It was the Saturday afternoon semifinals of golf’s Match Play Championship earlier this month. As hotshot Australian rookie Adam Scott lined up the short putt that could give him the distinction of beating Tiger Woods, Steve DePaepe teed off with a running commentary from his Evanston living room:” ‘The crowd has gone deadly silent . . . a Cinderella story out of nowhere . . . former greenskeeper . . . and now about to become the Masters champion. . . . ‘ “OK, so you had to be there.
Or in any of the thousands of living rooms across the country, where other guys were doing the same thing as DePaepe–sofa-surfing, watching golf and firing off their favorite lines from “Caddyshack.”
Movie-speak is a great American male pastime, enjoyed by young and old alike. But, even so, few guys are as fluent as DePaepe. He claims to be able to quote nearly 37 movies verbatim, and there are about 100 more that he speaks a smattering of.
It’s amazing what people can accomplish when they really apply themselves.
DePaepe’s family remembers that he first picked up conversational “Caddyshack” while still in his teens. Away at Bradley University in Peoria, “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” an urban drama starring Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke, became his native tongue. And now, in his mid-30s, his speech is a patois of box-office hits of the last couple of decades such as “Wall Street,” “Platoon” and “GoodFellas.” As a rule, he favors lines from movies featuring warped individuals looking to take over the world.
This year’s Oscar presentation will make movies a hot topic of conversation, but not many people will commit best-picture nominees “The Hours” or “Chicago” to memory. So what makes a person–OK, a guy–devote such a large portion of his internal hard drive to storing such useless trivia?
“It’s like remembering a good joke,” DePaepe said. “There’s just something about the off-the-wall-ness of a line that no one would ever say in real life that makes it stick with you.”
As an example, he parrots Bill Murray in “Stripes” boasting, “Chicks dig me because I rarely wear underwear, and when I do it’s usually something unusual.” Admittedly, that’s not something one hears (nor hopes to hear) every day.
In case you’re wondering, DePaepe does have a life. He’s a nice-looking guy, a college grad who owns a house-painting company in Wilmette and, despite his tendency to lapse into geek speak, chicks really do seem to dig him. But after reeling off more snappy movie patter, he worried about coming off as a movie freak–emphasis on the latter.
“Do I sound like some kind of couch potato loser?” he wondered. Noooo … It’s perfectly normal for a grown man to imitate another grown man who is playacting at being another grown man. Scary, but true.
Seems everybody’s got a brother/husband/son like Jeff Pfeffer of Deerfield. He can regurgitate chunks of “National Lampoon’s Animal House” like a frat boy at his first toga party.
” ‘Seven years of college down the drain,’ ” he repeats in quintessential Bluto Blutarsky-speak.
Now 37, Pfeffer grew up with “Animal House,” “Caddyshack” and “Stripes.” And today he’s watching them with his boys.
“We were laughing and repeating lines [from `Caddyshack’],” he recalls. “I said to my wife, `See. It goes from generation to generation.'”
Pfeffer says it’s no coincidence so many quotable movies were written by the same person: Chicago filmmaker Harold Ramis. “It shows his consistency and ability to deliver humor that people can connect with.”
He’s on to something there. After all, who can’t relate to Dean Wormer’s advice to Flounder in “Animal House”: “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
With such movies as “Analyze This,” “Caddyshack,” “Ghostbusters” and “Stripes” to his screenwriting credit, Ramis has fathered a mother lode of funny movie quotes.
And he’s funny even when he’s playing himself. In a brief interview conducted by car phone–warning: being glib while driving is not something the average person should attempt–he produced a plethora of quotable material.
Ramis acknowledged that people frequently walk up and spout dialogue to him on the street.
“Depending on which of my movies they quote from, it tells you a lot about them.” he said in that familiar Ramis deadpan. “The high end of my audience is `Groundhog Day.’ The more populist end of the spectrum is `Caddyshack.'”
Breathtaking extremes
As flattering as it is for him to have people hanging on his every word–“I blush with pride,” he confessed with mock seriousness–even he is sometimes stunned at the extreme to which some will take it.
“A guy will claim to have seen `Caddyshack’ 400 times and start quoting to me from it,” Ramis said. “I just laugh and say, `You are a very sick man.'”
Apparently this is a contagious condition.
“Guys live in fantasy more than women,” Ramis said. “And movies work hard at feeding back our fantasies to us.”
Purely theoretical, of course
Lake Forest movie-phile Rob Rowe has a completely different take on why guys are more into movie shtick than women. He figures it’s “further evidence that women are more highly evolved than men.”
