Ghostbusters is more than a classic movie, it's a project management inspiration. From up-front financing, extensive planning, team building, innovation and more the whole production was a truly temporary and unique endeavor.
The life cycle of the project for filming was less than 10 months, from October 1983 to June 1984 when the movie would be released in theatres across the USA and Canada.
We obviously know it was a successful outcome. The subsequent return on investment was $282.2 million - making Ghostbusters the highest grossing comedy movie ever at that time - but nobody could project this kind of return.
Sit back and enjoy some of the challenges, stakeholder interactions and innovative problem solving that faced this movie in its transition to the big screen.
Initiation: Dan Aykroyd wrote the original script. Inspired by his own family's research in spiritualism, going back as far as the 1920s. The ultimate trigger for the movie was an article he read, on quantum physics and parapsychology, in an American Society for Psychical Research journal.
The script was ultimately re-written by Ivan Reitman who wanted to make it a simple "going into business" movie, and Harold Ramis - which Aykroyd agreed to.
Team Building: The original Ghostbusters were supposed to be Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Eddy Murphy. Belushi died before completion of the script and Eddy Murphy was unavailable.
They continued moving forward without these actors. Aykroyd's agent set about finding the willing Director Ivan Reitman who produced Animal House and Stripes (with John Belushi, in the former, and Bill Murray & Harold Ramis in the latter).
Reitman bought into the project then helped recruit Harold Ramis to rewrite the script. Ramis then demanded a role as one of the Ghostbusters team. Two down, one to go.
Bill Murray the obvious third choice, had filmed two movies with Reitman and was a partner on Saturday Night Live with Dan Aykroyd. He was notoriously indecisive and bad at signing agreements. Apparently, he agreed to the role, but nobody was sure, and he remained out of contact, even up to the first day of shooting.
Up-front financing: The team pitched the Ghostbusters concept to Columbia pictures, in May of 1983. The movie Stripes had netted approximately $8 million, so it seemed a logical choice. In reality, the team had no idea how much the movie would cost to make, so they guessed, from the weight of the script, and decided that it felt like a $25 million production.
The President of Columbia pictures, Frank Price, who had a portfolio of successful movies under his direction, (including Kramer vs Kramer, Tootsie, Ghandi and The Karate Kid), felt that Ghostbusters was a safe bet and signed off with no strings attached - as long as the move was ready by 8 June 1984.
Conventional wisdom at the time was that Price had made a huge mistake and the movie was a waste of money. Before the release of the movie Price, the project sponsor and a principal stakeholder, had left Columbia Pictures.
Planning: According to Reitman the script was riddled with leaps of logic and gaps in the story. So, they spent a whole month rewriting over the Summer of 1983 at the end of which time, the screenplay was still half-baked, incomplete, with gaps in the story and things that didn't work. Many of these items (for example Slimer the ghost) are still in the movie in some form, as well as the iconic "Stay Puft" Marshmallow Man which the Director was against introducing, but they decided to keep.
The script, in true scope creep fashion, continued to evolve within an already unrealistic project timeframe. Additionally, at the end of Summer, Bill Murray was in France, and nobody knew if he would show up.
Innovation and Problem solving: At the outset, the movie was riddled with risks and issues, some of which could not be solved in the planning phase which took a few months of the ever shrinking 10-month lifecycle.
The continuously evolving script included an increasing volume of special effects shots and yet the team had no experience in this part of the industry and the only possible vendor with capability, Industrial Light and Magic, was fully booked up on Spielberg movie productions.
To solve this, Reitman engaged with his principal stakeholder, Frank Price, requesting a further $5 million budget, which he would need to start paying out immediately, to start a new special effects company. Reitman then engaged Richard Edlund, one of the key characters at ILM, to start his own company "Boss Films." In turn, Edlund cherry picked the best talent from ILM to get the job done and the film market now had a new vendor for this kind of work.
The next issue was Coca-Cola, who had just acquired Columbia, with no experience of moviemaking and no love of special effects comedies. Coca-Cola an active negative stakeholder in the project looked for opportunity to can the movie (pardon the pun) . . . and the future for Price was looking rocky. The Board no longer approved of his actions.
Also, the name "Ghostbusters" was owned by a company called "Filmation", the creators of "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe." Columbia refused to pay what Filmation were demanding for the name, so production had to carry this risk and treated it by temporarily shooting two versions of the movie simultaneously - "Ghostbusters" and "Ghostbreakers."
When casting was complete for all the other characters, and shooting about to start, Reitman, Aykroyd and the team shipped out to New York City, even with all these risks and also not knowing whether Bill Murray would show up.
To cap it all, the schism between Coca - Cola and Frank Price grew to the extent that Price left Columbia Pictures and there was nobody left at Board level to protect the movie.
Delivery: A key characteristic of projects, is their ability to keep rolling and evolving and with the right teams in place coming to a successful conclusion.
The Ghostbusters project methodology is a classic situation where they had to keep moving towards the goal and develop as the project evolved. Keep solving their own problems. Keep faith in the vision. Be aware of the issues and find ways not to trigger them.
During the delivery phase, the principal stakeholder and sponsor was gone, the remaining principal stakeholders were negatively disposed, the film name was owned by a third party, one of the main actors is out of contact and they were learning special effects on the fly with a fixed drop-dead date - what could possibly go wrong?
Well, plenty apparently. Yet rather than shrink in the face of adversity, the production team ignored the risks and carried on. They even moved from New York City to Los Angeles and completed filming there. Almost all of the iconic interior scenes in the movie, (the inside of the library, the firehouse and the hotel), were filmed on location in Los Angeles and the remainder on stage in Burbank studios.
At the first screen test, a few weeks from the launch date, special effects were incomplete, the movie had no song, and the shots were deliberately short so the audience could not see how it was done.
About 80% of the shots in the movie were first takes, as they had no time to finesse or retake shots.
It is hard to do justice to all of the challenges this project team overcame to realize the Ghostbusters movie.
Close: At 10 months, production was complete, and the movie was ready for handover to Columbia for launch, with one final twist in the story. They had consistently failed to clear the naming rights from Filmation.
Serendipity played a part. Filmation back then was owned by Universal Pictures who, at the time was run by ... Frank Price... the same guy that departed Columbia a few months previously and, he was able to say, "make the deal."
Whether or not you like the movie, Ghostbusters was a resounding success that went on to gross $300 million worldwide, inspired a range of toys and became a marketing dream for a slew of products. The movie itself spent 13 weeks at number one and the theme song was a chart-topping success for Ray Parker Jnr.
So, when your projects are overwhelming, and there's something strange and it don't look good. Who you gonna call? ...
Angus Peacock.
February 2022
(Research for this article was conducted via the internet and the Netflix series "The Movies that Made Us.")
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