When the hot young comics from Saturday Night Live spilled over into cinema in the late 1970s, they needed film-makers who could marshal their unruly talents. That task fell to John Landis, Harold Ramis and especially to Ivan Reitman, who has died aged 75.
Having produced the off-Broadway National Lampoon show, featuring some of the future SNL stars (John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner), Reitman was well placed to launch them on the big screen. He developed and produced Landis’s raucous hit National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), in which Belushi played the wildest member of a 1960s college fraternity. He also directed Ghostbusters (1984), which combined the tomfoolery of old Abbott and Costello movies with the sort of hip, scornful attitude personified by Murray.
