10+ 'Ghostbusters' Behind The Scenes Secrets Fans Didn't Know

The film's director, Ivan Reitman, claims that Dana's possession was all Sigourney Weaver's idea.

"She then got on all fours and started howling like a dog on my coffee table, and I was just fascinated," Reitman told the The Guardian.

During an interview with Esquire, director Ivan Reitman said:

"I read it and thought, 'Wow, this is an amazing idea.' But it would have cost something like $200 million to make. It took place in the future, with many groups of Ghostbusters functioning in an intergalactic setting."

Of course, it eventually went on to become the #1 song in the country. According to an interview that artist Michael C. Gross gave with Esquire:

"They played it ad nauseam. Many people said to me, 'I love your movie, but can you get them to stop playing that [expletive] song on the radio?'"

The way Akroyd describes it, he was surrounded by spiritualists his entire life. You know, one of those "my father and his father before me" type of deals.

The Akroyd's are seasoned vets at communing with spirits and the dead.

He's even started a business based on the folklore! Crystal Head vodka is available for purchase in thousands of stores across North America.

If you're a fan of conspiracy theories, you're going to want to check this out!

Writer Isaac Asimov was one of the godfathers of modern science fiction as well as a proverbial giant in the field of literature.

Akroyd describes a chance encounter where he bumped into the writer on the street to Esquire:

Isaac was apparently not happy at how filming had disturbed the peace of his building. Dan remarked that he found the whole situation a bit ironic: the fact that someone they all admired so much in-turn hated them with vigor!

I wonder if Asimov ever ended up seeing the film?

In the beginning, Dan Akroyd wanted Belushi to play the role of Peter Venkman. Sadly, Belushi died of a drug overdose before the cameras even began to roll. As a way to pay tribute to their fallen friend, Akroyd requested that Slimer share his likeness.

“I didn’t know until the last [expletive] day," Johnson lamented to The National Post.

"I’d been working for six months sculpting hundreds of Slimer variations, and they finally said ‘make him look more like Belushi’ and I said what the [expletive] are you talking about?"

"I pulled out a stack of headshots of John Belushi, poured a gram of cocaine on it and started chopping lines up. I was three grams into the night and in a cocaine-induced delusional paranoia, and I literally thought that John Belushi’s ghost came to me to help me out.”

Ramis recalled during a conversation with Esquire that:

"They came by after lunch and Danny gave me the one-line version of it, which basically was 'ghost janitors in New York.'"

According to Akroyd, the malice of the character became muddled once they blew him up to over 150-feet.

There was a serious amount of second-guessing, but ultimately they rolled the dice and audiences everywhere ate it up!

"The original screenplay, we wrote it for John Candy," Reitman said during an interview on the Ghostbusters YouTube channel.

"I remember sending it to Candy because I had just worked with him on Stripes. John didn’t get it. He kept saying, ‘Hey, well, maybe can I do him with a German accent?’"

There was already a live-action TV show that bore the same name!

Producer Joe Medjuck told Esquire "I was on the phone with someone at Columbia, and I held the phone up and said, "Look, I got 300 extras on the street yelling, 'Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters.' You gotta clear that title."

Actor and writer Harold Ramis told Esquire that: "When we were shooting the big climactic scene on Central Park West and 65th Street, we stopped traffic in 90 percent of Manhattan."

Can you imagine getting stuck behind the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man on your evening commute?!