Animal House: 12 Behind the Scenes Stories of a College Comedy Smash

Here are 12 Animal House behind the scenes stories, including one about an actress, pictured above, who wasn't in the movie.

But First

There are many who consider 1978’s Animal House one of the best, perhaps even the best, comedy movie. It’s iconic, though those posters of John Belushi’s Bluto in his “COLLEGE” sweatshirt were too ubiquitous, and hopefully college students are a little more creative with their décor these days.

The popularity of Animal House changed comedy, and changed film. It inspired many movies, including some outright imitators. Slobs-versus-snobs comedy, college comedies, raunchy, gross-out comedy, it was all taken to a new level of popularity starting with Animal House.

The movie also helped bolster, or start, several notable careers. That’s why Animal House is worth delving into even further. So here are the Animal House behind the scenes stories.

Three Character Names Were Taken from a Previous National Lampoon Project

Animal House is technically titled National Lampoon’s Animal House, as it was the first film produced by National Lampoon, the famed humor magazine. In addition to the magazine, the folks at National Lampoon would do one-off projects.

In 1973, they produced the book National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody, a full fake yearbook for the fictional C. Estes Kefauver High School in the fake Dacron, Ohio.

Needless, to say, a ton of detail went into the 176-page fake yearbook. Time Magazine called it “the best comedy writing in the country” at the time. Doug Kenney, one of the writers on Animal House and the first editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, was able to mine some content from the fictional yearbook he helped produce.

Larry Kroger, aka Pinto, and Mandy Pepperidge, are both characters in the 1964 High School Yearbook Parody. The name Vernon Wormer is also used, but in the yearbook he’s a gym and civics teacher.

Chris Miller, Not Kenney, Brought Personal Fraternity Experience to the Script

Kenney may have had an anarchic, no-holds-barred comedic style, but he was no Bluto. While at Harvard, he had been a member of the hoity-toity, elitist Spee Club. John Christian Miller, aka Chris Miller as per his credit on the Animal House screenplay, may have gone to Dartmouth, another Ivy League school, but Kenney considered him the expert on the fraternity experience among the National Lampoon writers, according to NPR.

Miller had actually started writing memoirs about his frat experience, a book he titled The Night of the Seven Fires, but he had abandoned it.

Fortunately, he had kept his manuscript around. Miller ended up turning in a chapter from his memoir because he was facing a deadline, and it earned him a role as one of the credited writers on Animal House. Several of the nicknames of characters in the film are taken directly from Miller’s frat brothers.

Not Everyone Got the Roles They Wanted

Ivan Reitman would end up with a successful career as a comedy director. He directed Ghostbusters, after all. Reitman was a producer on Animal House, but he also wanted to direct. At the time, though, he had directed one film, a low-budget Canadian cult comedy. That did not suffice for the producers at Universal.

Ultimately, fresh off the success of the raunchy comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie, John Landis was hired to direct.

Reitman had gotten The Second City’s Harold Ramis involved in the film, and he is a credited writer. While working on the script, which took nine drafts, Ramis wrote the role of Boon with himself in mind. Landis thought he looked too old for the part (though nobody seemed to give 28-year-old John Belushi much grief) and offered him a smaller role. Annoyed, Ramis declined.

John Landis Took a Lot of Credit for Shaping Animal House

In a conversation with Digital Movie Talk, John Landis called the original script for Animal House “the funniest thing I had ever read” but also “really offensive.” He said there had to be “good guys” and “bad guys” in the movie, so he created the idea of the villainous fraternity, compared to the “good guys” of Animal House.

The director also helped shape the cast. Originally, Animal House would have effectively been a Saturday Night Live movie. In addition to Belushi, who ended up in the film, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Dan Aykroyd were all originally thought of as being part of the cast as well.

Landis, though, wanted unknowns with dramatic backgrounds. That helped pave the way for Kevin Bacon and Karen Allen to make their film debuts. With his brash personality, Landis unsurprisingly rubbed some of the other creatives on the movie the wrong way. Harold Ramis has said that Landis always called Animal House “my movie,” which frustrated the writers who had spent years on the screenplay.

Donald Sutherland, the Biggest Name in the Movie, Missed Out on a Big Payday

Animal House was a cast with unknowns by and large, aside from TV star John Belushi. Oh, and Donald Sutherland, one of the biggest stars of the 1970s and a big get for the film.

Landis has told Variety that getting Sutherland to agree to take on a small role effectively got the movie made. So how did that happen?

Landis dropped out of high school, but lived in Los Angeles so he dove into the film business with both feet. As a young man, he got a job on the crew of Kelly’s Heroes, which involved going to then-Yugoslavia for filming.

While there, he would sometimes do Donald a solid by babysitting his son, none other than Kiefer Sutherland. The two became friends, and Landis got Sutherland to appear in both Kentucky Fried Movie and Animal House.

