Two friends are so desperate to party with the rich at a beachfront mansion, they conceal the death of their host—walking the corpse around, tying its limbs to theirs, presenting the dead man as if he were alive. It sounds dark, sick, and twisted. This idea could have been brought to the screen in a really off-putting way. But it ended up serving as the basis of a hysterically funny comedy that made a lasting impact on pop culture and even got a sequel. How do you make that concept funny? How do you draw it out for two movies’ worth of jokes? And how do you spawn a dance craze in the process? The answers are all here, as we find out what happened to Weekend at Bernie’s!
Author and screenwriter Robert Klane was known for writing dark comedies that dealt with taboos. Where’s Poppa? was about a man trying to get rid of his senile mother. Fire Sale is about a dysfunctional family trying to benefit from arson. Unfaithfully Yours follows a guy who thinks his wife is having an affair and plots to kill her and her supposed lover. In Folks, a man agrees to help his parents die in an accident so they can move on and he can collect their life insurance money. So it’s no surprise that Klane is the one who had the idea for a comedy about two guys who show up at a beach house for a weekend of partying and don’t let the fact that their host is dead derail their plans. This set-up first occurred to him in the ‘70s, when he was working in advertising. Executives would spend weekends at their beach homes and sometimes invited their employees to come along. He wondered, what would happen if the underlings got one of those beachfront mansions to themselves?
Klane wrote the story of Larry Wilson and Richard Parker, who work at a New York insurance company. When they discover some shady dealings in the company’s records, they report this to their boss Bernie Lomax, not realizing he’s working with mobster Vito to commit insurance fraud. Bernie invites Larry and Richard to stay at his place in the Hamptons over Labor Day weekend. He acts like he’s rewarding them, but has actually set it up for them to be taken out by a hitman named Paulie. He doesn’t know Vito has decided to cut his losses and have Bernie assassinated instead. It’s also a personal decision, because Bernie has been sleeping with Vito’s girlfriend Tina.
Bernie has been killed with a lethal injection by the time Larry and Richard show up at the mansion. They think he had a drug overdose. But soon the place is flooded with rich party guests, and who are they to disrupt the fun by telling people Bernie is dead? Besides, Gwen—an intern from the insurance company—is there. Richard had a disastrous date with her and wants to make up for it. So they keep Bernie’s corpse around for a while, acting like he’s still alive. And when they find out that Bernie was planning to have them killed, it gives them more reason to pretend he’s alive. They figure if Bernie is with them, the hitman won’t be able to carry out the murder plot.
After working together on the 1985 comedy The Man with One Red Shoe, Klane and producer Victor Drai decided to follow that with Klane’s dead man comedy. But they had trouble getting studios interested in their morbid concept until Klane took the idea to his friend Ted Kotcheff. He’s best known for directing the Rambo movie First Blood, but also had comedies on his résumé, like Fun with Dick and Jane and Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? As soon as Klane pitched him the basic idea, he was hooked. He thought it was hilarious—dark, but full of comedic and satirical possibilities. He signed on to direct the film and worked on the script with Klane. With Kotcheff attached, production company Gladden Entertainment agreed to get involved, with distribution secured through 20th Century Fox.
One of the first casting choices was Jonathan Silverman, from Caddyshack 2 and the sitcom Gimme a Break! It just wasn’t certain if he would be playing Larry or Richard. Another early choice was Jon Cryer from Pretty in Pink. A few weeks before filming was set to begin, screen tests were held with Silverman and Cryer taking turns playing Larry and Richard so it could be decided who would be playing which character. Silverman ended up with the role of Richard… but Cryer wasn’t cast as Larry. He’s not in the movie at all, because Kotcheff decided to have Cryer’s Pretty in Pink co-star Andrew McCarthy play Larry instead.
Drai was hoping to give the role of Gwen to his girlfriend Loryn Locklin, but executive decisions kept Locklin out of the movie. The role went to Catherine Mary Stewart, even though she felt she had flubbed her lines and blown her audition. Ted Kotcheff gave himself a cameo as Richard’s father when other options didn’t work out. Prolific character actor Don Calfa was cast as hitman Paulie, with another character actor, Louis Giambalvo, playing Vito. The memorable role of Tina, who has sex with a dead guy in a comedy years before the same thing happened in Clerks, went to Catherine Parks. Bernie was, understandably, a difficult character to cast. Who can you get to play someone who spends most of their screen time as a corpse? Another prolific character actor, of course. Usually clean-shaven, Terry Kiser had been growing out his facial hair while recovering from a motorcycle accident. When the chance to audition for Bernie came up, he shaved the facial hair down to a mustache and quickly won the role.
