Groundhog Day (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Groundhog Day, the 1993 film directed by Harold Ramis, opens on a man who is wrong about the weather. Phil Connors, a Pittsburgh weatherman, confidently tells his viewers that a blizzard will miss Western Pennsylvania. It does not. That small humiliation is the first in a long chain of indignities that will force Phil to live February 2 over and over again in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, until he becomes someone worth saving.

  Bill Murray plays Phil as a man openly contemptuous of the town, the people he works with, and the assignment itself. Andie MacDowell plays Rita, his new producer, who becomes the one person he cannot manipulate. Chris Elliott rounds out the road crew as cameraman Larry. The story they inhabit was conceived by a screenwriter named Danny Rubin, who started from a meditation on vampires and eternity, and ended up with something that Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, and literary theorists would spend decades dissecting.

  The film earned over $105 million worldwide and won a BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay. It also destroyed the friendship of the two men most responsible for making it. And it introduced a phrase into the English language: Groundhog Day, meaning a monotonous, repetitive, and unpleasant situation. What follows is the story of how a spec script about a man repeating the worst day of his life became one of the most analyzed films ever made.

• 2. The Idea Rubin Had

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  Danny Rubin was sitting in a Los Angeles theater in 1990, waiting for a film to start, reading Anne Rice's novel The Vampire Lestat. The book led him to think about immortality, not as a gift, but as a problem. What happens to a person, he wondered, when time no longer has consequences? He focused on men who could not outlive their adolescence, stuck in a kind of permanent arrested development.

  His agent had just pushed him to write a calling-card script after he sold his first screenplay, which became the thriller Hear No Evil. The idea of depicting centuries of historical change was too expensive for any realistic budget. Then Rubin remembered a brief story concept he had sketched two years earlier: a man who woke every morning to find it was the same day. He married the two ideas. By making eternity a loop rather than a line through history, he solved the budget problem and gained something better: dramatic compression.

  He opened a calendar and chose February 2. The date had story potential precisely because it was a recognized holiday without much weight behind it. Rubin knew that few people outside Pennsylvania were aware that the actual Groundhog Day festival takes place in a small town called Punxsutawney, a fact he had picked up from a writing job for a local phone company. That obscure fact gave him his trap: a small, isolated location with a ready-made reason for a TV weatherman to be there.

  He named the main character after the groundhog itself, Punxsutawney Phil. He chose "I Got You Babe" as the song that wakes Phil each morning because it repeats its own lines and is about love, both of which felt thematically right. He spent seven weeks making notes on the rules and characters, then one week writing the script. He deliberately chose not to explain the cause of the loop, comparing Phil's predicament to ordinary human life: "none of us knows exactly how we got stuck here either."

• 3. Two Visions of the Same Film

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  Rubin's script reached Harold Ramis through Richard Lovett at Creative Arts Agency, who could not represent Rubin but passed the pages to his own client. By the early 1990s, Ramis was looking for something different. His last directorial effort, the 1986 film Club Paradise, had failed both critically and commercially. He wanted to direct a comedy about redemption, and Rubin's script interested him, though he admitted he did not laugh while reading it. He saw the spirituality and the romance, but thought it needed more humor.

  Rubin chose Ramis's deal, which came through Columbia Pictures at a higher budget than an alternate smaller-studio offer of $3 million, though it required ceding some creative control. What followed was a prolonged negotiation between two writers with different instincts about what the film was. Ramis and Rubin loosely used the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief as an outline, but they disagreed on tone at nearly every step. Ramis reorganized the story into a standard three-act structure. He removed the original ending in which Rita gets trapped in her own loop, reasoning that audiences needed catharsis. He cut Phil's journeys outside Punxsutawney, removed expositional narration, and tempered the sentimentality with cynicism.

  Rubin had contractual permission to write one more draft after an initial revision, but the studio gave the rewrite to Ramis alone, ending Rubin's formal involvement. A scene from each man's version of the same diner exchange shows the difference. Rubin wrote Phil contemplating the space for possibility inside endless repetition. Ramis wrote Phil rattling off his own imagined virtues as Rita lists qualities she wants in a man. Ramis's version was funnier. It was also what attracted Bill Murray to the project. And then Murray and Ramis immediately began to fight about it.

