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| Cleanin' Up The Town: Remembering Ghostbusters |
Cleanin' Up The Town: Remembering Ghostbusters, by Claire Bueno, Anthony Zart & Richard Latto, ISBN 978-1836903437, £35.00.
About 40 years ago a group of friends leveraged some earlier success to make a high-concept and at the time high-budget science-fiction film. In the process the production paid for a special effects firm who would manage an Oscar nomination every couple of years. It would also spark a marketing juggernaut, with everything from sequels to poorly regarded follow-up films, action-figures, games from board to video, even animated series. Not Star Wars though. The other one. Ghostbusters!
Sharing its name with the 2019 documentary, Cleanin' Up The Town is an astonishing extension of a fascinating project. At once an appendix, an additional oral history, and a 'making of' the 'making of', Claire Bueno's book is a fitting companion to her brother Anthony's film. With deeper details and fresh interviews it helps shed new light on both that film and Ghostbusters.
A hefty tome, weighing in at some 900 grammes it is more substantial than many film books. Detailing not only the incredibly swift production of Ghostbusters but the decade longer process of making their film, it frequently uses the Bueno's fight to get their picture finished to give context to the subject film's struggles. A solid lump of hardback - I make it 24x16x4.5cm in (our) dimensions - it occasionally strays into detail that can be hard to conceptualise.
Some of that is technical vocabulary. There's a lot of focus on the processes of special effects, and literally at the nuts and bolts end of it. Boss Studios would win a Scientific and Engineering Award for their 65mm Optical Printer, and the machining and milling that made that magic are often mentioned. Though there are about 40 pages with photos, three of those in colour, there are several places where a diagram might have been handy. A picture's worth a thousand words, and all that, though we do see places where that was true. This includes some storyboards and behind the scenes images that help explain how a frequently rewritten script became a much loved cult classic.
There are several revelations, even beyond those in the eponymous film. This includes eight fresh interviewees. Among them is Reginald Veljohnson who continually repeats that he owes Ghostbusters his career. It was his first appearance in a law enforcement role, but in a career that includes Die Hard and almost nine years as a sitcom dad and Chicago cop in Family Matters, far from his last. There are other recurrences and first appearances. Much is made of Sigourney Weaver's role in Alien, but as with the production of that film there are ties to works like Dune, both filmed and unfilmed.
Something that was news to me was how large some of the sets were. This was John DeCuir's last film as a production designer but his 'old Hollywood' sensibilities really helped with the majesty of Gozer's temple. Among scenes and scenery left on the cutting room floor are a couple of moments that presage later doppelgangers in Coming To America and earlier comic nonsense in Trading Places. There's some truly insightful detail about the special effects that did as much to make Ghostbusters as the comedy. There's also a lot of discussion about the realities of the film business, at both the studio and indie levels. Claire Bueno is remarkably honest about the difficulties of bringing their project to screens.
That long process does contain some frustrations. There's a recurring theme about trying to arrange Bill Murray's involvement. "Famously difficult" would be an understatement. The opportunities they had for those willing to be interviewed were often rushed. A story about Weaver and the limo driver is the kind of logistical comedy of errors that would have an audience wincing and laughing in equal measure. That does mean that follow-up questions sometimes go unasked.
There's an anecdote from Ernie Hudson (Winston Zeddemore) that was intriguing enough that I started trying to track down more details. It involves a TV series he worked on. Narrowing it to a window between Ghostbusters (1984) and the interview he gave (2008) leaves just 40. That's not in the interest of fact-checking - more that as much of a cultural phenomenon as Ghostbusters was, it was also a job, a piece of work. As prosaic as that sounds, that's one of the themes of the film. Concrete proof of life after death becomes a dispute between janitorial free enterprise and regulators.
Legal woes aren't confined to the screen. There's a large element about the perils of agents, lawyers, 'fair use', crowdfunding, and the difficulties of trying to make a documentary film while using public transport. The arithmetic of film is complex. The first three pages of Chapter 66, Nobody Choosed Anything (p.495), go some way to explaining the two lengths of the documentary.
The book itself has a couple of small production issues. Print on Demand has advanced tremendously over the last few decades and Bookvault's quality is very good. I've got any number of other texts with the odd bit of misplaced ink and since my copy would end up full of Post-It(TM) style notes it's really me picking nits. There are a couple of typos. One unfortunately seems to mix up the homophonous words for 'celebration' and 'prophecy' but that's hardly a fete worse than death.
I'm not sure in a technical explanation if it should be 'flair' or 'flare' if only because it might be a term of art - there's a lot of jargon that could benefit from expansion and as mentioned the odd diagram could have helped clarify things. There's also some language used in one of the interviews that might be considered offensive. That's really me being pedantic though - my own editors would suggest no small measure of hypocrisy too. There is one amusing outcome of digital production though - when I saw the text below I thought immediately "No human would stack words like this."
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| Cleanin' Up The Town: Remembering Ghostbusters book excerpt |
Among the additional interviewees are two credited as 'New York Resident', but movie buffs might recognise the name 'Ned Gorman' as that of one of ILM's visual effects geniuses. 'Karl Hamann' has a film career of his own, but as spouse of puppeteer, Diana Hamann who has been the hands behind famous movie tongues like Beetlejuice and of course Gozer the Gozerian in the form of the Destructor in the guise of Mr Stay-Puft as chosen by Dr Raymond Stantz, PhD.
That researching was in part of one of the joys of the book for me: it's rabbit holes all the way down. If you're looking for a gift for the Ghostbusters fan in your life, this and the Blu-Ray of the accompanying film are a treasure trove. For anyone involved in film at a production level, this offers a fascinating glimpse of two extremes of the process, a decade-long indie slog and the headlong rush of a studio intent on a specific release date. There are some excellent worked examples of how being hard to reach can work to one's advantage in filmmaking, and whole chapters that talk about how much distress that causes. Having spent years cultivating a library of books about film, this is a delightful addition.
