Anna Faris details ‘Ghostbusters’ director Ivan Reitman ‘yelling’ and ‘slapping’ her butt on set.
In her new memoir, Ghostbusters author Pauline Kael recounts an incident during what she describes as a ‘pretty horrific’ shoot on the set. The director, Ivan Reitman, is described as being loud, almost violent and ‘a little bit rough.’ The incident occurred during a sequence where the cast and crew were walking through the Ecto-1 (the world’s largest robot) on the grounds of a military base. According to Kael’s account, the scene was so busy, and Reitman was so ‘yelling’ and ‘angry’ at her and the other actors in the scene, that Kael decided to take her leave. ‘It’s a shame; the shooting was so awful,’ Kael writes. ‘Even the cast and crew, who I felt had done a great job, were exhausted by the final few minutes and wanted to get off the set.’
It’s important to understand the context of what Kael describes as the ‘hideously violent scene’ on the Ecto-1. While she wrote about it in her memoir, Kael was not the first person to write about a violent incident on the set, but she was the first to give such detail to the incident. Kael did write about similar incidents during the production of Ghostbusters, although she did not provide details of a specific violent incident during the production of that film. The reason for writing about it now, however, is in part due to the popularity of Kael’s work, which has inspired many other writers.
There have been previous accounts of violent incidents on the set of Ghostbusters. In his memoirs, the director, Ivan Reitman, does not name names, but he has published details of several different events regarding the crew and actors during what was originally supposed to be a film noir style comedy, but turned out to be a very violent film. As recently as August 2015, Reitman provided details of a violent scene on the set of the film, during which, according to Reitman, a former agent for the production, Larry Kasanoff, ‘took a swing’ at a costar, Dan Aykroyd. ‘I’m not going to talk about his name,’ Reitman wrote in an email to The Guardian. Aykroyd’s manager