Ramis Reax

Lot's of reaction to the death of Harold Ramis, and Shackelford is our helpful tour guide.  He has items both at his own blog here and here, as well as at Golf Digest's Local Knowledge blog.

The LK piece has some great detail on the chaotic creation of Caddyshack, crediting Ramis with coaxing memorable performances despite the fact that he never played golf.  The piece also included this video of quotes from the film:



In the pieces at his own place, Shack links to many worthy sources, most notably this Tad Friend post at the New Yorker's Culture Blog and Frined's profile of Ramis for the magazine in 2003.  He also provides this short video of Ramis speaking about how the Marx Brothers influenced Caddyshack...



and this longer piece, which I've not yet had time to view, on the making of the movie:



Of course, everyone's favorite character from the movie deserves its own video tribute:



I'll give Eric Malinnowski at Fox Sports the last word:

As a genre, sports comedies were still a cagey proposition by 1980, more often prone to the over-Hollywoodized productions of the 1950s than the gritty realism of the post-Vietnam '70s. This trend, as it applies to sports films, really only started to be reflected in 1977, with George Roy Hill’s hockey classic "Slap Shot" being the de facto progenitor of this emerging trend. But if "Slap Shot" laid the table for the new subversive sports comedy, "Caddyshack" pulled the cloth out from under everything. 

"Bull Durham," "Major League," "White Men Can’t Jump" — you could argue that every one of these films and others that followed ("Happy Gilmore," duh) owe a debt to Ramis, showing that there was indeed an audience to be gained from the sports movie that dared to repel the heartstrings being pulled by others. When "Raging Bull" premiered four months later, this new wave was officially underway, but "Caddyshack" got there first. When "Rudy," "Hoosiers," "The Natural" and "Field of Dreams," among others, all followed in due time, they now had fair competition. The idea of the “sports movie” was a fully formed identity rather than a mere caricature. "Caddyshack" and its spiritual successors became constant refreshers that sports are, and should be, fun. 

None of this happens without Ramis, who kickstarted a monumental career in Hollywood by putting all his initial energies and creativity into "Caddyshack," a truly original film that has not seen its equal since. Ramis may now be gone, but he left his mark on an industry and countless millions of sports fans who will be quoting lines from his movies for as long as we even have movies. 

So he’s got that going for him, which is nice.