THEY’RE FUNNY THAT WAY . . .
Famously humble clowns Bill Murray, Gilda Radner get Hot Docs nod,
Early cast members of Saturday Night Live had humility baked right into their troupe name: The Not Ready For Prime Time Players.
It was a send-up of showbiz pretensions and a signal of their determination to make a splash in comedy while remaining in touch with regular folks. They meant it, too, looking askance at Chevy Chase when he bolted SNL after its debut 1975-76 season to pursue Hollywood stardom.
Bill Murray and the late Gilda Radner, briefly a real-life couple in the early 1970s and also a hilarious nerd duo Todd DiLaMuca and Lisa Loopner on SNL, were prime practitioners of this humble-fame approach, which Murray still espouses, even as the world insisted on giving them applause, awards and adoration.
It’s evident in two films screening at Hot Docs, the documentary film festival currently underway in Toronto: Tommy Avallone’s The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned From a Mythical Man and Lisa D’Apolito’s Love, Gilda.
The Bill Murray Stories, which has screenings tonight, Saturday and Sunday at Hot Docs, addresses head-on the title subject’s amusingly bizarre habit of downplaying his fame while barging into regular lives. Avallone follows up reports, readily available online — search “Bill Murray photobomb” on YouTube — of the comic actor’s propensity to delight his many fans by spontaneously joining in on whatever they’re doing.
He’s popped up in engagement photos, at bachelor parties, birthday bashes and even a White House press briefing, the latter to mock-solemnly make his predictions for World Series success for his beloved Chicago Cubs.
Murray is happy to do just about anything to help make an event happier: shake a tambourine, serve drinks and even wash dishes. Avallone’s film includes clips of many grainy and shaky cellphone videos taken by excited Murray fans, as the star of Ghostbusters, Caddyshack and Lost In Translation — to name just three of his many post- SNL movie hits — suddenly graces them with his presence.
“No one will ever believe you,” Murray tells the startled and amused people he’s “photobombed,” a term that in his case should be enlarged to “memory bombed,” one fan suggests, because of how much of an impact Murray makes just by acting like a regular Joe.
Murray, 67, often exits the scene as quickly as he makes it, and he’s not inclined — in this movie or elsewhere — to comment on the meaning of his random visits. When a fan at the 2015 Comic-Con asks Murray to explain his pop-up encounters, the comic smiles and feigns ignorance: “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” he says to the crowd. “It sounds like fun though, doesn’t it?”
He’ll leave it to others to analyze his intentions, although it’s obvious he simply enjoys being loved. A Texas bartender named Tyler Van Aiken tells Avallone’s camera that he figures Murray long ago decided it would be easier to just embrace stardom, rather than try to flee from it, as so many celebrities seem to do.
“How crazy would it be if you walked around town and everybody loved you? That would be exhausting,” Van Aiken says.
Gilda Radner, who died from ovarian cancer in 1989 at the age of 42, had a more complicated approach to stardom. She was simultaneously enraptured and repelled by it, as Love, Gilda makes clear.
Radner grew up in Detroit thinking of herself as homely and fat (she had a lifelong struggle with eating disorders), yet secure in the knowledge that she could make people laugh with her many self- deprecating characters — in her SNL years they included such popular creations as language-mangling senior Emily Litella and sassy Latina Roseanne Roseannadanna.
Her brief life included an Emmy win, a hit one-woman show on Broadway and a posthumous Grammy. She also starred in several Hollywood comedies — none of them nearly as successful as Murray’s, to her chagrin.
Yet at heart, Radner longed to be just accepted and adored as a regular person.
“My main priority is to be a girl,” she writes in her abundant diary notes, revealed in Love, Gilda. “I never wanted to be anything else.”
But her talent at making people laugh would insist on making her a star, right when she first grabbed public attention as part of the Godspell troupe in Toronto, where she would meet Martin Short, a future SNL player and briefly a romantic partner.
Radner was the first cast member hired by SNL producer Lorne Michaels for his counterculture TV show. She was arguably the most beloved member of The Not Ready For Prime Time Players during their five-year reign on SNL from 1975 to 1980.
Love, Gilda — which has two screenings left at Hot Docs, on Thurday and Saturday— credits her with being the first person to utter the word “bitch” on network TV without being censored, a tribute both to Radner and the popularity of her daffy Litella character, whom she based on her adored childhood nanny.
She’s also apparently the first person to talk openly on network TV about having cancer, which she did on her friend Garry Shandling’s show, a few months before her death. She managed to make fun of a very bad situation, also doing so in her autobiography It’s Always Something, titled for a Roseanne Roseannadanna catch phrase.
“My biggest motivation has always been love,” Radner wrote in another of her diary entries, and this humble statement of purpose applies equally to her and Bill Murray.
See hotdocs.ca for screening times and venues.