To better ground the narrative's ambitious and fantastical elements in a recognizable reality, Reitman and Aykroyd enlisted the writing efforts of Harold Ramis, who'd worked with the director on Animal House and Stripes. Though Reitman and Columbia Pictures Chairman Frank Price had confidence in the project, they decided the script would have to be significantly reworked to secure their desired $25 million. And instead of a climactic battle atop a towering building, the script ended with its heroes transported to another dimension.Īs noted by Ivan Reitman, Dan Aykroyd's original written iteration of Ghostbusters would have demanded a gargantuan budget, especially for a comedy. Despite being in the script, the villainous Gozer took on a variety of appearances, including that of an old man donning a suit and a large-scale, monstrous figure. What would become one of cinema's most iconic vehicles, the Ectomobile was painted black and could "dematerialize," while the character that evolved into Slimer was dubbed "onion-head." And instead of incarcerating their trapped ghosts in a New York City fire station, the smashers held their paranormal prisoners in a New Jersey gas station that would ultimately explode and create a giant sinkhole. Despite the inclusion of familiar elements, however, the differences between Aykroyd's original vision and the final film were stark. By the 40th or 50th page - however many there were - I was counting the budget in hundreds of millions of dollars."Īykroyd's central premise revolved around an opening to another dimension that flooded the world with hordes of ghosts, and in reaction, multiple teams of "ghost smashers," both heroic and nefarious, went into business to combat the threat. The Ghostbusters were catching ghosts on the very first page - and doing it on every single page after that - without respite, just one sort of supernatural phenomenon after another. There was very little character work in it. Reitman said of the script, "It was set in the future.and it took place on a number of different planets or dimensional planes. The latter was impressed but admittedly overwhelmed by what he read. After the tragic passing of John Belushi, who would have had a role in the film and ultimately served as inspiration the character Slimer, Aykroyd presented his ideas to Bill Murray and Ivan Reitman. As a self-avowed "kitchen-sink writer" with a tendency to "throw everything in there," Aykroyd's earliest and incomplete version of the script proved wildly ambitious, densely plotted, and unwieldy in scope. With his basic concept in place, Aykroyd began conceptualizing and writing what was then titled Ghost Smashers. Virtually every comedy team did a ghost movie - Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope. But the real jumping-off point came when he read a magazine article about parapsychology, and suddenly thought to himself, "I'll devise a system to trap ghosts.and marry it to the old ghost films of the 1930s. His great-grandfather even hosted séances in his farmhouse and had connections with a spiritual medium, so perhaps it's no wonder that Aykroyd's upbringing and unwavering interest in the inexplicable would find its way into his career as an entertainer. "It's the family business, for God's sake," he told Vanity Fair in 2014. As the great-grandson of a well-known spiritualist, the grandson of an engineer who toyed with the idea of contacting spirits through radio technology, and the son of an author who published work about the paranormal, the actor is no stranger to ghostly lore. Growing up in Ontario, Dan Aykroyd descended from a long lineage of paranormal enthusiasts.
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