stuff in the courtroom that's really physically happening to the actors as we're watching, you know, starting right about here.

JOE: And the--And there's always wind blowing.

IVAN: Yes.

JOE: Those wind machines.

IVAN: We started creating a rule for supernatural movies with ghosts. It had to do with light and wind and air.

-[Reitman laughs]

JOE: Love that shot.

IVAN: That was a Marx Brothers reference.

JOE: Nice dramatic music by Randy Edelman here.

DAN: Always hated that part of the business. He did not like the weight of those packs.

IVAN: These packs were really heavy.

DAN: Yeah, so we built rubber ones... and in the shots that you couldn't tell, Billy always wore the rubber one. I always wore the real one.

JOE: The real one.

DAN: You know, just to... torture myself.

JOE: Ray gets to say "Re."

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: Another smile. This is twice as many smiles as in he did in the first movie.

DAN: Good, good effect. That's a beautiful practical effect right there. An air cannon.

IVAN: We became a little more sophisticated about, you know, what the wands look like and the effect that they had.

DAN: Yeah.

IVAN: Yeah, but the visual effect...

JOE: But this was still made, right, I think in the age of optical effects rather than digital effects.

IVAN: It was the transition period. This was '89. They started doing digital effects, and we used some here. Certainly for the characters.

JOE: That's right.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: Now, Danny, did anyone ever do anything like this before you created this idea?

DAN: I-- This is the only system I know that looks like that. [laughs] In a movie called The Entity--I think Ron Silver was in it and Barbara Hershey--They tried to freeze a ghost using liquid nitrogen. That was the-- They trapped the ghost in kind of a house, and they used liquid nitrogen to freeze it. So that was kind of a technical approach to trapping them.

JOE: This is now the Ecto-1A.

DAN: Yeah. We're back in business, so--

JOE: Back in business. They fixed the car up a bit.

IVAN: Who did this song?

JOE: Run-DMC, I think.

IVAN: Ah. It was Run-DMC, yeah.

JOE: Yeah.

JOE: Here we are back in the real New York, obviously.

-[Medjuck laughs]

DAN: He had the trap buried in the ground.

JOE: They've done a new commercial.

JOE: More sophisticated than the first movie.

DAN: Yeah.

JOE: Back in the same firehouse.

JOE: I remember this took a really long time to do.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: I think this was a real jewelry store.

IVAN: Yeah.

JOE: We had to bring Slimer back.

DAN: It's a good little tune.

JOE: Yeah.

JOE: He didn't have to look for his marks in this one.

IVAN: This is one of my favorites.

IVAN: You can see in the background Ernie's Hudson's wearing a dark gray Ghostbusters outfit. I was just looking to change things up. Frankly, I miss the beige ones, although we used them a few times in this film as well.

JOE: Yeah.

DAN: Mood slime. Great.

JOE: Doesn't actually answer, of course.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: The famous toaster.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: You must have thought that yourself, Danny.

DAN: "Dust in the Wind."

JOE: My memory is, Danny, that this was your idea. Jackie Wilson.

DAN: Uh-huh.

JOE: 'Cause it's a song I love, and as soon as you mentioned it--

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: Back to the Three Stooges.

DAN: I like that Dana's a Renaissance woman. She's a cellist, art restoration--

IVAN: And a mom, you know.

DAN: Yeah.

JOE: A modern woman. She can do it all.

JOE: This was all a set. I think the--'Cause we had to rebuild it at one point, I remember, when we did some reshoots, but we kept it all.

IVAN: What a perfect combination of personalities.

JOE: Absolutely.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: The way they shake hands here.

DAN: Where's that painting today, I wonder.

JOE MEDJUCK It was around for a while.

IVAN: Yeah.

DAN: We gotta break it out if it's around on the lot for the anniversary.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

-[Reitman laughs]

-[Aykroyd laughs]

IVAN: I remember thinking about this scene, Dan, because I did David Cronenberg's first movie, called Shivers, in which a woman in this apartment gets attacked by this parasite monster. And there was just something so horrific about being attacked in your own bathtub that I thought, "Well, we should try something like this in this comedy."

