Posted on 08/24/2003 1:19:39 AM PDT by Pikamax
TELEVISION
It's not pretty, but 'Animal House' defines a generation
BY GLEN GARVIN ggarvin@herald.com
LOS ANGELES -- Dean Wormer: Who dumped a whole truckload of Fizzies into the swim meet? Who delivered the medical school cadavers to the alumni dinner? Every Halloween the trees are filled with underwear; every spring the toilets explode.
Marmalard: You're talking about Delta, sir.
Nobody had ever seen anything like it. It was rebellious, it was anarchic, it was gross. It had kids getting wasted and puking and being promiscuous, sometimes all at once. Its heroes were drunks and slobs and Peeping Toms; its villains were teachers and cheerleaders and anybody who was or would ever be grown up. It trashed militaristic ROTC Nazis and limp-wimp folksingers with equal glee. It was grungy rock 'n' roll in the slam-glam Age of Disco. It made audiences crazy. It was Animal House, and it was something.
It was also -- read it and weep, baby boomers -- 25 years ago. Animal House has confounded its own conception by growing into a distinguished middle age, officially celebrated at 9 tonight with a behind-the-scenes special on Spike TV. That's followed Tuesday with the release of a DVD that includes the original film and several extras, among them a ''mockumentary'' on what happened to the characters later.
If that sounds like a big to-do about a bunch of delinquent frat rats, well, Animal House was much more than that. For one thing, it pioneered -- invented -- the gross-out kid comedy genre. Every party-hearty sex-drugs-and-rock 'n' roll flick from Porky's to American Pie has merely treaded the same twisted path carved out by Animal House.
More importantly, it was the first comedy that was made by, for and about baby boomers. Though released in 1978, it was located squarely in the '60s -- not just in terms of its story, but its in-your-face sensibility.
''I guess you could say M*A*S*H was tonally, attitudinally, in the ballpark,'' says Ivan Reitman, barely 30 when he wangled the job as Animal House's producer. ``But this was the first movie that went all the way in embracing our generation and its values.
``We articulated that among ourselves while we were making it, that this was a movie for us. Remember, comedy back then was still Doris Day and Phyllis Diller. There was very little being made for this generation.''
TOUGH START
It almost wasn't made. The story that emerges in interviews with the cast and crew, as well as tonight's Animal House: Unseen And Untold on Spike TV, is of a movie that virtually nobody believed in. Universal tried to kill it on almost a daily basis; eight directors turned it down, not to mention 12 colleges in six states. (It was finally shot at the University of Oregon where the president OK'd it without reading the script -- he was still sick over saying no to The Graduate because he thought it was dirty, and had concluded he didn't know how to read screenplays.)
Its only champions were a couple of young low-level executives -- and the brain trust of the National Lampoon, a sacred-cow-slaughtering humor magazine for college-age kids, which had conceived the project.
But the Universal suits found Animal House's slapstick food fights, furtive furgling, and generally mutinous attitude to be vulgar, scruffy and mystifyingly unfunny. It survived their wrath only because its budget was so tiny that it was almost certain to turn a profit.
''The studio didn't want to make it,'' Reitman agrees. ``They only gave it a budget of $2.7 million, which was small even then.''
Although Animal House would launch much of its cast -- including John Belushi, Tim Matheson, Kevin Bacon and Tom Hulce -- toward stardom, they were barely known then, much less bankable. Belushi, with a cultishly small following from the new TV show Saturday Night Live, drew the top salary: $40,000. When Bacon, a waiter who had never been in a movie, was told he was being paid scale (that is, union minimum), he thought it had something to do with his weight.
Still, Bacon was a model of sophistication next to Stephen Furst, signed to play the hapless Delta pledge Flounder. Furst, a Hollywood pizza delivery boy, stuffed his picture and résumé inside every pie he delivered -- an impossibly unlikely strategy that paid off when he delivered a double pepperoni to National Lampoon publisher Matty Simmons.
At the last minute, Universal insisted that Animal House add an actual movie star. Director John Landis got his pal Donald Sutherland to take a small role as a hip English professor -- two days of shooting for $25,000. (Sutherland turned down a deal for $10,000 plus a share of the profits, which probably cost him $5 million.)
