For the better part of 1976, they would work at the Lampoon office and periodically get together at Kenney’s dorm-like West Village apartment to bang out a movie treatment, coming up with outrageous bits of dialogue, kicking around character sketches they’d based on everything from Archie and Jughead to Our Gang, and outlining ideas for scenes—many of which involved disgusting arias of gross-out humor. “Chris’s fraternity was virtually a vomiting cult,” said Ramis. “His fraternity would eat certain kinds of food to produce certain types of regurge. We had a lot of scenes that were almost orgies of vomit and hell-night scenes with frozen hot dogs in various orifices. We didn’t back off anything. And, in our naïveté, we totally believed that we were going to lead some studio to the most successful comedy they had ever made.”
What they ended up with was a treatment that was 114 pages long (a standard Hollywood treatment is somewhere between ten and thirty pages). “They gave me this thing and I didn’t know what the hell to do with it,” Simmons recalls. “It was funny as hell, but it was like War and Peace.” Whenever Belushi would drop by Kenney’s place, the writers would toy with him by saying, “Ooooh, do we have a movie part for you!” Belushi, who desperately wanted to parlay Saturday Night into a movie career, kept begging them to let him read it. It drove him nuts. Simmons and Reitman sent the strange, doorstop-size document to various studios, including Warner Bros., which quickly passed. Finally, the two men flew out to Los Angeles to meet with Universal Pictures president Ned Tanen, hoping for a deal but expecting another rejection.
Brilliant but erratic, the forty-four-year-old Tanen had already shepherded an impressive string of box office hits at Universal, including American Graffiti, The Sting, and Jaws. But like most other major studios in the mid-’70s, his was staffed largely with aging executives blindly chasing after what they thought young moviegoers wanted to see. Ever since the out-of-nowhere successes of Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider at the dusk-end of the ’60s, Hollywood had been caught flat-footed by a revolution it didn’t quite understand. “The studios were still controlled by moguls in their sixties and seventies,” says Reitman. “Even when you think of a critical movie that represented our boomer generation like Easy Rider, well, it was pretty fucking earnest.”
By the middle part of the ’70s in Hollywood, up was down, black was white, and yesterday’s surefire blockbusters were today’s megaton bombs. Everything seemed to be in flux. The studios, including Universal, lived in daily terror of missing out on the next big thing—but they were too myopic to see what that next thing might be. In reaction to this atmosphere of uncertainty, Universal had created a Youth Division and put Tanen in charge of it. The operating philosophy of the unit was to spread the studio’s production money around and place a lot of inexpensive, low-risk bets on risky movies with the hope that one or two of those wagers might pay off. Which, in theory, made a lot of sense. But it could also stand in the way of bankrolling a bigger, more ambitious movie such as Star Wars, which Tanen had, in fact, recently passed on.
Comedies had become especially tough to predict. With the exception of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and a few others, the studios were still serving up the same old diet of middlebrow comedies by Blake Edwards and Neil Simon. Tanen, who was smart enough to know what he didn’t know, had surrounded himself with a small staff of junior executives in their early twenties, such as Thom Mount and Sean Daniel—both of whom had been readers of the Lampoon. They worked out of a windowless basement office under the studio commissary.
When Matty Simmons and Ivan Reitman arrived in Los Angeles to meet with Universal, they checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and rehearsed their pitch. They needn’t have bothered. When they arrived in Tanen’s office, he was blunt with them. “Tanen said he hated the Animal House treatment,” says Simmons. “He really thought it was just awful.” But Mount and Daniel had convinced their boss that the Lampoon was hot with the audience they sought, so Tanen pinched his nose and reluctantly agreed to make a deal to develop a script as long as they promised to keep the budget under $2.5 million. Simmons and Reitman immediately agreed. To them, that sounded like a fortune.