  Murray wanted to deepen the film's philosophical dimension. Ramis countered that it was a comedy. Columbia Pictures itself demanded an explicit reason for why the loop begins, which Ramis and producer Trevor Albert addressed by agreeing to shoot scenes explaining it too late in the schedule to actually use. The studio never saw those scenes. Eventually, Ramis sent Rubin to work directly with Murray on the script just to stop Murray's early-morning phone calls. When Ramis called to check on progress, Murray asked Rubin to tell him he was not there.

• 4. Woodstock Stood In for Punxsutawney

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  The real Punxsutawney was nearly 80 miles from Pittsburgh and could not house the cast and crew. The Pennsylvania Film Commission sent location tapes, but they confirmed what the production already suspected: the actual town was too isolated and too limited for the script's needs. Ramis, a Chicago native, wanted to stay near Illinois. Location scout Bob Hudgins, who had worked on the 1987 film Planes, Trains and Automobiles, knew of Woodstock, Illinois, from that job and brought the team there after scouting over 60 other towns.

  After Hudgins arranged for Ramis and producer Trevor Albert to view Woodstock from the bell tower of the Woodstock Opera House, the decision was made. The town had the timeless quality the production needed, a quality the filmmakers believed made it look as if it could belong to no particular decade. A large pothole in the street even provided a recurring gag: Phil steps into it every morning.

  Punxsutawney officials, upset that their town would not be used, refused to allow the real groundhog Punxsutawney Phil to appear in the film. A wild groundhog was trapped near Illinois a few weeks before filming and given the name Scooter for the production. During the shooting of the scene in which Phil drives off a cliff with the groundhog, Scooter bit Murray on the knuckle hard enough to break the skin through his glove. During a later take, Scooter bit the same spot again.

  The Woodstock Town Square, the Woodstock Opera House, the Woodstock City Lanes bowling alley, and the Woodstock Moose Lodge all appear in the film. The Tip Top Cafe, used for several scenes, was purpose-built for the production. Local demand afterward led to a real diner with a near-identical name being opened at the same location. Three of the local businesses that had opposed the film's presence sued Columbia Pictures after filming ended for lost profits during production; one case was settled out of court, and the outcomes of the other two are not known.

• 5. 86 Days at 20 Degrees

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  Principal photography began on the 16th of March, 1992, and concluded on the 10th of June, running 86 days. The reported budget ranged between $14.6 million and $30 million. Murray estimated that temperatures on set were often around 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The cold persisted until the end of May, and Murray described being outside for up to 12 hours at a stretch as leaving his skin feeling raw.

  The conflict between Murray and Ramis ran through the entire shoot. Murray was in the middle of a divorce from Margaret Kelly. He showed up late, threw tantrums, and contradicted Ramis's decisions. Ramis called his behavior "just irrationally mean and unavailable." When Ramis heard that Murray had upset Michael Shannon, who was making his on-screen acting debut in the film playing a prospective groom named Fred, Ramis made Murray publicly apologize to Shannon.

  Before one of his scenes with Tobolowsky, Murray walked into a bakery and bought every pastry in the shop, then threw them to the crowd of onlookers watching the shoot. When Tobolowsky arrived for his first scene, he was handed a revised script; he estimated about a third of it had changed from his original copy. One early scene, in which Phil spray-painted his room, destroyed furniture, and gave himself a Mohawk, took three days to film and was ultimately cut in favor of the quieter pencil-breaking moment that appears in the final film.

  As summer arrived and temperatures rose, the cast continued wearing winter clothing while fake snow was used to maintain the visual continuity of the story's single frozen day. Ramis could not settle on weather conditions for the nine scenes featuring Phil and Ned Ryerson, so he shot each of them multiple times in different conditions before choosing a gloomy background to signal a loop nearing its end. The final scene, in which Phil wakes next to Rita, was decided by a crew poll that ended in a tie; a young female crew member served as the tiebreaker.

• 6. Release and the Year It Landed In

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  The film premiered on the 4th of February, 1993, at the Fox Theater in Westwood, Los Angeles. Murray did not attend. Comedian Rodney Dangerfield was among the guests, as were actresses Catherine O'Hara, Mimi Rogers, and Virginia Madsen. Ticket sales from the premiere raised $40,000, which was donated to the Scleroderma Research Foundation and the Turning Point Shelter.

