Ernie Hudson says being “pushed aside” in Ghostbusters marketing “felt deliberate”
Left off posters and pushed to the middle of the film, Ernie Hudson explained why Ghostbusters was "the most difficult movie I ever did"
Aux News Ghostbusters
It’s not a new criticism that Ernie Hudson’s Ghostbusters character, Winston Zeddemore, is among modern moviemaking’s most unfairly treated characters. Zeddemore’s accomplishments include saving New York City from a giant marshmallow man, driving the Statue of Liberty, and gazing upon the unholy CGI Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Heck, he even gets one of the best lines in the movie (“I love this town!”). Representing one-fourth of the original Ghostbusters, Zeddemore is a Big Apple legend, even if the ad wizards at Columbia Pictures were too afraid to acknowledge it in the marketing.
While fans at home probably had a hint as to why the one Black Ghostbuster wasn’t included in the marketing for the movie, the film’s impact was a difficult one for actor Ernie Hudson to live through. Speaking with SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Wrap Up Show, Hudson revealed that living with the success of Ghostbusters hasn’t been easy.
Hudson calls himself “the guy who was brought in” as his fellow Busters, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Bill Murray, had starred in numerous projects together. Aykroyd and Ramis wrote the film, and Murray joined the project after fellow SNL castmate John Belushi died. All three also had an ongoing working relationship with director Ivan Reitman, who Hudson calls “really a brilliant man” and someone he has “so much love and appreciation for.” Hudson maintains, “they were all welcoming and inclusive.” Columbia? Not so much. “The studio wasn’t, and the studio continued not to be,” he said. “So it made it very, very difficult because I was a part of it, but then I, very selectively, was pushed aside.”
The issues began with a script change made after Hudson was hired. As originally written, “Winston was in the very beginning of the movie.” However, the shooting script punted the character to the halfway mark, which he says “felt deliberate.”
Things only got worse for Hudson when Columbia marketed the movie. He wasn’t on the original poster, and even decades later, his image was missing from materials. “I went to the 30th-anniversary release of the movie, and all the posters are three guys,” he said. “Now I know the fans see it differently, and I’m so thankful for the fans because the fans basically identified with Winston, especially young—I don’t want to say minority kids—but a lot of kids.”
“It wasn’t an easy road,” he continued. “It was probably the most difficult movie I ever did just from the psychological perspective. And I’m still not trying to take it personally. If you’re African American in this country, anything bad happens to you, you can always blame it on ‘because I’m Black.’ You don’t want to go there. That’s the last thing I want to do. I got nothing bad to say about anybody, but it was hard. It took me 10 years to get past that and enjoy the movie and just embrace the movie. Ghostbusters was really hard to make peace with it.”
Ultimately, Ghostbusters continues to be a struggle for the actor, stamping an asterisk on his first success in the industry. “When you start out in the business, I was always told it’s almost impossible to succeed. But if you get in a major movie from a major studio, and it comes out, and it opens number one, it will change your career,” he said. “Well, Ghostbusters didn’t do any of that for me. I was working pretty nonstop. I did Ghostbusters,’ and it was two and a half years before I got another movie.”
Hudson reprised the role several times for Ghostbusters II and Ghostbusters: Afterlife. He also had a brief cameo in the 2016 reboot. And yet, he still feels treated like “an add-on.”
“Even now, we’re negotiating a new movie that’s gearing up to start shooting in March, and I’m like, ‘Guys, I’m not an add-on.’ So if I’m going to do it, it has to make sense.”
[via IndieWire]
73 Comments
Ernie, when someone asks you if you’re white, you say yes!
Dats rayciss
limp
You missed how he auditioned for his own character for the Ghostbusters animated series and was told to make it sound more like Ernie Hudson. He was not cast.https://www.cbr.com/tv-legends-revealed-ernie-hudson-lost-ghostbusters-cartoon-role/Courtesy of the excellent Will Harris:https://www.avclub.com/ernie-hudson-talks-oz-and-losing-out-on-the-ghostbuster-1798231857
The cartoon was such a strange thing. First with the “Real” part due to the other property, their design differences, and then the Venkman actor sounding almost exactly like Bill Murray (who I believe also did Garfield, leading to the live action Garfield director to reach out to Bill, then Murray think he was one of the Coen brothers…)
Heck, he even gets one of the best lines in the movie (“Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!”). FTFYIn fact, might even be the best line.
Right. “I love this town” isn’t even in the top 20 best lines of the movie. Yours is good. I was thinking “I’ve seen shit that’ll turn you white!” It’s not even the line itself, but his delivery.
Agreed.
I also really like “If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.”
Thats the line I was thinking of.
Bingo!
I’ll also add in, “Tell him about the Twinkie.”
That’s a big Twinkie.
Yes! I just posted this before I saw yours. LOL
My very favorite of his is from Ghostbusters II: “Tell him about the twinkie.” lol
It’s the one I quote the most, that’s for sure.