Ramis, Kenney, and Miller split the contracted $30,000 writers’ fee equally and got to work. Shortly after the deal was signed, Mount visited the trio in New York, bringing them sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli to get off on a good foot. “They had zero patience for bullshit,” says Mount, who remembers laughing through the entire meeting. “Chris said, ‘My job is to be the typist,’ Doug said, ‘My job is to make sure Matty Simmons gets murdered,’ and Harold said, ‘My job is to make sure these two guys don’t go to jail.’”
The studio gave the writers an office in its New York headquarters. Ramis described the Park Avenue base of operations as predictably stodgy—full of old English antiques and stuffy hunting prints on the walls. “I remember Doug drawing little rats on the paintings with a ballpoint pen that you wouldn’t notice at first look,” said Ramis. “And I remember stuffing towels under the door to keep the smoke in the room.”
Ramis, Kenney, and Miller worked on the script eight hours a day for three months. They would each write ten pages, then swap and discuss what they’d done, and then swap again like a collaborative daisy chain. Since they had no idea what a typical Hollywood screenplay looked like, Reitman gave them a copy of the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to use as a blueprint. Within that structure, they crammed all of their most extreme, debauched stories and set them in 1962 at a fictional institution called Faber College, whose founding motto was Knowledge Is Good. To them, the year the film took place was especially significant since they saw it as the last moment of idealism and innocence before John F. Kennedy’s assassination would unlock the nation’s darkest fears and unleash a new generation’s revolutionary impulses.
When they completed the first draft of the script, the always-hustling Ramis, with a pregnant wife at home, accepted a job as the head writer on SCTV—a new television show from Second City’s Toronto troupe that was attempting to draft on the success of NBC’s Saturday Night with a sliver of its budget. The idea had begun as a defensive one. Second City simply didn’t want to see any more of its homegrown stars poached by Lorne Michaels. While SCTV may have been less aggressive in its humor than his down-and-dirty New York show, it had a naïve brilliance to it. It was conceptually loony and affably dry. In other words, it felt … Canadian.
Rather than try to pretend to be something that it wasn’t, it built its shoestring budget into its premise, which revolved around a third-rate TV station in a fictional town called Melonville. Just a half hour long, SCTV aired only once a month, and its irregularity and obscurity made it almost impossible to find on the dial. But somehow that also made it even more precious when you discovered it. “We tried not to think of ourselves as competitors to Saturday Night Live because we weren’t,” says Joe Flaherty, one of SCTV’s original cast members. “Theirs was an NBC network show with hundreds of stations; ours played on the Global Television Network. Well, they called it a network. They had four stations in Ontario.” In addition to his head writer duties, Ramis also appeared on air in sketches with a rising stable of gifted improvisers that included, in addition to Flaherty, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Andrea Martin, and Dave Thomas. “We thought, Well, we’re doing it at a really cheesy Canadian television station, let’s be a cheesy television station,” said Ramis.
Ramis was stretched thin and wound tight. While working on the first thirteen episodes of SCTV, he would commute back and forth to New York to work on the multiple rounds of Animal House script revisions that Universal demanded during a particularly hellish period of development limbo. He, Kenney, and Miller were constantly barraged with nitpicking notes from the studio asking them to tone down the film’s most offensive gags, including its most disgustingly viscous vomit jokes. “Thom Mount pretended to like what we were doing,” says Reitman, “but Ned Tanen didn’t even pretend. Every time he read it, he hated it mo
re. He kept saying about the Deltas, ‘These guys are the heroes?!’”
Reitman had always hoped that he would be given the shot to direct Animal House when it was finally given a green light. After all, that was the basis of his original pact with Simmons. But Universal wasn’t high on the idea of handing $2.5 million to the man whose sole calling card as an auteur was the $5,000 Canucksploitation flick Cannibal Girls (which came with the ever-classy tagline “These Girls Eat Men!”). “Universal didn’t think my credits were highfalutin enough,” says Reitman. “Of course, it broke my heart.” Back in LA, Tanen had actually mocked up a list of a dozen more-established directors for his low-priority project, including John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy), Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces), Mike Nichols (The Graduate), Alan J. Pakula (Klute), and George Roy Hill (The Sting). Not surprisingly, none of them was interested—if, in fact, Tanen’s offers had even made it past their agents, which seems highly unlikely. Under the gun to get Animal House moving, Daniel struggled to come up with a candidate of his own. Someone young who got the Lampoon sensibility. Someone who also might say yes.