  1993 was considered the year of the family film. Hollywood had faced criticism for relying on violence and sex, and a recession created appetite for feel-good entertainment. Columbia Pictures chairman Mark Canton had noted that PG-rated films were far more likely to cross $100 million than adult-oriented ones. The three highest-grossing films in North American history at that point were all family-friendly: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Wars, and Home Alone. Groundhog Day was rated PG and positioned as a potential sleeper.

  It opened wide on the 12th of February, 1993, across 1,640 theaters and earned $12.5 million in its first weekend, an average of $7,632 per theater. A four-day President's Day weekend brought the total to $14.6 million, making it the second-biggest winter opening on record behind Wayne's World's $18 million from the previous year. About 80% of screenings were sold out, and 65% of those polled said they would recommend it.

  The film held the number-one position in its second weekend, grossed $9.3 million, then fell to second the following week behind the crime thriller Falling Down. It finished its run with a domestic gross of $70.9 million and earned approximately $34.2 million internationally, for a worldwide total of over $105 million. It placed 10th among North American grossers for the year. The studio's share of domestic returns, minus theaters' cut, was estimated at $32.5 million as of 1997.

• 7. What Critics Made of It

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  CinemaScore polls gave the film a "B+" from audiences. Critical response was positive, though not without reservations. Hal Hinson called it the best American comedy since Tootsie in 1982 and said Murray had never been funnier. Roger Ebert compared it favorably to the earlier Murray film Scrooged, noting that where that film offered grim discontent, this one offered optimism. Critics broadly agreed the film had an obvious moral and disagreed about whether that was a problem.

  Desson Thomson found the film deteriorated into a Hollywood morality tale. Owen Glieberman compared it unfavorably to Back to the Future, arguing it was less cleverly structured. Variety called the pacing uneven and described some scenes as running too long. Thomson said the repetition worked against the film; Hinson countered that small variations made each loop interesting as part of what he called a "brilliantly imaginative" and "complex" script.

  Murray received consistent praise. Gene Siskel wrote that any other actor would have made the film too saccharine. Ebert found Murray funnier as a sarcastic antagonist than a friendly protagonist. Hinson wrote that Murray's performance allowed Phil's optimism to feel honest rather than manufactured. MacDowell was praised by Maslin as a "thorough delight" and by Hinson for bringing "otherworldly" chemistry to the screen alongside Murray.

  At the 1994 BAFTA Awards, Rubin and Ramis won Best Original Screenplay. MacDowell won Best Actress at the 20th Saturn Awards. The film received no nominations at the 66th Academy Awards, despite Columbia Pictures sending over 4,500 Academy voters a custom box containing videotapes of nine of their eligible films in a campaign estimated to have cost between $400,000 and $650,000. In 2006, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry.

• 8. A Friendship That Did Not Survive It

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  Murray and Ramis had worked together since 1974, a partnership that had produced Meatballs in 1979, Caddyshack in 1980, and Ghostbusters in 1984. After filming on Groundhog Day concluded, Murray stopped speaking to Ramis entirely. He refused to discuss Ramis in interviews. Ramis continued to speak openly about Murray, including describing dreams in which the two were friends again.

  Some of their close acquaintances, including producer Michael Shamberg, speculated that Murray had grown resentful of the perception that his best work only came through collaboration with Ramis. Ramis believed that Murray's later dramatic turns, including his Academy Award-nominated performance in Lost in Translation in 2003, revealed more about who Murray was than anything produced in their partnership. When Ramis reached out to cast Murray in his 2005 black comedy The Ice Harvest, Murray's brother Brian declined on his behalf.

  The two men did not speak again in any meaningful way for nearly two decades. They reunited only in the final months of Ramis's life, before Ramis died in 2014. Rubin said that Murray and his brother now speak fondly of Ramis. On the 2nd of February, 2024, the city of Chicago declared it "Harold Ramis Day," in a ceremony that Murray attended alongside Ramis's widow Erica Mann Ramis and other cast members from the film.

  Murray eventually changed his view of Groundhog Day itself. He called it "probably the best work I've done" and said the same of Ramis. Tobolowsky, in 2018, said he believed Murray's performance would stand as one of the greatest comedic performances ever committed to film. Rubin, who taught screenwriting at Harvard University for several years, admitted in a 2017 interview some regret that Groundhog Day remained the pinnacle of his career, a film he said the studio always described as taking two weeks, but that he himself felt had to span a hundred years, or a lifetime.