Toga! Toga! Toga! The real story behind ‘Animal House’
Actor Stephen Furst, who played the inept, naive and lovable butt of a lot of semi-insane fraternity-house pranks in the 1978 film “Animal House,” died over the weekend. In a Miami Herald story in 2003, on the 25th anniversary of the film, we revealed the unconventional (OK, totally nuts) way he got the role, plus some other tidbits — many of them printable — about what went on on the “Animal House” set. Here it is:
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.
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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 the military-nut character 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.”
“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life”. How many times have I paraphrased that line to serve my own purpose.
I guess it was funny to people who had been to college, but I didn’t care much for it. It just seemed silly and childish to me. ‘Course, I never went to college so maybe I just didn’t have a frame of reference for the humor.
I don’t get the “downing” this comment. He’s being straight and truthful.
What more can a man ask for?
US, downvoting can just mean that you disagree. When I downvote somebody, it’s because I disagree with what they said. Of course, some people downvote because they think the commenter is an asshole and they want him to die, too.
I never down-vote somebody I want dead. I’d rather tell them they are an asshole and their comment sucks and all his teachers should all commit Seppuku out of shame.
Same here. I kinda like telling retards that they are retards. That little red thumb thing doesn’t give the same sense of satisfaction.
I’ve wondered if having to comment to be able to thumb down a post was possible? I’ll sometimes post a comment I know will draw down thumbs-ala pissing off Trump supporters-and revel in the number.
When I got out of the Corps in the early 70s, I went to Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Virginia for 2 years. Just for grins I sent away for my transcripts in the early 90s. Virtually all grades were “Inc”. I was literally D Day 10 years after the fact. We had a Vets Club, our frat as we had little in common with non vets at that time for obvious reasons. The one memory that stands out were the monthly Pig Parties where the next day the guy that brought the ugliest girl to our house would win $20. I never took a date but rather wore a gas mask as my bros shot gunned me. Ah sweet youth, gone in the twinkling of an eye.
Today I have two stickers on my car. One is a globe & anchor. The other is a Faber College sticker which shows a white bearded Emil Faber reading a book above the Faber motto:
“Knowledge Is Good”.
We had a ‘pig party’ when I was in college in the mid 80’s. $300 to the guy that brought the ugliest chick. I don’t know how we came up with that much prize money, but we did.
Anyways, I had a sure winner: six foot, three inches with drooping shoulders, a crooked nose, and short curly red hair. Ugly as sin. She also stunk. No way I could lose. But I did, to a guy that found a 400 lb black chick with saddle bags bigger than anybody’s thigh. Affirmative Action bullshit. I needed that prize money.
Was absolutely epic. I have about 10 movies on my iPad, Animal House is one of them.
The 1st time I went to see it was with my bride when it opened in Boston. The theater was a cloud of weed smoke-which we contributed to. I laughed so hard I had to see the movie again because I missed so much of it. Same with Blazing Saddles a few years earlier. Haven’t laughed that hard since. Do these movies still work with new generations? I doubt it. I once read a contemporary review of the Marx Bros. “Duck Soup” that said viewers of that day were literally (not figuratively) falling out of their seats laughing. Now it seems so dated. It’s tough getting irrelevant.
Ah, the Marx Brothers. 1969 during my freshman year at UW in Madison a local church ran a Marx Brothers movie every Friday night in the basement. There were about 40 folding chairs lined up in rows on a linoleum floor. The night they showed “The Big Store” I did fall out of my chair laughing so hard during the scene where Harpo is roller skating through the sporting goods department trying to avoid the bad guys. No weed was involved, pure humor.
“Night at The Opera” still holds up pretty well.
Depends on the new generation, two daughters in their 20s, one loved Animal house, caddyshack, original pink panther etc. other not so much, like her mother. Would be interesting to know how it plays with boys in that gen.
Animal House also had the worst movie soundtrack ever made.
Did Nietzsche ever “approve” of anything except what his persona Zarathustra lauded, then de-lauded? Onward I go, very soon to Ecce Homo, with little hope, faith or love for the name of your Avatar! BUT FOR a niece somehow linked-in with the Jesuits, the one who wrote to me that she had a love-hate relationship with Nietzsche during college, I would not now have the wherewithal to comment. I can say this: In the person of Zarathustra, Nietzsche liked nothing about “man”, little about “higher men”, at least the gang assembled at the end in his cave.
