Much fuss has been made about Ghostbusters: Afterlife filmmaker Jason Reitman picking up the family business from father Ivan Reitman after watching his dad bring to life the 1984 original Ghostbusters and its 1989 sequel. But he was not the only kid who haunted the set of the supernatural comedies.
Never-before-released images from the original films show quite a few little ones—some the children of the actors or filmmaking crew, some just visitors whose identities are lost to time—populating a few of the most iconic scenes from the franchise, like the one above, taken during the ballroom battle against Slimer in the first film.
The clear scene-stealer is Bill Murray‘s toddler son Homer, now a well-known restauranteur and proprietor of Brooklyn’s 21 Greenpoint. In photo after photo, he displays energy equivalent to an unlicensed nuclear accelerator—flashing his belly, laughing uproariously, and sometimes biting his father’s co-stars. (Reached by Vanity Fair, Homer says he was too young to remember those times, but is eager to see the images himself.)
“I remember Homer Murray being like the Tasmanian Devil,” says Jason Reitman, who’s a few years older. Both of them were among the first kids in the world to be fascinated by the Ghostbusters universe. Others followed after the first film debuted in the summer of ’84.
“All of our families kept showing up at various times on both of the movies, but particularly by the second one the kids wanted to come,” Ivan says. In the image above, young Homer entertains his slime-covered father in the ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel, where the Ghostbusters’ proton blasters would blow apart the room and bring light fixtures plummeting to the floor.
This time, Venkman’s proton blaster tested the elasticity of the little boy’s stomach.
“Did it feel like a safe set for kids?” Jason asked his father in a joint interview with Vanity Fair. “Sets can sometimes feel like dangerous places, and sometimes they feel like playgrounds.”
“I think this felt more like a playground, because it was a big open space,” Ivan says. “I mean, it don’t think it was safe under the chandelier when we crashed it down onto the table, but most of the time it was.”
On the set of Ghostbusters II, it almost looks like Jason is already giving Aykroyd direction. But that would not actually happen for 30 more years; Jason says he was probably just excitedly describing something to the actor.
Jason says this sequence is from a commercial within the film, in which the Ghostbusters try to hustle merch as customer bonuses. One of the items is the travel coffee mug attached to the belt of Harold Ramis. (“Limit one per family.”)
Another moment from Ghostbusters II finds father and son Reitman looking at what Jason remembers as concept art images of the villain Viggo the Carpathian. Now both of them have a sense of what it’s like to wrangle Murray, who is known for improvising his way through a script.
“Was Bill visual?” Jason asks Ivan. “When you were giving him notes, was he the kind of guy who would respond to, ‘Here’s the storyboards,’ or ‘Here’s what you’re actually going to be seeing up there?’”
“Not particularly,” Ivan says. “He was just looking out for opportunities. He was constantly, non-verbally writing his brain, sort of storing it away for when there’s an opportunity where he can sort of ‘score’ in the scene.”
“That’s interesting,” Jason says. “So when the opportunity came to make a joke, or an ad lib, he was building the bank.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s when the obsession began,” Jason says, looking at this shot of him staring through the camera’s viewfinder. It appears to be the museum set of Ghostbusters II, where Sigourney Weaver‘s character works. Ivan is looking over his shoulder, as is a background actor carrying a statue prop.
“What I would always joke is that I was annoyed that he never spent any time watching what I was doing,” Ivan says. “He was sort of more interested in everybody else in the crew and would go from department to department. I do remember asking him to look through the viewfinder a few times, to look at the shot we were planning.”
Another visitor to the set of the second film was Harold Ramis’s daughter, Violet Ramis Stiel, author of the 2018 memoir Ghostbuster’s Daughter. When she accompanied him in this shot, he was working on the courtroom sequence from the sequel.
“She’s a real cross between Harold and her mom [Anne Plotkin], and has a lovely, quirky sense of humor,” Ivan recalls. “I think they had a very mature relationship.”
“When you read Violet’s book, you get a sense of what their relationship was like, father to daughter,” says Jason, who consulted with her about the script for Afterlife and the way it handled her father’s legacy as Egon. “He clearly treated her like an adult from very early. That became part of their bond, and that’s what I see in this photo. There’s clearly a real friendship there.”
Was her curly hair from this era part of the inspiration for Finn Wolfhard and McKenna Grace as Egon’s grandchildren in Afterlife? “Absolutely,” Jason says. “We definitely wanted Phoebe and Trevor to look like Spenglers. Finn comes with the hair already, but we had to make that happen with McKenna.”
Ivan often gave his children cameos in his film. Jason plays “Brownstone Boy #2” in the Ghostbusters sequel, who famously tells Winston and Ray: “My dad says you’re full of crap.” Jason’s younger sister Catherine, now the star of the series Workin’ Moms, played the little girl whose joy Egon is monitoring as part of a psychological study.
“I think it was really funny to see Egon torturing her as part of the experiment. ‘Okay, now take away the puppy,’” Ivan says. “That’s one of my favorite lines in that movie.”
The Reitmans’ third child, Caroline, also turned up on the set of Ghostbusters II, although the infant was too young for a cameo. These shots hold special meaning for Ivan, as he explains:
“That’s Jason’s mom, my wife Geneviève, feeding the baby. And that’s the day she arrived holding that baby from Nevada, where we adopted her,” Ivan says. “She came right to the set, which was at the Burbank studios, to show me the baby. This is the first moment I got to see her. Of course, she got to meet the Ghostbusters.”
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