On June 20, the Nantucket Film Festival will honor Harold Ramis with their Screenwriter’s Tribute, and will host a special 25th anniversary screening of Ghostbusters (there’s ticket info on the Festival’s website). With speculation over the long-awaited Ghostbusters 3 at a fever pitch, I called Ramis and we talked about the status of that project, how he’s been “burned by sequels” and why he made a villain out of the EPA.

Why do you think that people are still so hungry for a new Ghostbusters, twenty years after the last film? Why Ghostbusters, and not, like, Caddyshack?

There was another “Caddyshack,” and it was terrible. That could be one reason.

Rodney Dangerfield wanted to keep it alive. It must have been mid-’80s, and I said, “I can’t imagine another ‘Caddyshack.’”

He prevailed on me, “No, it’ll be great. It’ll be great.” The studio loved the idea, but he was the only one who wanted to do it. Ted Knight had passed away. Bill Murray had no interest. Chevy had moved on. So it was going to be a movie based around Rodney, and the studio’s approach to me was, “Well, if you don’t write it, someone else will, and then it’ll be really terrible.”

So I said, “OK,” and I let them pay me a lot of money. I wrote it with a writing partner of mine named Peter Torokvei. Then Rodney pulled out. He got into a contractual dispute with the studio, and he wasn’t doing it. It left us kind of holding the bag. I pulled out at that time, and they went ahead and did it anyway, the old executive producers of the film. So there was no one involved who had original knowledge of Caddyshack making this sequel, and it was awful. We literally crawled out of the theater when we saw it. We didn’t want anyone to recognize us.

So I’ve been burned with sequels in the past. Even the sequel to Ghostbusters was not nearly as popular as the original.

Why do you think that was?

There are a lot of explanations. I don’t know. It came out four years after the original one. I think it was hard to find … think the effects got a little out of hand. I had ideas for it that got changed in going through the development mill. Everyone has a different idea, and what ended up in the script was not necessarily the way I would have gone.

So I’m just not sure what happened, except that it didn’t do as well. [laughs] The most easy explanation for this is sometimes you write better than other times.

One of the things I’ve always found really fascinating about Ghostbusters II is the way that it deals with the amount of time in between the two movies, like the thrown-out comments about how the Ghostbusters were sued in the intervening years. I’ve always kind of wanted to see that movie.

Of what happened right after the first one, yeah.

So what’s going to have happened in the 20 years in between Ghostbusters II and Ghostbusters III?

Oh, I can’t give away the spoilers. But it’s all just hypothetical now. We started with a story, and [Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky] are working on the script. So in the process of writing the first draft, they may deviate from the story we laid down. So I can’t guarantee anything, anyway. Of course, in total self-interest, my best idea was about what’s happened to Spengler in the meantime, what he’d been doing…

There’s also this thing in both movies where it’s like they keep saving the world, but nobody ever really gives them any credit. It’s like they just keep having to prove themselves. They save New York City, and then they get sued for it.

Right. Well, it’s the way the world is, I guess. George Bush saved the world from terrorism, and look — he got kicked out of office. [laughs]

Which reminds me: did you know that Ghostbusters has been embraced by conservatives?

I saw that in the National Review’s best conservative films or something. A lot of their titles are about the empowerment of the individual over the bureaucracies. So that’s one of them. We were entrepreneurs, small businessmen, who made it in spite of government regulation. The EPA was the bad guy, which was kind of a counterintuitive instinct we had. The conservatives just jumped on it.

Why did you pick the EPA?

Well, it seemed logical, like who would be involved in regulating the Ghostbusters? I think we actually picked it because it was so counterintuitive, because we think of environmental protection as such a good thing, which it is, but the Environmental Protection Agency is not always the most efficient. Here we were dealing with a completely new area. It wasn’t so much that the EPA was the bad guy. There was a bad EPA guy, who was the bad guy.

Right. The actual ghosts were kind of more threatening.

Yes. It was even written about — someone sent me something from an environmental journal, a journal of environmental law wrote about why Ghostbusters went after the EPA. But that wasn’t anything mentioned in the movie. I mean, in the second movie, Bill Murray’s going in the art museum. The guard at the desk says, “Oh, your TV show is one of my two favorite programs” — Bill’s been doing this show, “World of the Psychic with Peter Venkman” — and he says, “What’s your other favorite?” The guy says, “Bassmasters,” which is a fishing show. I started getting letters from bass fishermen. People pick up on things and read a lot into it.

Do you feel at all protective of the films, against certain readings?

No, every film is a projective device, to some extent. It’s a Rorschach test. The movies don’t change. We bring ourselves to these experiences, and everyone experiences them differently. So the movie’s the movie, and most people really like it. I’m sure there were fundamentalists who thought it was the devil’s work.

Where does the new game fit into the Ghostbusters timeline? Does the new movie happen after that?

I don’t think we’re treating the game like it’s the sequel because it’s set back then, anyway. The characters look like we did in the ’80s. They decided not to make them fat, gray-haired, and balding. [laughter] I think it’s a good commercial move.

I think that would be an interesting game, though. A new spin on the Ghostbusters mythology.

Yeah, where we’d stop and see our doctors along the way, stop and take our medication.
I was reading this interview you did with “The Believer,” in which you said that you really wanted to make a painful marital comedy about how life is difficult.

I was thinking about that, yes. At the time, I was. We were actually working on one, yes.

What happened to that impulse?

That particular one?

Yes.

Are you married?

[laughs] No.

[laughs] No? You’ve heard people talk about marriage?

I have, yes. Once or twice.

Marriage is difficult. When it’s great, it’s great, When it’s not, it’s horrible. Most people have a similar experience of it. That’s why there’s so much marital comedy. I think that romantic comedy sells people a - there’s a mythology around romance and marriage. It’s not a good thing, the mythology.

But you’ve dropped that project now?

It still would be a good idea, but [laughs] I’m afraid my wife would kill me.