Animal House
Short description
Animal House is set in 1962 at Faber College, where two fraternities represent opposing sides of campus life. Omega is made up of wealthy, well-mannered students from comfortable families, while Delta Tau Chi is a disorderly group of students with poor grades and worse conduct. After two new students are rejected by Omega and taken in by Delta, the college dean and the rival fraternity work together to have Delta removed from campus. The Delta members, led by the hard-partying Bluto Blutarsky, resist the effort in their own disruptive way.
The film was directed by John Landis, the second of the eighteen features he has directed in chronological order, following The Kentucky Fried Movie and preceding The Blues Brothers. Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller wrote the screenplay, and Ivan Reitman, Judith Belushi-Pisano and Matty Simmons produced. John Belushi plays Bluto, with Karen Allen, Tom Hulce, Stephen Furst, Mark Metcalf and Mary Louise Weller among the main cast. The production cost about 3 million dollars and returned roughly 142 million dollars worldwide, a return that made it one of the most commercially successful comedies of its time. On IMDb it holds 7.4/10 from 136,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 7/10 from 1,731 votes. A critics' rating of 7.8/10 from 55 reviews places it slightly above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The hole that John Belushi (1949-1982) made in the wall with his guitar was the only damage done to the building during filming. Instead of repairing it, students framed it and attached a plaque with an explanation nearby.
- Verna Bloom (1939-2019) later recounted that the scene with Dean Wormer (the one where she is drunk and he is on the phone with the mayor) was improvised from beginning to end because director John Landis disliked the dialogue written for the scene.
- The President of Oregon University only allowed filming because he hadn’t read the script. He had previously received the script for Mike Nichols’ (1931-2014) comedic drama “The Graduate” (1967), but refused permission to film. He later liked the film so much that he decided he wouldn’t miss the opportunity next time and would allow filming on campus if and when he was asked. However, he insisted that the university’s name not be mentioned in the credits.
- To land the role of Niedermayer, actor Mark Metcalf had to lie and claim he knew how to ride a horse. Once he was cast, the first thing he did was sign up for riding lessons.
- The film's advertising campaign turned out to be more expensive than the filming itself, meaning its cost exceeded the film's budget.
- In one scene, John Belushi's character teaches the other characters the “dirty” lyrics to the 1963 Louie Louie song by The Kingsmen, a garage rock band. This episode is based on a real investigation conducted by the FBI from 1963 to 1965 – two and a half years they spent trying to “decipher” the song’s lyrics, reacting to complaints from various religious and conservative groups about “offensive language and obscenities” in the barely intelligible lyrics that the band supposedly spewed at a juvenile audience. After spending over two years and tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars, the FBI was forced to admit that it had found nothing “obscene” in the song’s text.
- The bottle of whiskey that one of the characters (played by John Belushi) constantly sipped from actually contained iced tea. This was one of the tricks that helped the actor stay away from alcohol and drugs. The actors threw parties every night, but John Landis specifically housed Belushi with his wife, Judith Belushi-Pisano, in a house several kilometers from the shooting location. Belushi was already known for his binges, and Landis wanted him to remain sober during filming. Belushi threw several parties at his home, but managed to restrain himself each time.
- When the actors were preparing for filming, they were specifically advised to stay away from students. However, one day some of the actors (with the exception of Belushi, who was in New York filming another episode of Saturday Night Live) accepted an invitation from girls to a party on the campus of the University of Oregon. The real students reacted with hostility, and a fight soon broke out when James Widdoes threw a plastic beer cup at a drunken student football player. As a result, Widdoes had several teeth knocked out, and Bruce McGill was given stitches. When Belushi returned to the set, he was eager to return to campus and deal with the students, but he was restrained.
- In one of his interviews, Donald Sutherland, who played the professor, said that initially, due to the film's limited budget, the producers offered him a percentage of future earnings instead of a fixed fee. But the actor, not particularly believing in the film’s success, preferred to take $50,000 up front. He later regretted his decision, as "Zoo" collected over one hundred and forty million dollars in the US alone.
- The actors playing members of one fraternity deliberately antagonized the actors playing members of another fraternity off-camera to "stay in character" and more convincingly portray animosity during filming. Mark Metcalf specifically moved to a hotel room directly above Bruce McGill's, where nightly parties were held, in order to be angered by the noise and commotion and to more easily get into his role in the mornings.
- Many posters released for the film's theatrical release featured a shot of Sarah Holcomb's character without a bra (this is the scene where she unfastens her bra and passes out from being drunk). Before the widespread availability of VCRs in the US, some decency laws prohibited the depiction of nudity of minors in situations that were "actually occurring or depicted," and the latter definition certainly applied to the acting. The actress was 18 at the time of filming, but her character stated she was only 13. This created a problem, and in the initial copies of the film released for home viewing, her bare chest is not visible.
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