Chevy Chase remembers the night Bill Murray banged on his door at 3 a.m. looking to score some weed.
It was the autumn of 1979, a year and change after the two comedy legends famously scrapped backstage at Saturday Night Live minutes before Chase went live from New York.
The day of their notorious backstage brawl, Chase had returned to the show he’d left for movie stardom, guest-hosting SNL amid rankled egos and high tensions.
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“When you become famous, you’ve got a year or two where you act like an asshole,” Murray said years later. “You can’t help yourself. It happens to everybody. You’ve got, like, two years to pull it together—or it’s permanent.”
In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Chase & Co. made their names as comedy’s rising disruptors, bouncing between SNL and the subversive spin-off projects of National Lampoon Magazine. By the time Chase and Murray found themselves co-starring in Caddyshack, a golf comedy helmed by their buddy Harold Ramis, that beef had maybe, seemingly been squashed.
As he recounts in a deleted scene filmed for filmmaker Douglas Tirola's new National Lampoon documentary Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, Chase was awoken in the dead of night in his Florida hotel room by a Murray on a mission.
“I was sleeping and there was a banging on my door,” he says. “I think it was Bill and maybe Brian Doyle-Murray… there were a couple of them. I don’t mean a couple of Murrays necessarily, although there are like 11 of them, which is way more than we need…”
Someone was on the hunt for marijuana, and as Chevy Chase recalls in classic Chevy Chase fashion, they needed him—Caddyshack’s “quote-unquote star”—to get the attention of the cast’s resident dope man: Rodney Dangerfield.
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