16 Repeatable Facts About “Groundhog Day”

Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 16 Repeatable Facts About Groundhog Day.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. TOM HANKS AND MICHAEL KEATON TURNED DOWN PLAYING PHIL.
Hanks was busy, and figured if he starred in the film audiences would just expect him to become nice because he’s always nice anyway. Keaton didn’t understand the script. He admitted to regretting the decision.

13. NOBODY REALLY KNOWS HOW LONG MURRAY WAS STUCK IN THE SAME DAY.
Ramis refuted an earlier estimate of 10 years, guessing in 2009 it was more like “30 to 40 years.” In Rubin’s original script, Murray was looping for 10,000 years, and he marked the time by reading one page in one of the B&B’s library books every day.

16. MURRAY AND RAMIS’ FRIENDSHIP FELL APART ONCE FILMING ENDED.
Ramis admitted that his old friend and fellow Stripes and Ghostbusters star was “really irrationally mean and unavailable” at times, and often late to set, though he attributed the behavior to a divorce Murray was going through at the time. Outside of a few words at one wake and one bar mitzvah, Murray stopped speaking entirely to Ramis for 20 years, only to finally bury the hatchet on Ramis’ death bed before he passed away from complications due to autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis in 2014.