PUSHING LIMITS
But it wasn't just the lack of star power in Animal House that appalled Universal executives, it was everything. A movie set in the 1960s, which everybody was going dancing at Studio 54 to forget? A movie about a renegade college fraternity, at a time when fraternities were on the brink of extinction? Worst of all, a movie in which Hollywood's eternal definitions of good guys and bad guys were turned on their heads?
The execs would have felt even worse if they'd known that even some of the cast members were nervous. Martha Smith was no prude -- she'd already done a Playboy centerfold -- but she shuddered every time at the parts of the script involving her character, the randy cheerleader Mandy.
'I'm reading along, and it says, `She stands nude in front of the sorority window and masturbates herself.' And I'm thinking, 'How am I going to cover this up from my parents?' '' Smith laughingly recalls. ``Or -- this was cut from the movie -- `Bluto [Belushi's character], hiding underneath the bleachers, looks up her skirt and discovers she's wearing no panties.'
Finally Smith gave up and asked to switch to the role of another cheerleader, the priggish (and fully clothed) Babs.
Outlandish as the script was by Hollywood standards of the day, it was downright sober compared to earlier drafts. The first one was about the Manson family in high school, and even 20 drafts later, director John Landis still found himself cutting out a scene of a 10-minute vomiting contest.
Some of the other bits vetoed by Landis or Reitman are not the stuff of family newspapers to this very day: encounters between sensitive bodily parts and various substances including frozen hot dogs and buckets of hot tar; a beer keg bursting out of the forehead of a paper-mache replica of President Kennedy on a homecoming float; and jokes about Bob Dylan and Norway's King Olav IV (don't ask).
Reitman still tenses up a bit at the mention of his daily wrestling matches with the screenwriters, Doug Kenney, Harold Ramis -- and particularly Chris Miller, a porn-prone National Lampoon writer ''whose erotic prose was so prurient it practically ran down the page,'' as another Lampoon editor once observed.
''There was this constant dialogue back and forth about about how much drinking should the characters be doing? How many drugs should they be doing? How much sex should there be?'' Reitman recalls. ``Finally I just had to tell Miller, there's a point past which things are not funny, they're just tasteless.''
But when the final arguments about the script were over, the actual filming -- just 32 days -- went smoothly, if exhaustingly. (Especially the memorable toga party scene, which lasted for two 12-hour days.)
Reitman and the National Lampoon crowd, as they watched the dailies, thought the movie was going well. But they weren't sure until its first sneak preview screening in Denver. The audience went nuts, even tearing out rows of seats.
''That was one of the great screenings of my life,'' says Reitman, who went on to make both Ghostbusters movies, among others. ``I've never seen an audience get into a movie like that. It was like a rock concert.''
BOX OFFICE GOLD
Even so, neither Reitman nor anyone else could have predicted the mania that struck when Animal House was released that summer. It would eventually rake in more than $170 million and for years was the most successful comedy of all time. Reitman, who had a share of the profits, was rich. So was National Lampoon. Belushi's face was on the cover of Newsweek. Fraternities boomed, and on some college campuses there were toga parties so huge they had to be held in football stadiums.
In Hollywood, that can only mean one thing: Sequel. And they tried, oh National Lampoon tried. There was one script set in a sorority. Another centered around D-Day, leading a revolution in Central America. Kenney, Ramis and Miller finally settled on an idea: the Delts would reunite five years later in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, during 1967's Summer of Love.
But those plans suffered a blow when Kenney tumbled to his death from a cliff during a Hawaiian vacation in 1980. Eighteen months later, Belushi's fatal drug overdose put an end to them. For most of the cast, those two deaths -- especially Belushi's -- are the only sad memories connected to a movie that was as much fun to make as it was to watch.
''The greatest tragedy is that there's a generation out there that doesn't know John Belushi and what he could do,'' Matheson declares. 'You hear kids say, `Hey, don't you mean Jim?' And it's just not right.''
He had fairly severe emotional issues....bi-polar or manic depression among them and was known to have a very hard time handling the fame.
IIRC, the coroner had ruled it accidental. They found no drugs in his system (he had dried out and went drug free), and they found that part of the ground at the end the cliff that had given way from underneath his feet. He had also just gotten engaged and had signed a multi-million dollar movie deal (as a producer).
