Death Therapy
‘The Tensions Were So Crazy’: An Oral History of ‘What About Bob?’
The stars hated each other. The script was a mess. The producer was booted from the set. Inside one of the most tumultuous movie shoots of all time — that ended in a cult-classic comedy
T he What About Bob? production crew was deep in the woods of the tiny Virginia town of Moneta when they heard a frightening sound they couldn’t quite identify. They were over three months into shooting the 1991 Bill Murray–Richard Dreyfuss comedy about a mentally ill man who becomes obsessed with his tightly-wound therapist — way past the scheduled completion date — and things had been extremely tense from the beginning. But nothing prepared them for this.
“It sounded like an animal was being slaughtered,” says set photographer Barry Wetcher. Eventually, Wetcher says, they realized the noise was coming from a man — specifically, the film’s director, Frank Oz. A celebrated voice actor on Sesame Street and The Muppets, Oz also had a stellar career as a filmmaker by that point, having directed fan-favorite films such as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Little Shop of Horrors. (Following What About Bob?, he would also direct In and Out and Bowfinger, among other films.) But this production clearly was pushing him to his limits. “He wasn’t screaming at anyone in particular,” Wetcher says. “He was just screaming.”
The plan for the night was to film the climactic scene where Dr. Leo Marvin (Dreyfuss) takes Bob Wiley (Murray) into the wilderness and straps 20 pounds of explosives to his chest in a last-ditch attempt to finally remove the patient from his life. “Death therapy, Bob,” says a crazed Marvin. “It’s the only cure.”
Things were only slightly less charged when the cameras weren’t rolling. Murray and Dreyfuss grew to despise each other as their time in Moneta dragged on, eventually reaching a point where they didn’t even communicate when the cameras were off. If this wasn’t enough of a headache for Oz, he was fighting his own war with producer Laura Ziskin about nearly every aspect of the movie, including how to end it. On that night in the woods, Oz finally hit his breaking point.
“Remember in the old Woody Woodpecker cartoons, where the old thermometer goes up and up and up and up and then explodes?” Oz asks as he munches on oatmeal at an Upper West Side diner late in 2024. “That’s what I saw at that moment. And I remember kicking over a garbage can and shouting, ‘Children! Children!’ I walked to my trailer, and I just couldn’t believe what was going on. I was so upset. I remember Richard knocking on my door, and I said, ‘Richard, go away. I don’t want to talk to you now. Go away!'”
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Of course, all of this was hidden from the public when the film hit theaters on May 17, 1991. It was the top movie at the box office that weekend, and ultimately grossed $64 million ($150 million in 2025 dollars). “In this splendidly cast film, Murray and Dreyfuss play off each other to their maximum advantage,” wrote Hollywood Reporter critic Duane Byrge. “Murray does what he does best, to shine on and ultimately destroy authority figures, while Dreyfuss‘ portrayal of the runty doctor is splendidly Napoleonic.”
What About Bob? had a long afterlife on cable and home video, and is generally seen as one of Murray’s greatest onscreen achievements, just one notch below Groundhog Day and Rushmore. “Not everything holds up,” Murray told Variety’s Rebecca Rubin in January, noting that he’d recently rewatched What About Bob?. “I hadn’t seen it for 15 years. I saw it and said, ‘God damn, it was funny.’”
Murray may be able to look back at the movie and laugh today, but most Nineties cinephiles know the humor came at a considerable cost. Stories have emerged over the years about Murray chucking a glass at Dreyfuss’ head, tossing Ziskin into the lake, and causing general mayhem on the set. But most of the participants have stayed silent, and the full story of the production has never come out — until now. Rolling Stone spent the past several months conducting extensive interviews with members of the cast and crew and, with the help of her former assistant Blair Richwood, combing through the archives of Ziskin, who died from breast cancer in 2011.
While Murray did not respond to interview requests, this story includes detailed accounts from Richard Dreyfuss, Julie Hagerty (who played Leo Marvin’s wife, Faye), Charlie Korsmo (the Marvins’ son Siggy), Kathryn Erbe (daughter Anna Marvin), director Frank Oz, screenwriter Tom Schulman, casting director Glenn Daniels, and staff photographer Barry Wetcher. It’s the story of a painfully funny movie that required a lot of pain to bring to life.
I. Baby Steps Toward a Screenplay
On Aug. 14, 1983, a new novel named August appeared on The New York Times bestseller list alongside Stephen King’s Christine, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, and the illustrated novelization of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Written by Judith Rossner, it chronicles a tumultuous, five-year relationship between a disturbed New York teenager named Dawn Henley and her psychoanalyst, Dr. Lulu Shinefield, who has significant psychological issues of her own. Its title refers to the Shinefields’ yearly August vacation in the Hamptons, and how Henley deteriorates when her doctor is away. It spent 19 months on the Times bestseller list.
Two of its readers were screenwriter Alvin Sargent (Julia, Paper Moon, Ordinary People) and producer Laura Ziskin (Eyes of Laura Mars, No Way Out), who felt that August’s central idea of a patient cracking up when their therapist goes on vacation would make a funny movie. They wrote a 14-page treatment in 1987 called What About Bob?, creating characters and a story that, other than its original seed, was completely different from August. It begins with a group of shrinks at a marina talking about the tragedy of Dr. Marvin, a once distinguished colleague who lost his mind when a patient became obsessed with him and his family. The story then unfolds in flashback.
Sargent and Ziskin wrote out a handful of scenes with bits of dialogue that wound up in the finished movie largely intact (“They can turn a perfectly peaceful household into an insane asylum!”), but it ends with a series of rough thoughts and questions, like, “How does Bob get to stay or does he go? I think he should stay in the house or move in somehow … How does he drive the Doctor crazy?”
To answer these questions and get their treatment turned into a complete screenplay, Sargent and Ziskin turned to Tom Schulman after falling in love with his spec scripts for the boarding school drama Dead Poets Society and the black comedy Second Sight. Neither movie had been made at that point, and they had no way of knowing Dead Poets Society would become a beloved Robin Williams classic that would earn Schulman a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award. (It hit theaters the same month as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, based on another Schulman script.) At the time Sargent and Ziskin came to him, he was a relative unknown who loved their idea and desperately wanted to find a way to make it work.