Egon’s best line for me was “I feel like the floor of a taxi cab”
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
His best line ever was n Leviathan, “bitch, we still here!”
I thought Peter Venkman said that line?
Saying “I love this town” is the best line in Ghostbusters is like calling Lord of the Rings a Billy Boyd franchise
Winston even has a line in Ghostbusters II that is one of my favorites and I still use all the time. When Ray asks him if he got the number of the ghost train, Winston (stunned) simply says, “Sorry…. I missed it”.
I think you meant to say, “When someone asks you if you’re a god, YOU SAY ‘YES’.”
Winston was by far the most relatable character in the first film.
I would hope so, considering that’s the whole point of the character
I admittedly gravitate to Ray because it seems like Ackroyd inadvertently wrote a bunch of his high-functioning autism into the character, but Winston might be the best audience surrogate in any movie.
I feel like Ackroyd split the autism vibes between Ray and Egon, with Venkman serving as their neurotypical extroverted salesman who helps them talk to clients.A lot of tech companies are run the same way!
I know it probably sounds nuts, but to me, I think he deserved an Oscar nomination for playing Solomon in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. He was so good in that.
“If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say” is a line I’ve used with almost every employer I’ve ever had.
Life imitates art
I’ve heard about this Winston-at-the-beginning script before, and I’d kinda like to read it.Is it out in the wild anywhere? I did a quick search just now, but I keep finding the “final” shooting script.
Dan Akroyd might know
That would be an interesting read. But as is, I do like how he enters the story, with the job posting after they’ve had some success. It feels natural, and in it’s own way, it’s a pretty unique introduction
I have a sneaking suspicion that “Winston from the start “ was a hold over from when Eddie Murphy was earmarked for Winston.
I don’t know if it was the Murphy version of Winston or a separate-but-unused one, but IIRC he was also originally supposed to be vastly more qualified than the other Ghostbusters.I’m glad they didn’t go that route. Yes, he still could’ve still been distinct enough from the two weird nerds and the used car salesman to be a fun and interesting character, but Winston – and Hudson’s performance – provides a relatable character to ground the story a bit and give us a tether to reality.From least to most, the characters I could relate to were Egon -> Ray -> Venkman -> Winston, and the gap between those last two is pretty vast. That’s not to say I didn’t like all of the characters – I did! – but Winston brought relatability they didn’t.
It’s been awhile but I seem to recall reading that, originally, Winston was ex-military, super highly educated, and basically the most naturally capable of the group. And then, they just ditched all of that backstory.
That’s his story in the IDW comics.
He wasn’t that educated, but he was ex-military, and he was now working construction jobs that were on-and-off. He takes the Ghostbusters job because “there’s a steady paycheck involved”. He was blue-collar, so wasn’t put off by getting messy (they’re basically exterminators), and because of his military background, he had a high “terror threshold.”Also, none of this was in the script, it was stuff that Ernie Hudson came up with on his own to flesh out the character. I’m a Ghostbusters super fan, but I think they did him dirty in that movie. He could have had a similar relatable back story, and made him a lab assistant at the university or something and then had him from the beginning.
Yeah, that was my feeling too. But I definitely won’t give Columbia a pass for possibly having been shitty.
I’ve never seen that version of the script, but the big thing (that it’s weird wasn’t mentioned in the article) was that the role was written for Eddie Murphy, which is why Winston was in the movie from the start, because Murphy’s star was on the rise. Murphy decided to do Beverly Hills Cop instead, and when he turned down the movie, the role was reduced. Which makes sense, because Eddie Murphy was one of the hottest stars in Hollywood and Ernie Hudson (as much as I love the guy)…just wasn’t. Supposedly, all the backstory that they wrote for Winston when he was going to be Eddie Murphy is in the novelization of the movie.
I think I remember from the Netflix Movies That Made Us episode, when they were going to have Eddie as Winston, he was going to have a much more promenant role, and Venkman was going to be a smaller one. When Eddie passed they brought in Bill Murray to play Venkman and his role was expanded (because now Venkman was being played by the big star instead of Winston)
Yeah, it always seemed to me that the role of Winston survived because they had a handful of lines they’d written for Murphy that they couldn’t have any of the white characters say, and they thought were too good to cut.
Dats rayciss
limp
Obligatory Community clip:
Too bad that’s not ernie hudson. That’s keith david “Obligatory” fuck up.
Seeing Winston get more of his due was one of the better parts of Afterlife. Dictionary definition of too little too late, but still nice to see.
Ok sometimes an actor gets written out of scripted scenes due to various constraints, but to then miss him off the posters (to add to the years of that happening) is straight up bullshit – a glaring error. Note that he mentions he’s treading that line of not knowing whether to blame it on being Black. I would say that is very likely a factor, and maybe not surprising given the sort of fandom Ghostbusters seems to have attracted in the last decade.
