RIP Harold Ramis @69 [Ghostbusters etc.]

[Dr Mordrid]

NNNNNOOoooooo!!!

Goobye Egon

And thank you Harold for so many good times. RIP.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-harold-ramis-dead-20140224,0,2259309.story

Harold Ramis was one of Hollywood’s most successful comedy filmmakers when he moved his family from Los Angeles back to the Chicago area in 1996. His career was still thriving, with “Groundhog Day” acquiring almost instant classic status upon its 1993 release and 1984’s “Ghostbusters” ranking among the highest-grossing comedies of all time, but the writer-director wanted to return to the city where he’d launched his career as a Second City performer.

“There's a pride in what I do that other people share because I'm local, which in L.A. is meaningless; no one's local,” Ramis said upon the launch of the first movie he directed after his move, the 1999 mobster-in-therapy comedy “Analyze This,” another hit. “It's a good thing. I feel like I represent the city in a certain way.”

Ramis, a longtime North Shore resident, was surrounded by family when he died at 12:53 a.m. from complications of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a rare disease that involves swelling of the blood vessels, his wife Erica Mann Ramis said. He was 69.

[Jessterw]

My son wore has been wearing his Ghostbusters shirts since he heard this unfortunate news.

[Evildead666]

RIP Indeed.

He will be sorely missed.

[cjolley]

Rip

Here is a nice article by Stephen Tobolosky (Ned Ryerson from Groundhogs Day) about him.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/02/harold_ramis_stephen_tobolowsky_remembers_the_groundhog_day_director.html

Ididn’t know Harold Ramis well. Our main point of contact was that we worked together for a few weeks in 1992 on the movie Groundhog Day. However, that was no ordinary film. The experience was like walking on a rope bridge in the Himalayas. Every gust of wind was memorable. I would like to share the essential shapes I saw and the impression he made on me.

I met Harold when I tried out for Groundhog Day. He didn’t watch my audition. He auditioned with me! He grabbed a script, stood up, and played Phil Connors, the weatherman Bill Murray would make iconic. And Harold was good! He said he thought it would help put the actors at ease to read with a fellow actor rather than a casting assistant.

As he talked to me about the movie, I noticed something in his expression that, as I look back, was an essential characteristic. Whatever he said, whatever he did, he looked like he was trying to suppress a smile. It was as if laughter was always trying to escape. It didn’t matter if Bill Murray and I were shooting our street scene, or the weather had blown in, attempting to ruin our schedule, or if Harold was trying to settle some conflict on the set; he always seemed on the verge of laughing.

more...

[Jessterw]

Esquire also published two pieces, The Quiet Genius of Harold Ramis and An Oral History of Ghostbusters.

Harold was unique in that he was a master at drawing the focus away from himself, stepping back so you could see the whole scene. He was a truly gifted straight-man foil to Murray's bounding puppy-dog-esque energy: in an in-depth 2004 profile on Ramis in The New Yorker, Stripes director Ivan Reitman noted “Bill is this great improv player, but he needs Harold, the focussed composer who understands setting a theme and the rules of orchestration."