Tom Schulman (screenwriter): I felt right away that the therapist needed to be at the high point of his career. I figured he had a book coming, was going to be on a show like Good Morning America, and this guy Bob would come into his life and essentially destroy every bit of success he had just had. There needed to be some ego on his behalf to get destroyed.
He had equally vivid ideas about the patient, Bob Wiley, who was named after Wile E. Coyote due to his tenacity and relentless spirit.
Schulman: I felt that Bob needed to be multi-phobic, just have an array of phobias and problems, really unable to even get from his apartment to a shrink’s office. I felt like the Marvin character would have another shrink refer Bob to him, a shrink who just wants to get rid of this patient. I thought Marvin ought to have a book with a reasonable idea that seemed like it could help Bob. So [that book], Baby Steps, came to me as that kernel of a thing that Bob would at least at first think, “Oh, my God, I’m cured.” But nothing lasts long.
Schulman stuck with Ziskin and Sargent’s idea of telling the story via flashback.
Schulman: It started with a group of psychiatrists in a boat on Lake Winnipesaukee telling stories of the worst doctor-patient situation they’d ever heard of. One of them says, “You’ve heard nothing until you heard about what Leo Marvin had to deal with.” Another one says, “That was his house over there. There’s just the chimney, the whole house is gone.” The story launches from there.
In his original draft, the first thing we learn about Bob Wiley is that he compulsively swallows toothbrushes. “In three excruciating swallows, like a mouse going down the throat of a snake, the toothbrush disappears down his throat,” he wrote. “Bob pounds his chest, swallowing as he does. Then, delicately, he belches. He takes a deep breath, relaxes somewhat, and opens the medicine cabinet. There sit ten packaged toothbrushes. Bob opens one.” This idea was ultimately discarded after much fiery debate on the set (more on that later), but Schulman also came up with a simple idea for Bob that wound up driving much of the story.
Schulman: I realized that the most important thing for him to do would be to constantly interpret all of Marvin’s efforts to get rid of him as forms of therapy. There was no hope for Marvin in that sense.
He also realized he had to find a way to make the audience root for Bob and against Marvin, even though what Bob is doing — stalking his therapist and his family on vacation — is wildly inappropriate and could be the plot of a horror movie if presented differently.
Schulman: Marvin has to be an egomaniac, so that we are really rooting for him to be taken down a notch. And Bob has to be sympathetic, just needy in a way that makes us want someone to help him.
II. Baby Steps Toward a Director and Cast
After selling the movie to Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, the search started for a director. Notes from Laura Ziskin’s archives reveal they considered Milos Forman, Steve Kloves, Arthur Hiller, Danny DeVito, and Carl Reiner before settling on Frank Oz. Despite being best known for voicing Yoda, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Cookie Monster and his pioneering puppetry work with Jim Henson, Oz was also a successful director. He was on a hot streak in the late Eighties after helming The Muppets Take Manhattan, Little Shop of Horrors, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
Frank Oz (director): I remember it starting with [Disney CEO] Jeffrey Katzenberg calling me to ask if I was interested. This was after Dirty Rotten Scoundrels came out, and around the time Jim [Henson] died. And I would get a lot of scripts, mostly comedies, from my agents. This was one of the scripts that I felt I could do something with, because, from my viewpoint, I feel like comedy is often pushed too hard. I felt the script needed grounding, and I like doing that.
Bill Murray was everyone’s first thought to play Bob Wiley. But his last two movies were the blockbusters Scrooged and Ghostbusters II, and he was an extremely hot commodity.
Schulman: Alvin, Laura, and I pretty much insisted that they go out to Bill first. There was nobody else in my mind who would have worked. And Bill said yes. But then Bill and the studio got locked in a battle over his fees, which went on for maybe six or eight months. They went back and forth, getting closer and closer, but then reaching a place where they were just deadlocked. And then the studio started coming up with other options.
One name they tossed around was Robin Williams.
Glenn Daniels (casting director): Robin Williams could have worked in anything because he was brilliant.
Oz: I think that Bill was the best choice, but I could have worked with Robin Williams. I could imagine a version of the movie with Robin Williams in my brain.
Richard Dreyfuss (Leo Marvin): It doesn’t seem like Robin would have done that. I don’t know. It seems too easy for him.
It became a moot point once Murray and Disney struck a deal. Finding the right Dr. Marvin, however, took a bit more thought. Ziskin’s notes show that both Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine were considered at one point.
Schulman: We talked about Alan Arkin at one time, who I thought would’ve been great. I also vaguely recall Woody Allen’s name coming up for Dr. Marvin, but I thought it would be a bad idea. Woody was essentially a very likable guy. And yes, he’s associated with psychiatry because of all his neuroses, but it still felt wrong.
Charlie Korsmo (Siggy Marvin): I think the tone would’ve been totally wrong if they cast Woody Allen. He could do miffs, not volcanic.
Oz: I remember being in the Four Seasons, and I auditioned several people for Dr. Marvin. I also remember speaking to Bob Newhart and Richard Benjamin for the part.
Daniels: I don’t see Bob Newhart and Bill Murray as having enough friction between them. I don’t see them as that far apart from each other.
Dreyfuss: I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d used Bob Newhart, but I’m better.
Daniels: Richard Dreyfuss was very well-respected at the time. He was an Oscar winner [for 1977’s The Goodbye Girl], and it was interesting to cast him in a comedic role, because he usually did drama.
Oz: I’d never worked with Richard before. It was Jeffery [Katzenberg], I think, who wanted Richard. So I met Richard and we talked about it. I found him to be brilliant. He felt that in the original script, Marvin was made a fool too often, and he was right.
Finding the right actress to play Leo’s wife, Faye, also took a bit of work.