The film is a great comedy, but it’s worth noting that there’s an extra level of entertainment here for horror fans. Catherine Mary Stewart, Don Calfa, Catherine Parks, and Terry Kiser all had roles in iconic ‘80s horror movies: Night of the Comet, The Return of the Living Dead, and Friday the 13th Parts 3 and 7.
Kiser wasn’t happy with the first couple days of his performance. He played a corpse too well. It wasn’t funny. Then he came up with the idea that Bernie would have died smiling—a pleasant reaction to the drug injection. That’s when he found the way to make a dead body get laughs. As Silverman put it to Entertainment Weekly, “Terry Kiser did something so clever: he died with a smirk on his face, which let the audience love him.”
Kiser proved to be so skilled at physical comedy, it’s almost shocking that he wasn’t hired to show off this ability in more movies. Watching this, you’d think he was a major comedy star. It’s not easy to make a dead man seem hilarious, but he pulled it off. When Larry and Richard move Bernie, Kiser flops himself around while never changing the goofy expression on his face. It never looks like he’s really alive to make the movements; he is completely convincing at being dead, yet manages to be funny at the same time. It’s incredible, and made all the more impressive by the fact that Kiser was working with busted ribs—an injury sustained during the speedboat sequence.
Silverman and McCarthy had good chemistry together and are both amusing and likeable in their roles. Richard is usually tense, Larry tends to go with the flow, and it’s entertaining to watch them bounce off each other and exchange dialogue. Jon Cryer missed out, but this pairing works perfectly. Calfa also generates some good laughs, as his hitman character gradually loses his mind. He keeps trying to kill Bernie, but is fooled by Larry and Richard’s antics into believing that Bernie is surviving everything that happens to him.
With a running time of ninety-eight minutes, the film spends a surprising amount of time on the set-up. Bernie doesn’t die until the thirty-three minute point. That opening stretch is funny, but the movie really comes alive… so to speak… once Larry and Richard find Bernie dead. From that point on, the movie’s pace quickens, and it’s packed with funny lines and sight gags. It helps that it’s nice to look at, with the beach scenes taking place in a beautiful location in North Carolina. Fans shouldn’t go searching for Bernie’s house, though. It was constructed on a historical site and had to be removed, with no trace left behind, once filming was completed.
The movie is so entertaining, it ends up feeling shorter than it is. And that makes it very easy to watch over and over.
The title Weekend at Bernie’s came about late in the filmmaking process. The original title was Sitting Ducks. Marketing executives wanted to call the film Hot and Cold, which is why the Jermaine Stewart song “Hot and Cold” plays over the credits. Terry Kiser and Ted Kotcheff both claim responsibility for the title Weekend at Bernie’s. Whoever came up with it, they found the right one. And then, as far as producer Victor Drai was concerned, 20th Century Fox bungled the release.
Post-production on James Cameron’s The Abyss was taking longer than expected, so Fox pushed that movie back and dropped Weekend at Bernie’s into its July 5th, 1989 release date. It was sent out into a crowded market, having to compete with the likes of Batman, Lethal Weapon 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters 2, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The film came in at number eight over its opening weekend. But while Drai feels it could have done better, it was still a success. Made on a budget of fifteen million, it earned thirty million at the box office, then did massive business on home video and got steady play on cable.
Critics were not kind to the film, with many writing it off as lowbrow nonsense. Audience members, on the other hand, gave it a CinemaScore of B, and its reputation has improved as decades have gone by. People magazine noted that it seems to have “aged into something close to respectability,” with many viewers looking back on it fondly as a beloved comedy favorite.
Reminiscing about the film years later, McCarthy told The A.V. Club, “That movie was completely stupid and fantastic. It’s the stupidest movie. I love it. We knew at the time it was ridiculous, and there was no top to go over… That was a lot of fun to do, which is not always the case. Often when you’re doing a comedy, it becomes an inside joke where we think it’s really funny, but to other people it’s just not that funny. But that movie has its own logic.” And fans have been enjoying that goofball logic for a long time now.