The 1980 movie Caddyshack regularly appears at or near the top of lists of the best—or at least best-loved—golf movies. From the goofy and often downright crude humor, to the “snobs vs slobs” subtext, and even the language-and-nudity-inspired “R” rating, Caddyshack has something to appeal to just about every golfer.
The film has inspired a variety of Caddyshack products over the years—hats, t-shirts, gopher puppets, even a Florida restaurant located near the World Golf Hall of Fame which is owned by the Murray brothers (including Bill, of course, and older brother Brian Doyle-Murray, who co-wrote the movie), and regularly-updated video releases on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray. Until recently however, if you wanted to read about the movie, there were only a few random magazine articles over the years, and 2007’s The Book of Caddyshack, by Scott Martin. Now, however, there is Scott Nashawaty’s Caddyshack – The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story.
While the 2007 book is something of a novelty item, breaking down scenes in detail and noting cameos, goofs, and trivia, the new book by Nashawaty, the film critic for Entertainment Weekly, is a more mainstream effort that delves into the back story of the making of the movie before getting into the movie itself.
Nashawaty opens by recounting the July 12, 1980 press conference with the film’s writers and stars at Rodney Dangerfield’s comedy club in Manhattan, less than 24 hours after the press preview of the movie. Neither event went well, and no one would, at the time, have predicted the late-blooming but monstrous success story that Caddyshack would become. To investigate the roots of the story of the movie, Nashawaty turns the calendar back even further, to 1966 and the blossoming of a few twisted, but talented, young men at The Harvard Lampoon.
The notorious college comedy/social commentary magazine begat a new publication, The National Lampoon, with Henry Beard and Doug Kenney (later one of the writers of Caddyshack) at its beating heart. The story develops from there with the introduction of a cast of characters who defined ’70s comedy, both written and in live performance—Michael O’Donoghue, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Harold Ramis, among others. The cross-pollenization that resulted in the Lampoon’s first film, the 1978 mega-hit Animal House, and later in Caddyshack, was an admixture of talent from the magazine; Chicago’s famed Second City improv comedy troupe; the Toronto, Canada, comedy club scene; and New York’s Saturday Night Live television show.
Nashawaty’s Caddyshack is a social history, a “Sherman-set-the-Wayback-Machine-for-1978” look at the roots of a larger comedy phenomenon that just happens to have spawned an improbable, crazy, disjointed, somewhat dysfunctional, and really, really funny movie that occupies a unique position with respect to the game with which it is associated. Golfers the world over quote lines from the movie in appropriate circumstances on the course and in the clubhouse, and I would venture to guess that everyone who plays the game—with the possible exception of some of the stuffier R and A group captains and squadron leaders—has seen the movie at least once.
In the book, anecdotes from the sets and locations of the film are intertwined with behind-the-scenes details of the movie business politics and pressure that seethed under the surface. Well-known stories of rampant and blatant drug use among cast and crew during filming alternate with Hollywood-tell-all-like revelations about the movie’s untested first-time writer-director, Harold Ramis; the nearly unknown Borscht Belt comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who found the transition from standup to film comedy an uneasy fit; less-than-congenial co-stars Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Ted Knight; and the Hollywood executives, casting directors, and technical professionals who played their respective parts in the film’s making. It’s something of a roller-coaster ride, and it holds surprises for even the movie’s most dedicated fans.
There’s surprisingly little about golf in this book about one of the golf world’s most beloved movies, but there is a lot to learn about how the movie came to be. It may seem to be a lot of attention to pay to the story of the making of one 98-minute movie that is replete with sophomoric humor, drug jokes, nudity, and bad behavior from the bottom of the social spectrum at an upper-crust country club to the top—but the movie’s long-lived success, despite its slow start, justifies the attention.
Nashawaty’s Caddyshack will be enjoyed by golfers and non-golfers alike, whether they lived through the years in which the story takes place or not. It’s a fascinating history of movie-making in that era, a microcosm of bad behaviors with good outcomes, with a cast of stars and unknowns—both then and now. It distills the essence of a time when comedy in America was undergoing profound changes from a film that has ridden cult status to mainstream notoriety in the almost 40 years since its inauspicious debut.
