Plot
After the defeat of Gozer in the first film, the Ghostbusters were sued by city, county, and state agencies for the property damage caused during the battle. A judicial restraining order barred them from paranormal investigation, effectively putting them out of business. Five years later, Ray Stantz and Winston Zeddemore work children's birthday parties, Egon Spengler runs experiments on human emotion, and Peter Venkman hosts a television show called The World of the Psychic.
Dana Barrett is now a single mother to an infant, Oscar, and works restoring paintings at the Manhattan Museum of Art under Janosz Poha. When Oscar's stroller rolls away on its own into traffic, Dana turns to Egon, and the old team reunites to investigate. They discover a river of psychomagnotheric slime flowing through an abandoned section of the New York Pneumatic Railroad beneath First Avenue, a slime that feeds on and amplifies the city's negative emotions.
At the museum, Janosz is possessed by the spirit of Vigo the Carpathian, a tyrant whose self-portrait hangs in the restoration room. Vigo intends to be reborn into the world through Oscar's body, with Janosz promised Dana as a reward. After the Ghostbusters are put on trial for breaking their restraining order, the courtroom slime releases the ghosts of the executed Scoleri Brothers; the team captures them, the charges are dropped, and they reopen for business. As the slime spreads and the city descends into supernatural chaos, the Ghostbusters animate the Statue of Liberty using positive-charged slime and a sound system, marching it to the museum to rally the crowd. Buoyed by the change in public mood, they drive Vigo back into his painting and destroy him, freeing Oscar and Janosz.
Development
Columbia Pictures wanted a sequel almost immediately, but Reitman and the principal cast were reluctant. They had intended the first film to stand alone and wanted to pursue other projects.1 A sequel was being discussed in gossip columns as early as December 1984.2
David Puttnam became head of Columbia Pictures in June 1986 and had no interest in a sequel, at one point considering making the film with a new, lower-salaried cast and was not eager to keep Murray.3 Columbia executives in New York even tried to set up a secret deal that would shield the project from Puttnam, but it collapsed because the principals could not align their schedules.2 Despite the impasse, there were rumors as early as 1986 that Aykroyd was writing a script;4 he completed a first draft by himself in September 1986, titled "Ghostbusters: The Seed."2
Dawn Steel replaced Puttnam in 1987 and made the sequel a priority, raising it during her own job interview.13 Meanwhile, the animated series The Real Ghostbusters had become a hit and kept the property alive with the public. An early-1988 lunch at Jimmy's in Beverly Hills, attended by Murray, Ramis, Aykroyd, Reitman, agent Michael Ovitz, and CAA's Ray Kurtzman, was meant mainly to see whether the team would reunite at all.3 The lunch went so well that working together again became appealing,3 and a deal followed. The budget was kept to roughly $25 to $30 million, well below an estimated $50 million, by having the stars defer their usual salaries.53
Scripting
The story changed substantially during writing. Murray nicknamed an early, completely different version "The Last of the Ghostbusters," partly to head off any future "Ghostbusters III."6 Once Aykroyd and Ramis began co-writing, they developed the moral premise that negative human emotions have consequences and can build up in big cities like New York and Los Angeles; from this came the river of slime, with Vigo eventually created as the force motivating it. A second idea involved an infant with sudden adult agility and focus, originally conceived as the child of Peter and Dana, then reworked because the marriage angle proved a creative dead end. Dana became a divorced mother instead. Ramis also explored drafts in which the team was a hugely successful worldwide company called Ghostbusters Inc., and another that picked up directly from the end of the first film.
The August 5, 1988 collaborative draft contains the basic premise of the finished film but with notable differences: Janosz Poha and Slimer are absent, Dana is replaced by a love interest named Lane Walker, Walter Peck makes a brief appearance, Mayor Lenny is replaced by a politician named Maury, and the river of slime is represented by a horde of insects rather than a flowing river. At Murray's request, comedy writer Elaine May spent six hours consulting on the script.2
Production
Much of the scripting, production, effects, and design detail in this article is drawn from Adam Eisenberg's "Ghostbusters Revisited" in Cinefex no. 40 (November 1989).7
Reitman and producer Michael C. Gross chose Industrial Light & Magic, with Dennis Muren supervising the effects. Filming began November 28, 1988 in New York City under a tight 67-day schedule before the production moved to Los Angeles for interiors.6 The runaway baby carriage was shot early, during two weeks of New York location work. Downtown Los Angeles stood in for Manhattan's First Avenue for the street excavation scene, and a Toluca Lake location served as Armand's Restaurant.3 Principal photography wrapped after thirteen weeks,8 with the official wrap of main-unit photography on March 7, 1989 after a rushed day shooting the World of the Psychic scene.
