Tag Archives: Harold Ramis

Harold Ramis — director of such films as “Caddyshack,” “Groundhog Day” and “Analyze This” — thinks he dodged a bullet Bill by ducking out of a directorial role in the notoriously awful Super Mario Bros film.

“(Producer) Roland Joffe wanted me to direct the ‘Super Mario Bros.’ movie,” Ramis told the Associated Press. “I took the meeting because I loved the game.”

“I’m glad I said no,” he added with a laugh.

Among other things, Ramis is now appearing in the Ghostbusters videogame. He’s also able to sleep well at night, un-haunted by the specter of directing what turned out to be attempted murder on the
Mario franchise. We consider both of these things positives.

More through the link.

Ghostbusters writer and general superstar Harold Ramis has told explained to GamesRadar why writing funny games is so difficult. Basically, it’s a stupid amount of work.

“To make a game so funny with so many comic alternatives, that would be like writing three hit movies,” he said.

“The scripts are impossibly long. That would be a considerable investment. And I was thinking if you wrote that much comedy, chances are you would put it in a feature film.”

It’s repetition in comic films that keeps people coming back, said Ramis, but the same process doesn’t necessarily translate to games.

“It seems like the attraction of playing any videogame is that it gives you control over a world that you have no other access to,” he added. “Once you’ve mastered a game, you kind of lose interest.”

Full interview through there. Via GoNintendo and Kotaku.

Atari may be touting that Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis were the writers of the Ghostbusters game, but both men acknowledge that it’s more of a marketing ploy than anything.

Speaking with The New York Times, Aykroyd said that Terminal Reality came to him with script in hand, and he and Ramis supplied the structure and tone.

“In the beginning they came to me, and I said, ‘I encourage you, go ahead,’ ” he said. “They gave me the script. I took it. I rewrote it doing little tiny structural things, mostly bringing back the tone of the original dialogue and the vernacular — the terms, the idiom — but they really had it.

“Two-thirds of it was there. Then they gave it to Harold. He did the same thing.”

While Aykroyd admitted he is not a gamer, he was still impressed by Terminal Reality’s knowledge of special effects as well as its familiarity with Ghostbusters’ lingo and style.

More through the link.

Poor old Ghostbusters scriptwriter Harold Ramis didn’t know how much work was involved in writing and voice-acting a game.

“It was a little weird. I had no idea because I’m not a gamer,” he told MTV.

“The game scripts are like 250 pages. You need all these alternatives so it took forever. A lot of it is just yelling, ‘Look out! Throw that trap, rookie!’ Stuff like that.

“Fortunately the voice still fits. The uniform unfortunately doesn’t”.

Ours doesn’t either, Harold.

Game’s out in June.

Speaking to videogaming247, Ernie Hudson – the actor who played Winston Zeddmore in the Ghostbusters movie – has revealed the length of the upcoming game’s script. Basically, it’s a half a Haze.

“You know, I read the script, and it’s a really good script,” he said. “It’s huge. It covers every possibility. A regular film script is 120 pages, this thing’s 480 pages, or something.”

Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis, the talent behind the original film script, wrote the new, original content for the game.

Hudson was at the MCM Expo in London promoting the game, to which he’s added a VO.

“All the characters are back, including Bill Murray, which I was surprised at, because Bill tends to not do these things,” he said. “If you look at his movies, I think the only time he ever did a sequel was with Ghostbusters. And it took five years to get him to do that.”

We’ll post the full interview with Ernie later this week.