25Caddyshack (1980)

The movie is lionized for Bill Murray’s “Cinderella story” speech (improvised, apparently), for Rodney Dangerfield’s golf pants, for Chevy Chase’s ad hoc wisdom (“…be the ball…”), and for its raucous send-up of country club WASP culture. Harold Ramis made his directorial debut, authoring the screenplay with Brian Doyle-Murray and Doug Kenney. Kenney, an alumnus of The Harvard Lampoon and co-founder of The National Lampoon, died shortly after Caddyshack hit theaters, falling from a cliff in Hawaii. Kenney’s name was on two screenplays – Animal House, in which he had also played the Delta House character Stork, and Caddyshack. “At his funeral in Connecticut, four hundred people showed up. They included some of the biggest names in comedy, the new wave, the new movement he had helped to create,” wrote Robert Sam Anson, in a 1981 Esquire magazine profile of Kenney, titled, “The Life and Death of a Comic Genius.”