The night Bill Murray almost died at Hunter S Thompson's house
When the Groundhog Day star was cast to play the gonzo reporter in the 1980 movie Where the Buffalo Roam, Bill Murray and Hunter S Thompson got on dangerously.
(Credit: Alamy)
Art » Features
Sun 19 January 2025 16:45, UK
Hunter S Thompson sits on a deck chair. For some reason, he always seemed to be sitting on deck chairs, a noted shirker of upholstery. He chokes down another gulp of his cigarette and considers the question as deeply as he has ever considered anything in his life: is Hunter S Thompson the man, now inseparable from Hunter S Thompson the myth? Where does one end and the other begin? Is he bound to keep up chaotic appearances because thatâs whatâs expected of him, or is he bound to perpetuate the madness by virtue of his freakish nature?
At the midpoint of his manic life, he didnât seem quite so sure himself. There were surely Monday mornings and bleak comedowns where he considered the former and almost flirted with a sobering chamomile and a calming long walk, but there are also only so many times you accidentally burn down a yacht with a flare gun while high on mushrooms and not think that maybe something about you is hardwired for the highwire life.
Bill Murray certainly figured that only bedlam was bound to follow in the writerâs blazing trail; he was mad and always had beenâthere were no questions about a mask eating into the face about it. Even when the cameras werenât rolling, and no stories were being sketchily stirred up on the wing, he was a rampaging freak with no known equal. Murray was an authority on the matter because one night, he tried to be his equal, and it almost cost him his life.
The Groundhog Day star was cast to play the gonzo reporter in the 1980 movie Where the Buffalo Roam. The semi-autobiographical comedy captured the journalistâs rise to fame or infamy, depending on who you ask. In the build-up to shooting the project in the late 1970s, Murray began spending plenty of time with the fellow he was set to portray. In fact, all of the cast and crew got to see him plenty of times thanks to the self-appointed role of âexecutive consultantâ that the late writer took up.
When the script was first presented to him, he called it âbad, dumb, low-level, low rentâ and railed against it. Originally, he had signed off on the film rights to the obituary he had written for the celebrated Chicano activist Oscar âZetaâ Acosta without question. But he suddenly took an active interest, albeit all this materialised in was him roving around the set, firing machine guns into the distance. However, it did give Murray the chance to get a grip on the character.
Sadly, taking this to the next step almost caused him to lose his grip on life. âOne day at Thompsonâs Aspen, Colorado home, after many drinks and after much arguing over who could out-Houdini whom, Thompson tied Billy to a chair and threw him into the swimming pool,â Saturday Night Live associate Doug Hill recalls. Murray had asserted that he was confident a simple underwater knot slip while heavily intoxicated would be absolutely no problem. After all, he had no experience in the art of escapology, so he was destined to be blessed with beginnerâs luck.
Thompson agreed. âNothing that ever amounts to a great anecdote ever goes wrongâ was his line of thinking and, essentially, the motto he lived by. The issue was that there was apparently no rope on hand, so they used duck tape instead. Thatâs a detail that is difficult to ratify, and accounts vary. But rope, tape or otherwise, according to Hill, Murray was floundering at the bottom of the pool while Thomspon was idly pouring himself another drink, like a fellow watering seaweed.
Whether he was too intoxicated to care, just letting the anecdote overlords do their work, or supremely confident that Murray was down there seamlessly slipping out of his restraints like an eel in handcuffs, for a frighteningly long time, Thomspon failed to do anything other than embellish the banks of his bloodstream with yet more booze. Alas, something must have eventually stirred in him, and somehow, he summoned the strength to plunge into the pool and carry the weight of Murray, whatever chair he was bound to â likely a deck chair â and probably a few kilos worth of duct tape to the surface where the party promptly continued.
As Hillâs simple conclusion states, âBilly nearly drowned before Thompson pulled him outâ.
However, as though a spell had been cast by this near-death battle of stupidity unbecoming of men in their 40s and late 30s, respectively, Murray was in the clutches of Thompson mania. When he returned to Saturday Night Live after long months of shooting Where the Buffalo Roam, he would lounge around puffing cigarettes through a trademark Thompson-esque holder, a living facsimile of the gonzo kingâseemingly blissfully unaware that the same man had almost killed him through daft misadventure a few tumultuous weeks early.
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