JOE: And it's slightly more frightening because she seems more vulnerable 'cause she's taking her shirt off.

JOE: And I love Venkman's apartment, the way Bo Welch decorated it. I used to just walk around and look at objects on the set all the time.

DAN: Yeah, he sleeps in his clothes.

JOE: Stantz is always so enthusiastic about...

DAN: Yeah.

IVAN: We played with new technology as a way of dealing with this slime thing which is kind of a different psychic event, as you were saying, Dan.

DAN: Harness the slime was the idea with the new technology.

DAN: Him with the baby's priceless. Are you kidding me? That's-- There should be a whole movie of him with babies.

IVAN: You know, the baby, just like everybody else, was charmed with Mr. Murray. And this is all just real, natural.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: [laughs] I love this.

DAN: What a master, my God. He's so magnetic and lovable, you see.

JOE: Making fun of this--This is on the stage with a background.

JOE: ls Carpathia even a real place? Is Carpathia--

IVAN: Yeah, I think so.

DAN: Yeah. Sure.

JOE: "Time is but a window. I'll be back." Great line.

-[Reitman laughs]

-[Medjuck laughs]

JOE: Danny, would you have written something like this, you and Harold? Or is this Bill just riffing?

DAN: No, that's Billy. That's totally Billy doing his... Richard Avedon.

JOE: Look.

IVAN: Nice look, Dan.

-[All laughing]

IVAN: This was the apartment of Marc Glimcher that we used.

JOE: I didn't know that.

IVAN: It's a famous building, really, on the Upper West Side that has a very distinctive architectural form.

JOE: I never knew that this was--

IVAN: Marc Glimcher is a famous gallery owner.

JOE: The Pace Gallery.

DAN: Oh, no, she cleaned. [laughs]

JOE: We're gonna have to explain to young people what a long-distance phone call is.

IVAN: Really, as you can see, it's truly this grand romance between these two-and this child.

JOE: Totally.

DAN: It's beautiful. It's your core of the story. You know, it really is the core... of pulling all the characters together. It's the, it's the hub of the wheel.

-[Medjuck laughs]

-[Aykroyd laughs]

IVAN: The baby was always very responsive to these two. I think both of the twins just liked the whole idea of filming and were sort of fascinated by everything, and were very natural and realistic in their responses to the actors who were comfortable enough to sort of change the lines and work with what the baby was giving.

JOE: There's Ivan Reitman crossing the street.

IVAN: Was that me?

JOE: That was you on the right.

IVAN: I didn't even see.

JOE: Yeah. This is a new hairdo, right? She didn't have this hairdo in the first one. Slightly based on the cartoon show.

JOE: In the first movie there seemed to be a bit of romance between Janine and Egon.

DAN: And Spengler.

JOE: But in this one, we've switched it to...

IVAN: To Rick.

JOE: Yeah.

DAN: He's solid, Rick, all the way through too.

JOE: I have a feeling that this was done during reshoots. We wanted to add a moment of danger that we didn't-- Seemed to be missing. When we did reshoots, at one point... You added--

DAN: Well, it's logical in the story.

JOE: Yeah. It fits perfectly.

DAN: Psychometric disturbance.

JOE: Absolutely. That's usually the case. Winston to the rescue.

IVAN: Well, I think there were--Particularly, I was focusing so much on the relationship in these scenes... between Venkman and Dana that, I think, what we realized when we first put and edited the film together that we needed to bump up the scares, and bump up the Ghostbusters story, which sort of got placed in a secondary place. And we did a lot of reshooting. And it basically starts here in the sort of second half of the movie where we started adding scarier sequences and complications in the plot to build up the tension.

JOE: See that tie Bill's wearing? I still have that tie. I love that tie.

JOE: Now, this was shot in a nightclub that had this set up.

