Caddyshack: Chronicle Of Cult Comedy Classic

Morgan is currently writing her own book about her experience on the film.

Directed by the late Harold Ramis, Caddyshack was met with mostly negative reviews when it was released in July 1980. It was a modest box-office hit, but was eclipsed by The Empire Strikes Back, the disaster parody Airplane! and The Blues Brothers, with which it had a definite rivalry.

The film, created in a haze of pot smoke by Ramis, Brian Doyle-Murray (Bill Murray’s older brother) and National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney, has since gained a cult following. But based on Nashawaty’s account, it’s amazing that it came together at all.

Nashawaty recounts the early days of the Lampoon, the Groundlings improv troupe and SNL’s Not Ready for Primetime Players to the massive success of the 1978 film National Lampoon’s Animal House, which quickly became to that point the most successful comedy film of all time.

Kenney and Ramis were both writers on Animal House, but Ramis in particular felt slighted by studio involvement in the film. When the pair looked to their next project, they would try to do it on their own, with Ramis as a first-time director.

For writing help, they turned to Doyle-Murray, who’d always wanted to make a movie about his days as a teenage caddie at an exclusive golf club.

Orion Pictures, a fairly new studio at the time, gave the unexperienced filmmakers creative freedom. What followed was a film that barely resembled its early scripts and instead cobbled together mostly improvised scenes to create a pretty loose story.

The lack of studio heads on set also led to rampant partying and cocaine use. Kenney can even be seen snorting a line in the background of one of the scenes. Ted Knight, the veteran TV actor who played the snobbish Judge Smails, seemed to be the only cast member who didn’t partake.

The film was originally supposed to focus on the caddies at the fictional Bushwood golf club, but the young unknown actors lacked the ­chemistry and improvisational chops that Chase, Murray and Dangerfield had. The caddy storylines were drastically reduced and the improv masters’ parts all extended.

The recent Netflix film A Futile and Stupid Gesture, which chronicles the life and career of Kenney, suggests the famous animatronic gopher from the film was added thoughtlessly by studio interference, but Nashawaty’s account shows that it was used as a clever way to tie Ramis’s unchained scenes together.

Nashawaty’s book is a great chronicle of this long-gone era of comedy — the stories of on-set debauchery, Dangerfield’s lack of film experience and the rivalry between Chase and Murray make for a fun read.

But there is a disturbing side to all the fun. Cindy Morgan, who played Knight’s sex-crazed daughter, felt exploited and bullied into doing a nude scene and was treated rudely by Chase and others.

The actress agreed to appear topless for a sex scene between Lacey and Danny in Caddyshack. But she wasn’t aware that producer (Jon) Peters had booked a Playboy photographer to come to set to shoot her for a promotional spread in the magazine, which she initially declined to do. She reluctantly agreed to go through with it when Peters threatened to end her career, before Ramis stepped in and canceled the shoot.

Morgan is currently writing her own book about her experience on the film.