Your Commodore - Commodore Is Awesome

FEATURE
Above: Amanda Barry, put your clothes
back on this instant!
SEQUEL
OR
BUST!
-Fe•'•
6h o ya gonna call this time?"; "Noiltho ya gonna call?";
here to save the world again"; "They're back to save the world";
W
the possibilities
" T
of crummy
h
by-lines
e y
are seemingly
' r
endless.
e
Yes,
after five quiet years the Ghostbusters, heroes of the world's biggest-grossing
comedy ever, are back. But for Columbia Pictures, eager fork box-office success
to mop up the worry left by a string of flops, it hasn't been easy...
In 1982 Ivan Reitman (currently one of Hollywood's hottest come .
properties after success such as 'Legal Eagles', 'Screwballs', 'Stripes', 'Animal
House' and 'Twins') pulled together 'Saturday Night Li*' star Bill Murray,
'Blues Brothers' maestro Dan Aykroyd, talented actor/ writerldiectorl producer
Harold Ramis and Academy Award darling Sigourney 'Aliert(s)' Weaver for
a big-budget film comedy aboutfour psychic investigators who start a rather
Ily exorcism business, Ghostbusters Inc. The fi
d011ars lm, to wmake, h i cwent h on c to ogross s $220 t million, pretty much guaranteeing ..
a sequel t w in eone nform t or y another, particularly in the light of Hollywood's current
obsession
m i
with
l
Roman
l i
numerals
o n
('Friday 13th Part Ix', 'A Nightmare on Elm
Street. VI', 'Batman II', 'Blade Runner II' (being filmed on the 'Batman' set),
'AlienIV*(wits Arnold Schwarzeneggar and Sigourney Weaver already signed),
'Spaceballs III: The Search for Spaceballs II' and 'Star Wars I: The Clone
Wars' art%,all in the,pipeline). However after the worldwide furore of the first
piepre's suCcess had died down, everything went quiet. Ex-Columbia Pictures
head David Puttnam showed a noted lack of enthusiasm for 'Ghostbusters
II', even to the point of considering making it with an all-new low-budget
cast. Putinam's much-publicised enmity with star Bill Murray, the leader of
the Ghostbusters, obviously didn't help, and it wasn't until late 1987, when
Puttnam was deposed as studio boss, that 'Ghostbusters II' cropped up again.
Puttnarn's replacement, a Hollywood power player named Dawn Steel, recalls
it as "one of the first things we talked about" at her interview for the corporation's
presidency. Not surprising, since it was obviously crucial to the ailing studio
that the movie got made. Six flops in one year (1988) - including the anticipated
smash success 'Punehline' (with Tom Hanks and 'Sally Field), which grossed
only $21 million left Columbia Pictures with a lot of problems, both in
financial terms and in the box-office credibility stakes.
Despite the usual sure-fire success of sequels to big movies, the sheer volume
of genre movies on the Summer market might just have left "Ghostbusters
II' comfortably profitable but not, ultimately, a massive hit. Studio boss Steel
called the movie "the most important sequel in the history of Columbia Pictures"
and it's easy to see why. It was a predictable but necessary evil for the
corporation; one requiring a big investment and, therefore, a big risk. The
film had got to be made. The formula had to be repeated, The cast and crew
from the original movie had to be involved. But how were they all going
to be got together?
The story of how it happened begins much like the plot of 'Ghostbusters
II' itself, in which the protagonists of the original have left 'busting behind
and gone back to some semblance of normal life. The same was true of most
of the east and crew from 'Ghostbusters'• urray had appeared in several
....
Sixty Y O U R COMMODORE