And I feel certain, by all accounts, Nietzsche would roll in his grave laughing if he viewed “Animal House”. He would delight in the soundtrack, too! Best to reread “Thus Spake Zarathustra” before you mispresent, misrepresent, as all “higher men” do, the teachings of Zarathustra!!
I “missed” that one — I did not go see “Animal House”. Probably, the release of that movie coincided with one of my “spiritual periods”, the “Roamin’ Catholic” male kind of mental disorder, not the female malady! Longer lasting, too! FULL DISCLOSURE: I also failed to view a single episode of “Friends”. I ditched my TV more than 12 years ago, and I have not gone to any of HorrorWorld’s productions for even longer. So, what do I know? For what It’s worth (h/t Buffalo Springfield).
I was in a 2 yr A&P program (Airframe & Powerplant Mechanic) at Long Beach City College when the movie came out.
The school tried to accelerate the program halfway through and it adversely affected many of the students (I was getting married and honeymooning when they wanted to go year-round).
It became an us versus them situation, as we students (about 24 of us) were a pretty tight group by then.
We went to see the movie as a class and instantly identified with the Deltas. It became a rallying point and ever after we would apply movie dialogue to all manner of school related events. Good times.
My assessment is as they say “times were much more simple back…” the rebelling was aimed much lower at the here and now like their parents and school. They just wanted to make to Friday. Kids these days are rebelling about global warming with the help from the school. They are worried about the next hundred years.
Animal House was my fraternity ….ATO . We got put on probation several times and had to pay the sororities almost a grand for a panty raid . The College of Charleston had 6 girls to 1 guy. I had a new Camaro,an apartment 1/2 block from my frat house and plenty of gals…life was good .
Based on Dartmouth frat scene of that time. It does not do the actual debauchery credit.
In the 70s, Playboy ranked the party schools 1 -20. Dartmouth was not on the list. In a footnote, Playboy said this: To those wondering why Dartmouth is not on the list, it is because it is our policy not to rank professionals against amateurs.
“John Christian “Chris” Miller (born 1942 in Brooklyn) is an American author and screenwriter. He is best known for his work on National Lampoon magazine and for the movie Animal House.[1] The latter was inspired by Miller’s own experiences in the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity at Dartmouth College, in which he went by the name “Pinto”. Miller graduated from Dartmouth in 1963.”
Sorry, Buckhed.
Absolutely correct. The National Lampoon magazine was amazing humor and satire in teh 70’s. Many of the scenes from the movie were based on various short stories from it, such as Pinto’s first lay. The other contributor to that magazine and a lesser one to the movie was PJ O’Rourke. I have read several of his novels and they are hilarious. Unfortunately he ended up with the neocons. I think they must have something on him.
I can beat that, to a degree. Animal House was filmed at the University of Oregon in the fall of ’77. I happened to have taken that term off, but I manage to come back in time to participate in several scenes. We were rewarded after filming was complete when the producers rented the Lane County Auditorium for toga party. None of the stars showed up but Otis Day and the Knights provided the entertainment and I truly believe that almost everyone who attended got laid.
I loved that movie.I was a junior in high school in 1978.I and a bunch of friends got high( smoking wacky weed ) as possible before going in the movie theater .The whole crowd seemed to be as high as we were.Alot of great laughs.
Ed ,you need to smoke some dope .The right dope will put a big smile on your face.
I used to smoke dope, bb. I quit because I’m already fucked up enough without it. Damn near everything puts a smile on my face. That movie is just one of the things that don’t. Sorry.
Just thought.I don’t remember ever seeing flounder in another movie.I don’t remember ever seeing him on tv or on any magazines.Am I wrong ?I guess I could Google it.
He was in some TV space show. Battle star Galactica or something.
Her was in one of those Doctor/Medical series. St Elsewhere, I believe.
He was the deputy side kick with Chuck Norris in “Silent Rage.”
I believe he was on St. Elsewhere. I did see him on an episode of Scrubs.
How the Animal House movie led to the Blues Brothers. When I was a student, I remember often going to Taylor’s to listen to Curtis Salgado and the Stilettos. Taylors is still there, but it isn’t the same as it was, but then neither is Eugene or the U of O. It was a vastly better place back then but then so was America.
up the creek another good movie of his