National Lampoon’s Animal House is the comedy that changed everything in Hollywood.  In honor of its 25th anniversary this year, Josh Karp talked to director John Landis, co-writers Harold Ramis and Chris Miller as well as studio executive Thom Mount to get the full behind-the-scenes picture on this pop

culture icon.

In mid-1975, a 23-year old North Carolina native named Thom Mount reported for his first day of work at Universal Studios, where he had just been hired as the assistant to Ned Tanen, the studio’s famously explosive production chief.  "Tanen was nuts," says Animal House’s director, John Landis (The Blues Brothers, Trading Places).  "He just bounded off of the walls.  People would leave his office ashen-faced."

Immediately upon Mount’s arrival at the office that day, Tanen gave the young assistant his first assignment.  He directed Mount to find an executive named Jerry Miller (no relation to Animal House screenwriter Chris Miller), fire him and then figure out just what the hell the soon-to-be-deposed Miller had been working on.

Mount did as he was told.  Not surprisingly, Miller was displeased by the turn of events; to say nothing of the fact that he was being fired by someone that he’d never met.  Launching into a rant about what a bastard Tanen was, Miller predicted that Mount wouldn’t last 6 months working for such a madman.  Then Miller refused to be fired.  He quit.  Mount wasn’t about to quibble over the details.

After Miller’s dramatic departure, Mount began sifting through a pile of papers, scripts and film treatments that Miller had left behind on his desk.  One treatment that caught his attention was for a project entitled The Night of the Seven Fires.

"It was all over the map," says Mount, "It was essentially about frat parties, initiations and a lot of throwing up at Dartmouth College."

Though the treatment lacked a clear story line, Mount found that there were certain basic elements in place for a compelling film.  Namely, there was a renegade fraternity bent on fun and destruction in equal parts; an overbearing, almost Nixonian administration with a creepy dictatorial Dean; and an unchecked desire on the part of the characters to have an unfettered, uncensored good time.  Mount saw huge potential.

"It was inspiring, though decidedly non-linear," Mount says of the treatment.

Thus, on his first day of work, 23-year old Thom Mount discovered the beginnings of Animal House on the desk of a man he had just fired.  The film would go on to become one of film history’s most successful and influential comedies.

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National Lampoon magazine was founded in 1970 by three recently graduated Harvard Lampoon editors (Doug Kenney, Henry Beard and Rob Hoffman) who were looking to stave off real jobs, and Matty Simmons, a hustling former press agent turned Weight Watchers Magazine publisher. 

Between 1970 and 1974 National Lampoon became a massive cultural and financial success.  With a gigantic pass-along readership of 12 million, the magazine was breaking the traditional boundaries of comedy by taking no prisoners in pursuit of a laugh (it famously published a post-Chappaquiddick Volkswagen Bug ad parody featuring Ted Kennedy after the company had bragged that their car floated) and setting the stage for the brand of humor that producer Lorne Michaels would soon co-opt for Saturday Night Live.

By the end of its first year in publication the role of each founder had been clearly established.  Simmons was the moneyman.  Kenney was the mad genius that set the magazine’s edgy, sophomoric and totally counterculture editorial tone.  Beard functioned as the Lampoon’s calm, steady center: the man responsible for making sure that there was a magazine to put out each month.  Hoffman had little to do with the magazine since he’d bailed out early for business school and his family’s Coca-Cola bottling business in Texas.

In 1975, under the terms of their original agreement, Simmons bought out Hoffman, Kenney and Beard (known as "The Harvard Boys") at roughly $2.5 million apiece.  Suddenly rich, Beard immediately packed up his office and left the magazine, declaring it his happiest day since being discharged from the Army.

Only Kenney remained on board.  Profoundly talented and equally erratic (he often disappeared without a trace for months at a time — once living in a tent on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard) Kenney was still the magazine’s driving creative force.

Kenney specialized in off-the-wall humor that revolved around nostalgia and a firm understanding about what there was to both love and hate about Middle America and its institutions.  Above all, however, was an improvisational and highly literate quality typified by the following story told by Harold Ramis.  "Doug stood in my living room and randomly pulled a book off of my shelf, opened to a page and started reading aloud.  Then he stopped reading and improvised in the style of the book," Ramis says. "I couldn’t tell where the reading had stopped.  He told me that he could do it with any book on the shelf."