IVAN: Yes--

DAN: Yeah, the Tunnel nightclub.

IVAN: Yes, it's in Lower Manhattan.

DAN: On the West Side.

IVAN: This is one of the additional scenes that we did very quickly, and I'm quite proud of it.

JOE: But you did something very smart I didn't know about. You just turned them around, switched sides.

IVAN: So we didn't have to relight it.

JOE: You didn't have to relight 'cause it looks the same in both directions.

IVAN: It's a tunnel into darkness.

DAN: That was a real train track that they used to deliver goods into the city.

JOE: Oh, is that right?

DAN: Yeah.

IVAN: I mean, this is on the sort of Lower West Side down by the docks.

IVAN: I think that might be me.

JOE: I think that's you. You always do those voices.

IVAN: I always did the deep voices.

IVAN: We had to do this very quickly. And we just went to an old makeup specialist who did horror effects and borrowed his stock of funny heads.

DAN: It's totally the flavor of Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Bowery Boys, Abbott and Costello. What-- Originally what we wanted to do was just that kind of ghost comedy from the '30s, but with the real vernacular and the real technology.

IVAN: And a legitimacy as well.

DAN: Yeah. Right.

IVAN: Sort of recreating that memory from our own childhoods.

-[Medjuck laughs]

-[Aykroyd laughs]

-[Medjuck chuckles]

DAN: The old pneumatic railway. There was a pneumatic railway under Manhattan that for--It only had ten stops, and it only ran for a while. But the concept was you got sucked by a vacuum of air through the tube.

IVAN: Yes, much like--

DAN: A mail chute.

JOE: Oh, really?

IVAN: Or those old bank tubes that they used.

DAN: Exactly, mail chutes. Yeah.

JOE: That's nice that they jump in after him.

IVAN: They're Ghostbusters.

JOE: Yeah.

DAN: That is a Chateaubriand. Very good.

JOE: This is more backstory that we needed. Like why aren't they together?

IVAN: This is, I think, a line that Bill actually uses.

-[Medjuck laughs]

-[All laughing]

JOE: Rick always said this was one of the movies he didn't want to keep his... costumes from. He's very-- He used to be very clothes-conscious.

IVAN: Yeah, Gloria Gresham did the costumes for this. I think I worked with her five or six times.

JOE: Right.

IVAN: Including the Twins and Kindergarten Cop films and Six Days, Seven Nights.

IVAN: This turned out to be, if you remember, one of the coldest days in history in Manhattan. [laughs]

DAN: And then we shot this. And the next day, the film didn't process correctly, and we had to go back the next night and reshoot this...

IVAN: Yeah, so--

DAN: ...entire crawling out again.

IVAN: Yeah.

JOE: They've been in the slime, so now they're nasty people.

DAN: Yeah. Slime causes bad energy.

JOE: And feeds on it.

DAN: The long johns.

JOE: It's Judy Ovitz who gets slimed here.

DAN: Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah. Aw...

IVAN: And perfectly 1989, MC Hammer doing a song for us. And he was nice enough to do a cameo.

JOE: No, Bobby Brown.

IVAN: Bobby Brown. Jeez. Excuse me.

JOE: There he is, Bobby Brown. Right there.

IVAN: You did a very good job, Bobby.

JOE: Yeah.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: Typical babysitter's excuse.

JOE MEDJUCK Here he is, the--This, as I remember it, was shot at the Greystone Mansion.

IVAN: Only Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis could get away with dialogue that we just heard.

JOE: Both writing it and saying it.

IVAN: Saying it comfortably and believably.

JOE: Yeah.

IVAN: Strangely enough, you'd always get an applause in New York City.

JOE: Yeah.

-[Medjuck laughs]

DAN: More applause.

IVAN: That did get laugh, yeah, in New York. More applause, exactly.

JOE: There's a great Torn Wolfe essay that's about that. Just walking through the city, and people saying snarky things.

DAN: Brian Doyle-Murray.

