The irreverent director who made
Ivan Reitman 1946–2022
Ivan Reitman didn’t traffic in subtleties or arch bon mots. The director and producer made his name with a string of broad, irreverent comedies that harnessed the anarchic energy of Saturday Night Live stars John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Dan Aykroyd. These films included the bawdy fraternity send-up Animal House (1978); Meatballs (1979), featuring Murray as a counselor at a nutty summer camp; and Stripes (1981), a Murray vehicle set in the army. His biggest success, though, was 1984’s Ghostbusters, starring Murray, Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis as parapsychologists who start a ghost-removal business. Combining madcap humor with horror and offbeat special effects, it was an international smash, launching a TV spinoff and a pair of sequels. Reitman said he had an inkling the film would strike gold the first time he saw the stars walking up Madison Avenue in their jumpsuits. “There was just something so extraordinary about that image,” he said. “I said, ‘I think this movie’s gonna work.’”
Reitman was born in Czechoslovakia, where his father owned a vinegar factory, said the Associated Press. His mother was an Auschwitz survivor. When the postwar communist government “began imprisoning capitalists,” the family fled to Vienna in the hold of a barge, then joined a relative in Toronto. There, Reitman “displayed his showbiz inclinations,” starting a puppet theater and studying music and drama at McMaster University. In college he “made his first short films and met many of the future stars of Canadian comedy,” including Rick Moranis, said The Guardian. After graduating, he directed a series of low-budget comedy and horror movies before hitting the big time as a producer of Animal House.
While none of Reitman’s post-Ghostbusters films “scaled similar box-office heights,” he had several more hits, said Variety, including Beethoven (1992) and the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedies Twins (1988) and Kindergarten Cop (1990).
When his “track record as a director cooled,” he turned to producing, making Up in the Air,a 2009 comedy-drama starring George Clooney as a corporate downsizer that won six Oscar nominations. Reitman spoke often about the difficulty of comedy—and the extent to which people underestimate it. “People tend to think that you just get some funny guys in a room, turn the camera on, and ‘Boom!’” he said. “Whereas I like to think I had something to do with it.”