Simmons, and the magazine, needed him badly.  Knowing that Kenney was obsessed with show business, Simmons told him that the Lampoon was going to get into the movie business.  They had already produced several successful comedy records, as well as radio and stage shows.  Simmons thought film was the next logical step in his burgeoning comedy empire.  Even more, however, it was a way to keep Kenney engaged with the Lampoon.

Simmons teamed Kenney with Ramis — who at the time was working with Second City and a Lampoon traveling stage show — and put them to work on writing a film treatment and script based on the magazine’s immensely successful 1964 High School Yearbook Parody which Harpers had called "The best example of group writing since the King James Bible."

The yearbook had been Kenney’s brainchild (though humorist P.J. O’Rourke was also a major contributor) and took the reader through the senior annual of Larry Kroger (the Animal House character Pinto’s real name), a non-descript student at Estes Kefauver High School in Dacron, Ohio.  It was a clear, devastating and hilarious depiction of life in the innocent world that seemed to precede the Kennedy Assassination and the Vietnam War.

Also on board with the project was a young Czech-born Canadian B-horror film producer who was responsible for projects like Rabid and They Came From Within.  His name was Ivan Reitman (who would go on to direct Stripes, Ghostbusters and Dave); Animal House would be his first venture into the world of Hollywood filmmaking.

Kenney and Ramis first tried high school as a backdrop and produced a treatment for something called Laser Orgy Girls, about a Charles Manson-like high school student and some extraterrestrials that he meets in the desert.  Simmons objected.  Though he liked the material, he was wary of involving teenage characters with sex and drug use on film. 

They moved to college, but couldn’t find the correct tone or rhythm.  Desperate, Kenney suggested using the college-based short stories written by the Lampoon’s Chris Miller.  A Dartmouth grad and real-life Delta, he had produced several pieces for the magazine using his true-to-life fraternity escapades as inspiration.

A Brooklyn native, Miller found tremendous happiness within the fraternity system and had worked on and off on a memoir recounting his experiences at Dartmouth.  "I’d written about my freshman year, when I felt alienated from all of the football-playing, prep school-going, big corporate executive guys who went to Dartmouth.  All those Republicans," Miller says, (also the screenwriter of Club Paradise and Multiplicity).  "I finally found a home in this sick fraternity."

The goings on at Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta Phi house were a tad wilder than those that would eventually wind up on screen when Animal House made it to the theaters. Miller’s house, where he was known as Pinto, took part in such odd behaviors as public masturbation contests, the charting of penis sizes (flaccid and erect), a wide variety of vomiting rituals and at least one case of sodomizing a pledge with a frozen hot dog.

On deadline and stuck with writer’s block one night, Miller dug into his Dartmouth memoir files and submitted "The Night of the Seven Fires" for publication in National Lampoon.

"It described a typical Hell Night," Miller says of "The Night of the Seven Fires".  "There is sick and then there is sick with elegance, inventiveness and innovation.  It’s not just about blowing a booger out of your nose.  We Deltas believed that we were the artists of sickness.  Our motto was ‘sickness is health, blackness is truth and drinking is strength’."

"When you talk to people about Dartmouth," Ramis chuckles, "they mention Chris’ fraternity."

The piece Miller submitted was concerned with a particular ritual in which pledges were instructed to put out campfires by repeatedly vomiting on them.

With this as their original source material, Kenney, Miller and Ramis convened at a Greenwich Village restaurant for Sunday brunch to kick off the film project.  The three writers spent several hours simply telling their favorite college stories, which Ramis (who was deposed as president of his Washington University fraternity in a scandal related to missing dues) jotted down on a yellow legal pad.  There were many different stories they told that day and, by the end of the session, the three all agreed on one thing of great importance: at the heart of any great animal house, there is a great animal.

"The moment after we said that, we did that thing where we all looked around and said: Belushi," Miller states.

All three knew John Belushi through his work in National Lampoon’s "Lemmings" stage show and they decided to tailor write the part of Bluto with the Saturday Night Live star in mind.

"We knew nothing about Hollywood norms," Miller says of the 114-page treatment they ultimately produced (35 pages is considered long by most executives).  "We weren’t operating within normal parameters at all.  [Animal House] is now referred to as a brilliantly structured movie — which was a total accident."