JOE: Brian Murray.

IVAN: That's Bill's brother.

JOE: I think the voice... Isn't this the voice of Max von Sydow?

DAN: It sounds like Max von Sydow from The Exorcist.

JOE: Yeah.

IVAN: It is Max von Sydow. He came in for one day, did this quickly for us, and it was amazing.

DAN: "I command you," remember? From The Exorcist.

JOE: There's some echoes of Rosemary's Baby in here a little bit.

JOE: It's from the The Lady from Shanghai, a Columbia movie, is why we could get it probably.

JOE: Here's the wind blowing again.

DAN: Good "baby directing" there, Ivan.

IVAN: Thank you, sir.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: No, you would often stand in front of the baby and be talking to him while they were filming, getting its attention.

DAN: Mm-mm-mm.

IVAN: This was all just really scary.

JOE: This is a bit like The Wizard of Oz too.

IVAN: Yeah.

IVAN: All these costumes have a kind of, really, '40s feel to 'em.

JOE: Nice handheld.

-[Medjuck laughs]

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: This is as straight as I've ever seen Brian Doyle-Murray playing a role. Completely seriously.

JOE: It's a great effect, Ivan.

IVAN: It's just garbage.

JOE: I know, but it's still great.

IVAN: With a lot of wind.

JOE: Yeah.

IVAN: This is really a transitional film in terms of the effects and in terms of how we're playing the scarier stuff. Somewhat reminiscent of...

JOE: The Shining.

IVAN: ...of Stanley Kubrick in the--

JOE: The Shining.

IVAN: Yes.

DAN: That's like a Christo piece right there.

JOE: Right. It is an artwork.

IVAN: I love the quietness of this.

JOE: And the babyjust like a sacrificial.

JOE: This was a practical shot. The baby was on a wire, is my memory. Very carefully...

DAN: On a tray?

IVAN: Yes. And we took him across.

DAN: That's one good sport baby, man. I tell ya.

-[All laughing]

JOE: Cannibal Girls is the new, new movie by Ivan Reitman starring Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin.

-[Aykroyd laughing]

JOE: My memory is that a couple of--This montage piece and the movie theater were originally written for Ghostbusters one.

DAN: Yeah, that's right.

JOE: And we never used 'em.

DAN: The fur coat.

JOE: Yeah.

IVAN: Good memory, Joe. Thank you.

JOE: 'Cause I remember we worked on--

DAN: I love the--

JOE MEDJUCK This was one of the most amazing nights ever 'cause we had about 300 extras down in Washington Square. And after take one, everybody came-- all the students, from NYU--

IVAN: Came out of their dorms.

JOE: Suddenly, there were 5,000.

IVAN: There were about 5,000 people.

JOE: Yeah.

JOE: This is before the movie. Cheech Marin on the right there.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: I remember--

DAN: Oh, that's great. [laughs] "Better late than never."

JOE: This guy's a great actor too.

JOE: Ben Stein.

IVAN: Though it was just a step forward from our skies in the first movie...

JOE: Right

IVAN: ... where we could start to do things that were more digitally based.

IVAN: I always had a hard time with this effect, with the museum being totally covered in a layer of slime. Because, as effective as our visual effects people were, there's just something--There's not enough detail in a large Jell-O mold.

DAN: Yeah.

JOE: It's not particularly frightening, a large Jell-O mold.

IVAN: Yeah.

DAN: Well, it sells the abnormality of it though.

IVAN: Yes.

DAN: It's pretty good. It's alive in there. It's got, you know, the clouds and...

JOE: Shortly after the movie opened, like, I think about a week afterwards, was the Tiananmen Square in China where the students put up a copy of the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of all those things.

IVAN: This is us building the interior of the Statue of Liberty on a stage for us to do this scene. They wouldn't let us go into the real Liberty and do this.

JOE: There's the equipment we saw them working on earlier.

IVAN: I think the logic of this was a little complex...

DAN: [laughs] Yeah.

