The Original 'Ghostbusters' Did Winston Zeddemore Dirty Big Time, But 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' May Set Things Right
So remember how halfway through the first Ghostbusters movie, they need to hire another guy to help deal with the extra workload? That new guy, Winston Zeddemore, was played by an actor named Ernie Hudson - and Ernie Hudson got screwed over pretty hard when the original film was going through rewrites.
Seven years ago, in 2014, Hudson revealed to Entertainment Weekly just how much of Winston's originally equal part was taken away - around sixty pages, to be exact.
"The night before filming begins, however, I get this new script and it was shocking. The character was gone. Instead of coming in at the very beginning of the movie, like page 8, the character came in on page 68 after the Ghostbusters were established. His elaborate background was all gone, replaced by me walking in and saying, 'If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say.' So that was pretty devastating."
Zeddemore was apparently originally supposed to be a hardline military character, who was there with the team from the beginning. Hudson told EW:
"When I originally got the script, the character of Winston was amazing and I thought it would be career-changing. The character came in right at the very beginning of the movie and had an elaborate background: he was an Air Force major something, a demolitions guy. It was great."
Apparently, though, the studio had other ideas.
"The next morning, I rush to the set and plead my case. And Ivan basically says, "The studio felt that they had Bill Murray, so they wanted to give him more stuff to do." I go, "Okay, I understand that, but can I even be there when they're established?" And of course, he said no, there's nothing to do about it. It was kind of awkward."
Ironically, it's a well-known fact that nobody was ever confident that they "had" Bill Murray - in the Netflix documentary The Movies That Made Us, the entire production team recalls feeling surprise and relief when Murray actually showed up on the first day of filming.
Hudson has since made his peace with the change, but he knows as well as anyone what kind of opportunities he lost with those sixty pages.
"Winston wasn't included in the movie poster or the trailer and all that stuff. I felt, had the original character been in play at the beginning, that would've been different...It would've sent a signal to the studios and very likely impacted my career in a different way.... At conventions, the question I always used to get was, "'Where does Winston go?'"
It seems, however, that with the release of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, fans may get the answer to that question - and Hudson might get the part he always deserved. On an episode of Michael Rosenbaum's podcast Inside Of You, the actor said:
"Yep! Yep, thanks to Jason Reitman. Winston is definitely a complete character."
We're still not sure in what way his character is being completed, but that's part of the fun: We'll all get to find out together when Ghostbusters: Afterlife hits theaters this Friday.
