“The original idea for Groundhog Day came to writer Danny Rubin in 1990. He had moved to Los Angeles to work as a screenwriter. While waiting in a theater for a film to start, he was reading the book The Vampire Lestat (1985) by Anne Rice. Rubin began musing about vampiric immortality and what one would do with their time if it was limitless. He reasoned that vampires were like normal people without being forced to adhere to the same rules or moral boundaries. He questioned if and when it would become boring or pointless, and how a person would change over time, especially if that person was incapable of substantial change within their own limited mortal life. He singled out men he deemed to be in arrested development, who could not outlive their adolescence.
Having recently sold his first script for what would become the thriller film Hear No Evil (1993), his agent prompted him to develop a “calling-card” script that he could use to gain meetings with producers. Rubin began work on his idea of a man changing over eternal life but quickly realized that the idea was impractical because of the expense of depicting historical and future events. At this point, Rubin recalled a brief story concept he had written two years earlier that followed a man who would wake every morning to find it was the same day repeating. Rubin married the two ideas to create the outline for Groundhog Day. By portraying eternity as a repeating cycle instead of a straight line through history he eliminated the production cost of constantly changing settings. He believed that the repetition also offered him more dramatic and comedic possibilities.
Rubin opened a calendar and picked the next nearest holiday, February 2, the eponymous Groundhog Day. He saw it as a date with story potential because it was a recognized holiday without much widespread attention. Rubin believed that people held a vague awareness of the holiday using a groundhog to predict changing seasons. Even so, he believed few people outside of the state of Pennsylvania were aware that the actual festival takes place in the small town of Punxsutawney, something which he became aware of through a writing job for a local phone company. Setting the story in Punxsutawney provided a small area in which to trap Phil Connors, while reporting on the event gave the character a reason to visit. Rubin took the main character’s name from Punxsutawney Phil. He hoped that the film could become a perennial holiday favorite like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965).”
Song Of Ajax 