Special thanks to a spy code named ‘My Father’ for linking me to an email from Harold Ramis to Mark Caro at the Chicago Tribune. The basics: Ramis is in, Aykroyd is in, and maybe… just maybe, so is Bill Murray.
aykroyd, ivan reitman and i are consulting at this point, and according to dan, bill murray is willing to be involved on some level. he did record his dialogue for the new ghostbusters video game, as did danny and i, and ernie hudson. the concept is that the old ghostbusters would appear in the film in some mentor capacity. not much else to say at this point. everyone is confident a decent script can be written and i guess we’ll take it from there.
Of course, Dan Aykroyd is well known for being wildly over-optimistic about this stuff, so don’t get too excited.
There’s one other bit that’s interesting, and may explain some of the Seth Rogen/Romany Malco/Paul Rudd rumor-mongering from this summer: Ramis says that Columbia is hoping that the connection he and Year One writers/The Office exec producers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg have with Judd Apatow could mean that casting might come from his corner of the comedyverse. I do believe Seth Rogen when he denied the rumor, but that doesn’t mean the rumor – which was untrue when rumored – could become true. This business is so weird sometimes.
Read the whole email here.
Oh, and that game? It dropped off the listings at Gamespot, but it’s not dead yet, even though things slowed down a lot (it was getting quite expensive). Expect the game to come roaring back to life in the weeks ahead.