In early 1992, a Hollywood film crew led by director Harold Ramis descended upon the quiet community of Woodstock, Illinois to film Groundhog Day, a quirky comedy in which Bill Murray plays a vain, selfish weatherman who ultimately becomes a better, more thoughtful human being after being trapped in a strange time loop, reliving February 2 over and over again for years before being allowed to rejoin the normal flow of time. Though the plot revolves around Pennsylvania’s famous Groundhog Day ceremony, Woodstock stands in for Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania in the completed film, since the quaint, old-fashioned location better resembles the charming small town described in Danny Rubin’s original script. Its connection to Groundhog Day remains a point of pride for Woodstock, especially as the film has garnered a reputation as a classic through television airings and home video, even being added to the United States National Film Registry in 2006.
As some extant home movies show, the filming of Groundhog Day was a big deal in Woodstock even before the film became a perennial. Thanks to YouTube, fans can now see behind-the-scenes footage of several of the movie’s key scenes. Probably the movie’s most famous running gag is the antagonistic relationship between Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, and Ned Ryerson, a garrulous, tacky insurance salesman played by the ubiquitous Stephen Tobolowsky. Because of the movie’s repeating structure, Murray encounters Tobolowsky again and again, frequently putting his foot in a water-filled pothole in the process. For the curious, here is what the filming of that scene looked like from an onlooker’s point of view. The cameraman for this particular clip is a man named James Carvis, who served as an extra and stand-in during the film. Carvis died on February 1, 2015, the day before the famous holiday, but his behind-the-scenes footage lives on.