Skip to main content

Watch Dan Aykroyd & Bill Murray Goof Off in a Newly Unearthed Ghostbusters Promotional Film

If you weren’t in the indie cinema exhibition industry in the 1980s, you probably haven’t heard of Showest. But this was *the* convention back then, a chance to travel to Las Vegas, shmooze with film distributors and Hollywood studios, smoke cigars, drink single malt Scotch, run up your company’s tab and have a dim memory in the morning of visiting a strip club. You know: Business, American Style!

And so what we have here is a promotional film for an up-and-coming 1984 movie called Ghostbusters. Not the trailer, you see, that’s for the general public. Instead, this is two of the film’s lead actors, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray, directly addressing attendees, imploring them to check out what could be the sci-fi comedy of the summer. “It's gonna make E.T. look like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Murray quips.

There’s a few things apparent from this promo film: Ackroyd and Murray are completely winging it, and this probably took as long to shoot as it takes time to watch. Also, perhaps: they’ve been “celebrating” if you know what I mean. Maybe. Allegedly. Either way, you can tell these guys are goofing about and making each other laugh. And it also ends with a Ghostbusters theme that isn't the Ray Parker, Jr. classic. It's…well, it's this, if you need to hear the whole thing.

And finally: there’s a few jokes that, if not totally “rapey” per se, do assume a woman-as-sexual-favor vibe. To that I would posit: Ackroyd and Murray knew their audience (unfortunately). (It was the Reagan era, and don’t forget, the main villain of Ghostbusters is the Environmental Protection Agency!)

But let’s not end on a down note. Instead, let’s just quickly add that as of this writing, the *other* Ghostbusters star, Rick Moranis, has just appeared after years in seclusion to appear with Ryan Reynolds in a cellphone commercial. Yes, it’s also advance promo for a Honey I Shrunk the Kids reboot, but I’ll take what we can get these days.

P.S. If you’re wondering what happened to Showest, the convention arm of the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO, for short, go figure), you can read all about it here.

Related Content:

The Zen of Bill Murray: I Want to Be “Really Here, Really in It, Really Alive in the Moment”

Bill Murray Explains How He Was Saved by John Prine

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd Get Brian Wilson Out of Bed and Force Him to Go Surfing, 1976

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Watch Dan Aykroyd & Bill Murray Goof Off in a Newly Unearthed Ghostbusters Promotional Film is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3k0CdNO
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more