Daniels: A lot of women who came in who were hot at the time. The first one that comes to my mind is Anne Archer, and she had just come off of Fatal Attraction. She came in and she was completely unfunny. So we realized that we needed somebody who was really good at comedy, but wasn’t going to steal the screen from Bill or Richard and also be believable as the mother, et cetera, et cetera. And we settled on Julie Hagerty pretty soon. Frank and Laura and myself discussed it, and we were all big fans of hers. She is like Diane Keaton in that she comes with her own neuroses that usually works.
Julie Hagerty (Faye Marvin): I remember Frank Oz asking me to come audition in an empty theater where I read with Bill and Richard. I was really nervous at first, but then we started playing and it was fun.
Oz: I tend to work collaboratively. I wanted to figure out who Bill and Richard liked, since they’d have to work with them. I was trying to decide between Julie and somebody else, and Richard kept telling me that Julie was fantastic. That put me over the line.
Glenn Daniels read with many young actresses for the part of Anna Marvin, Faye and Marvin’s teenage daughter.
Daniels: One of them was a young lady named Gwyneth Paltrow. She was brought into my office by Boaty Boatwright, who was a talent agent for many, many years. She came to prominence for casting [Mary Badham as] Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. And she showed up at my office with Gwyneth without even a phone call. She just said, “Read her.” Gwyneth hadn’t done anything at that point. Nothing. And as Boaty and I were talking, she just looked like a deer in headlights. I had no idea what she was doing there. But anyway, I read her and she wasn’t funny, and it was a comedy. I had to tell Boaty it wasn’t going to work. I wound up talking to maybe a hundred girls, and nobody seemed to fit in. And then my assistant said to me, “What about Kathryn Erbe?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know who she is. Have her come in.'”
Kathryn Erbe (Anna Marvin): I auditioned for it at two different points. The first came when I was still an undergrad drama major at NYU. And then I graduated, went to L.A. for a sitcom [Chicken Soup starring Jackie Mason and Lynn Redgrave], that only ran 12 episodes. When they called me back for a second audition, I was doing Grapes of Wrath on Broadway. I thought [the part] had gone away at this point, but I remember riding my bike over there and seeing them all. And I got it.
Child actor Charlie Korsmo was given a three-picture deal with Disney after his breakthrough role as the Kid in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy. It meant he didn’t have a choice when the studio told him he had the role of Siggy Marvin.
Korsmo: James Cameron had just offered me the role of John Connor in Terminator 2. But Disney exercised their option and I had to do What About Bob? instead. The first time I heard about the movie is when I was told I couldn’t do Terminator 2, but possibly could if they finished the movie just on time. But we ran a month and a half over. I loved Terminator, so I was pissed from day one. I just wanted to get out of there so badly to do T2 instead.
III. Baby Steps Toward Moneta, Virginia
The remote Virginia town of Moneta was home to a mere 236 people when the What About Bob? cast and crew arrived in the summer of 1990 after filming for a few days in New York City. The scenes take place in Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, which is 750 miles to the north, but few viewers would notice the difference.
Erbe: It was a tiny, tiny, tiny town. We spent most of our time on this beautiful property on Smith Mountain Lake that had lots of different sized and shaped condos. No one was there, because it was the end of summer into fall. And so we all had our own apartments. Mine was bigger than my one back home in New York City, and it had a balcony looking onto the water. Bill had a great big one, and he had a boat. He took us waterskiing. We went waterskiing to the full moon at night once.
Dreyfuss: We were right at the water’s edge. We loved being there.
Barry Wetcher (set photographer): It wasn’t like when you’re shooting in Philadelphia and you can go out to dinner in a great restaurant. We were all pretty much prisoners, so to speak. If I recall correctly, it was the moonshine capital of the U.S., because it was a dry county, meaning they can’t sell alcohol. And we all had houses around the lake. Bill would often throw a party on Friday or Saturday nights, and he would somehow get us alcohol. Those parties are my most pronounced memories of that movie. We also had great tennis tournaments.
Hagerty: There was one little place to eat if you left the community, then you were still in the middle of nowhere.
Erbe: I spent a lot of time with Julie and her dog, Raisin. We smoked and drank and shopped and ate, and we went horseback riding. We found this place that would take us on trail rides. We did that by the moonlight, too, and went and had a campfire dinner with a can of beans and the fire. It was awesome. We drank moonshine. It really was so fun, and we weren’t working as much as all those guys were.
Korsmo: Julie and Katy Erbe weren’t actually that far apart in age. Julie Hagerty always plays these sweet fragile women, but she’s kind of a brassy lady in real life. So they were always hanging around and smoking together even though they were playing a very prim and proper mother and daughter. They seemed like biker girls.
Erbe: We’d be at the one bar/restaurant, and Charlie would be there doing his homework. That’s probably where he was seeing me and Julie smoke. He just was a lovely kid, such a lovely kid. His humor was very dry and very funny. He was always studying. He had to continue his schoolwork when we’d be off at night. I remember wishing that he could come have more fun with us.
Hagerty: Charlie was going from movie to movie at the time, and he wanted a dog really bad. He would come into my camper when we were working and play with my dog, Raisin, and we would make frozen pizza rolls for lunch.
Everyone had memories of fun (or just plain weird) interactions with Bill Murray. One example: On Oct. 4, 1990, MC Hammer — then at the peak of his fame — played a show 40 minutes away from set in Roanoke, Virginia. According to Wetcher, Murray rented a bus and took the crew.
Wetcher: I remember Bill got up onstage and was rapping with Hammer. It was fun.
Daniels: Bill used to call me “Mr. White,” and to this day I have no idea why. During the shooting of the movie, he used to call me at my New York apartment at 3 a.m. He’d go, “But Mr. White, listen …” And he wanted me to meet some person, usually a young lady the next day in my office for some role that didn’t exist. I guess he was flexing his muscles or trying to impress them. But I got at least a half a dozen of those calls during the time I was on the film.
Erbe: One day, we were shooting the scene at the general store in Moneta, and they had to stop traffic on this two-lane road. A camper pulled up, and the family inside saw Bill Murray. They went, “Hey, Bill!” And he walked over, opened the door, got in, and he left with them. It took a long time to get him back.
