Caddyshack (1980) and Caddyshack: The Making Of Hollywood Cinderella Story (2018) by Chris Nashawaty Now here's something we've never attempted before........re-visit a 38 year old beloved movie while simultaneously reading a new book about it origins and production history......
No big surprises coming back to the movie........we always knew it fell into our peculiar category.......of movies where you find yourself laughing more at the fond memories of them then you do when sitting through the movies themselves.....
38 years later, 'Caddyshack' remains what it is.......stop-and-start, sporadically funny, a shapeless mess that seems to randomly lurch in multiple directions as it desperately searches for laughs.......sometimes it strikes comedy gold(the candy bar in the pool, the moments with Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield machine gunning his one liners) .......and .sometimes it only lies there, inert.
Chris Nashawaty's 'making of.' chronicle goes a long way in explaining how the movie turned out the way it did........and surprised us by being far more ambitious than we expected in its detailing of the film's 'origin' story........which began in the chaotic genesis of the "National Lampoon" magazine.
The book comprehensively begins with the rise of the baby boomer generation of hungry, ambitious, and brilliant comedy writers and performers........who conducted their very own revolution against 1950's and 60's conformity, culture and politics. Between the National Lampoon Magazine, Saturday Night Live and Second City TV, they tossed out comforting, safe old-school comedy, replacing it with cutting edge, aggressively irreverent satire.
Inevitably, this wild bunch stormed the movie business........and their movies almost always boiled down to watching staid, stupid, bigoted Authority Figures endure withering mockery at the hands of this this new generation of anarchic, anything-goes-for-a-yock jokers.......(not unlike the Marx Brothers outraging polite society in films like "A Night At The Opera")
As detailed by Nashawaty, vast easily obtained stashes of pot and cocaine fueled this new generation of comedy and comedians........and the book unsparingly describes the making of 'Caddyshack' as awash in a sea of weed and blow.........(with the sheer amount of drugs ingested, you have to wonder how any of the actors stayed lucid enough to step in front of a camera......)
Apart from the drugs, a good old-fashioned, eternal clash of egos also propelled the youth comedies like 'Caddyshack'........at the end of the day, the bitter, hateful clashes between Bill Murray and Chevy Chase weren't much different from the titanic battles between 1930's actors on the Warner Brothers backlot.
But ultimately, that sea of drugs took its toll.......not long after the film's 1980 premier, Doug Kenney, the mercurial, high-strung screenwriter of both "Caddyshack" and "Animal House" was found dead after plunging off a cliff in Hawaii.......two years later, John Belushi succumbed to his addictions.
For moviegoers unfamiliar with all these rancorous and tragic backstories......only smile--inducing memories remain about 'Caddyshack' and that's probably the film's lasting achievement.....not a bad place in pop culture history to end up after close to 40 years. For the movie, an overly generous 2 & 1/2 stars (** 1/2), for the book, 3 & 1/2 stars (*** 1/2)......(the truth behind the legend hurts, but still fascinating to read about)
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