‘Ghostbusters’ Was Radically Changed Because Signorney Weaver’s Audition Was Better Than the Script
The success of 1984’s Ghostbusters soon led to a Saturday morning cartoon show, a popular toy line and even a kid’s juice brand that superfans still enjoy to this day, expiration dates be damned!
But all of the family-friendly tie-ins do seem a little odd, in retrospect, considering that the film’s story culminates with Dana Barrett and Louis Tully engaging in demonic sex before transforming into gargoyle-like hellhounds — to say nothing of the infamous “Ray gets a hummer” scene that Dan Aykroyd insisted on including.
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The concept of human characters transforming into the vicious “Terror Dogs” has become an indelible part of the franchise’s mythology. The third act of Ghostbusters: Afterlife similarly found two characters hooking up and becoming possessed by the interdimensional creatures, who suddenly loved hanging out in Walmarts for some reason.
But the transformation angle wasn’t actually a part of the original Ghostbusters script. In fact, it’s only a thing thanks to Sigourney Weaver’s impressive yet slightly-crazed audition.
Even though she had already starred in huge movies like Alien and The Year of Living Dangerously, Weaver still had to audition for the role of Dana. But she was a little confused about the ending. “I misunderstood the script because I thought the girl did turn into a dog,” Weaver explained on an episode of The Graham Norton Show. “Ivan Reitman, the director, was filming me, I started to turn into a dog and started to sort of gnaw on the cushions and shake them and howl a little bit — I’m an actor I really got into it.”
“He turned the camera off,” Weaver continued, “(and) he said, ‘Don’t ever do that again. It’s so grotesque an editor might want to use it.’”
But Weaver’s audition was so good that the movie essentially copied her wild improv. “In the end, they changed the script and had our characters turn into the terror dogs,” the actress revealed. “That wasn’t the story until I turned into a dog on this couch.”
At least the late Reitman admitted to lifting the plot point straight out of Weaver’s audition. Weaver “got on all fours and started howling like a dog on my coffee table, and I was just fascinated,” he said in a 2014 interview. “It was so goofy and funny and I remember calling up Harold (Ramis) literally as she left my office and saying, ‘I had this actress Sigourney Weaver coming in about Dana Barrett, and she said something about Dana becoming a dog, and I think that’s a good idea, we should look at it.’”
Reitman also noted that the filmmakers were “struggling with the whole key-master/gatekeeper thing” at the time.
They could have at least given Weaver a cut of the Ecto-Cooler sales as a thank you.
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