Korsmo: The two people that people ask me most about are him and Robin Williams, who I worked with on Hook. And they’re exactly the opposite. Robin Williams in real life, at least post-cocaine and everything, was nothing like the manic wild man he played onscreen. He was this quiet, reserved, introverted, very gentle guy. And Bill Murray acts like he’s onscreen all the time. I don’t know if he’s putting on a show or not, but if he is, he’s putting it on all the time.
Erbe: Julie and Bill and I went into Roanoke one weekend day — and I knew he was a big star, of course, and was a huge fan of his work, but didn’t fully appreciate how beloved he is by the people. And they literally carried him away. We lost track of him and just went on with our day. He just got carried away by the crowd of people.
Korsmo: I remember sitting in my trailer when we came back to do reshoots. I see him walking across the field. He sees me from a hundred yards away, and he doesn’t say anything. He just starts walking towards me. And when he gets to my trailer, he punches the screen out. He sticks in his hand and goes, “Korsmo, good to see you.” And then he walks away. That’s the kind of thing he would do in Stripes or something, but that’s what he does in real life, too.
Dreyfuss, meanwhile, had his own eccentricities, particularly when it came to his love of the Civil War.
Korsmo: He’s a real history buff, and I was also very interested in the Civil War at the time. But he’s like a Civil War reenactor, and I think he was skeptical of me. One of the first times we talked about it, he just asked me to name three generals. He was testing whether I knew anyone other than Lee and Grant, I guess. I think I went with [William] Rosecrans just to let him know I’m on his wavelength. I think he took me more seriously after that.
Oz: On [Richard’s] birthday, Laura arranged for maybe a dozen Civil War reenactors to come galloping onto the set.
Hagerty: It was a total surprise to him.
Dreyfuss: The day before that, I marched with the Southern contingent at the re-creation of the Battle of Cedar Creek. It was a great honor.
IV. Baby Steps Toward Shooting a Movie
They arrived on the set without a script anyone loved.
Oz: Everybody had their own idea about what the script should be. It felt like there was my version, there was Laura’s version, there was Richard’s version, there was the Disney rep version. I felt I was cobbling together different versions to shoot every day.
Schulman: I liked the whimsy of opening the movie with Bob swallowing a toothbrush.
Oz: Is that grounded? No. That is dishonest, unless you create a world in which people can eat things like glass or toothbrushes. But that’s not the world of this movie. The world created was a believable world. I like my movies to be grounded, and trust that it’ll be funny because of the actors.
Oz also dumped the entire framing device where the story was told in flashback, along with early scenes that would introduce Bob’s inattentive mother and flaky, Neil Diamond-obsessed ex-wife, who Schulman had included to convey how desperately Bob needed a family that cared about him. A tiny wink to the toothbrush bit remains, where Bob borrows Leo’s toothbrush and never returns it.
Schulman: It turns out, that old adage “less is more” is true. Just by the way Bob reacts to seeing the pictures of Marvin’s family on his wall gives you that sense of what he needs. And then he’s constantly like, “Aw, the fam.”
Oz: Every decision I make has to grow from how I see the whole movie. It is almost like sculpting an elephant, where you remove all those things that don’t look like an elephant. At one point, I remember saying to Bil and Richard, “If we weren’t all such big fuckin’ stars and big-time people supposedly, we would do what students do and just go page by page and order room service and work on it all day.” And that’s what we did. We went page by page all together.
They still left a lot of room for improv, most notably during the family dinner scene where Bob orgasmically moans over the food before performing the Heimlich maneuver on Dr. Marvin.
Oz: The dinner scene is one of my favorites. That’s because you don’t hire Bill Murray to read lines. You hire Bill Murray because of Bill Murray. He’s brilliant. So you just let him fly. So all that moaning was from Billy. It wasn’t written.
Korsmo: They just rolled film for two hours, as I recall. And that was entirely improvised. There was a lot of material they could have used, and it was funny throughout. I’m not sure how they picked “pile it high and deep” and “Is this corn hand-shucked?”
Erbe: Because our characters love Bob, Charlie and I were able to laugh. Richard wasn’t allowed to. It created a nice tension.
Korsmo: The dialogue in that scene is almost entirely Julie and Bill. The two kids are just sitting there reacting to it, and Richard Dreyfuss is just sitting there seething. But they literally went on for two hours doing that scene, and every time they’d swap out film, everyone would break out laughing.
After the meal, Bob, Faye, Anna, and Siggy joyfully wash dishes while singing “Singin’ in the Rain.” Leo watches, simmering with rage.
Hagerty: We just started throwing the dishes around, and I can’t believe that none of us dropped one. It was so fun. We were throwing them and catching them, and Frank let us do that. He knew what he could get, and the fact that he got it from all of the performances, he’s a wonderful director of letting you play.
Oz: The process was not tightly directed. It was all of us playing around. With Bill, everything was improv. We established this when we worked together on Little Shop of Horrors. Billy just improv’d that whole scene, and that was the agreement we had, that he didn’t have to stick to lines. I didn’t want him to.
The scene where Bob is tied to the mast while sailing with Anna and her friends was also largely improvised.
Oz: It was Bill’s idea to just keep saying, “I’m sailing. Sailing!” I’m not sure if the “ahoy” was scripted or not.
Erbe: That was a really long day. At one point, Bill started singing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).” It was hilarious.
For the scenes where Bob spends the night with the Marvins before the Good Morning America shoot, Murray and Korsmo were given permission to lob whatever insults they felt like while jumping up and down on their beds.
Korsmo: I remember Bill getting very sweaty when we did that. They gave us some things they wanted to make sure we said. And then we just spent 45 minutes yelling the dumbest things we could come up with at each other.
As Dr. Marvin correctly surmised after their one and only proper therapy session, Bob has an “extreme need for family connections.” He gradually heals as the Marvin family embraces him. Dr. Marvin, meanwhile, grows increasingly unhinged by Bob’s constant presence.
