Harold Ramis looks back at "Year One" from Day One

By Martin A. Grove
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - In the beginning there was nothing. Then Harold Ramis got an idea.
That was in the summer of 2005. His comedy "Year One" opened this weekend via Columbia Pictures with Jack Black and Michael Cera as lazy hunter-gatherers on a Biblical epic road trip after being kicked out of their primitive village. The film opened at No. 4 with a solid $20.2 million.
Inspiration? Mel Brooks' "The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man."
"I loved the conceit of putting characters with a contemporary consciousness in an ancient world." It all sounded funny to Ramis, who definitely knows "funny" after "Caddyshack" and "Ghostbusters."
Another influence: A mid-'70s PBS documentary he recalled about how Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons co-existed for thousands of years and must have met.
"I was working with John Belushi and Bill Murray at the time at National Lampoon and I directed them in an improv," he told me. Murray's Cro-Magnon was "his usual contemporary hipster and John played the Neanderthal like a moronic thug." There was "a nice Abbott & Costello quality" that stuck in Ramis' head.
Inspiration struck: "Why not do something set in the ancient world and invest the characters with my own consciousness?" Genesis supplied the story.
"I imagined the hunter-gatherers living in a virtual Garden of Eden with one rule -- 'Don't eat the fruit from that tree.'"
Naturally, a guy like Jack Black "would have to eat the fruit. So it's not only the story of every comic hero, it's actually the story of every adolescent."
To Ramis, Genesis is "one epic journey after another as well as one dysfunctional family after another. So I set these characters in motion, expelled them from their Garden paradise."
The first people they meet are Cain & Abel. Genesis doesn't tell us much about them, so Ramis made it a classic sibling rivalry and Cain's a bit of a sociopath.
There was going to be an episode with Noah, but that was scrapped. Not only would it have been expensive to create a flood and build an arc, but "Steve Carell's 'Evan Almighty' had just been out and, I thought, sort of burned a lot of Noah."
But that didn't matter. There's lots of other good stuff in Genesis -- like Abraham & Isaac. "They're the next important people they meet. Despite every warning by Abraham that God will destroy Sodom for its iniquities, it just makes them want to go to Sodom even more."
In November 2005, Ramis was ready for a studio deal. He had "a loose three acts, which is all I ever want to tell anyway. I always feel people pitch too much. As long as a studio feels you can do it, they don't want to hear too many details."
But always give 'em a marketing hook. "It could be the greatest idea in the world, but if they can't sell it, it's no good to them." Continued...
Source: Reuters