Second unit work continued in New York from March 29 to 31, 1989, and in Los Angeles on April 4 and 5. The Washington Square sequence, shot on March 30, drew roughly 750 people by 5 a.m.; by the third take, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 had gathered, and crew had to physically block extras from running into the camera. Four weeks before the release, ILM was unable to complete a scene involving ghosts pouring from the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, and a replacement scene, in which Mayor Lenny recounts a conversation with the ghost of Fiorello La Guardia, was shot on April 27, with additional photography running through May 3.
Ivan Reitman's son, Jason Reitman, appears in the film as the Brownstone Boy; his daughter, Catherine Reitman, appears as the Girl with Puppy.
Additional scenes were added after early preview audiences found the ghosts, slime, and Vigo poorly connected, and felt the concept of good slime versus bad slime needed clarifying. The Impaled Heads and Ghost Train sequences were among these additions, requiring a return to New York only about three months before release. When the studio moved the release date up to June 16, 1989 to avoid opening against Batman, ILM's shot count climbed from around 110 to 180 effects shots, with nine units shooting daily for weeks; the studio eventually had to cap the work to protect quality.9 Available Light, Visual Concept Engineering, Apogee, and Pacific Title handled overflow effects work.
The courtroom set used for the Scoleri Brothers sequence was a modified version of one built for Reitman's 1986 film Legal Eagles, pulled from stock and augmented with a glass partition and an elaborate cornice ceiling.
Vigo
Vigo was inspired by Carpathian mythology, the Dracu, and Vlad the Impaler, conceived by Aykroyd and Ramis almost as a Dracula figure.1 The Vigo painting proved the biggest design problem; ILM worked on it for months, and Reitman rejected one version as too "Conan the Barbarian."5 Gross ultimately turned to Glen Eytchison and the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, whose performers staged living tableaux of classic paintings, to develop a workable design.5 For the finished film, Wilhelm von Homburg was photographed in front of a bluescreen and matted over a miniature of a slimed, columned corridor built by the ILM model shop. Howie Weed of the creature shop wore appliance makeup for shots of Vigo transformed within the painting and for the scene in which Ray is possessed, since Aykroyd's schedule did not allow him to play the demon-possessed Stantz.1
Janosz Poha
When Peter MacNicol first read the script, his character was a nondescript art curator named Jason. He nearly turned it down, then reconceived the role as a fussy Carpathian with a thick accent and Euro malapropisms. After he demonstrated the voice for Reitman, Aykroyd, and Ramis, Reitman renamed the character Janosz Poha.1 MacNicol studied a Romanian travel agent's speech for the accent, though he found it too refined to be funny.1
For the scene in which Janosz kidnaps Oscar, MacNicol was dressed in drag and filmed in front of a bluescreen. The arm-stretch effect was achieved using a piece of tubing covered in costume fabric and rigged to slide down a pole. Wider shots of Janosz carrying Oscar in flight were accomplished using a miniature rod puppet and buggy operated by character performers.
The Scoleri Brothers
The Scoleri Brothers, Tony and Nunzio, were played in latex suits with animatronic masks by Tim Lawrence and Jim Fye. Ramis said the ghosts were loosely based on the real-life Scoleri Brothers who once robbed and assaulted his father, a storekeeper. Lawrence took early inspiration from the Blues Brothers, imagining a tall thin figure and a short fat one, and worked with Henry Mayo and input from Gross to refine the designs; they were the first ghost designs green-lit for the film. Camilla Henneman built a fat suit for the roughly 800-pound Nunzio using spandex pouches filled with gelatinous material, techniques she had used to pad Weird Al Yankovic for his "Fat" parody. Puppeteers used servos, pneumatic cylinders, and a computerized SNARK (Synthetic Neuro-Animation Repeating Kinetics) system to achieve lip-sync on the heads.
Tony Scoleri went through three development stages. The first involved a full-size puppet with an articulated head, built by Mark Wilson; video tests were promising but Muren felt the rotoscope load required would slow the schedule. Tony was redesigned as a suit worn by Jim Fye, with the head fixed to a skullcap positioned in front of and above Fye's own head, and the neck elongated to complete the emaciated look. The Nunzio suit weighed close to 80 pounds; both performers hung in front of bluescreen for hours at a time.