Oz: The idea was as Billy gets healthier, Dr. Marvin gets crazier. But we shot the movie out of order. And so I had to chart Dr. Marvin’s craziness. So, for instance, if he starts at zero in the beginning and he ends up 100 percent crazy at the end, then I had to go through each scene. I’d say, “In this scene, he’s five percent more crazy,” and then 10 percent more crazy and 15 percent more crazy and 20 percent, 30 percent.
Dreyfuss: I don’t think Bob is ever sane, though. He is insane from the beginning to the end.
Oz: It’s weird that Richard thinks that. Because if that’s the case, there’d be no satisfaction from the audience. I find that odd.
After the disastrous Good Morning America interview, Leo finally throws Bob out of the house. The kids are confused and ask him why he did it. “You think he’s gone?” Leo roars. “You think he’s gone?! That’s the whole point. He’s never gone!”
Oz: Richard was fucking brilliant that scene. He was insanely brilliant.
Erbe: There was just a lot of room for Bill to improvise when Richard would open the door and see him, and he would say a different thing every single time, and none of it was scripted.
When Leo realizes that Bob won’t leave unless he’s somehow restrained, he commits him to an insane asylum. But Bob is released within hours after he charms the staff. During their drive back to the house, Leo slams on the brakes. His line in the script simply reads, “Get out of the car.”
Dreyfuss: I didn’t say, “Get out the car.” I said, “GETOUTOFTHECAR!!” [as one long, slurred syllable of uncontrolled rage]. I didn’t have to think. I just did it.
The hilarity of that moment embodies the great work Dreyfuss did throughout the entire shoot.
Korsmo: I think he’s the funniest part of the movie. Dr. Marvin is this petty little man who is sitting on a volcano of anxiety and anger, which is naturally funny to me. Maybe I relate to it more later in life.
Hagerty: I don’t think anybody else could have done that besides Richard Dreyfuss. He was so genius in that part.
Oz: Richard was fabulous. He was essentially the straight man to Bill in the movie, and the straight man doesn’t get the credit. It’s not fair.
Dreyfuss: I don’t have the slightest idea how I created that character. Any time anyone has ever asked me why I did such and such in building a character, I always say, “I don’t know.” And I don’t know. I just do what I do, and you either get it or you don’t. I thought What About Bob? was, as written, very funny. And so I just did it.
But Oz’s warm feelings toward his cast were apparently not entirely mutual.
Dreyfuss: I went out to dinner once with one of the crew, and I said, “What do you think of Frank Oz as a director?” And he said, “Hmmmmm.” I didn’t think that he thought very much of Frank. And the other person said, “Master close-up/master close-up over the shoulder … Master close-up/Master close-up over the shoulder … A monkey could direct that way.” So, they didn’t think very much of him. I thought that he actually could direct if he bothered to direct, but he didn’t really do that. He refused to give me any direction.
Hearing this read back to him, Oz breaks out in uncontrollable laughter.
Oz: That’s great, hysterical! That’s how he saw it. That’s all there is to it. Look, every set has a culture and a dynamic of its own, and there I have had difficulties. Those bad situations are cracking me up because they show our frailty as human beings and our imperfections … the egos and the fears, the insecurities when you get in a crucible that’s so pressurized. Making a movie like this, we’re talking about millions and millions and millions of dollars. We’re talking about stars believing that it better work, because the next paycheck won’t be good if it doesn’t. Richard Dreyfuss was not trying to be bad. Everybody believes they’re doing the best thing for the movie and they’re trying their very best. That doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is the best for the movie, but they honestly believe it.
V. Baby Steps Toward an Ending
Laura Ziskin and Alvin Sargent’s original story treatment from 1987 had Dr. Marvin suffering a complete breakdown at the end, and Bob, 100 percent healed, becoming Leo’s therapist. “Remember, one day at a time,” Bob tells him. “One step at a time. Baby steps. Little baby steps.” The final scene is the group of shrinks from the beginning marveling at the crazy saga while riding in a boat together.
Tom Schulman’s 1990 script changed the plot so that Dr. Marvin loses his medical license after trying to murder Bob, and is institutionalized. Upon his release, he learns that Bob and the Marvin family have rented a lakeside cottage together. Bob is now a forever part of Leo’s life. Leo silently watches Bob and his family play volleyball together. “A zombie would seem more alive [than Leo],” Schulman wrote. It also ends with the doctors on the boat. “Wait a minute,” one of them says. “You’re not telling me that Bob Wiley is Dr. Robert S. Wiley, the psychologist?!”
These endings left nobody completely satisfied, creating conflict that lasted throughout the entire shoot. A tense meeting between Schulman and Murray before cameras started rolling portended many difficult days to come.
Schulman: The day before we were supposed to leave for the set, I met up with Richard and Bill in Bill’s hotel room. Bill turned to me and said, “Where’s that ending you’re supposed to be working on?” And I said, “It’s up in my room.” And he said, “Well, why isn’t it in here?” And I said, “Because it’s up in my room.” He said, “Well, go get it.” And I said, “OK.” When I got there, I got a call from the studio saying, “Bill doesn’t want you on the set.” I was like, ‘What?” I tried to talk to him about it, but never heard back. And so I never stepped foot on the set.
Hagerty: I remember at one time having five different scripts in my house. There were different writers and different endings. There were a lot of different opinions.
Schulman: They called in Elaine May at one point. She had this idea that when Bob comes out of that burning house, Marvin looks at him and goes, “Oh, my God, you’re alive. Thank God you’re alive,” and hugs him. And then you would cut to the next summer, and Bob and Marvin and their family would be in a little boat on the lake, talking about last summer and what a disaster it could have been, but things all worked out … This is what Disney wanted, a happy ending.
Oz: That ending would have made me vomit. Happy endings make me vomit anyway. I don’t think it’s about happy endings. I think it’s about satisfying endings. The protagonist can die, not so happy. But if he dies for a greater cause, that can be satisfying. I think “happy” is a misnomer.
