The stories of the tension and fights between Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss on the set of What About Bob? are legendary – and with a reputation that got him the nickname “The Murricane”, that says a lot. And even three decades after What About Bob? was released, Dreyfuss has such bad memories from the set that he still wants absolutely nothing to do with Murray.
In a new oral history on the destructive making of 1993’s What About Bob?, Dreyfuss was asked if he intended to formally patch things up with Murray. And it went about as well as you’d expect. “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.” For what it’s worth, Dreyfuss does consider Murray the key reason why people still watch the movie today.
But it wasn’t just Bill Murray that Richard Dreyfuss didn’t jive with – it was also the movie’s director, Frank Oz. As it goes, Dreyfuss and Oz would only communicate with each other through an assistant director serving as middleman, a situation which derived from Oz barring producer Laura Ziskin from the set. As Oz tells it, he made the attempt to bury the hatchet with Dreyfuss but it was another dead end. “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.”
Bill Murray has reportedly clashed with a number of his co-stars over the years and Richard Dreyfuss is known to be a curmudgeon so it’s really no wonder that they didn’t get along one bit when making What About Bob? Murray has made peace with others over the years, but this is one of those beefs that just doesn’t seem anyone has an interest in truly settling. Then again, baby steps…
