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It was reported this week that production has been suspended on the Aziz Ansari-directed film Being Mortal, following a complaint against Bill Murray for “inappropriate behaviour”. Despite Murray’s rep as a twinkly-eyed folk hero of modern comedy, whimsically strolling between spirit-bolstering urban legends – stories of him crashing parties; riding through supermarkets on a child’s bike; or stealing chips from strangers’ plates and whispering, “No one will ever believe you” – it’s not the first time that complaints have been made against Murray.  

Lucy Liu previously revealed that Murray had launched a verbal tirade against her during the making of the 2000 action-comedy Charlie’s Angels. Murray was apparently upset over script rewrites that had nothing to do with Liu. Speaking on the Los Angeles Times podcast Asian Enough, Liu described how he began to “hurl insults” at her on set and used “inexcusable and unacceptable” language. (Murray is yet to address the latest complaints, but was asked about Liu’s allegations in a 2009 interview: “Look, I will dismiss you completely if you are unprofessional and working with me," he said.)

Richard Dreyfuss – Murray’s co-star from What About Bob? – made no bones about the experience of working with Bill Murray. “He was an Irish drunken bully, is what he was,” Dreyfuss later said.

So traumatic was the experience of making the Frank Oz-directed comedy, that Dreyfuss had to block it out. “I didn’t talk about it for years,” he admitted in 2019. Dreyfuss described one incident, in which he tried to show Murray a change in the script after Murray had returned from dinner one evening drunk. “I said, ‘Read this, I think it’s really funny,’” recalled Dreyfuss. “And [Murray] put his face next to me, nose-to-nose. And he screamed at the top of his lungs, ‘Everyone hates you! You are tolerated!’” Murray grabbed a glass ashtray and threw it at Dreyfuss’s face. Thankfully, he missed. It’s not the lovable Bill Murray that most of us imagine. 

In light of Murray’s alleged behaviour on Being Mortal, Dreyfuss’s son, Ben Dreyfuss, tweeted about Murray’s What About Bob? antics: “Bill Murray had a meltdown… because he wanted an extra day off and Laura [Ziskin, the producer] said no. According to Ben Dreyfuss, Murray “ripped her glasses off her face”. He continued: “Everyone walked off the production and flew back to LA and it only resumed after Disney hired some bodyguards to physically separate my dad and Bill Murray in between takes… Good movie though!”

Bill Murray had a meltdown during what about bob because he wanted an extra day off and Laura said no and ripped off her glasses off her face and my dad complained about his behavior and Bill Murray threw an ashtray at him. https://t.co/Ns0h29hki5

— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) April 21, 2022

On-screen, Murray is beloved for the heady nostalgia of his Saturday Night Live/Caddyshack/Ghostbusters era, and his later recasting in quirky or melancholic comedy dramas – from Lost in Translation to On the Rocks – usually playing a lethargic Lothario, or a downbeat ponderer on the twilight of life. Released in May 1991, What About Bob? came somewhere in between – the beginning of a near-wilderness period in Murray’s career.

It’s rarely remembered alongside his best-known films, but really (and contrary to Richard Dreyfuss’s experience) it’s Murray’s most lovable performance of all. He plays Bob Wiley, a needy, neurotic, multi-phobic man-child who follows his psychiatrist, Dr Leo Marvin (Dreyfuss), on family vacation and drives him crazy. 

Murray admitted the psychiatrist-patient relationship was antagonistic both on and off-camera. “[We] didn’t get along on the movie,” Murray later said about Dreyfuss. “But it worked for the movie. I mean, I drove him nuts, and he encouraged me to drive him nuts.” (I wonder if Dreyfuss, who once branded Murray “a despicable pig”, would agree that he’d encouraged it.) Murray was apparently irritated by Dreyfuss’s serious thesping: “He drove me nuts with his stage precision, so I returned the favour with anarchy. That’s cinema verité you see up there.”