Schulman: Disney said to me, “Will you write that happy ending [where Leo forgives Bob and they become friends]?” And I said, “No. Absolutely not, because it doesn’t work. You haven’t laid the [groundwork] for this. You haven’t set up anything earlier in the movie that’s going to make this work. It’s going to be a disaster.” So they said, “Well, that’s what we’re going to do.”
Dreyfuss: That ending would have been crap. Anyone who would have said that in front of me would have received a, “Crap.”
Korsmo: [That ending] just negates everything that came before, basically.
Oz: Nobody was ever happy with the ending, none of us. So it got to the point where we had one terrible night where everybody met for the ending, and it was an explosive night. From that moment on, I had to shoot two endings. We shot my version, which Bill agreed with, though I can’t remember the details. And we shot Laura’s version, which Richard agreed with. One of them was the ending on the boats.
Schulman: We showed both endings to a test audience. I snuck down to the front of the theater at the end of the movie and looked back. Couples were looking at each other going, “What the hell happened?” It was like looking at people watching Springtime for Hitler. They just didn’t work.
Oz: Both endings were scrapped, and we finally just punted and reshot the ending in California.
They settled on an ending where Leo was indeed committed to an insane asylum, but leaves in a near-catatonic state to attend a wedding between Bob and Leo’s sister, Lily. At the end, Leo awakes from his stupor to voice his objections. “Dad’s back!” Siggy exclaims. Title cards reveal that Bob went back to school to become a therapist. He wrote a bestseller called Death Therapy. Leo sued him over the rights.
Korsmo: They toyed with the idea of having Richard Dreyfuss in a Hannibal Lecter-like bite mask, with the bars over his mouth. But they decided that was too dark, I guess. And they kept pushing people to give more broad performances. At the end, I jump up and yell, “Dad’s back!” And [Oz] kept wanting that to be bigger and bigger. It’s the last thing anybody says in the movie, but I eventually sarcastically did a take, “Dad’s back!” And that’s the one they used.
Oz: This was another version of Laura’s ending. I felt, and I still do, that the ending’s too cartoonish. It’s not true to the world which the characters inhabit. All of the sudden, Marvin wakes up and it just seems … It just didn’t feel honest to me. It didn’t feel honest to the world which the characters inhabited.
Korsmo: The final ending’s not a dark or sad ending, but it’s consistent with everything that came before. It’s not, “Suddenly we’ve all accepted this. Ha, ha, ha. Wasn’t I a fool?” It’s still Bob intruding on Leo’s life and ruining it, basically.
VI. Baby Steps Toward a Blood Feud
The most well-known aspect of the What About Bob? production is the notorious feud between Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss. But in reality, it wasn’t just a battle between the two stars. It was actually a multifront war that placed Frank Oz and Bill Murray on one side, and Richard Dreyfuss and Laura Ziskin on another. The roots of the Murray-Dreyfuss feud, unbelievably, go all the way back to the May 13, 1978, episode of Saturday Night Live, which Dreyfuss hosted just weeks after winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Goodbye Girl. Murray was in the SNL cast at the time.
Dreyfuss: I recognized back then that he didn’t seem to like me, but he didn’t seem to like anybody. I saw him interact with the other Saturday Night Live cast members … but that was none of my business. Bill had this really sarcastic attitude. He was sarcastic to everybody.
Erbe: Bill and Richard have two distinct personalities with two different styles of work and two different styles of comedy.
Hagerty: Whatever the underbelly of [the feud] was, it all worked. Whatever happened worked on the screen. It’s just life. I mean, not everybody gets along, but when you come to work, you come to work and do your job.
Korsmo: I heard there was a lot of tension going with producers and the rest of the creative team, particularly Laura with the director. And I guess there was also a lot of tension between Richard and Bill. That I did not know at the time. Everyone was fairly protective of me.
Wetcher: Bill was fun. He could be difficult — not for me, not for the crew per se. He’s really kind of a crew person.
Erbe: Bill brought a boombox to the house set. And he’d play music in between setups, which was really good for morale, just keeping everybody up.
Daniels: Apparently Laura made the decision that they were going to work on Columbus Day, and Bill didn’t want to work on Columbus Day.
Wetcher: Bill said [the request] was for the crew. And I remember the AD [assistant director], Jimmy Skotchdopole, came back onto set and said, “Disney said no.”
Dreyfuss: I walked in and said to Laura, “What’s going on?” And she looked up at me and she said, “Hold me.” So I put my arms around her. Bill had gone to her about the day off, she had said no, he had said, “Please.” And then she said, “I don’t want to ask them for something I know that we won’t get.” And so she said, “I’ll ask. I won’t get it, but I’ll ask.” And she came up to him a few minutes later and said, “You’re not going to get it.” Bill said, “We don’t know that.” And he reached up and he took her glasses, the ones that she was wearing on her nose. And he said, “You don’t know that.” And he tore her glasses off her face and crushed them into separate parts and threw them into her face, which I thought was pretty wacky.
Korsmo: I remember hearing he broke her glasses.
Oz: I thought at the time he crushed her glasses for personal reasons, but it makes sense to hear it was for the crew. He really cared about the crew.
At another point, cast and crew confirm, Murray threw Laura into the lake.
Erbe: I just remember Laura ending up in the water.
Wetcher: He picked her up and took her along the dock, which was by the house we were shooting. And I just remember he threw her in the lake. I don’t really remember why he did that. I didn’t think it was mean-spirited.
Korsmo: That was, I guess, supposed to be funny, but I don’t think she thought it was funny.
Oz: It was couched in the celebration of her birthday, but she didn’t appreciate it.
Schulman: Laura was a wonderful person. In the world of Hollywood, she was a force of nature. She willed every movie that she did into existence.
Erbe: I just loved her. She was so alive and vibrant and enthusiastic and such a supporter of me.
Dreyfuss: She was powerful. That’s what I remember.
Hagerty: She was a powerhouse. She was on the set every day, and a woman producer of a big movie. I’m sad she’s not here on the earth anymore.
