Bill Murray-Tree

Bill Murray is famously eccentric, which often manifests itself in awesome ways, like him singing karaoke with strangers or showing up at random house parties and doing the dishes.  Other times, it comes out in less awesome ways, like him having the Ghostbusters 3 script for three months and refusing to read it even though he gets asked about it every three days.  Murray was on Howard Stern this morning to promote the DVD release of Get Low, and provided our latest update on the project.

Bill-Murray-Kingpin

Howard Stern: Is it true that there is a Ghostbusters 3 and that you’re the problem and you will not sign off on this? Do you know about this?

Bill Murray: Yeah, I guess I’m the problem. Before I was an asset, [but] now I’m a problem. There’s a script somewhere [on my desk], but I haven’t read it yet.

HS: Why haven’t you read it? Is it because you think it’s a bullsh*t idea? In other words, Ghostbusters has had its time and you did a remarkable job with that and you’ve moved on?

BM: There’s a little bit of that. I only made one sequel
and it was Ghostbusters 2 and it didn’t end up the way it was presented.

Murray either forgets or purposely blocks out his work on Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties.  Just as an aside here, in a GQ profile from last year, Murray tells a cute story about how he did Garfield because he mistook the guy who wrote it, Joel Cohen, for Joel Coen of the Coen brothers (it might shock you to learn that there are multiple guys named Joel Cohen working in Hollywood).  In both cases he seems genuinely unaware that there was a sequel, and that he was in it.  Anyway…

[still talking Ghostbusters 2] About five years after we did the first one, the clever agents got us all together in a room and… we really are funny together, I mean they are funny people – Harold [Ramis] and Danny [Aykroyd] and myself, with Ivan [Reitman] and maybe one or two other people. We were just blindingly funny for about an hour or so and the agents, there was just foam coming off of them. [Ewwww.... -Ed.]

They had this pitch and Danny and Harold had concocted some story ideas… and it was a story, it was good story. I think I had even read one or two [scripts for Ghostbusters 2] that Danny had rolled out beforehand, but this one was a good one. I said, “Ok, we can do that one.”

It was just kind of fun to have all of us together… I mean [Rick] Moranis, Annie [Potts] – these people are just sterling people to begin with.

HS: So how do you go back and really make another? Does Ivan want to make [Ghostbusters 3]?

BM: Yeah, Ivan wants to make it and I… I owe him, ya know. He’s puzzled that I haven’t gotten to this one.

HS: How long has it been sitting on your desk, this script for Ghostbusters?

BM: Well, it may not be on the desk – it’s over there somewhere. How long? I don’t know. [Almost three months now, by my count. -Ed]

BM: I’ll get to it… I gotta get to it – I feel bad. I got a message and I think people – I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings – it’s not the foremost thing in my mind, so I don’t think about it. [Screenrant has the rest]

And if you think that’s wild, you should’ve seen when Howard got Bill on the Sybian. Mee-yow. Anyway, I love Bill Murray, but at a certain point, not reading the script stops being cool in an I-care-about-my-art sort of way, and gets into I-don’t-own-a-TV-for-the-sole-purpose-of-telling-people-I-don’t-own-a-TV territory.  Shit or get off the pot, Bill, and I feel strange saying that to someone who I just referred to numerous times as “BM.”