The most striking difference in the original concept of Groundhog Day as envisioned by its screenwriter, Danny Rubin, is that the audience entered the endlessly cycling time loop in which TV weatherman Phil Collins find himself trapped at a point in which Phil has already been repeating February 2 over and over and over again. The second huge divergence of Rubin’s original idea from the completed film is the significantly more downbeat ending that has Phil discovering that his beloved Rita is terminally stuck in her own parallel time loop. Of such endings are wildly popular romantic comedies most assuredly not made.
Director Harold Ramis is not a name naturally associated with romantic comedies, but his innate comic sensibility allowed him to see in the emotional core at the center of the rather offbeat plot of Rubin’s idea the chance to make an impact on the evolution of the romantic comedy. Ramis took on the challenge of tweaking Rubin’s script so that he didn’t sacrifice the philosophical underpinning of the premise that drew his attention in the first place in transforming the final product into a love story that was literally timeless.
Ramis pulled off this cinematic alchemy in a way at once elegantly simplistic and conceptually perilous. By creating an entire establishing backstory that becomes the entry point for the audience to get to know Phil and Rita well enough to become emotionally invested in whether they can actually get together despite the enormous obstacle facing them, Ramis essentially engaged in ideological destruction of Rubin’s comedic vision. Whether Rubin was right or Ramis was right will never be known, of course, but when you consider how the movie would have opened under its original concept, one does have reason to ponder.
Ramis pulled off this cinematic alchemy in a way at once elegantly simplistic and conceptually perilous. By creating an entire establishing backstory that becomes the entry point for the audience to get to know Phil and Rita well enough to become emotionally invested in whether they can actually get together despite the enormous obstacle facing them, Ramis essentially engaged in ideological destruction of Rubin’s comedic vision. Whether Rubin was right or Ramis was right will never be known, of course, but when you consider how the movie would have opened under its original concept, one does have reason to ponder.
That vision thrust the audience blindly and boldly into the world that of a never-ending Groundhog Day that Phil has already become intimately comfortable with. He knows what songs are going to be played on the radio before they start. He knows what people are going to say before they speak. He even seems to know that that when heads outside this goofy guy is going to come and start talking to him and because he knows this for some reason he is ready to punch the guy right in the kiss. The audience is right there in the middle of the time loop with Phil but unlike in the Ramis version, there is nothing comforting or familiar. This opening sets the movie in the world of suspense which is the ideological opposite of the romance because by definition the audience may not be given enough information to separate the good guys from the bad guys. As a film constructed upon the mysteries of the world in which the suspense genre inhabits, it is a brilliant way to enter Phil’s world. But, of course, Ramis was completely right: as a love story, the opening simply does not work.
Which is why when you sit down to watch Groundhog Day—maybe during a marathon on February 2—even if you have never seen the movie before, you already feel at home with the characters long before the news crew wraps up after their encounter with the groundhog for the first time. Now that you know the background story behind the genesis of that film, the next time you watch it, you are equipped to engage its philosophical conceit for yourself: what if you could somehow work yourself out of your present time loop and into one in which Groundhog Day was filmed using Rubin’s original script. Would you be excited to face the unknown? Or are you much happier sticking with the comforting familiarity of what you know.