Korsmo: She was pretty inclusive and respectful even though I was only 11 years old. But at the same time, I knew she was not beloved on the set. Tension followed her everywhere she went.
Oz: I wanted to make the best movie possible. But I think she saw things maybe that I didn’t see, [and] vice versa.
Korsmo: I think she had in mind a sort of darker, more neurotic, New York therapy comedy kind of thing. And she was pretty insistent on it, even though I don’t think that was anyone else’s view of the movie at that point, besides maybe mine.
Wetcher: There seemed to be two camps, so to speak, where it was Bill and Frank versus Laura and Richard. It seemed like Laura and Richard were on the same page about the script, and Bill and Frank were on another page, and that accounted for a lot of tension.
Oz: The tensions were so crazy, and there were different camps. But I don’t deal with camps. I don’t like that on my set.
Everything came to a boil after they made the decision to film the two completely separate endings, tacking weeks onto the shoot. By this point, summer was turning into fall and temperatures were plunging.
Erbe: The leaves were turning, and they had to paint them green. We had layers and layers of long underwear underneath our clothes, and we were putting ice cubes in our mouths so we didn’t have fog coming out of our mouths when we talked.
Oz: It was supposed to be summertime and here was Thanksgiving coming.
Wetcher: We all heard about a script meeting where Bill threw a glass at Richard.
Oz: What happened that night is etched into my memory. I got in a room with Bill and Richard to try and solve a script problem. We had several drafts that various people liked. Bill left the room and came back about 20 minutes later. Bill said something, I’m not sure what it was, but he was obviously in a dark mood. And Richard said, “Is that Bill talking or is that Bob Wiley talking?” And I remember Bill grabbing a glass and saying, “This is Bill talking.” And he heaved the glass about 10 feet up in the air against a huge high fireplace and glass scattered all over the room. And I remember Richard going, “Whoa,” and standing up and leaving.
Murray confirmed the incident in a recent interview with The New York Times, stating: “I did fire a glass, but I threw it at the ceiling. We were in a townhouse on the set of What About Bob?, and I did not fire it at anyone. I threw it up in a far corner of the townhouse, assuming it might break upon contact with the ceiling and the walls, but I didn’t throw it at anyone. If I’d thrown it at Dreyfuss, I’d have hit him.”
Dreyfuss: Talking about [the glass incident] is childish. And I’m an adult, so I stopped talking about it. You’re the first person I’ve talked to about it for years. And I don’t like me talking about it. The fact was, we made a very funny movie, and that was more important than not liking one another.
Oz: One night, maybe a week later after he threw the glass, Bill was concerned that Richard was screwing with him. It got really bad.
They were filming the “death therapy” sequence in the woods, where Leo straps explosives to Bob and tries to murder him.
Oz: Laura came to me and said that Richard thinks I’m spending more time on Bill’s ending. I’m not sure if that was the words, but that was the intent. She was attacking my integrity, and I don’t allow that, because I was doing my very best. Even though I disagreed with the ending, I was doing my very best. And I totally fuckin’ lost it.
After screaming like a wild animal in the woods, Oz called his lawyer at 2 a.m. and said he could no longer work with Ziskin.
Oz: I said, “This is ridiculous. I can’t do it.” And Laura was … Rest in peace. Laura was wonderful. When she was on your side, she was ferociously on your side. But when she’s not on your side, she was ferocious in another way. It was not good. It got to the point where it was her or me. I said, “I’m not going back to the set if she’s there.” And so, she had to leave. I’m sure she’d have her own version of all this, and it’s really not fair since she’s not here to defend herself. She might have a whole different view of me and that might be justified. I don’t know. But we had a dinner break around 2 a.m. that night. Laura came to me with her teeth gritted and said, “Well, good luck to you.”
There have been rumors that Dreyfuss was “barely” willing to speak to Oz after he forced Ziskin off the set. He slightly disputes that notion.
Dreyfuss: You should take out the word “barely.” We weren’t talking. That’s it.
Wetcher: They only communicated to each other through AD Jimmy Skotchdopole. It got really ugly.
Oz: We still had to finish the scene that night. We were outside in the forest. I was in my director’s chair. I said to Jimmy, “Give me a flag over here and a flag over there and flag over here. And I boxed myself in so I wouldn’t be seen. And I said, “Jimmy, I’m going to give you instructions to tell Richard. OK? And I’m not going to talk to Richard.”
Schulman: From what I heard, Bill and Richard never spoke again after the glass incident besides as their characters. But it really worked well onscreen since there was so much hostility.
Oz: Unfortunately, I agree. Not unlike Dr. Marvin and Bob, the personalities of Richard and Bill also need each other in that Richard is more structured and Billy is more lax. That conflict which is the essence of drama also was there for comedy. So that enhanced it.
Dreyfuss: I don’t think it helped the end result. Nope. It was childish.
Wetcher: Bill and Richard, aside from whatever personal shit was going on between them, they pulled it off. They pulled it off.
Oz: Two days or so before we wrapped, we were shooting Dr. Marvin’s office since we filmed the movie out of order. And I remember sitting there between takes, and after all this hell we gone through, Billy says, “Frank, wouldn’t it be amazing if this movie turned out to be good?” It just cracked me up so much.
Dreyfuss: I think it’s like that Cary Grant and Frank Capra movie, Arsenic and Old Lace. They really didn’t get along during the shoot. I don’t know why. I don’t know anything about it, but I know that they didn’t get along. And it’s hysterical.
Ziskin became a Hollywood powerhouse in the years that followed, producing giant hits like As Good As It Gets and the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy. She married her What About Bob? writing partner Alvin Sargent in 2010, one year before she died from breast cancer. When digging through her archives recently, Ziskin’s former assistant, Blair Richwood, found a letter Ziskin wrote to Frank Oz shortly after he kicked her off the set. The letter cc’d Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film executives Donald DeLine and David Hoberman, but Oz has no memory of ever receiving it. Rolling Stone has been given permission to run it in full so that Ziskin’s voice can be a part of this story.
Frank:
I’m told you are in distress over what occurred Friday night. For the record, let me give you my point of view about what happened.
