'Ghostbusters' director Ivan Reitman has died

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Ivan Reitman (1946 to 2022)

Photo: ROBYN BECK / AFP

He was the grandmaster of artfully over-the-top clothes.

Anyone who regularly went to the cinema as a child in the 1980s and 1990s grew up with his films and tried to reenact them in the Schuhhof.

His extensive body of work of elevated silliness includes Twins, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito (1988), Kindergarten Cop (also starring Schwarzenegger, 1990), and Father Too Many, starring Robin Williams and Billy Crystal (1992).

Ivan Reitman was born in Czechoslovakia in 1946 to Hungarian Holocaust survivors.

At the age of four, the family emigrated to Canada.

After graduating from college, he first worked for Canadian television;

later he produced the films of his Canadian colleague David Cronenberg, who revolutionized horror films with works such as »Shivers« in the mid-1970s.

Reitman, however, was drawn to comedy from an early age.

As early as 1979 he directed the sex outfit »Meatballs« (»baby fat and meatballs«) in Canada, which became a huge success on the US market.

Bill Murray also played his first leading role in the film - who subsequently took part in Reitman productions again and again.

For example, two years later in the also curtailedly suggestive outfit »Stripes« (»I think a moose is kissing me«s).

Probably Reitman's greatest hit was the 1984 ghostbuster comedy »Ghostbusters« starring Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Rick Moranis, which was followed by a second part in 1989 and a reboot with a female star cast in 2016.

In the later project, Reitman was still involved as a producer.

As reported by the industry magazine Variety, among others, Ivan Reitman died in his sleep on February 12 at his home in Montecito, California.

He was 75 years old.

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