For the Impaled Heads sequence, the crew put out a call across New York for "dead heads." Better-detailed pieces were placed in the foreground, with lesser-detailed ones behind. One of the foreground heads in close-up was sculpted by Adam Jones, who later became a guitarist for Tool.
Slimer
Slimer was a matter of considerable debate. His popularity with children, thanks to the first film and The Real Ghostbusters, led the filmmakers to write him a subplot in which Louis tries to catch him while he eats his way through the Firehouse. Gross asked that elements of the cartoon Slimer be folded into the design. During dailies, Murray reportedly objected that the film was called "Ghostbusters," not "Slimer," and the character was repeatedly cut back even though the scenes were filmed. Preview audiences found Slimer's segments intrusive, and Reitman ultimately trimmed him to two brief shots plus one under the end titles.
Slime and the river
The color and origin of the river of slime were not fixed during production. ILM's Dennis Muren and art director Harley Jessup tested formulas against ideas ranging from Slimer green to blue. The final mixture combined methocel with mica dust and a top layer of mineral oil, run through a gravity-fed miniature river one foot wide and ten feet long, rigged with injectors, air bladders, and plexiglass baffles to suggest something alive beneath the surface. Four rented cement mixers ran for days to produce enough slime. For the scene in which Winston, Egon, and Ray plunge into the river, the actors fell onto airbags off-camera and were later composited into the miniature; Ernie Hudson recalled shooting drenched and freezing on a New York street at two in the morning.
For the slime shell encasing the museum exterior, a full-scale replica of part of the Manhattan Museum of Art facade was constructed on a Burbank Studios stage. Chuck Gaspar's crew cut slits into the walls and attached hoses to tanks holding 8,000 gallons of slime; forty people operated the valves and pumps. Separately, the shell itself was photographed as a vacuformed clear-plastic sculpture filled with water, diamond dust, and injected color, then composited over a museum miniature and surrounded by matte paintings of the surrounding street.
The Statue of Liberty
Aykroyd and Ramis originally conceived the Statue of Liberty as a force of evil used by Vigo, but out of respect for the monument it was changed to a positive influence.1 The sequence combined miniatures, a larger head sculpture, a costume worn by Jim Fye for full-length views, and full-scale set pieces. A larger-than-life replica of the crown, built about 30 percent oversized on a Burbank Studios stage so the actors' faces and shoulders would be visible, was mounted on a gimbal to simulate the statue's movement. The gimbal, which dated to around 1940, broke down on the first day of shooting and had to be replaced and rebuilt with new cylinders flown in overnight. Bill Murray described riding the rig as "quite a ride, nausea, sea legs, the whole thing." Wide Fifth Avenue shots were achieved with matte paintings because it was nearly impossible to light New York above street level at night.
Other effects sequences
Several additional effects scenes were created by ILM and outside houses. The Ghost Train evolved from a discarded idea for a ghostly subway station of rotting commuters, and was added after principal photography to heighten tension; Apogee shot an eighth-scale antique train roughly 25 feet long against black, rendered it transparent, and composited it into footage of the actors lit with interactive lighting at a New York nightclub called The Tunnel. The Titanic shot grew from Ramis's idea that all the city's dead were returning; ILM modelmakers built a plywood-and-urethane replica aged by spraying iron powder and an oxidizing acid onto the hull. For the Washington Square monster, master stop-motion animator Phil Tippett accepted the assignment on the condition that the shot run only 160 frames and be done in a single in-camera take, and he delivered it despite a car accident that injured him and hospitalized his wife; he declined a credit for a single shot. The Theatre Ghost, built by Rick Lazzarini from a Henry Mayo drawing, used a "Facial Waldo" rig so an external operator's expressions drove servos in the puppet.
The mink coat appeared in four versions using different combinations of radio-controlled servos, hand puppeteering, and cable-pull mechanisms. Reitman originally approved the design as white fur, but called for darker fur after a film test ten days before the shoot; the crew rebuilt it in time for filming outside the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.
For the bathtub creature sequence, a tub was fabricated from white silicone to simulate porcelain while remaining flexible. The creature was built from dielectric gel, a Dow Corning breast-implant material reinforced with china silk and spandex, and operated like a hand puppet by Tom Floutz reaching up through the base of the tub. John Van Vliet of Available Light added a cel-animated tongue for the final few frames.
