"Groundhog Day" Notes

Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray film from 1993, was on commercial television a few days back. I couldn't stand to watch too much of it, even though I thoroughly enjoyed the film. It was one of those movies when you're a kid that makes you realize that "soul-searching" is a thing that you must force on yourself, since your days won't be repeating like they do for Phil Connors.

Dan and I tried occasionally to figure out how many days Phil lives through. We joked that it had to be, like, at least a few years.

Well, after I saw it was on, I decided to look the movie up on the interweb.

The original story for the script was wildly different from what made the final film. Rita, Andie McDowell's character, was also going to be living through the days with Bill Murray's Phil, and they weren't going to fall in love until later in their travels through the day.

There was a person who did some studying, and despite only showing forty something days in the film, his calculations meant that it would have been a minimum of eight years and a handful of months.

Harold Ramis, the film's director and regular Murray co-conspirator, said during production that he was guessing that Phil lives through about ten years during his stay on Groundhog Day.

The original script had Phil Connors living through 10,000 years. 10,000.

Well, it had him and Rita living through those 10,000 years.

Later Ramis said that he's come to believe that Phil Connors lives for many more years than his first guess of 10 years.

If we think about it: he learns to play piano to the point of being excellent; he masters ice sculpting; he learns almost everything about almost everybody in town; he kills himself at least a dozen times; he tries to save the old man as many times; he spends countless nights committing crimes when he first realizes there aren't any repercussions for his actions; he eventually learns the day's mini disasters and is able to help everybody who needs it; and he fails to seduce Rita so many times he actually learns French.

That sounds like at least a few hundred years to me. Maybe even a thousand.

Maybe even ten-thousand.