IVAN: ...to understand, even for us.

JOE: But I think the toaster explained it when they--It could be nasty, but if you added enough goodwill...

DAN: Yeah.

JOE: New version of "Higher and Higher."

IVAN: Good thing you see all the electricity.

DAN: Yeah.

IVAN: All that magical electricity.

JOE: That good energy there.

IVAN: Letting us know that this is slime that is positively energized. My favorite part of this whole sequence was this.

JOE: Yes, it's...

JOE: Here he gets his chance.

DAN: Yeah, we had to have something big walk into the city and--

IVAN: I guess.

DAN: Recall Stay Puft, so...

IVAN: At least in the story, Liberty made sense.

DAN: Yeah.

IVAN: Although, as lovely as the statue is, doesn't quite have the goofiness and delight that the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man has.

DAN: But the logic of the good energy... coming to life works in a strange way here.

IVAN: Again, this is Fifth Avenue that they let us close for about a couple of miles... while we put thousands of extras and bystanders on the two sides to cheer. Liberty going by. And of course, the Statue of Liberty wasn't really moving in this gigantic form over here. And we rigged up this tall thing that everybody could look up at as the statue--To represent the statue walking by.

DAN: So this movie's really not getting its due as a Christmas, New Year's movie.

JOE: No--

DAN: Like Trading Places is now known as a Christmas movie. We gotta stress the Christmas side of this in our repackaging.

JOE: Well, we don't do much with Christmas. It's mainly the New Year's.

-[Aykroyd laughs]

JOE: Here we have a really high-tech effect.

IVAN: Yeah. We just had to explain things.

JOE: She saves him.

DAN: Good, good.

JOE: Little bit of Alien here for Sigourney.

JOE: Where we were shooting this, of course, at the time.

JOE: And the positive vibes.

DAN: Good old Vigo.

JOE: This is right. We planted this. We forgot that he's gotten inside you.

DAN: But we don't trap him. We dispatch him to the next...

IVAN: Dimension.

DAN: Next dimension, or the afterworld.

JOE: Well, I guess he's sort of not a-- I guess he is a ghost, but...

-[Aykroyd laughs]

-[Aykroyd laughs]

DAN: Really funny now. Oh, great.

IVAN: Quite a thrill to stand in front of all these people.

DAN: Yeah.

JOE: Here we go back there with Billy Parker. Harold and Danny. There you are, Dan.

DAN: Liberty. We never got Liberty back on her pedestal. She just kinda...

IVAN: Yeah, we do.

DAN: Oh, really?

IVAN: Hang on.

JOE: Yeah, you forget. There he is.

DAN: A really good companion piece to the first one, you know. Characters expanded. New hardware. Great sets. Made the city look great.

IVAN: But I'm proud of us. It does feel like the late 80s.

JOE: Yeah.

IVAN: As opposed to the first half of the '80s in the first film. I think the two movies represent New York in a special way.

JOE: Here they are in a different color outfit, Ivan, that you--

DAN: He was superb in the picture.

JOE: Kurt Fuller, yes.

IVAN: Unfortunately, we've lost David Margulies.

JOE: Yeah. Harris is still working.

IVAN: He was a great mayor and a great actor.

DAN: And the guy who played Vigo too, yeah.

JOE: Yeah. Yeah, we had two of them. Hank and Will. Henry, I think, is his real name. And Slimer. The TV show made a star of Slimer. We've lost both Bernie Brillstein and Michael Gross. I'm the last of the executive producers left.

JOE: Chappy-

IVAN: Michael Chapman did a wonderful job.

JOE: Yeah. Worked with us several times. Sheldon Kahn and Donn Cambern.

DAN: Well, there we are. All right, we got her back.

JOE: Gordon Webb. Yeah.

DAN: [laughs] Good.

JOE: Twin Towers still standing, of course.

DAN: Look at that, the Twin Towers. Yeah.

JOE: Still there.

DAN: Mm-hmm. An innocent time in the world.

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