Schulman had also written Dead Poets Society, which went into production as he began work on the What About Bob? script. Released in June 1989, Dead Poets Society – directed by Peter Weir and starring Robin Williams – won Schulman an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. In hindsight, it seems an unlikely trajectory: from sentimental Oscar-worthy drama to a jolly, mid-budget comedy – the kind of comedy that were ten-a-penny in the Eighties and Nineties, but which feel desperately rare now (unless they’re on Netflix and star Adam Sandler). “Laura Ziskin had read Dead Poets Society and I wondered why, based on that, they’d want me for this,” laughs Schulman. 

As the story begins, Bob is a neurotic basketcase, confined largely to his apartment due to debilitating agoraphobia, with just his goldfish Gil for company. He manically massages his temples to his own unconvincing mantra – “I feel good, I feel great, I feel wonderful. I feel good, I feel great, I feel wonderful” – and won’t touch anything outside his apartment, for fear of germs, without a handkerchief.

By contrast, Dr Leo Marvin’s pomposity is inflated by the success of Baby Steps, his “groundbreaking” self-help book (Leo’s description, not min). He’s due to be interviewed on the breakfast TV show Good Morning America – live from his holiday home at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire – to publicise the book.

Bob shuffles into Dr Marvin’s life after a psychiatrist pal calls and refers him as a patient. (While manically packing his belongings, presumably on the run from Bob – “He passes Bob off quite sadistically,” laughs Tom Schulman.) It doesn’t take much ego-stroking for Marvin to agree to take on Bob. “I know that you don’t like flattery,” says the shrink to Marvin. “But if there’s anyone I know who can win the Nobel prize, it’s you.”

Bob arrives for their first session minutes later. “The simplest way to put it,” explains Bob. “I have problems.” Indeed, Murray’s Bob is a classic Bill Murray character buried beneath a mass of neuroses. “This is what you might call the upbeat side of mental illness,” said Murray about the film. 

Bob is the easy charm of Ghostbusters’ Peter Venkman, the sourpuss cynicism of Groundhog Day’s Phil Connors, and the vicious tongue of Scrooged’s Frank Cross all inverted – wide-eyed, un-self-aware, and incapable of seeing the bad in Dr Marvin (of which there is plenty).

Bob’s best lines are as dry and punchy as any vintage Bill Murray. When asked about his failed marriage, he replies: “There are two types of people in this world. Those who like Neil Diamond and those who don’t. My ex-wife loves him.”

Fobbed off with a copy of Marvin’s book but unable to cope with his doctor on vacation, Bob baby steps his way Lake Winnipesaukee and invades Dr Marvin’s life. Bob charms his family with puppy-eyed eccentricities; bonds with Marvin’s kids; interjects himself into social occasions; and even lands a guest spot on Marvin’s Good Morning America interview. To Marvin, Bob is a narcissist sociopath, manipulating his way into their lives – like a cuddly Cape Fear. 

(Which is fitting – Steven Spielberg reportedly wanted Murray to play the villain in his proposed Cape Fear remake, which was eventually directed by Scorsese, with Robert De Niro in the role.)

The question is whether Bob really is innocent, or a master manipulator. “We talked about this before the movie was made,” says Tom Schulman. “I remember there was a shot done of Bob walking around the Marvins’ house – a slow lurking Steadicam shot. But that sense of spying and lurking just felt wrong for Bob. I think he’s an innocent person. Very damaged but innocent.”

There is, beneath it, a quite brilliant comedy concept: as Bob is baby steppin’ his way from anxiety-ridden wreckage to rehabilitation, Marvin descends from successful shrink to madness. It’s a sublime comic performance from Dreyfuss, cracking up scene-by-scene. It’s not just that Bob is a relentless irritant, but the realisation that Bob is more rounded, more popular, and more emotionally available. It begins with passive aggression ("I don’t get angry," Marvin tells Bob through gritted teeth) and escalates to him trying to get Bob committed. By the end, he wants to blow up Bob with 20lbs of explosives

“Richard Dreyfuss really understood that role,” says Schulman. “There’s a moment where he’s driving Bob back from the mental institution and throws Bob out of the car. Richard can’t even say the lines because he’s so angry. Richard really got into it.”