Notably, Universal offered Sutherland $25,000 a day for two days of work or two percent of the film’s gross. Presuming the movie wouldn’t be a big hit (and he wasn’t the only one), Sutherland took the guaranteed cash. That decision, in the end, would cost him roughly $14 million.

An Academic Got a Chance to Avoid Making the Same Mistake Twice

Animal House had a script. It had a director. It had a cast. All it needed was a location to serve as Faber College…and that proved to be a problem. Since the movie was a period piece, set in 1962, the film needed a campus that had a timeless look. Every campus with that look would read the script and quickly decline to allow shooting.

The film almost got to shoot at the University of Missouri, but then the school’s president read the screenplay, and that was that.

Landis and company finally made it to the University of Oregon. The school’s president, William Beaty Boyd, also had concerns, but he also had a working memory of a similar experience. While an administrator at Cal, the school was approached to shoot The Graduate there. Cal declined because the movie “lacked artistic merit” and The Graduate was shot at USC. It then became a huge hit.

Boyd didn’t want that to happen again. He ran it by university officials who agreed that, while raunchy, the film was a funny take on college life. All Boyd and company asked in return was that Oregon never be mentioned in the movie.

Life Imitated Art at Times

The actors playing the members of Delta House were put up in a hotel in Springfield, Oregon together to bond. Bond they did, though Belushi and his wife Judy stayed at a house in Eugene (home of the university) to help Belushi stay clean during filming. Fun times were had in the hotel, but a trip to the campus did not work out as well.

Some female students from Oregon invited the cast to a frat party. The actors went, but quickly found out that the frat had not invited them, and they were very much not welcome.

A Small Budget Led to an All-Hands-on-Deck Approach

Landis got a budget of $3 million to make Animal House, a slim sum even for a comedy in 1978. Corners had to be cut everywhere. During the 32-day shoot in Eugene, Landis did not have a trailer or an office, and it was three weeks before he could watch any of the dailies he shot.

Landis’ wife Deborah Nadoolman, a costume designer, was around to help as well. She didn’t do too much “designing” on Animal House, though. Instead, she bought most of the costumes from local thrift stores in Oregon.

On top of that, she and Judy Belushi joined forces to make the togas for the famed toga party scene as well.

Two Notable Scenes Were Done in a Single Shot

Comedy, especially physical comedy, often plays quite well if you can get it to play with as few cuts as possible. If you can do it in one shot, even better.

Flounder was not the slickest of characters in Animal House, but Stephen Furst was an actor, not a real guy. During the scene in the grocery store where Flounder is tasked with catching assorted items being thrown his way, Landis and Tim Matheson were just off screen tossing the items at him.

Landis did not necessarily expect Furst to nail it, but he managed to catch every item and crush the whole thing in a single take, much to the director’s amusement, and amazement.

Then, there’s perhaps the most-famous scene in the film, the food fight. Other than Bluto’s clarion call, the actual fight was shot all in one take. Landis told the actors to have an actual food fight and to play for keeps. If you watch the scene, you can tell they listened to his advice.

It Was Successful Pretty Much Right Away

Sometimes, a famed movie doesn’t hit immediately. When you are born, it’s been established as a classic, so you only know that reality. Or, perhaps, you just don’t remember when it actually came out, which isn’t surprising if a movie isn’t a hit.

But Animal House was not some slow-burning cult classic. No, it was a huge hit.

It helps that Landis and some of the cast went on a national tour to promote the movie. It also helps that Universal organized toga parties to promote the movie on college campuses around the United States.

While the movie was not a hit internationally, in its first run it made more than $120. million domestically. It was so successful it got a re-release in 1979. Until 1984’s Ghostbusters it was the highest-grossing comedy movie.

No One Could Crack a Sequel

Pretty much right away, the writers had an idea for a sequel set in 1967. The whole thing would be a take on the hippie scene in San Francisco.

Miller and Lampoon writer John Weidman took a crack at putting together a treatment, but Universal turned it down, reportedly because the hippie-tinged More American Graffiti had tanked in 1979.

In 1982, National Lampoon producer Matty Simmons co-wrote a screenplay set five years after the first movie, and a full screenplay was produced. It didn’t go anywhere, though.

There Was a TV Show, Though

Delta House had a pilot, written by the writers of the film. Not only that, but John Hughes was a writer on the show. They got the actors who played Dean Wormer, Flounder, Hoover, and D-Day to reprise their roles as well. If that wasn’t enough, a promising young actor named Michelle Pfeiffer had a regular role as, um, The Bombshell. That’s all she is known as.

Of course, Delta House couldn’t get Belushi, so Bluto was replaced by his heretofore unmentioned brother Blotto, played by Josh Mostel. On top of that, an ABC sitcom could not traffic in the same style of raunchy humor that made the movie stand out.

Delta House only aired 13 episodes before ending.

Liked These Animal House Behind the Scenes Stories?

You might also like these stories of Kentucky Fried Movie, the film that led to both Animal House and Airplane.

Main image: A promotional image of Michelle Pfeiffer in Delta House. ABC.

Editor's Note: Corrects links.