Ivan Reitman: An appreciation of the man who brought us Ghostbusters and so much more

Like a bunch of entrepreneurial paranormal investigators who decide to set up their own business, Ivan Reitman was involved in 1984's original Ghostbusters from the ground level. The director-producer, who died on Saturday at the age of 75, worked with the movie's writers Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd, helping to turn the latter's 80-page treatment into an actual script at Aykroyd's house in Martha's Vineyard during the summer of 1983. "What I remember was the confidence that the three of us had in getting there," Reitman told EW in 2015. "We just worked all day until dinner time, and we just kept adding very, very quickly. After two weeks, we actually had a draft. It wasn't the greatest draft, but it was a pretty amazing draft nevertheless, that worked."

It was Reitman who insisted that Aykroyd's fantastical imaginings be rooted in a down-and-dirty New York setting, filming much of the movie in New York, beginning with a shot of Aykroyd, Ramis, and their costar Bill Murray running through Manhattan in their Ghostbusters uniforms. "It was Madison Avenue around 61st, and I sort of just look up, and I see them for the first time, and I got this amazing shiver up my spine," Reitman would later tell writer Geoff Boucher. "And I said, 'Wow, that's a fabulous image' — I didn't even know why it was special, but I just had the sense at that moment that we were doing something that was going to work."

Reitman's hunch proved correct. Released in June 1984, Ghostbusters topped the box office chart for seven consecutive weeks, replacing 1978's National Lampoon's Animal House — which Reitman produced — as the most successful comedy movie of all time. Had those two films been the only ones on Reitman's résumé, it would already have been remarkable. But the filmmaker's career involved much more than the adventures of John Belushi's Bluto and Murray's Peter Venkman. Whether it was putting Kevin Kline in the White House or getting Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant, Reitman was a master director of the star-filled, high concept blockbuster comedy — a genre that is increasingly becoming a distant memory to cinemagoers but dominated the box office in the '80s and '90s. And as a producer, he helped shepherd the visions of several important young directors to the big screen, both in the comedy genre and beyond it.

The son of immigrants from then-Czechoslovakia, Reitman was born in Komárno but raised in Toronto. In the early '70s, he directed a low-budget comedy called Cannibal Girls and produced the one-act stage show Spellbound, which featured music by Howard Shore and a book written by master-of-horror-in-the-making David Cronenberg, with whom Reitman frequently collaborated around this period. "My inspiration was not Hollywood, but the New York underworld," Cronenberg later told Venice Magazine. Although Reitman would become famous for his comedy career, his early film successes came via horror, producing Cronenberg's 1975 virus-zombie shocker Shivers and executive-producing the director's follow-up Rabid.

Reitman also worked in the U.S., producing the off-Broadway The National Lampoon Show with a cast that included Murray, Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Harold Ramis. That experience led Reitman to pitch National Lampoon publisher Matty Simmons on a movie inspired by his satirical publication. "I was a big fan of the Lampoon," Reitman told EW in 1998. "One day, I called up Matty Simmons and said, 'Let's make movies.' ... When Saturday Night Live started, Lorne Michaels picked up most of the cast [of The National Lampoon Show]. But Harold Ramis was sort of left off. I told Harold we should put a movie together using some of the skits from the Lampoon show." (Ramis would co-write National Lampoon's Animal House with Doug Kenney and Chris Miller.)

Reitman had originally planned to direct Animal House but Universal insisted on hiring the more experienced John Landis, who had recently overseen the sketch-filled comedy Kentucky Fried Movie. "I had worked on it three years, brought Belushi into it... my original intention was always to direct it," Reitman told EW in 2012. "The studio wouldn't let me do it, and so we hired John Landis, who did a great job." Among Reitman's producing tasks on the project was trying to find a college prepared to host the bawdy film, which would eventually be shot at the University of Oregon. "The hardest part was getting a college to let us shoot there," Reitman told EW. "Universities would say, 'Oh, you're from Hollywood? Come on down.' Then they'd read the script and turn us down."

Animal House was made on a budget of around $3 million and grossed $120 million on its initial release, giving Reitman the clout to direct his first, properly-budgeted film, 1981's summer camp comedy Meatballs. The movie starred Murray, who was something of a mercurial character even at that early stage in his career. "It's not like he was a big star or anything," Reitman told EW. "But he's always kind of been iconoclastically difficult about agreeing to be in things. And also hard to reach. But I refused to take no for an answer, and I refused to hire anyone else as the star of the movie because I couldn't think of anyone else who could kind of fill those shoes. He agreed finally to do it, I think, on the eve of the first day of shooting, and he showed up on set on the second day of shooting. It was really touch-and-go all the way. But when he got there, he was absolutely committed. He was brilliant. He helped rewrite the script, as he usually does. It was the start of his career, and he was certainly responsible for the start of my directing career."

Meatballs earned an impressive $43 million, and Reitman and Murray re-teamed for 1981's Stripes. Reitman lured Murray to join the army-comedy by first casting the comedian's friend Ramis, who had little onscreen film experience at the time, as one of the leads. "I called up Bill," Reitman later recalled. "I said, 'You've got to help us do this, it'll be great, and I've called Harold Ramis to be the second guy.' I remember [Bill] calling me up saying, 'That's just not fair, bringing Harold into this... I'm going to have to do it, right?'" Stripes was another hit and helped pave the way for the trio to collaborate again on Ghostbusters.

Following the success of Ghostbusters, Reitman repeatedly proved his cinematic skills, both when it came to crafting comedy and handling A-list talent. The director located and utilized the funny bone of Terminator actor Schwarzenegger with 1988's Twins, 1990's Kindergarten Cop, and 1994's Junior while also crafting one of the all-time great political comedies with 1993's Dave. Outside of the films he directed, Reitman played a producing role on a slew of other movies, including 1996's Space Jam, 1997's Private Parts, 2009's Up in the Air — which was directed by Reitman's son Jason — and 2012's Will Smith-starring superhero film Hancock.

Reitman also helped launch a new generation of big-screen comedy talent by executive-producing director Todd Phillips' films Road Trip and Old School after meeting the filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival. "Ivan produced my first two studio films (Road Trip and Old School), but that title, producer, doesn't even do him justice," Phillips wrote on Instagram after the news broke about Reitman's death. "If it were boxing, he would have been my cornerman. He had my back, and he taught me SO much. He was always so generous with his expertise and experience, and he was also so f---ing harsh, in the BEST way."

Finally, with Aykroyd, Reitman became the keeper of the Ghostbusters flame, directing 1989's Ghostbusters II and producing 2016's Ghostbusters and last year's Jason Reitman-directed Ghostbusters: Afterlife. At the New York Comic-Con panel for the latter film in October 2021, Reitman addressed the gathered crowd of fans, many of them dressed in Ghostbusters costumes, and expressed his joy at the continuation of the franchise he had created with Aykroyd and Ramis decades before. "Well, I was lucky enough to get a great idea from Dan Aykroyd, he sent me an 80-page script, and we made the film in 1984, rushing all the way," said the filmmaker. "And it's amazing how you responded to it, and I just want to thank you all for being here today and hanging in there for almost forty years."

To riff on the lyric from a certain movie's theme song, Ivan Reitman was ultimately in the business of making audiences feel good. Few filmmakers have succeeded as spectacularly.

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