Back on July 13, 1990, just like today, the multiplexes were thick with sequels and action flicks. That day, Ghost, starring Patrick Swayze as Sam Wheat, a murdered banker who haunts lower Manhattan to protect his lover Molly Jensen, played by Demi Moore, began its ascent to surprise summer blockbuster. The two-hour supernatural romance, produced on a $22 million budget, grossed more than half a billion worldwide and dramatically out-performed both Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall ($261,317,921) and Bruce Willis’s Die Hard 2: Die Harder ($240,031,094). The sleeper hit even toppled the year’s box-office darling, Pretty Woman, by almost $50 million as it launched key players into Hollywood’s stratosphere.
An ethereal Moore—in addition to besting her then-husband Willis—soon became the highest-paid actress. Swayze, fresh off Dirty Dancing, further cemented his status as a go-to leading man. The movie’s five Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, netted two Oscars. Whoopi Goldberg’s best-supporting-actress win for her tart portrayal of con-artist psychic Oda Mae Brown ended a 50-year drought for African-American women in the category. (Hattie McDaniel had won for 1939’s Gone with the Wind.) Presenter Jodie Foster gave the film’s second statuette to Bruce Joel Rubin, Ghost’s screenwriter, who defeated Woody Allen (Alice).
When the Los Angeles Times featured photos from the ceremony “there was Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, and my right arm,” says Rubin, whose other credits include Jacob’s Ladder and The Time Traveler’s Wife. “That’s what it is to be a writer in Hollywood.” We asked Rubin to share memories of making the beloved film to mark its silver anniversary.
How turning on, tuning in, and dropping out led to Tinseltown success.
Ghost’s journey from idea to screen began in 1965 with “an LSD trip,” says Rubin. A roommate—who knew counter-culture guru Timothy Leary—gave Rubin a tablet of LSD that he secreted away and waited “for the right time to take.” When that moment finally arrived, “nothing happened.” This being the 60s, a visitor had just stowed a vial of pure Sandoz acid in Rubin’s refrigerator. “My roommate went to give me one drop,” says Rubin. “He went, ‘Whoops!’ The entire eyedropper went shooting down my throat and I began a journey that has never ended.” Rubin realized he wanted to tell an “entertaining and not pontifical” story from a ghost’s point of view. Two years of pitching around Hollywood culminated in one trippy week that saw five studios vying for the idea.
Demi’s pixie haircut and snagging Swayze.
After the project landed at Paramount, studio executive Lindsay Doran called Rubin to say she had found a director. “My heart was beating through my chest and I’m thinking, Spielberg, Scorsese, then she said, ‘Jerry Zucker.’” At the time, Zucker was known for wacky comedies like the cult hit Airplane!. “I thought [he] was probably the worst choice.” Still, Rubin agreed to a dinner where “a great friendship formed. [Zucker’s] one of the most extraordinarily wonderful people around.” A year of collaborating on somewhat painful re-writes of re-writes yielded a script that was “crisper.”
Next came the “delicious” casting process. “Demi was on the radar immediately. And she wanted to do it, which was wonderful,” says Rubin, who calls her “ballsy.” Moore was hired “as a long-haired actress,” but showed up on the first day of shooting with “a short haircut, which is kind of an in-your-face choice,” Rubin recalls. “It announced to us that she had her own ideas about who her character was.” In addition to Moore’s “stunning haircut,” Rubin praises the actress’s “depth of emotionality. She can literally produce tears from one eye or the other.”
For the part of Sam, the filmmakers “went to every major actor in Hollywood who was hot at the time.” So who turned the part down? “Everybody. Harrison Ford said, ‘I read this thing three times and I still don’t get it.’ Michael J. Fox, Paul Hogan, on and on, we kept getting turned down.” Rubin believes the actors “didn’t want to play dead men . . . they all saw it as a loss of vitality.” Zucker had faith the film would land somebody better after each pass but “finally there wasn’t anybody. . . . When Patrick said yes, he basically saved the movie.”
Somewhere in the Paramount vault is an unseen Swayze-Moore sex scene.
Rubin’s wife is a potter, and it was Zucker’s idea to make Moore’s character one, too. The equal-parts hot and artsy scene between Moore and Swayze—where his hands envelop hers in wet clay as she spins a phallic pot between her legs—has become iconic in the annals of celluloid romance. Initially, though, the scene’s carnal nature “was not something that we were prepared for. In fact, we shot a lovemaking scene.” Yet as everyone watched the pottery-scene dailies—the screening of footage shot the previous day—“we just kind of looked at each other and started to understand that what we had was really amazing. The pottery scene proved to be so erotic that we didn’t need anything else.” And while the statistics on a presumed spike in pottery wheels is unknown, the song that accompanies the scene, 1965’s Unchained Melody by The Righteous Brothers, quickly reappeared on the Billboard charts.
The beginning of a beautiful GIF.
Zucker asked Rubin to create “a Casablanca line” and the two came up with Swayze’s final dialogue: “The love inside, you take it with you.” Yet the oft-quoted dialogue that has become an Internet GIF sensation occurs when Goldberg, acting as the medium between Swayze and Moore, warns, “Molly, you in danger, girl.” (Sam’s murderer, Carl Bruner, played by Tony Goldwyn, poses the danger in question.) Though Rubin cannot recall the remark’s exact providence, he guesses “it was Whoopi because she is unbelievably funny.” The TV smash Scandal, currently starring Goldwyn, appropriated the line for a tongue-in-cheek episode title.
Ghost also haunted the box office.
On opening weekend, 25 years ago, Zucker called Rubin and told him Ghost had “sold out everywhere.“ The movie continued to vie for the top slot at the box office through mid-September. ”And we were still playing in theaters six months later at Christmas,” Rubin says.
Twenty-five years, a Japanese remake, and a Broadway musical later . . .
Rubin credits the secret of Ghost’s success to the idea of a dead guy learning to say “I love you” to someone he failed to say it to when he was alive. “That you would fight back from the other side is a core wish of people. [The film] postulates a universe . . . where love goes on.” The writer says he used “a very simple line at the end” to convey this cosmic idea, one Moore says—as a tear wells in her right eye—after she and Swayze share a final kiss: ”See ya.“
