What’s up internet?  My name’s Jon Abrams and for now my blog is called Slow-Motion Quick-Draw.  Let’s save the extended introduction and get right to talking movies.  That’s really the best way for you and I to decide if we’re going to get along. 

 

For my first blog entry on CHUD.com I will cover The Best One Minute and Twenty-Seven Seconds In All Of Cinema.  Maybe some will paint that label as a slight exaggeration, but I figure it’s harder for the scholars to argue the point when the numbers are that specific.  Besides, I had to get your attention somehow.

 

Let’s do this thing!

 

 

 

GHOSTBUSTERS, Columbia Pictures, 1984.

Directed & Produced by Ivan Reitman.

Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.

Director of Photography, Lazlo Kovacs, A.S.C.

Music by Elmer Bernstein.

 

Ray: Dan Aykroyd 

Winston: Ernie Hudson

 

 

EXT. CAR – NIGHT

 

Nighttime.  A Carpenter-esque synth score plays as the Ghostbusters car drives over the Brooklyn Bridge, lights flashing.  Manhattan Island is the backdrop.


WINSTON (O.S.)

Hey Ray — you believe in God?

 

RAY (O.S.)

Never met him.

 

INT. CAR – NIGHT

 

Ray is reading floor plans.  Winston is driving, cigarette in hand.

 

WINSTON

Yeah well I do.  And I love Jesus’s style, you know.


RAY

This roof cap is made of a magnesium-tungsten alloy.


WINSTON

What’re you so involved with there?


RAY

These are the blueprints for the structural ironwork in Dana Barrett’s apartment building, and they’re very, very strange.


WINSTON

Hey Ray — do you remember something in the Bible about the last days, when the dead would rise from the grave?


RAY

I remember Revelations 7:12…  “And I looked, as he opened the sixth seal, and behold there was a great earthquake.  And the sun became as black as sack-cloth.  And the moon became as blood.”


WINSTON

“And the seas boiled, and the skies fell.”


RAY

Judgement day.


WINSTON

Judgement day.


Eerie Elmer Bernstein score kicks in.


RAY

Every ancient religion has its own myth about the end of the world.


WINSTON

Myth?!?  Ray, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the reason we’ve been so busy lately is because the dead HAVE been rising from the grave?


Ray absorbs that idea, looks at Winston, sighs apocalyptically:


RAY

How about a little music?


Winston takes a drag as Ray reaches for the radio.


WINSTON

Yeah.


CUT TO:

 

EXT. CAR – DAWN

 

Corniest post-disco, sub-Rick-James music cue of the entire film.  Day is now breaking.  It‘s tough for the post-9-11 viewer not to notice the Twin Towers in the background skyline.

 

 

 

 

By the age of 14 I was probably already qualified to write a dissertation on this movie, for love of how many times I’ve seen it.  I’m sure I’m far from the only one.  But I’m just talking here about this one scene, in many ways the fulcrum of the movie.  It is so brief that it barely registers, but it does register, consciously or not, enough to matter in the grand scheme.  It effectively moves us from what has gone before and prepares us for an ending where we, the audience, believe as much as the characters do that a giant marshmallow man is really stomping through New York City church rooftops.  By then that particular onslaught is not just funny, it’s almost scary. 

 

That happens due to the methodical way that Ivan Reitman as director, and Dan Aykroyd & Harold Ramis as writers and as their respective characters, parcel out information that informs and prepares us for the next otherwise implausible occurrence.  It’s primarily Bill Murray’s job to maintain the comedy throughout, which he absolutely does.  But you already knew that.

 

So, this “Judgement day” scene does a couple great things.

 

It’s the one and only scene with absolutely no laughs in a movie that is completely full of them.

 

It adds a depth and a mythology to a movie that too many people consider a toss-off insubstantial comedy.  I love Caddyshack, Stripes, Trading Places, Fletch (etc.), more than most movies ever, but none of those movies have that extra mythical weight that Ghostbusters does.  This here is a dramatic scene.  Nothing funny about it – a purely dramatic scene.  That makes it unique in this entire movie.  This scene sets the stakes, which go beyond life and death for the main characters and are about nothing less than the fate of the world entirely.  Ambitious much?

 

It also offers an appreciation for the underrated Ernie Hudson.   The word has always been that this role was earmarked by Aykroyd for Eddie Murphy.  While Eddie Murphy is, for me, second only to Bill Murray in the great pantheon of film comedy, I still feel glad that Hudson got this role.  As far as I’m concerned, Eddie Murphy could and still can do anything he sets his talent to, even drama (he was stellar in Dreamgirls).  But no, he couldn’t have pulled this scene off at that stage of his career, not in 1983, not [blasphemy] as effectively as Ernie Hudson did.  I say this not to compare the two, just to show how much I appreciate the one by invoking my love of the other.  Ernie Hudson is the 6th or 7th funniest person in Ghostbusters at best, but he brings a touch of realness to it that I think the movie needs in order to work as well as it does. 

 

Dan Aykroyd’s no slouch as an actor either, in my opinion.  And also in the opinion of the 1990 Academy Awards, who so adored him as “Boolie” in Driving Miss Daisy.  I just felt like typing the word “Boolie” just there.  “Boolie.”  Okay I’m good. 

 

In general, throughout the running time of Ghostbusters (with the exception of the ghost BJ scene, which simply does not belong), Aykroyd is invaluable.  He’s a real team player and lets Bill Murray and Harold Ramis take most of the major laughs.  This was at the height of Aykroyd’s popularity and dominance too – people forget what a huge star he was.  Not only that, but he’s the only one of the three leads who could have pulled this scene off believably in the scope of their characters.  Murray would have come off too arch, and Ramis would have come off too cartoony.  Aykroyd is just so obviously invested in the moment that it plays beautifully. 

 

Praising Dan Aykroyd is no hipper to do now than when I did it as an undergraduate chimp sitting amongst serious students of Renoir and Brakhage, but how can you not be warm on the guy.  I love the fact that in real life Dan Aykroyd seems to thoroughly believe in this exact kind of stuff.  I love the fact that he does all this research for his movies and absolutely nobody who laughs at the funny parts, a.k.a. everybody else, ever notices.  I love all the insane names he comes up with.  The technical jargon, the ancient pseudo-history, the monologues – all that is Aykroyd.  And I love how Ramis as a writer and Reitman as a director ably work with all that raw material, and are able to ground it in believability and relatability. 

 

What a classic.

 

Anyway that’s it for today.  If you enjoyed any part of this monster, then please hang in.  I’m just getting started…