In a reply to a comment a couple of days ago I made reference to a story that I had read regarding Bill Murray’s involvement with Ghostbusters 3 and his demands that the character Winston Zeddemore play a larger role. A couple of people have asked me about this and Matt mentioned it over on Culture Kills and I thought I should go out and expand on it.
Straight off the bat I need to correct myself, I associated the reference to the yet to start production Ghostbusters 3 and the actual demands from Bill Murray stem from the Ghostbusters game that’s coming out this month and features all four of the original Ghostbusters actors.
So the demands regarding Murray’s involvement in the game and I guess the return to the franchise were fairly limited however one that Dan Aykroyd mentions was that he wouldn’t sign up unless the character of Winston Zeddemore was beefed up to give him more equal footing.
Even Murray returned – not with a hatful of diva demands, but wanting an assurance that Winston Zeddemore, the underwritten black character from the movies, would be elevated to full status. source
There was also an article which directly quotes Dan Aykroyd but I can’t find it.
Even though it wasn’t the film it was still a really classy move on Bill Murray’s behalf to campaign for an another actor and character that has been given a bit of the short end of the stick. It’s interesting too because the Zeddemore character lost a lot of his lines in the first Ghostbusters film to Bill Murray’s Venkman character after the studio decided that would be a good idea to focus on Murray more.
In fairness it probably was a really good idea to focus on Venkman in the first film but that really doesn’t make up for it in the sequel when Winston is treated as a secondary character.
Now the challenge is out there, Microsoft or Sony – whoever wants me to review their version of the Ghostbusters games need to send me their console.
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