A quick wit in his own right, Rowe doesn’t boast as vast a repertoire as other movie mimics.
“At my age, with four kids, I don’t have much free RAM space left, so I can only hang on to a few key movies that I keep coming back to,” he said.
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is Rowe’s holy grail. He owns the movie, has watched it countless times and considers it to be “the epicenter of all absurd behavior.”
“If there’s an issue that’s awkward to discuss, you can default to Python as an alternate way of communicating,” Rowe suggested.
Hmmm. One is left wondering what sorts of discussions can be facilitated by pretending to be a misfit member of King Arthur’s court. (Maybe this is something Colin Powell should take a crack at.)
Face-to-face with Murray
Of course, like all guys who like to speak movies, Rowe is also a “Caddyshack” fan. And he once went toe to toe with the head greenskeeper himself.
Thirteen years ago, while celebrating his first wedding anniversary, he found himself in an elevator with Bill Murray.
“I said to him, `Who are the gopher’s allies?’ And without missing a beat, he throws back, `The harmless squirrel and the friendly rabbit,’ in full Carl Spackler accent,” Rowe recalled. “That exchange lasted all of maybe 30 seconds, but that’s the highlight of my first anniversary.”
Mrs. Rowe is clearly one lucky lady.
Although she admits that it can be “totally mortifying if he springs it and we’re not with the right crowd,” Suzette Rowe has gotten used to Rob’s handing her a line. She knows that when he says, “I’m picking out a Thermos for you!” he’s not being helpful. He’s being Steve Martin in “The Jerk.”
“I just put it into that `guy thing’ category,” she said.
What makes this particular guy thing odder than most is that language skills usually favor the female. According to professor Larry Lowry of the University of California at Berkeley, an expert in developmental cognitive sciences (the study of how people think and learn), “Females have more neurons devoted to language than males.” Which explains why women don’t need to let movies do their talking for them.
The scientific explanation
“Girls speak earlier, are more fluent, have better accents and speak more accurately,” Lowry said. He goes on to explain that “male and female brains just work differently.”
Well, hello!
“For men, something where the context is unusual or a little off-step jumps out at them,” Lowry said. “The more emotional or repetitive the stimulus, the more likely it’ll be remembered.”
Evan Tapper, 27, who works at Blockbuster in Wilmette, has seen a lot of movies a lot of times.
And he agrees that emotions play a huge role in remembering and quoting dialogue: “For guys there’s this fear it’s not manly to express too much emotion. Speaking in movies is safer. You’re assuming the persona when you say the lines.”
Lowry places the optimum age for imbedding these lines into long-term memories at adolescence, when our prefrontal lobes are firing on all cylinders and our emotions are all revved up.
This certainly jibes with Brian Bertola, 22, and his penchant for quoting “Coming to America,” a movie he has seen 50 times or more.
“When I was about 10, my dad and I would quote from a movie if a situation came up where a line would fit. `Coming to America’ is the first movie I remember doing this with,” Bertola said.
He was stumped for a minute when asked to replay a favorite quote from the movie.
“It’s hard to think of a line without foul language,” he admitted.
Makes for some great father-and-son moments.
These days Bertola trades quips with friends. “There’s a buzz that comes from speaking the same movie,” he said.
“We’ll shoot lines at each other and try to guess what movie it’s from.”
Alert for an overload
Storing all these sound bites eats up megabytes of memory. Aren’t some of these guys in danger of a total system crash? One more new Bill Murray movie and that’s it–suddenly they can’t remember their address or phone number?
Not to fear, according to Lowry.
“The more you devote yourself to something, the more the brain provides neurons for it,” he offered reassuringly. “Like a muscle, with exercise, it builds up.”
So it can’t hurt you. But can it help? Is there any practical application for the ability to slip into a Carl Spackler persona as easily as a golf shirt and khakis?
“Well,” Tapper offered, “you can always get a job at Blockbuster.”
Talking the talk with filmmaker Harold Ramis
When it comes to putting words in guy’s mouths, Harold Ramis is the man.
Between “Caddyshack,” “National Lampoon’s Animal House” and “Stripes,” the North Shore resident has created the universal language spoken in ball games, bars and golf courses across the country.
And, to quote from “Stripes,” “That’s a fact, Jack.”
Naturally, in talking to Ramis, he had a lot to say about what makes movie lines memorable. And about what drives guys to spew movie lines like a city fire hydrant on an August afternoon.
