A Hundredth-Birthday Serenade, from Bill Murray

The actor and Ivan Reitman, the director, throw a Zoom bash for their centenarian “Stripes” cinematographer, Bill Butler, and swap stories about John Candy and the Teamsters.
Reitman, Butler, and MurrayIllustration by João Fazenda

On a recent Wednesday, Bill Murray and Ivan Reitman, two old friends whose collaborations include “Meatballs,” “Stripes,” and “Ghostbusters,” reconnected, via Zoom, to observe some milestones. Reitman, cheerfully placid, sat in a tidy home office decorated with awards; Murray, white hair askew, angled his iPad from fireplace to ceiling fan, occasionally muting himself. “I could lie on the floor,” he said, helpfully. “I’ll call back.” His camera bounced toward a view of sky. Reitman smiled a little. “Seven movies,” he said.

“I can hear you,” Murray said.

This year, “Stripes” turns forty; that day, its cinematographer, Bill Butler, was turning a hundred. Butler, who lives with his wife in rural Montana, isn’t best known for his cinematography on “Stripes”—it’s often overshadowed by his work on “Jaws,” “The Conversation,” “Grease,” three “Rocky” sequels, “The Thorn Birds,” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” among others—but, in September, a new 4K Ultra HD Columbia Classics print will display it (tracking shots of drills at Fort Knox, a warmly lit mud-wrestling sequence with John Candy) in stunning clarity, along with reminiscences from Murray and Reitman.

Reitman got the idea for “Stripes,” in which a devil-may-care Manhattan cabbie (Murray) and his long-suffering friend (Harold Ramis) join the Army, in 1979, just before the Toronto première of “Meatballs.” “I was shaving and I thought, Oh, Cheech and Chong join the Army,” Reitman said. “Wouldn’t that be a funny idea?” Cheech and Chong didn’t work out. “We tried to get whatever was good from the Cheech and Chong draft and give it to Judge Reinhold—he played this druggie guy,” Reitman said.

While making “Meatballs,” Murray’s first starring role, Reitman, noting that Murray interpreted “all the beats in the script in a whole new original way,” had learned to roll with it, to “take advantage of this remarkably powerful force.” The powerful force, now in a sunny kitchen, called out to a house guest (“You can talk and walk—this is not a monastery”) and reflected on memories of “Stripes”: leading a surprisingly competent drill routine (“The real generals who came to watch it, the real brass, were, like, ‘How?’ ‘What?’ ”); his stove-top-flirtation scene (“I think I said to the prop man, ‘I want bigger stuff—spatulas, utensils’ ”); the expert camerawork of Bill Butler. In a sequence where a basketball breaks two consecutive windows, “I said to the prop guy, ‘Don’t throw it to me—throw it through the window next to me,’ ” Murray recalled. “Bill had the camera in the perfect spot.”

Murray grew pensive. “What I remember most about the movie is watching ‘Monday Night Football’ and Howard Cosell saying, ‘There is some tragic news out of New York City: John Lennon has been killed,’ ” he said, paraphrasing. Reitman nodded. “It just took the guts out of you,” Murray continued. “You think about death: ‘Why am I still alive? Why is John Lennon dead and this makeup artist is still living? Why is Judge Reinhold still alive?’ ” On set, “it actually galvanized us all as a group, because we were all mourners,” he said. “John Lennon was dead, and somebody’s gotta do the work.”

A Zoom alert: Butler was in the waiting room.

“Are we going to see him?” Murray said.

“We’re going to sing ’im!” Reitman said.

They sang “Happy Birthday” as Butler, beaming, his hair neatly combed, appeared onscreen, from Montana, in a kitchen bursting with black, white, and silver balloons. Gold Mylar “100” numerals floated behind his head. “And one hundred more!” Murray sang.

“When I think about a hundred years—” Butler said. “I could bore you to death. People, as they get older, they have all these stories to tell. I can remember the day, listening to the radio, when they made a big announcement: they had just invented plastic!” Reminiscing about “Stripes,” he said, “The Teamsters were something else.” One day, en route to lunch, “Ivan and I are riding up the hill, and we look up, and here’s his camper rolling down the hill into the lake,” Butler said, laughing. “Those drivers weren’t really friendly.”

“For Harold and I and Candy, too, to have you shooting the movie—you made us look good, Bill,” Murray said. “And you gave me a whole lot of encouragement from the first day. I remember you saying, ‘You can do what you’re going to do—I’ll find you with the camera.’ ”

“Making movies, to me, is so much fun that I don’t think I could do anything else in life,” Butler said.

“You are a good role model for those in the film industry,” Murray went on. “Don’t spend your money on alcohol and drugs, get yourself a nice place up there in nature. You’ll always be able to get your hands on some balloons—that’s obvious. You don’t have to spend all your money on balloons now.” Murray threatened to visit (“I’m coming to stay for quite a while—you might want to start throwing out some stuff, clear a lot of extra space”), and Butler signed off. Murray and Reitman observed one last milestone: watching a clip from the forthcoming movie “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” directed by Ivan’s son, Jason. The scene involved a supermarket, Paul Rudd, and a disturbance on a baking-goods shelf. “Marshmallows—look out!” Murray said. A mini marshmallow man emerged from a bag, smiled, and bit Rudd’s finger. Murray howled with laughter. ♦