In 1984, while the movie was still being filmed on The Burbank Studios soundstages, Columbia Pictures enlisted Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd to help sell the film to theater distributors at the ShoWest convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. A 13-minute film reel was assembled of rough film clips (not shown in movie order) introduced by Bill and Dan, which was shown at the convention. The first part of the reel is Bill and Dan talking outside of Soundstage 12 in front of the Ecto-1. Then there are some really dark film clips with no music or temp music (including the unused Hughes/Thrall theme song) and no special effects. This is followed by Bill and Dan to close it out. Aside from the music (or lack thereof) and effects, the scenes are pretty much the same as what’s in the final movie, though some clips are very slightly different. Some examples: When interviewing the librarian, after Ray expresses his enthusiasm (“I can’t wait to get a look at this thing”), he exchanges a look with Peter that is not in the final film. When doing the Twinkie analogy, Egon says “PKE sample” instead of just “sample”. There might be more subtle differences, but these were the two that immediately jumped out at me.
Below is the full transcript of the intro and outro from the reel, transcribed by me, Paul Rudoff. The film clips are not transcribed, though I noted which clips are used. A few framegrabs are also included, and since the original film was not cleaned up, I took the liberty of removing some of the dirt specks from them. (The logo on the door has some physical nicks and scratches in it that I did not remove, as I’m not trying to alter the content itself.)
An edited version of the reel can be found on the Ghostbusters 1&2 4K UHD & Blu-Ray 2019 5-Disc Set, which can be purchased from my store page. The unedited version made its way into the hands of the fans, and can be viewed on Spook Central here. In the transcript below, the portions that were edited from the 4K/Blu-ray set are in BOLD GREEN.
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