“There is not a guy in America, of a certain age, who doesn’t wish he was as funny as Bill Murray,” Ramis said. “Teams of well-paid Hollywood writers spend a year to make these characters as clever as possible. Then we test these lines with audiences and get their reactions. The lines that make it through to the final cut have been in every draft from 1-15 and you just know they’re solid. So it’s natural that when a guy wants to throw out a laugh, he reaches for one of these lines.”
Even so, Ramis acknowledged that funny comes not just from what you say but also from how you say it. He divulged that in “Caddyshack,” Bill Murray’s character is 95 percent improvised.
“I had Bill for only six days of filming and had only one script prepared for him–the `Dalai Lama’ speech. We started with that, and then Bill added killer enhancements that have become part of the legend of the movie,” Ramis said.
Although some might say it’s not polite to laugh at your own jokes, who can argue with Ramis’ choice of a scene from “Stripes” as one of his favorite screen moments?
“I love the Old Yeller speech in `Stripes,'” he said with a laugh.
“`We’re Americans. You know what that means. It means our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. . . . ‘”
It’s almost impossible to read those words and not hear Bill Murray’s voice in your head. And it’s equally tough not to continue the rest of the speech aloud in your best Bill Murray accent.
No wonder Murray gets Ramis’ vote as the most quotable comedy actor of all time.
“I’ve done five films with him and highlights from those movies would be the best stuff anyone has said in the history of movies,” Ramis said.
You can say that again. And again. . . .
— Sue Vering
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Make our day and ID these movie lines
Some Q staffers dispute the notion that committing movie dialogue to memory is just a guy thing. So feel free to choose up teams of men vs. women on this quiz on quotes. Q suggests awarding extra points for those who not only identify the movie but also the actor and character. Answers on Page 5.
“Man, that ball got outta here in a hurry. I mean, anything travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it, don’t you think?”
“You’re on a gravy train with biscuit wheels!”
“The American Express card. Don’t steal home without it.”
“Check my pulse on this question, Jack, do I think you’re a psycho? Yes!”
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning! Smells like victory.”
“Yes, Satan? Oh, I’m sorry, sir. You sounded like someone else.”
“But face it. You’re a neo maxi zoom dweebie, what would you be doing if you weren’t out making yourself a better citizen?”
“I want your blood and want your soul, and I want them both right now.”
“I did not achieve this position in life by having some snot-nosed punk leave my cheese out in the wind.”
“I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch.”
“Do you know what it’s like to be me out here for you? It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about!”
“I just don’t get it! She seems totally uninterested in me, despite my smothering obsessiveness.”
“Tell the cook this is low-grade dog food. The steak still has marks where the jockey was hitting it.”
“Take a man and remove all accountability and reason and that is a woman.”
“I’m funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh?”
As good as it gets: Answers to the quiz
Yeah, some of these quotes from Page 1 are obscure but we think they’re all fun.
“Man that ball got outta here in a hurry. I mean anything travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it, don’t you think?”
–Kevin Cosner as Crash Davis in “Bull Durham”
“You’re on a gravy train with biscuit wheels!”
–Bill Murray as Ernie McCracken in “Kingpin”
“The American Express card. Don’t steal home without it.”
–Wesley Snipes as Willie Mays Hayes in “Major League”
“Check my pulse on this question, Jack, do I think you’re a psycho? Yes!”
–Ben Stiller as Greg Focker in “Meet the Parents”
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning! Smells like victory.”
–Robert Duvall as Lt. Col. Kilgore in “Apocalyse Now”
“Yes, Satan? Oh, I’m sorry, sir. You sounded like someone else.”
–Jim Carey as Ace Ventura in “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”
“But face it. You’re a neo maxi zoom dweebie, what would you be doing if you weren’t out making yourself a better citizen?”
–Judd Nelson as John Bender in “The Breakfast Club”
“I want your blood and want your soul, and I want them both right now.”
— Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo in “Tombstone”
“I did not achieve this position in life by having some snot-nosed punk leave my cheese out in the wind.”
–Jeffrey Jones as Ed Rooney in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”
“I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch.”
–Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper in “Jaws”
“Do you know what it’s like to be me out here for you? It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about!”
–Tom Cruise as Jerry Maguire in “Jerry Maguire”
“I just don’t get it! She seems totally uninterested in me, despite my smothering obsessiveness.”
–Chris Elliot as Nathanial Mayweather in “Cabin Boy”
“Tell the cook this is low-grade dog food. The steak still has marks where the jockey was hitting it.”
–Rodney Dangerfield as Al Czernik in “Caddyshack”
“Take a man and remove all accountability and reason and that is a woman.”
–Jack Nicholson as Melvin Udall in “As Good As It Gets”
“I’m funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh?”
–Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito in “GoodFellas”
