BILL MURRAY THOUGHT GARFIELD WRITER WAS ONE OF THE COEN BROS.

Some cats may have nine lives. Garfield has had two — at least in the movies — and Bill Murray, who was the voice of Garfield in both of them, is convinced that he’s gonners for good. In an online chat with Reddit’s AskMeAnything, Murray said, “They sort of shot themselves in the foot, the kidneys, the liver and the pancreas on the second one,” which went straight to video. Murray went on at length about his apparently nightmarish experience making the original film in 2004, noting that it began after he realized that the Joel Cohen who wrote the screenplay was not the Joel Coen, one half of the Coen brothers writer/director team. He said that when he was handed the script, he didn’t bother to read it. “I thought, ‘He’s great, I’ll do it.” Murray indicated that he did not realize how deficient the script was until he began watching the edited film while recording the dialogue. After spending about eight hours trying to make the lines that had been written funnier, “I said, ‘You better just show me the rest of the movie.’ And they showed me the rest of the movie, and there was just this long, two-minute silence. And I probably cursed a little, and I said, ‘I can fix this, but I can’t fix this today. Or this week. Who wrote this stuff?'” At which point “the misspelled Joel Cohen” as Murray put it, stepped forward. And Murray indicated that he tore into him. After the first movie turned out to be a hit at the box office — Murray suggested that his own script-doctoring may have had something to do with that — he returned, only to discover during the second go-round that studio executives were telling the director to make changes — “countermanding what I was doing.” That movie, he said, turned out to be a “miscarriage.”