In my headcanon, Winston went nuts from repeated exposure to the paranormal, changed cities, changed his name, and decided to put his containment skills to use as the warden of Oswald Correctional Facility.
It’s shitty they left him out so much, especially if he wasn’t originally supposed to be. Winston was my favourite Ghostbuster. He was the most relatable. “if there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.” Iconic.
But he didn’t do NOthing!24:06
https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-10-e-05-george-carlin-frankie-goes-to-hollywood(Note: does not reflect the poster’s opinion of Huson or Winston. I’m a fan and the fan’s know.)
Good lord, I botched that post.
Hudson did get screwed over. that said, i suspect a lot of the changes were just about not being able to get Eddie Murphy for the role.
Why are we leaving out:“Tell him about the Twinkie.”
I hope he has a role in the new one. In fact, if it’s just him and Janine returning from the OG, that’d be fantastic (though I’d love some Ramis also).
I’d love the next Ghostbusters movie to be an all-black one, with a token white Ghostbuster. Sure, there’d be backlash, but can you imagine, say, Ernie Hudson, Franklin Ajaye, Tracy Morgan and then some random white guy, busting ghosts in New York? I can.
Well, you know they’d bring Leslie Jones back, too, then.
“As originally written, ‘Winston was in the very beginning of the movie.”’However, the shooting script punted the character to the halfway mark, which he says ‘felt deliberate.’”I’ve always heard that the original idea was that Eddie Murphy would play the Winston role and he would be the main character, which is why he would appear from the beginning of the film. But once Murphy passed (or the deal fell through, or whatever) they rewrote it so that Winston doesn’t appear until much later.Can anyone confirm this? Or have I Mandela Effect’d this?
Just a guess but seems to me Murphy would have overshadowed the other three way, way too much. No way would they have allowed that to happen. Murphy just oozed charisma onscreen back then. It would have been his movie and he would have earned it.From 48 Hours two years previous.
Murphy just oozed charisma onscreen back then. Still does these days, in a good part – he was really good in the Dolemite movie.
Just imagine that, the black dude got downplayed and forgotten by marketing. Same thing happened to Yaphet Kotto for Live and Let Die: the producers were afraid of hitting their southern demographic and had him do no publicity.
Yeah. I mean, it is shitty, but this was the 80s. Treating minorities as secondary characters was sadly routine.
Okay. I did a podcast series on the Ghostbusters quartet of movies, and the thing that I will maintain until I die is that while part one was pretty bad for Ernie, it was expected due to the fact that this was a role originally written for a bigger star, and once that star didn’t take the role, his lines were reduced to bump up Venkman. Cool. Awesome. Whatever.
It is the second movie that is egregious. Winston was THE movie to me as a young black kid, and he was an established part of the world by that juncture. While the first script was written for Eddie, the second script was written with these four actors in mind from the very beginning.
Winston got less lines than nearly anyone in the movie. He has less scenes than anyone. He took a backseat to, in no particular order, the other three Ghostbusters, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis and Annie Potts, AND Peter MacNicol as Janosz. There were moments where the other three Ghostbusters were together doing something, and Winston was nowhere to be found. He was still given one sentence lines, reacting to other people’s monologues. They wrote that one with him in mind, with Winston being in the cartoon and reaching a certain (read: my) demographic, and they still gave him nothing to work with. That will never stop irritating me. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1pugr6iGOBZkLzf0URnfax?si=5a72210654364db0
Winston was always my favorite Ghostbuster – I seem to remember it was because of the cartoon but honestly I remember so little of that show that I can’t give a specific reason why – and I do have a vague memory of being disappointed he didn’t do more in the second movie.
I watched it again recently for research for my podcast, and I audibly groaned “AGAIN?” after his portrayal in the second movie. Nothing has changed.
Julia Louis Dreyfuss had it right!https://photos.app.goo.gl/ytpbhm3DJZ1KxoZ89
I’ve searched for that skit on YouTube to no avail.
Here you go! https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-10-e-05-george-carlin-frankie-goes-to-hollywood
On the version of the DVD I have, you can watch the movie along with the storyboards, which were clearly based on an earlier version of the script. (Louis is drawn to look like John Candy and Gozer as Pee Wee Herman, which were the original casting ideas.) Winston is in it early and is actually the one who gets slimed at the hotel. When they corner Slimer (Onionhead!) in the ballroom, the other guys don’t really know how to use the equipment (that they built!), so Winston takes charge and shows them what to do and how to capture a ghost. It certainly would have been a more prominent and important role.
I never really understood why they even needed a fourth Ghostbuster. It was obviously nothing but a huge vehicle for huge comedy stars at the time. Anybody they brought in to be a fourth would have felt the same way as Hudson.
Imagine being whitewashed out of a film where the main antagonists are ghosts. FUCKING. GHOSTS.Couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge a non-white guy as ONE QUARTER of the team, huh?
Rachel ”Rochelle” True of “The Craft” has entered the chat…