In fact, neither Miller, Kenney nor Ramis had even attempted to write a feature length screenplay before they set to work on Animal House.  A former ad copywriter, Miller had written :30 and :60 commercial spots and Ramis had worked on developing skits for Second City, but nobody had so much as a general idea of how to go about taking on the task of writing a film treatment.  As a result, they devised a system that would make most writers cringe: Miller would write the first ten pages, Ramis the second 10 and Kenney the next 10.  Then the three would exchange what they had written and discuss and edit each other’s work.  Then they would switch pages again until each writer had spent time working directly on both editing and composing each page of the treatment.

"[The system] worked because we all had a lot of subversive sensibilities in common," Miller smiles about the trio’s unusual writing practice, "We didn’t like authority and thought it was more important to have fun than to worry about your permanent record." 

Just the kind of wisdom one might expect from a Delta who once vomited out a campfire. 

And beneath it all the three writers had a sense that they were somehow capturing the spirit and aesthetic of their generation and its common experience in a way that Hollywood had never attempted, much less achieved.  "I remember having this grandiose feeling that we might be writing the biggest film comedy of all time," Ramis says matter-of-factly.

With a finished and gigantic treatment in hand, Simmons approached several studios about making Animal House.  The treatment was uniformly rejected everywhere Simmons went.  Persevering through the setbacks, Simmons continued to pitch the treatment across Southern California.  He continued to meet with a lack of interest until the treatment fell into the hands of Mount, who by now was an executive with his own assistant, Sean Daniel, at Universal.

"They saw something in Animal House and decided that there was an audience who would see it," Miller states, "Nobody else got it.  But, those guys did."

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Mount and Daniel convinced Tanen (who, depending on his mood, either loved and hated the project) that Animal House was a worthwhile project and that they could capture the dollars of the twelve million strong Lampoon readership.  After some initial disapproval of the idea, Tanen told Mount to make a deal with Simmons, get to work on the script and find a director.

One of the first tasks for Mount was to clean up the script slightly.   "We had to get rid of the constant vomiting on fires," he laughs.  "Meanwhile we’d bring the script to Matty Simmons who would make insightful comments like, ‘This isn’t funny enough, boys.’  It was hilarious."

Mount commuted back and forth between LA and New York, working with Kenney, Miller and Ramis on the script while bearing first-hand witness to the early days of the cultural phenomenon that was Saturday Night Live in its first season.  Prior to Saturday Night Live’s 1975 debut, the only two television shows that had ever managed to capture the "youth market" were American Bandstand and The Monkees.  Saturday Night Live signaled an entirely different ethos.  It was aggressive, political, raw and very funny.  Miller, Mount, Kenney and Ramis all intuitively saw that there was a sea change in the culture and, if written correctly, Animal House could capitalize on the same new wave of comedy.

"I wanted [Animal House’s] script to be smart and radical — just like SNL," Mount says.

When it came to finding a director the dark specter of The Monkees again reared its ugly head.  Tanen recommended Jim Frawley (a frequent Monkees director) to helm the project.  Other studio-approved directors included Mike Nichols, John Schlesinger and Bob Rafaelson.

At Tanen’s request, Mount dropped off a copy of the script at Frawley’s house.  A few days later Mount spoke to Frawley and was relieved at the response.  "Frawley said, ‘It’s garbage.  I hate it," Mount recalls.

At the same time as Mount was making his way through some of Hollywood’s least likely Animal House directors, Sean Daniel’s then-girlfriend Katherine Wooten was working as the script girl on a wild independent production called Kentucky Fried Movie.  Shot in 20 days, the film was essentially a series of blackout sketches organized together as a feature length movie.  The film spoofed television, commercials and movies, including a legendary Kung Fu scene.  Its director was a 27-year old high school dropout and film junkie named John Landis.

Wooten’s stories from the set intrigued Daniel and she encouraged him to come look at the Kentucky Fried Movie dailies with Mount.  After a few minutes of viewing the wholly irreverent guerrilla film, Daniel, Mount and Simmons knew that they had found a director with National Lampoon sensibilities that could translate Animal House from page to screen.

Excited, "We told Tanen about Landis," Mount says.  Tanen’s immediate reaction was, "Fuck that guy."

Not dissuaded by his boss’s "fuck that guy" decree, Mount and Daniel eventually nagged Tanen into meeting with Landis and watching portions of Kentucky Fried Movie.  After the meeting, Tanen relented that he may have been too harsh about Landis and agreed to hire him with the strict caveat that Landis must deliver the movie for less than $2,500,000.

