Dan Aykroyd, a ghost lover himself, imagined Ghostbusters a little differently.
Who you gunna call...when you want to know more about ghosts? Dan Aykroyd of course.
Ghosts were not a new thing for Dan Aykroyd when he wrote Ghostbusters in 1984. In fact, you could call him an expert in the supernatural just like his character is in the blockbuster, Raymond Stantz. Aykroyd has been interested in ghosts since he was little, so he wanted to conceptualize a comedy based on ghost hunting. But his first script turned out completely from how we know the original movie. There were a lot of details that were out of this world... literally.
There's no doubt that Ghostbusters is a classic, but years before Aykroyd wrote it he was already deep in supernatural culture. According to Looper, Aykroyd's family was in the business of ghosts. His father wrote a book called The History of Ghosts, and his family would often have seances and study the paranormal. Aykroyd himself has had many ghosts sitings throughout his life and was apparently even welcomed by them when he was born, according to his mother. But between his research of ghosts and his roles on Saturday Night Live, he thought of a way to combine the two.
"It was around the time I had just finished Saturday Night Live, and I read an article on quantum physics and parapsychology in the ASPR and said, ‘Why not marry the actual scientific discipline of psychic research to an old-style comedy?'" Aykroyd told The Daily Beast.
The first script for Ghostbusters held a lot of different things from the final script, however. The original name for the movies was going to be Ghost Smashers. Doesn't have that same ring, does it? Aykroyd also said that the original draft for the script held a lot more of those technically words he came across in his paranormal and scientific research.
According to TheRaffon.net, Aykroyd said, "In parapsychology, a lot of researchers and thinkers have developed a link between quantum theory and paranormal activity -- there are even several books on the subject -- but parapsychologists have long been plagued by the fact that only one person in ten ever reports a paranormal experience. I thought: 'What if you advertised on TV or in the Yellow Pages and said: "Hey, we believe you, we understand you."' I thought it would help. That was the birth of the commercial enterprise of ghostbusting."
"My first draft was written in a way that your basic acceleration physicist might have enjoyed more than the mass audience," Aykroyd continued. "Also, my original story was more eerie in tone, and it started right off with the crew busting ghosts. The first frame was the garage door opening up at the Firehall, the Ectomobile roaring out into the night and the guys going on a bust."
When Ivan Reitman, the future director of the film, got Aykroyd's first script he was very confused by it. The draft, interestingly enough, had the movie set in the future and took place on many different planets.
"Dan had written only forty or fifty pages at that point, and frankly, I had no idea how I would go about making it into a film," Reitman said. "For one thing, it was set in the future — not far in the future, but far enough — and it took place on a number of different planets or dimensional planes. And it was all action. There was very little character work in it. The Ghostbusters were catching ghosts on the very first page — and doing it on every single page after that, without respite — just one sort of supernatural phenomenon after another. By the tenth page, I was exhausted. By the fortieth or fiftieth page — however many there were — I was counting the budget in hundreds of millions of dollars. And there really weren't very many laughs. Although I could detect a comic attitude, the whole thing was written rather seriously. In the end, I just kind of set it aside and forgot about it."
But Aykroyd put more effort into it and eventually had Harold Ramis, who also played Egon Spengler, working with him to revamp the script.
"In Dan's draft, you could not differentiate the characters," Ramis said. "Stantz and Venkman and Ramsey — the character we changed to Winston — were all essentially the same. That was fairly representative of Dan's writing at the time. He was very much concerned with story and structure and effects, but he would sort of stay on the surface of his characters. So one of the first things we did — together with Ivan — was work out distinctive character traits for the Ghostbusters so that each would have his own internal motivation and personal style."
The last thing to be scrapped from Aykroyd's original draft was the ending, which saw the ghost hunters being taken away to different dimensions.
"In a sense, it seemed almost like two different movies," Ramis continued. "And while I think most people can accept the notion of the supernatural as being one thing, interdimensional travel to them is sort of a shadow area that relates more to outer space. It just seemed too big a leap for the audience to make."
While Aykroyd's first script is bizarre and completely different from the Ghostbusters we know and love, it is amazing to see how hard he worked on making it the success we know today. We're just glad Ivan Reitman took a chance on the alien-ghost story and was able to convince Aykroyd it was nonsense. We'll never look at marshmallows the same again.