I have seen these photos pop alot over the years. They are what I assumed were Promo shots of Ecto 1 pulling into a Cemetery for the first film. However, Ernie and Dan exit the vehicle in some of the photos, making me dismiss the idea of it being promo shots(as most would be done with all 4, and not only 2). I was mostly wondering, if it is possibly a cut scene that was ultimately dismissed, or just some randoms stuff they did between filming, with intent of just showing Ecto 1 off.
The main reason it really catches my interest is because I feel it explains where Winston and Ray were before the whole biblical talk during there drive to the firehouse.
If it’s the one I think you’re speaking of, it’s not a cemetery, but actually just outside of Fort Detmerring. Yes, it’s the location of a deleted scene, though part of it did make it into the film: the scene during the montage when Ray’s pants get taken down by a female ghost. If you watch closely, you see he is wearing an old military uniform in the scene (look closely at his shoulders). The full scene plays out something like Ray and Winston are investigating the place. They split up and Ray goes into a bedroom where he finds a trunk with the old uniform in it. He puts pices of it on, just for fun kind of. He then lays on the bed, waiting for something paranormal to happen. Then, the pants scene comes into play. In one version of the script, at the end of the film Ray returns to the fort with a bottle of Wine and flowers, like he is going back for a hot date.
I, too, like the idea of this scene as a whole. It would’ve made a very funny scene, and given Winston more screen time, so that’s just a double bonus.
The ending scene with Ray going back would’ve been hilarious, but somewhat of a bad fit… almost too slapstick for that character, I think. Definitely would’ve been funny as hell though.
The plot was moving much too fast at this point to introduce anything even slightly extraneous. The idea behind the scene was to give Dan a love interest- a woman who’s been dead for a hundred years. But the scene was too long and it was in the wrong place in the film. We all loved the notion of Stantz having sex with a ghost, though, and we didn’t want to let go of that, so Ivan came up with the idea of treating it as a dream and inserting it into the very end of the montage –Harold Ramis
“We were well into the main plot at this point- Dana and Louis were possessed, the apartment building was starting to go- and it just didn’t make sense to suddenly cut to this irrelevant scene of Dan getting a psychic ■■■■■■■. It wasn’t until we realized that we were a little bit short on montage material that I thought about resurrecting it. blah blah blah special effects. Invariably, it seems to work better than originally intended, because in post production you can manipulate things until they’re just right. So it was a great finish for the montage. If you look carefully, thought, you can see that Dan has on a strange costume- a tip-off that the scene was originally meant to be part of something else. Fortunately, no one seems to notice- or at least no one seems to care. After all, it is a dream sequence.” –Ivan Reitman
The past few times watching it I have noticed that there were (can’t recall what they are named) around the bed, they were those things you use to keep people back away from objects that are on exhibit. Crap, that is really bothering me that I can’t remember what they are called. Now that you mention what the scene was about, that totally makes perfect sense!