"It was some number that Ned pulled out of the air," Mount sighs of the $2,500,000, "which was status quo at the time."

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Landis came on board and immediately suggested some changes to the script.  "It had a sense of anarchy and real wit and it was brilliantly funny," Landis says of the script, "but it was kind of hateful."

This didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone given that such humor was precisely the kind of hard-edged thing the Lampoon was known for (the magazine once published a parody of the traditional, syrupy American baby book for Vietnamese parents during the Vietnam War — featuring sections for "first X-Ray," "first funeral" and the like). 

Overall, the consensus on the matter was that the film was shockingly harsh.  Too East Coast.  Too conservative.  Both the Deltas and the Omegas were pigs.  There was no one to root for.

"My major contribution was to say that you had to have good guys and bad guys," Landis says, "You had to make the conflict much simpler.  Us against them. You needed a good guy fraternity."

He also eliminated all scenes that involved projectile vomiting onto campfires.  And true to form, "Not all of this," Ramis recalls, "was met with great excitement by the screenwriting team."

Approaching the project, Landis had another movie in mind that he had briefly been considered for.  The film was called The Big Bus and it had a decent script and a great concept.  It was essentially a parody of disaster films set on a bus.  It was Airplane! before its time.

Just 24-years old at the time, Landis only had the low budget film Schlock under his belt.  Then studio executive Barry Diller called Landis in for a meeting about the possibility of his directing The Big Bus.  Diller asked Landis about his thoughts on casting.  "As the bus driver I saw Rock Hudson," Landis says, "For the female lead I wanted Elizabeth Taylor."

Diller didn’t get it.  He asked why you would cast straight actors in a comedy.  He wanted comedians.  In other words, the belief was that you needed comedians to make a comedy.

"I wanted to use serious actors," Landis says, "I wanted people to believe the parts."

With his anti-establishment ideas on this matter, Landis didn’t get The Big Bus job.  In a strange twist of fate, the project ultimately ended with the aforementioned director Jim Frawley at the helm.  Distinctly non-straight man Joe Bologna was cast in the lead.  The film was a gigantic failure.

Landis refused to give up on his idea of straight actors in comedy and Kentucky Fried Movie had succeeded based, in part, on getting straight actors to do outlandish things.  Landis wanted to apply the same principle to Animal House.  However, Tanen had other ideas.  He wanted movie stars and comedians, much like Diller had.  Landis stood his ground and continued to hold out for character actors and unknowns.

"They wanted Dom DeLuise to play the [Mafia-connected] mayor," says Landis.  "I love Dom DeLuise.  I just didn’t want him for the part."

Rather than DeLuise, Landis hired a character actor named Cesare DeNova who had been in other dramatic films like Cleopatra and Mean Streets, where he had even played the role of a Mafia don. 

As the evil Dean Wormer, Landis wanted Jack Webb, the deadpan, crew cut, crime-fighting star of TV’s Dragnet.  Over a booze-soaked lunch, however, Webb confided to Landis that he couldn’t understand why anyone would want him for a comedy. 

After Webb turned down the opportunity to play Wormer, Landis turned his sights onto veteran character actor and film heavy, John Vernon.  Landis was inspired to contact Vernon after he’d seen the actor perform in Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Jesse Wales.  At one point in the film, Vernon delivers the unforgettable line, "Don’t piss down my leg and tell me it’s raining."

"I saw that and thought, ‘Dean Wormer!’" Landis exclaims.

For the Dean’s bored lush of a wife, Landis wanted to really go straight and suggested the lavender-clad former starlet and leading lady Kim Novak.  Tanen and other Universal execs thought Landis was insane.

Instead he cast Verna Bloom (After Hours, The Last Temptation of Christ) a gifted stage actress who had made her film debut in Haskell Wexler’s 1969 independent film classic, Medium Cool.

As casting continued, executives at Universal began to fear that the film lacked anyone with movie star credentials.   Belushi himself was only considered a supporting ensemble actor at the time and, consequently, the prevailing opinion was that he couldn’t carry a film at the box office.  Tanen and Reitman desperately wanted Landis to cast Chevy Chase as Otter (the charming Omega lady-killer), a role that had been written with him in mind.  Landis hated the idea.  "The role [of Otter] was so close to Chevy," Landis says, "It would have thrown off the balance of the film."