ILM also reworked the proton streams so they behaved like lassos and fishing lines reeling the ghosts in, an effect that paired well with the squash-and-stretch mirror trickery used on the Scoleri Brothers. The Slime Blower packs, designed by Stephen Dane after military flamethrower backpacks, were three to four times as bulky as the Proton Pack props; only the gun was practical, fed by large external tanks off-camera.1
Jack Hardemeyer
A deal could not be reached to bring back William Atherton as Walter Peck, so the antagonist role of the mayor's aide Jack Hardemeyer went to Kurt Fuller, whom Reitman remembered from an earlier reading. The path to that reading began when Harold Ramis's first wife saw a play in which Fuller starred, attended it eight times, and recommended him to Ramis. Ramis saw it, approached Fuller, and arranged for him to read for a different part, a scene in which a desk catches fire; that role went to Gilbert Gottfried. When the Hardemeyer role opened, Reitman returned to Fuller. Fuller, then selling real estate in Los Angeles and doing theater, flew to New York and was told just before his first scene with Murray that he would be fired if Murray did not like him. He overacted, and Reitman told him to "do less than you ever thought it was possible to do."
Soundtrack
The film's orchestral score was composed by Randy Edelman. The accompanying pop soundtrack included contributions from Bobby Brown, who performed "On Our Own" and "We're Back," and New Edition, who contributed "Supernatural." "On Our Own" received wide radio play during the summer of 1989.10
Theatrical release and reception
Ghostbusters II opened June 16, 1989 at number one with a domestic opening of about $29.5 million across 2,410 theaters,11 and grossed over $112 million by the end of its domestic theatrical run.8 Tim Burton's Batman opened the following week and performed considerably better at the box office, contributing to a sense among critics and the studio that the sequel underperformed relative to expectations.
The film drew criticism for being less funny than the original and for a plot seen as rehashing the first. Some viewers felt the scary ghosts made it less child-friendly, and others objected that pairing Janine with Louis undercut the relationship between Janine and Egon developed in the first film and the animated series. Reitman pushed back on Murray's later claim that the story suffered at the expense of special effects, instead blaming the third act with the Statue of Liberty for not coming together, while still calling it a worthy sequel.12
Influence on The Real Ghostbusters
The Real Ghostbusters kept the franchise in the public eye and, according to producer Joe Medjuck, its only direct influence on the sequel was bringing Slimer back.13 The animated series later nodded to the film across several episodes:
- "Partners in Slime" has Egon say he collected the mood slime "last year after we battled Vigo the Carpathian," confirming a version of the film's events occurred in the cartoon continuity, though the slime is depicted as yellow and behaves differently.
- "Something's Going Around" introduced Louis Tully into the animated series, already working for the Ghostbusters, and gave Janine Melnitz a hairstyle matching her appearance in the film. Egon's dialogue in that episode implies the Ghostbusters never went out of business, which would contradict the film's premise, suggesting events unfolded somewhat differently in the animated continuity.
- "Mean Green Teen Machine" features the slime animating the Statue of Liberty in a direct echo of the film's climax. Winston references "Remember what happened the last time we dug up the street?", though he was not present for that incident in the film.
- "The Treasure of Sierra Tamale" and "Attack of the B-Movie Monsters" both use the term "psychomagnotheric," coined in Ghostbusters II.
The reordering of Janine's relationship is part of why fans split the broader story into two continuities: a movie canon based on the films and an animated canon based on the first film and the cartoon series.
Home video and television
For years, Ghostbusters II was released alongside the first film in DVD box sets, but unlike the original it never carried deleted scenes, production images, or interviews. In the United States it premiered on ABC on Sunday, February 16, 1992, as part of "The ABC Sunday Night Movie." In the edited-for-television version, Peter's line about "three million completely miserable" people in the tri-state area was replaced with an alternate take referring to "miserable wretched walking worms."
Sony announced at Comic-Con 2008 that both Ghostbusters films would release on Blu-ray on October 21, 2008, later shifted to June 18, 2009. The original film's Blu-ray released as scheduled, but a Blu-ray of Ghostbusters II was not included. On March 21, 2012, Dan Aykroyd announced via Twitter that a Ghostbusters II Blu-ray was "definitely coming out (with some extras/commentary)," though no release followed that statement.
Notes
