Harold Ramis—the writer, actor, and director behind classics like Ghostbusters, Animal House, Caddyshack, and more—died this week at the age of 69. As a key figure in the National Lampoon, Ramis features heavily in Ellin Stein’s history of the Lampoon, That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick. What follows is adapted from the book.

In the summer of 1978, Harold Ramis moved to LA. He realized that if he really wanted people to return his calls, he needed to get into directing and in 1979 started writing a script with the understanding that he would direct it. His collaborators were Doug Kenney and Brian Doyle-Murray and the theme was golf, that most suburban of pastimes to which all three had remained loyal underneath all the countercultural enthusiasms.

Like 1978's Animal House, the resulting script is another exploration of social dynamics in a closed society—in this case, a snooty country club. When a caddy from a large Catholic family (not unlike the Murrays) who is hoping to win a scholarship offered by the club expresses his fears that he won’t be able to afford college, a stuffy member of the old guard responds cheerily, “Well, the world needs ditch diggers too.” Into this hotbed of pompous petty snobbery breezes unapologetically vulgar Rodney Dangerfield, spreading lots of new money around, driving a bright red Rolls-Royce, and sporting orange golf balls and tees in the shape of naked ladies. While this was not someone Kenney might have been drawn to in real life, the story is weighted in Dangerfield’s favor: How can we resist a guy who throws money at the bloodless club orchestra to play “Boogie Wonderland” while telling an equally stiff matron, “You’re a lot of woman . . . Wanna make fourteen dollars the hard way?”

The stars were Chevy Chase and Brian Doyle-Murray’s brother Bill Murray, performing together for the first time. Chase, not cast against type, plays a rich smoothie who becomes remarkably successful at the game despite having no clear goal in sight, to the point where he puts on a blindfold before teeing off only to hit a perfect shot. He also shares Chase’s apparent nonchalance, airily saying, “Keep it” when a date finds an uncashed check for $70,000 in his apartment (this may have been inspired by an incident when Peter Ivers, Kenney’s Harvard buddy, found an uncashed check for $186,000 in one of the writer’s books).

Murray, meanwhile, portrays the club’s eccentric groundskeeper, a driven man whose goals are to eradicate the course’s gopher population and to become head groundskeeper. Murray perfectly captures his character’s sad bravado, foreshadowing the mature talent that would later make him an Oscar contender. As usual, his dialogue was largely improvised, with the script reduced to a jumping-off point.

While Chase found that the off-the-cuff aspect of the production “made it so much fun to do,” even he had to concede that it was difficult to structure the improvisation into a story the audience could follow. This was the problem Ramis came up against when he tried to edit “the inspired nonsense you get from Chevy or Bill. We had a good script,” he maintained, “but it was unfortunately 150 pages long [which would make the finished film run to over two hours], so we were tearing out pages on the set, which, when you come into the editing room, leaves you with terrible continuity flaws.” This may have been one of the hard-won lessons that led him to describe the making of Caddyshack as “a $6 million scholarship to film school.”

As it had in the early days of SNL and the National Lampoon, the line between work and life blurred during the two-month shoot. “We all lived at this motel for golfers,” Chase recalled, “and the evenings were spent rabble-rousing, partying, and chasing golf carts around,” an atmosphere more old-school performers like Dangerfield found disconcerting. Even more disconcerting was the fact that “there was plenty of coke on Caddyshack,” Chase admitted, “because there’s plenty of coke in Florida. None of us brought it to the movie. It seemed to just arrive.” The prevailing attitude toward the drug threat is indicated in the scene where Chase’s Zen golfer asks the caddy, “Do you take drugs, Danny?” and, on receiving the answer “Every day,” replies “Good.”

The chaotic atmosphere may have derived from the producer being Kenney, never known for his outstanding organizational ability. “It was the first thing Doug had produced, and I’m not sure he felt totally on top of all the details,” Ramis said. Apparently exhausted by his responsibilities, Kenney took to napping in the bedroom of a house being used as a location, a practice that led to a Three Bears–like situation when the house’s owner discovered him and asked, “‘Excuse me, who’s that sleeping on my bed?’”

“The intent is to be as funny as possible as much as possible.”

Clearly, while not as broad as the movies that were to appear under the banner of the Lampoon itself, the post–Animal House output of its creators was not designed to be stinging satire. “My films are similar in intent—the intent is to be as funny as possible as much as possible,” said Ramis in 1988. “You’d like to think your audience is the top 10 percent on the college boards, but it’s everybody”—everybody, but some more than others. “You can safely say young males liked the movies better than anyone else. There’s a lot of thirteen-year-old male fantasy operating in this work, but juvenile is not a criticism; it’s a description,” he protested, comparing condemning his films for this reason to “going to the opera and saying, ‘It’s a good play, but why do they have to sing so much?’”

Ellin Stein has written for the New York Times, The Times (of London), the Guardian, the London Telegraph, and Variety and is a former reporter for People and InStyle. She currently lives in London, where she teaches screenwriting at Goldsmiths College, University of London.