For a little over two hours, the people who made Ghostbusters sit down and explain how it happened. Cleanin' Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters, a 2020 documentary directed by Anthony Bueno, gathers those recollections into one long account of the film's making.
What is Cleanin' Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters about?
Cast and crew talk through the production in their own words, and the documentary arranges those conversations into a single story. It starts at the very beginning, with where the idea came from, and keeps going until it reaches the question of where the Ghostbusters franchise is headed next. Between those two points the interviews cover the work of getting the film made, as remembered by the people who were in the room. Nothing here is dramatised; the material is memory, discussion and first-hand detail, laid out in order.
About the cast
The participants credited on the documentary are Sigourney Weaver, Annie Potts, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, William Atherton, Jennifer Runyon and Ivan Reitman. Because this is a documentary, they are heard as themselves, looking back on the job instead of playing parts. Anthony Bueno directs.
Context & significance
Making-of documentaries come in very different sizes. Many are short pieces put together to accompany a release, and they rarely have time for more than a few anecdotes. A feature-length retrospective is another kind of project: at 128 minutes, this one runs longer than plenty of the films such documentaries are made about, and that length lets it treat a single production as a subject in its own right. The form depends on testimony. What the viewer gets is a set of people recalling the same period from different jobs and different angles, with the director's task being to shape those memories into something that reads as one continuous history. The stated ambition here is completeness, the full story from the first spark to the future of the franchise, so the documentary speaks most directly to viewers who already know Ghostbusters and want to hear how it was put together. It also works as a case study for anyone curious about how a studio picture comes into being. It is an American production, listed in the catalogue as a documentary.
Watching Cleanin' Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters on Ktime
You can stream Cleanin' Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters on K-Time. This page is free to read, while playback needs a K-Time account login. The service is designed around Persian-speaking households abroad, with a Farsi interface available across its television, phone and web versions.