John Landis was a twenty-six-year-old high school dropout and movie brat who had basically grown up on Hollywood’s back lots. He’d already been a mail boy at 20th Century Fox, a jobbing stuntman, and a blink-and-miss background actor. At twenty-one, he’d directed his first film—a ludicrous and lively low-budget comedy titled Schlock that’s best remembered (if it’s remembered at all) for being shot in twelve days for $60,000 and for featuring future Oscar-winning makeup effects maestro Rick Baker in a gorilla suit. As Universal was scrambling to find an Animal House director, Daniel’s girlfriend, Katherine Wooten, was working as a script supervisor on Landis’s second film, The Kentucky Fried Movie. Written and produced by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (the “ZAZ” team that would go on to make Airplane! and the Naked Gun movies), Kentucky Fried was a loose string of buckshot, drive-by comedy skits that threw every absurd sight gag at the movie screen in the hope that a couple might stick: It had dwarves in clown costumes whipping topless women, a news anchor announcing in stentorian tones, “I’m not wearing any pants, film at eleven,” and snippets of a movie-within-a-movie chopsocky epic called A Fistful of Yen.
“Katherine used to come home and say, ‘You’ve got to meet this guy, John Landis,’” says Daniel. “So I went to his editing room and he showed me a twelve-minute reel of footage he’d made to help find more financing for the film. It was absolutely hilarious.” Daniel handed Landis the Animal House script and told him to call him back and let him know what he thought.
“It was the funniest thing I’ve ever read and still is to this day,” says Landis. “But it was also a mess.” Desperate to nail down his first Hollywood credit, Simmons agreed that Landis seemed like a close enough fit with the Lampoon. And Tanen, after some initial objections, shrugged and went along with the decision. “The fact that they hired this kid shows you how unimportant the studio thought this movie was,” says Landis, who was thrilled to be offered a studio picture. The next day, Landis flew to New York to meet the writers.
Landis says that when he arrived at the Lampoon office, he walked into a wall of ice coming from Ramis and Kenney, who silently sat on the far end of the table sizing him up. Although Landis possessed a sharp, caffeinated sense of humor and wore a shaggy beard that at least made him look the part of a New Hollywood hipster, the writers allowed themselves to see only a fast-talking Tinseltown smoothie who’d just flown in from “The Coast.” “Harold and Doug got possessive about the script,” says Chris Miller. “They didn’t want some jerk from Hollywood coming in and taking it away from us.”
The young outsider wasn’t shy about telling the writing team that large chunks of the script had to be scrapped. He told them that, as it was, there were no good guys in the story, just bad guys. There had to be some delineation between the Deltas and the Omegas—heroes versus villains, white hats versus black hats, slobs versus snobs. They couldn’t all be thugs. And while a little gross-out humor was fine, the grossest of the chunk-blowing gags absolutely had to go. “He was an outsider and an obnoxious one,” said Ramis. “John was really arrogant for his age and experience. He sort of referred to Animal House right away as ‘my movie.’ We’d been living with it for two years and we hated that. But he did seem to understand the material.”
Eventually, the writers warmed up to Landis. But Ramis would be less understanding when it came time to cast the movie. From the earliest stages, they had imagined their circle of friends appearing in the main roles. John Belushi was obviously Bluto, the Deltas’ most debauched slob, with a 0.0 grade point average. But they also saw Chevy Chase as the smooth lothario Otter, Dan Aykroyd as the chopper-riding motorhead D-Day, and the Murrays as various other fraternity members. But Landis wasn’t interested in making a Saturday Night Live movie. For his part, Ramis was hoping to play the part of Boon, the commitment-phobic smartass. Landis allowed him to audition for the part opposite Karen Allen, but he’d felt all along that Ramis was too old to play a college student. Instead, he gave the part to Peter Riegert, a stage actor who was dating Bette Midler at the time and was a mere three years younger than Ramis. The slight made Ramis fume.
