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me. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I said, “I’ll wear it in the sketch. I look so damn good in it.” We’d rehearsed the sketch, done it in blocking, so on and so forth. For the real show, they put stage blood onto this Colombian-frog burger, and whoever it was sprayed blood all over this jacket. I just about went nuts. I guess I blew the first line, then they sprayed the blood all over me. This is my classic Saturday Night Live story. They sprayed the blood all over me, completely destroyed the jacket, I had blood all over my hands, and I had two minutes to get out of this clothing. Taking off the jacket, I got blood all over everything. I had two minutes to get on a wig, a mustache on my lips and a pillow in my stomach to look like Walter Cronkite. And all this stuff was being done while the band was playing “Contusion,” by Stevie Wonder, at top volume. The makeup guys were fighting about how much gray to put in my hair. I’d blown O’Donoghue’s joke, and I was now in danger of blowing myself completely out, because I had this huge pillow and it never fit; the zipper didn’t close. There was blood still all over my hands and the wig and everything. The band screeched to a halt, and the guy said, “Five seconds.” And I went absolutely crazy. I went absolutely hysterical. I shrieked like a banshee, and the audience started laughing. They said, “This guy’s having a breakdown.” But then I pulled it together, and I was really funny in the sketch, and that was really when I realized that it could be fun because it was so ridiculous. That was when I finally relaxed. But I had to blow a big joke in order to do it.

I heard that you had to agree to do ‘Ghostbusters’ in order to get the backing for ‘The Razor’s Edge.’ Is that how it worked out?

What happened was, John Byrum and I had The Razor’s Edge in a developmental stage at Columbia—they’d given us a little dough to write the screenplay, but nobody was getting into work early to find out how the rewrites were going. Then Dan Aykroyd called me up with this Ghostbusters idea, and I said, “Yeah, this is great.” He sent me about seventy-five pages, and within an hour there was a deal. They had a producer, they had a caterer, they had a director, they had everything. But it wasn’t at any particular studio yet; it was just a project floating in space. Then all of a sudden, all of the studios found out about it, and they all wanted it. So Dan said, “Well, we gotta get going on this.” I said, “Well, you know, I’m really trying to get this other thing done. I’m trying to convince the studio to give us the go.” And he said, “Well, tell ’em they can have Ghostbusters if they do The Razor’s Edge.” So, another forty-five minutes later, we had a caterer and a producer and a director for The Razor’s Edge. We went out and shot it last summer. Columbia started getting impatient about Ghostbusters. All the time we were in Ladakh we’d get these messages that were like three days old, saying, “Is Bill finished? He’s supposed to be doing Ghostbusters on the twenty-fifth.” I made the mistake of calling America from Agra, that white building—you know, the Taj Mahal. There’s a phone booth at the Taj. They said, “You gotta get right back.” I wanted to take ten days off. I was so tired that I couldn’t even get out of the hotel room in Delhi for four or five days. I didn’t really do anything except sleep. Then I found out that they were going to have the rough version of The Razor’s Edge ready by the end of the week, so I decided to fly to London and see it. Flew to London, saw it. The next day I got on the Concorde, flew to New York and went from the airport to the set on Madison and Sixty-Second Street. I weighed about 171 pounds, I think. I’d lost 35 pounds. So I started eating right away [laughs]. A production assistant said, “Do you want a cup of coffee?” And I said, “Yeah, and I want a couple of doughnuts, too.”

For the first few weeks, I was getting beaten to go to work. It was like, “Where’s Bill?” “Oh, he’s asleep.” Then they’d send three sets of people to knock