Ivan Reitman was a director and producer with a golden touch for Hollywood comedy and feelgood entertainment – the heir, perhaps, of Ernst Lubitsch or Gregory La Cava from the golden age, but with a multiplex talent for the 80s and 90s – able to detonate serious box-office explosions. His great heyday, importantly, coincided with the great heyday of video rental and home entertainment – an era of couples and families browsing the VHS racks at video rental stores on a Friday and Saturday night and deciding that comedies were the best bet: Reitman’s comedies.
And this, most famously, was for the glorious high-concept fantasy comedy Ghostbusters in 1984, which brilliantly absorbed SNL-type comedy into the movie mainstream and made stars and serious players of its leads: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. I have a happy memory of Ivan Reitman appearing on stage in London just last year, to deafening applause, joining his son Jason before the premiere of the newest film in what became the Ghostbusters franchise: Ghostbusters Afterlife.
Reitman was able to hyper-evolve a comedy style which started in the wacky, boisterous, non-PC style of the frat house – there was his Canadian debut Meatballs (which was also Bill Murray’s acting debut) and the army comedy Stripes (again Murray, developing his miraculously laidback droll style). Before this, Reitman had produced National Lampoon’s Animal House, a movie that showed what a huge mainstream market there was for goofy, borderline-crass guys’ comedy. Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II took him to the stratosphere: an effects-laden spectacular with the heft and power of a big sci-fi or action movie – but a comedy with cool, even subtle performances.
The same can’t exactly be said for his other directing coup, but it showed his pure Hollywood genius: realising the family comedy potential of Arnold Schwarzenegger in movies such as Twins and Kindergarten Cop. Those movies put Arnie’s muscular power and box office chops at the service of Reitman’s inspired talent for popular comedy. He was a titan of showbusiness and a master of the impossible task of making people laugh.
