By James Barber
The movie comedy “Stripes” turned 40 last year. A popular hit when released in theaters back in 1981, the Bill Murray and John Candy film has become a classic, with jokes endlessly quoted on military bases all over the world. That’s the fact, Jack!
Director Ivan Reitman died unexpectedly at age 75 on Feb. 12, 2022. Even though he’d previously had some success with the low-budget comedy “Meatballs,” the achievement of “Stripes” launched a long Hollywood career.
Reitman went on to direct some of the most successful comedies of the ’80s, including both of the original “Ghostbusters” movies, “Twins,” “Kindergarten Cop,” “Dave” and “Junior.” He found later success as a mentor to younger directors and produced such movies as “Old School,” “Private Parts,” “Space Jam,” “I Love You, Man” and his son Jason’s Best Picture Oscar nominee “Up in the Air.”
All the success traces back to “Stripes,” a chaotic and raunchy comedy that’s most certainly not anti-military and was released at a moment when theaters were still flooded with angsty dramas focused on the fallout from the Vietnam War.
Let’s go ahead and say that the success of “Stripes” opened the door for the return of military-themed movies that focused on the positives instead of the negatives. Would we have seen “Top Gun” or “An Officer and a Gentleman” if “Stripes” hadn’t proved that audiences wanted military movies that recognized the benefits of service? Probably not.
Like many great comedies, the movie we saw wasn’t necessarily the one the filmmakers originally planned. “Stripes” had a long road from idea to screen and took some weird twists before the project made it to theaters. Here are six amazing facts about “Stripes.”
1.The script was written for Cheech and Chong.
Reitman came up with the idea for a pro-Army comedy about best friends joining together and enlisted screenwriters Len Blum and Daniel Goldberg to write the screenplay.
“It was just before the premiere of Meatballs in Toronto, Canada,” said Reitman in an interview with the U.S. Army website. “I felt like it was time for another service comedy. We were in peaceful times, it was post-Vietnam, and I thought it would be great to have some comedic look at the Army that would not be another protest movie. Those had been a staple of Hollywood. My idea was to have Cheech and Chong join the Army; that’s what Dan and Lenny [Blum] initially wrote.”
That could have been a hilarious movie. Cheech and Chong were hot after the surprise success of “Up in Smoke” in 1978, but they were writing their own movies and Tommy Chong was the director (even though their manager Lou Adler somehow took credit for Chong’s work on the first movie). They were grinding the movies out quickly. Both “Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie” and “Nice Dreams” were released before “Stripes,” so they were never really going to show up and star in someone else’s film.
Fortunately, Reitman got along with Bill Murray from “Meatballs” and recruited him to play the lead, John Winger. After they signed up John Candy to play wildman recruit Dewey “Ox” Oxberger, the pieces were in place for a truly chaotic comedy.
2. The Army supported the filmmakers.
You have to wonder whether anyone at the Pentagon actually read the screenplay before giving the Army’s blessing to “Stripes.” Even though the movie followed the old Hollywood arc of “raw recruits surviving training before taking on the enemy on the field of battle,” all the anarchy was in the details.
A big part of the reason that “Stripes” works is that the movie was filmed in a real military environment. And the Army’s decision to support the production made all the difference. That support “made it really easy for us to get troops during filming,” said screenwriter and producer Daniel Goldberg. “It just took away any kind of negativity from the movie, and that support really made it a very enjoyable experience for everybody because we were really embraced by the Army.”
3. “Stripes” was made by Canadians.
Why was one of the best-loved Army comedies made by a bunch of Canadians? Sure, it’s true that the lead best friends John Winger and Russell Ziskey were played by Chicago natives Bill Murray and Harold Ramis, but they were totally surrounded by our friends from the North on set.
Reitman was born in Czechoslovakia but emigrated to Canada as a child. Screenwriters Goldberg and Blum are Canadian. So was Candy, and he was joined in the movie by fellow “SCTV” Canadians Dave Thomas and Joe Flaherty.
That’s a lot of Canadians. Maybe it took foreigners to remind Americans just how funny the military can be.
4. Warren Oates was the movie’s only legit military connection.
After dropping out of high school, future actor Warren Oates enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1946 and served for two years as an aircraft mechanic. He made the rank of corporal before his discharge in 1948. He discovered theater while a student at the University of Louisville and became an actor.
Drill Sgt. Hulka became one of the actor’s most iconic roles. Oates managed to deliver menace with a straight face while still conveying a sense that he was in on the movie’s joke. “Stripes” works mostly because he keeps the chaos anchored.
Oates became a star character actor in the ’60s and appeared in some great movies, including “In the Heat of the Night,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Two-Lane Blacktop,” “Badlands” and “Dillinger.” He worked at a furious pace throughout his career and made three films after “Stripes” before dying of a heart attack at age 53 less than a year after the “Stripes” premiere.
5. The Czechoslovakian border scenes were filmed in Kentucky.
The Army let the production film at Fort Knox, and the producers realized that the Kentucky woods made a great stand-in for the Czechoslovakian border. Not only did that keep the budget down, the filming took place close to home for several of the actors. Oates hailed from the small town of Depoy, Kentucky, and Sean Young, who was in her first major film role and would go on to star in “Blade Runner,” “Dune” and “No Way Out,” was from Louisville. John Diehl, who launched a successful career after playing recruit Howard “Cruiser” Turkstra, hailed from nearby Cincinnati, Ohio.
6. ‘Stripes’ was one of the first movies to use a Steadicam for filming.
Another reason that audiences love “Stripes” is the look and feel of the graduation scene. Reitman credits Garrett Brown, the inventor of the Steadicam. Even though he wasn’t credited for his work on “Stripes,” Brown supervised use of the Steadicam for that section of the film.
Nearly 50 years later, we’re used to the Steadicam, but the camera was a revolution when Brown invented it in 1975. The Steadicam is a mount that isolates the movie camera from the operator’s movement, allowing for smooth camera movement even when the camera itself is moving over rough ground.
Before the Steadicam, filmmakers had to use hard-to-move tracks to assure a steady moving shot. The setup process was time-consuming and therefore expensive. Steadicams revolutionized filmmaking in the ’80s.
Reitman was under the impression that “Stripes” was only the second movie after “Rocky” to utilize the technology. That’s not quite true. There’s a spectacular sequence in the Woody Guthrie biopic “Bound for Glory” (1976) that introduced the Steadicam to the world. There’s a great chase sequence in “Marathon Man” (1976) and, of course, the training sequences in “Rocky.”
Still, filmmakers were figuring out the technology when Brown pushed boundaries to create the climactic scene in “Stripes.” Next time you watch, tell your friends that the movie wasn’t just a dumb comedy but also a technical breakthrough for cinema.
— This story was inspired by a U.S. Army story based on an interview that Ivan Reitman and Daniel Goldberg gave in honor of the 40th anniversary of Stripes in 2021.
