Meatballs

Anyone looking for the moment when Bill Murray became “Bill Murray” should take a passing glance at some of the comedian’s early Saturday Night Live sketches, and then head straight to Meatballs, the 1979 summer-camp comedy that made Murray a movie star. Meatballs director Ivan Reitman had worked with Murray on a pre-SNL stage show in New York, and brought him in to liven up a sketchy, not-that-well-thought-out low-budget production, shot on location over the course of a month at an actual, working Ontario camp. Reitman’s instincts about Murray’s potential were spot-on. Meatballs is a slobby comedy in the M*A*S*H* and Animal House mode—albeit far less satirical and far more family-friendly—with dozens of characters and storylines crammed into an hour and a half. Murray is the constant, with his character serving as a role model to Camp North Star’s counselors and counselors-in-training, while helping bring a shy, awkward kid played by Chris Makepeace out of his shell. Murray improvised wildly on Meatballs, bringing a touch of real life to the scenes where he’s playfully grabbing his fellow counselors by the hair, or teaching Makepeace how to bet in blackjack. (“Twenty? What are you, some sort of madman? Is that what they teach you in that school of yours, 20?”) Then, late in the film, when Camp North Star is losing in the annual Olympiad to the snooty rich kids from Camp Mohawk, Murray rouses the troops with an off-the-cuff, from-the-heart, funny-but-true speech about how, “It just doesn’t matter!” And thus Murray’s place in movie history was secured, even before Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, Rushmore, or Lost In Translation.