Even though Animal House was a low-budget low priority at the studio, Universal was adamant that Landis cast some stars. He was told he had to sign up both Chase and Belushi. It wasn’t explicitly stated as a deal breaker, but that’s the way Landis interpreted it. He knew that he had to quickly think of a way to sabotage the studio’s ultimatum. “I had to meet with Chevy,” says Landis. “And I didn’t want Chevy Chase. Not because I don’t like Chevy Chase but because he was the star of Saturday Night Live. The first year, he’d always say, ‘I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not.’ I thought whoever played Otter should be Otter. So what happened is Ivan and I had lunch with Chevy and he’s desperately working Chevy to be in the movie. And I’m working desperately to have Chevy not to be in the movie, and Ivan was kicking me under the table really hard.”
Landis’s scheme went like this: The director knew that Chase was weighing another offer to star in the lightweight comic murder-mystery Foul Play with Goldie Hawn. He told Chase that if he was in Animal House, he’d just be part of an ensemble, but if he did Foul Play, he’d be the star of the film, like Cary Grant. Chase ended up choosing Foul Play. “I read Animal House and thought it was good,” says Chase. “But I’d sort of already lived it. I hadn’t lived Goldie Hawn.” Ramis had a different theory as to why Chase passed on Animal House. Namely, that he was too competitive with Belushi and he didn’t want to share the limelight or be upstaged by him. Either way, the studio was furious. Landis could not mess up his courtship of Belushi.
While Animal House was going through endless rounds of revisions, Belushi had flown down to Mexico to make his film debut in the Jack Nicholson–directed Western comedy, Goin’ South. He’d only had a small part, but it had been an unhappy experience for him. Landis invited Belushi to his room at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York and tried to sell him on Animal House. The director told him how playing the lovable glutton Bluto would essentially be like playing a cross between Harpo Marx and the Cookie Monster. Belushi’s eyes lit up. Midway through Landis’s sales pitch, the actor asked if he could use the phone in the next room and call room service. Landis figured, Why not? After all, Universal was picking up the tab. When Belushi returned, he seemed interested, but unwilling to commit. He told Landis that he would have to think about it and left. Five minutes later, there was a knock at Landis’s door. It was room service with a heaving cart buckling under a Roman feast that included ten shrimp cocktails.
As Belushi waffled about whether to do the film, his old friend Doug Kenney stepped in to try to close the deal. In the end, Belushi would sign on to play Bluto for $35,000. Landis could breathe again. Not only because he’d secured the star whom Universal had demanded, but also because he no longer had to move on to his second choice for the part: the pot
bellied rock ham Meat Loaf. But he wasn’t off the hook yet.
“We had Belushi, but Universal still wanted another star in the film,” says Landis. “Now, I had been a flunky on the set of 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes in Yugoslavia. And Donald Sutherland and I had gotten very friendly. I used to babysit Kiefer. And when I was doing Kentucky Fried Movie, Donald was huge. And I asked him to be in it, and he was, as the clumsy waiter. So now comes Animal House and I called Donald and said, ‘Look, we’ll write you a part and you’ll only have to be on the set for a day or two.’” Sutherland agreed to help Landis out. But since this wasn’t some dinky, independently financed film, it was a Universal film, he asked for $50,000 for two days’ work. He got it.
As for the other reprobates in the film, Landis could now cast whomever he wanted. The rest of the leads comprised young unknown stage actors and just plain young unknowns: Tom Hulce as freshman pledge Pinto, Stephen Furst as the “fat, drunk, and stupid” Flounder, Mark Metcalf as ROTC Nazi Doug Neidermeyer, Karen Allen as the put-upon Katy, Jamie Widdoes as chapter president Hoover, Tim Matheson as lady-killer Otter, Sarah Holcomb as the mayor’s jailbait daughter, Clorette DePasto, Kevin Bacon as smarmy Omega Chip Diller, and Bruce McGill as grease monkey D-Day.
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