The film was shot in 1990 in Moneta, Virginia. According to Frank Oz, production was “incredibly difficult, incredibly full of tension”. The director said: “I was really scared to death that we had a piece of s–––, because it was so impossible to judge it.”
To break up the boredom of production, Bill Murray took the entire crew of 50-odd people to a nearby MC Hammer concert (it was 1990, after all). They drank Moonshine and Murray estimated he drank “four or five ounces of 190 proof alcohol”. When Hammer played U Can’t Touch This, Murray joined him on stage and busted out the Hammer dance. “That’s right, the Hammer dance,” Murray said in a 2004 interview. “Surprisingly, I knew all the steps. But I learned why he wore those weird chef’s pants, because I split my pants right up the back. And since it was the end of the month off on a remote location, all I had was my pants. I was going commando, if you know what I mean. I was working without a net.”
And, as an oft-repeated story goes, Murray allegedly threw Laura Ziskin in the lake. “Bill also threatened to throw me across the parking lot and then broke my sunglasses and threw them across the parking lot,” Ziskin said.
Tom Schulman doubts that Murray really threw her in the lake, but he remembers hearing from Ziskin about the friction between Murray and Dreyfuss. “I heard the same stories you did,” he tells me. “There was a constant battle about how the movie was going to end. I think Bill and Richard didn’t agree on that. That created some tension. I heard they had a meeting to talk about the ending because they disagreed and things got pretty heated.”
Charlie Korsmo, the former child star who played Dreyfuss’s son in the film, says that one of the questions he’s asked most frequently about his acting days is: “Is Bill Murray really like that in real life?” “Bill Murray is kind of like that all time,” laughs Korsmo. “For better or worse. It was funny for me but I could tell that for some of the adults who had to deal with him it could be a bit much!”
Talking in 2012, Frank Oz recalled creative differences between himself, writer, producer, Murray, Dreyfuss, and Disney. “Everybody had their own viewpoint on how to make the movie better,” said Oz. Schulman recalls that Oz and Disney wanted a happy ending, in which everybody makes friends. “Someone said if Bob and the psychiatrist had been a man and a woman they’d have kissed and made up at the end,” says Schulman. “My strong feeling was that it wasn’t going to work. They shot that ending and shot the ending we have now, and did test screenings of both. The one that’s on the movie is the one that worked…”