I supported you strongly and vocally in the meeting with Richard last Sunday — because I would do that in any event and because I agree with “your” version of the ending.
I agreed with [co-producer] Bernie [Williams] at 5 a.m. and after the incident with Bill, that we had no choice but to shoot two versions if we wanted to get on with things. I was disappointed that you subsequently re-wrote the version you had fought for so hard on Sunday, but that was your choice and I still feel structurally that it is probably better than the so-called A version. You called me to the set Friday night to tell me there was a lot of tension between Bill and Richard. I advised you to just have Richard do the speech both ways and to downplay characterizing things as Version A and Version B. After you decided not to to shoot the speech 2 ways, and even though you said you could just cut out of it, Richard came to me, upset, feeling that he had been “shined on” to some degree. In retrospect I think he just needed to blow off steam. But the actor came to the producer and expressed some feelings; you had already told me there was a lot of tension and I felt you should probably have the information you as the director would be aware of the actor’s state of mind — since you all have to keep working together and hopefully successfully. I did not do anything to deserve your “response,” but I know how pressured you feel and everybody loses control on occasion.
It’s unfortunate for everyone that you are unable to speak to me about what happened, about the movie, etc.
I am not “against” you — I am for you and for our film. We have certainly had our disagreements — and I’m sure you recognize that the resolution of all those disagreements has often resulted in better work for the picture.
I’m told that you feel I have been crawling all over you. I made a conscious effort to stay off the set as much as possible last week. I’m sure you are aware that other than suggesting the line about “He left. You mean he was leaving,” I did not try to comment on the ending unless you asked my opinion. On Friday, I came to the set because you called me there.
Be that as it may. For your sake and mine, I wish you only the best in completing the film. I look forward to seeing it cut together.
Regards,
Oz: Wow. I can understand her point of view. Although, in the letter, she is missing some of her behavior that was not kind to me and was detrimental to the movie. But we all have our own memories.
VII. Baby Steps Toward a Legacy
When shooting finally ended in the fall of 1990, the cast and crew all went their separate ways. Most of them haven’t spoken to each other in decades.
Hagerty: You don’t always keep up with everybody because everybody comes together and then everybody goes off and has their life. It’s sort of a mystical, magical kind of work when you come and go out of people’s [lives], like we’re gypsies. God, I haven’t seen Katie in forever and ever. Please tell her I said hello.
Erbe: That’s really good to hear. I’ll try to reach her.
Korsmo: I don’t keep in touch with anybody. And it’s partly my fault. Frankly, Robin [Williams] did more to stay in touch with me after Hook than I didn’t stay in touch with him, which was foolish of me, because he was a very good man, and I wish I’d reached out to him more over the years.
Korsmo largely retired from acting after What About Bob?, though he did appear in the 1998 Jennifer Love Hewitt movie Can’t Hardly Wait. By that point, he was a student at MIT. He attended Yale Law School afterward, joined the Federalist Society, and is currently a professor of corporate law and corporate finance at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland. He’s still a little pissed about missing out on the chance to star in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Korsmo: I joke that of course after working with me on T2, obviously James Cameron would’ve cast me in Titanic, too. Leonardo DiCaprio would be teaching law in Cleveland right now.
Oz: I last saw Bill when he auditioned for Indian in the Cupboard. He really wanted that role. I was very grateful he was willing to audition. It’s not that he wasn’t great. He just wasn’t who I saw. There’s so many talented, brilliant actors who I had to say, “No, it’s not going to work,” just because it wasn’t who I saw, the character as I saw it. We haven’t spoken since. As a matter of fact, I got an award at Disney last summer and there was a video segment where Steve Martin, Robert De Niro, and Bill said nice things about me. I sent Bob a thank you note and was able to thank Steve since I know him so well, but I wasn’t able to find Bill so that I could thank him. He’s elusive.
Dreyfuss hasn’t communicated with Murray since filming wrapped.
Dreyfuss: Why would I do that? We left on bad terms. Oh, yeah, one day I decided to make up with Bill, about 15 years after the movie came out. I went to a restaurant that his family ran and told his brothers that I was looking to make up with him, but he was not there.
Does he hope to ever have the chance to sit down with Bill and make peace?
Dreyfuss: No.
Oz still hopes he’ll have the chance to hash things out with Dreyfuss.
Oz: Years later, I wrote to him and said what a brilliant job he did. He didn’t get the attention, I think, that he should have gotten because he was not the lovable character. I wanted to let him know how highly I thought of his work. I did never did hear back. I’m not sure why. Maybe he was appreciative of it. Maybe he still had a problem with me. I don’t know. But he had a reason to have a problem with me. It was a tough shoot, and my job was to keep going forward.
Dreyfuss: I did get the letter. I thought it was great. But have we been in touch? No.
The passage of time has allowed them all to realize that they made something very special, even if the process was often maddening.
Hagerty: I don’t know if it’s a perfect storm or just a perfect situation. It was perfect writing, perfect chemistry. It was like one of those wonderful, wonderful explosions of everything working right.
Schulman: A lot of people tell me it’s their favorite comedy, which is always wonderful to hear. People will immediately say, “Baby steps,” or things like that. It’s great that it’s remembered.
Erbe: People talk to me about it all the time. It’s a movie that families watch over and over again together. I think it’s about family and about misfits, and it has a good heart.
Hagerty: It’s a really wonderful, odd family movie that does talk a lot about family dynamics and visitors to your home. I mean, have you ever had a visitor where you go, “Oh, my God, I wish they’d go away”?
Dreyfuss: It’s a very funny movie. And that’s due to Bill first and everyone else second. Bill is a hysterically funny guy. Even if you’re angry at him, he still makes you laugh. That’s an amazing talent.
Oz: We all have imperfections. And they come out when we’re in this heightened crucible of making a movie. But when you think of the world outside, we’re so lucky that we get to do what we do. We’re so lucky, so fortunate. And within this crucible, all this nonsense happens. Looking back, it’s just so funny to me. [Laughs hysterically]