I’ve told this story before: When I came to see Harold Ramis, who died today, for this profile in the winter of 2009, he opened the door to his suburban Chicago office and couldn’t quite suppress a chuckle: “They always look like you,” he told me. For decades, under one pretense or another, a steady stream of boys, then young men, and finally not-so-young-men had come knocking, intent on meeting the man who had created the foundational movies of our generation. It wasn’t only that we could rattle off a series of quotes from _Caddyshack. _It was that Ramis, hand and hand with his avatar and muse Bill Murray, had taught us how to be. If an earlier generation had learned what it means to be a man from war movies, we learned it from Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes and Ghostbusters. And that was _before _Ramis made Groundhog Day, his greatest critical hit, or Analyze This, his greatest commercial one. That counts as a pretty good career.
I spent about three bitterly cold days in and around Chicago with Ramis. Rereading the story, I am reminded of how intent he was always on following the old Second City imprecation to work from “the top of your intelligence.” Nothing—not the Baby Ruth gag, not the flops, not the dick jokes—was ever a throwaway or done without purpose. At the time, he was doing post-production on Year One, which put him in the weird position of being both a God to younger comedy-makers like Judd Apatow who were now in control of things, and needing to humbly adapt his methods to the new generation’s way of doing things. This he seemed to do with good humor. I watched an ADR session with Jack Black in which the two men recorded about fifty alternate jokes for a single line in Year One. I’d say forty-eight of them were hysterically funny, which is all that seemed to matter to Ramis.
When I interviewed Murray last year, he told me that he had recently reached out to Ramis and that the two men had taken steps toward repairing their relationship. Rereading Ramis’s pained account of their breakup, this makes me happy. Perhaps my favorite of his answers below is a throwaway, about the Dalai Lama: “He’s cool. He’s jolly.” That strikes me as the exact amount of reverence a classic Ramis character would have for the spiritual leader of a major world religion. The only thing better is that His Holiness wanted to talk about Caddyshack.