Co-screenwriter Chris Miller based the National Lampoon short stories that gave rise to the film on his experiences in a fraternity at Dartmouth, from which he graduated in 1962:
"I was at Dartmouth in the early sixties and I belonged to the outlaw fraternity on campus at that time (Alpha Delta Phi). I always said that one day I was going to write the story of that experience. So, around 1974 or so, I started writing it as a novel and then the novel got cut up into chunks, which became short stories that ran in the Lampoon. The stories were documentary. They were cinema verite. When the script was written, the actual incidents that the two stories were about were the fraternity initiation that I underwent ( The Night of the Seven Fires) and the experience I called Pinto's First Lay.
"I was Pinto in my fraternity. That was my name. In the movie, I think that Pinto is me as a pledge and Boon is me as a senior. All the other guys are guys that are so archetypal that everybody knows them. Everybody had friends like those other guys.
"I think the parts of the movie that were most true to my life were the road trip and what goes on during the road trip. In fact, the guy who was the original guy who tried to get a date with the dead girl was at the premiere. When the incident came on, he stood up and raised his hands in the air just like Rocky."
According to the notes at the end of the film, Babs becomes a tour guide at Universal Studios. The closing credits for this film (and Landis' The Blues Brothers (1980)) include an advertisement for the tour at Universal Studios. The ad says "Ask for Babs." As of 1989, Universal Studios no longer honors the "ask for Babs" promotion, which was either a discount or a free entry.
After the closing credits for Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) there is an ad for Universal Studios Florida. Under the logo the words "Ride the Movies" fade out to "(Ask for Babs)."
Karen Allen (Katy) had just moved to New York City from the Washington, D.C., area and was studying at the Lee Strasberg Institute. "One day I walked by a bulletin board and there was a flyer that said, 'College-Aged Actors and Actresses Wanted for Feature Film.'"
Mark Metcalf (Neidermeyer): "I was doing a play in New York called Streamers. Michael [Chinich], a casting director from Universal came and saw it and liked my performance. He called me in to meet with John Landis. I originally went in for the part of Otter. I was dressed kind of Otterish and Landis immediately started talking to me about Neidermeyer. That was his instinct. He asked me if I could ride [a horse]. I told him I was born on a ranch in Montana and had been riding since I was two. He laughed and said "sure." I lied to him 6 different times and I don't know if he liked the fact that I lied or if he eventually gave up, but he wanted me to come back and meet the producers. A couple of weeks later, I came back and read for them. I did the scene with Michael. It was the scene that had Flounder [wearing a Delta pledge pin on his uniform]. I had my script rolled up because I knew my lines really well and Landis encouraged me to really take it out on Michael, so I was hitting him with my script and using it as though it was a riding crop and abusing him, doing things to him that I would have been arrested for in public life."
At the end of Animal House a subtitle says that Doug Neidermeyer went to Vietnam where he was "killed by his own troops." John Landis' segment of Twilight Zone - The Movie (1983), about racial bigotry, has a scene in a swamp in Vietnam. One of the American soldiers says, "I told you we shouldn't have fragged Neidermeyer."
That's followed Tuesday with the release of a DVD that includes the original film and several extras, among them a ''mockumentary'' on what happened to the characters later.
Already on my "beg borrow or steal" list.
Fawn Lebowitz was killed when her kiln blew up! ROFLMAOPIMP
Go and rent Ivan Reitman's recent telling of a different but very similar story set in more recent times. It's not at all the same tale, and misses a lot of the magic of the original. But it's certainly worth a look, and it's not a bad way to waste away a rainy evening.
Tooooooooogaaaaaaaa!!!
That's one of the great lines from a film full of 'em.
But I have a strong preference for another, though the context in which it was used is of some importance. And those usually around me know what sort of mischief is coming when I quote it.
May I have ten thousand marbles, please?
-archy-/-
Somebody's gotta do it...
Otter: Flounder, you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You f***ed up -- you trusted us! Hey, make the best of it!
Is this what you're talking about? Or is that a watered-down, "illustrated" (comic book, almost?) version of a different, actual conventional novel you're referring to?
Otter: Better listen to him, Flounder. He's pre-med.
Life, no. College though, that's s different story.
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