It was a reaction, perhaps, to the real-life tension. Speaking in a 1991 interview, Murray described some tactics he employed to needle Dreyfuss: “While he was talking, I got real close to crowd him. I put my head on his shoulder, screamed into his ear and did all sorts of annoying things. Some of that was even in script… No wait, none of that was in the script. I made it all up.”

The film was shot in 1990 in Moneta, Virginia. According to Frank Oz, production was “incredibly difficult, incredibly full of tension”. The director said: “I was really scared to death that we had a piece of s–––, because it was so impossible to judge it.”

To break up the boredom of production, Bill Murray took the entire crew of 50-odd people to a nearby MC Hammer concert (it was 1990, after all). They drank Moonshine and Murray estimated he drank “four or five ounces of 190 proof alcohol”. When Hammer played U Can’t Touch This, Murray joined him on stage and busted out the Hammer dance. “That’s right, the Hammer dance,” Murray said in a 2004 interview. “Surprisingly, I knew all the steps. But I learned why he wore those weird chef’s pants, because I split my pants right up the back. And since it was the end of the month off on a remote location, all I had was my pants. I was going commando, if you know what I mean. I was working without a net.”

And, as an oft-repeated story goes, Murray allegedly threw Laura Ziskin in the lake. “Bill also threatened to throw me across the parking lot and then broke my sunglasses and threw them across the parking lot,” Ziskin said. 

Tom Schulman doubts that Murray really threw her in the lake, but he remembers hearing from Ziskin about the friction between Murray and Dreyfuss. “I heard the same stories you did,” he tells me. “There was a constant battle about how the movie was going to end. I think Bill and Richard didn’t agree on that. That created some tension. I heard they had a meeting to talk about the ending because they disagreed and things got pretty heated.”

Charlie Korsmo, the former child star who played Dreyfuss’s son in the film, says that one of the questions he’s asked most frequently about his acting days is: “Is Bill Murray really like that in real life?” “Bill Murray is kind of like that all time,” laughs Korsmo. “For better or worse. It was funny for me but I could tell that for some of the adults who had to deal with him it could be a bit much!”

Talking in 2012, Frank Oz recalled creative differences between himself, writer, producer, Murray, Dreyfuss, and Disney. “Everybody had their own viewpoint on how to make the movie better,” said Oz. Schulman recalls that Oz and Disney wanted a happy ending, in which everybody makes friends. “Someone said if Bob and the psychiatrist had been a man and a woman they’d have kissed and made up at the end,” says Schulman. “My strong feeling was that it wasn’t going to work. They shot that ending and shot the ending we have now, and did test screenings of both. The one that’s on the movie is the one that worked…”

Undoubtedly, it was the right creative choice. The film’s conclusion is its best joke: Bob marries Dr Marvin’s sister, while the once-brilliant Dr Leo Marvin is reduced to a catatonic heap in a wheelchair, a half-woven basket in his hands. “If you think about the way the Disney company likes to make movies,” laughs Schulman. “To them that was a dark ending.”

After the relative disappointment of Ghostbusters II (though it still made $215 million) and box office bomb of the heist comedy Quick Change – Murray’s only film as (co)director – What About Bob? was a modest success. “The studio had bigger ambitions for how it would open and play than the way it did,” says Schulman.

Aside from Groundhog Day, few films in the Nineties are remembered as Bill Murray classics. But he had unlikely (and underappreciated) supporting roles in Kingpin, Ed Wood, and Wild Things. (Though it’s probably best to forget his elephant buddy comedy Larger Than Life, or The Man Who Knew Too Little – for which I remember being alone in the cinema on opening weekend). His critical reappreciation began with Rushmore in 1998 and was cemented with Lost in Translation in 2004.

What About Bob? almost returned for a female-led reboot. “They sent me the pilot,” says Tom Schulman. “I don’t think the network decided to go forward with the series. It just felt like the same thing all over again." Maybe it missed Murray’s ability to annoy. As Murray said himself: “What you eventually see in the movie isn’t close to how really annoying I can be when I put my mind to it. There’s always more annoying behaviour right below the surface."