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Chris Miller hit the bigtime in 1978 when he turned his fraternity memories into National Lampoon’s Animal House.  The movie detonated a cinematic and cultural explosion that’s still echoing.  Year in and year out, the movie gains new fans as ensuing generations discover it.
           
Animal House was not the first of Miller’s tales to find a passionate audience.  As National Lampoon’s resident short story writer for over twenty years, he crafted wildly popular and sensitive opuses “Caked Joy Rag,” “Groin Larceny,” “Beat the Meatles,” and dozens more.   

But when his fraternity tales—“The Night of the Seven Fires” and “Pinto’s First Lay”—triggered Animal House, the rest was history.  The movie is based on Miller’s experiences at Dartmouth College’s Alpha Delta Phi in the early sixties, where the brothers’ ribald frivolity so impressed him that he recreated it in the fictional members of Delta House.  Miller thinks of Pinto and Boon, played by Tom Hulce and Peter Riegert, as his naïve freshman and suave upperclassman selves.  He appears in several scenes of the movie as Delta brother Hardbar—watch him exploding smoke bombs during the Homecoming Parade.

Another Miller screenplay, Multiplicity, was also inspired by one of his Lampoon stories. It, too, was based on his life, as he processed into comedy the stresses he experienced trying finally to grow up and become a responsible husband and father.  Starring Michael Keaton and Andie McDowell, it portrays the appalling shortage of time in modern life.  The hero’s solution is to clone himself repeatedly, which, of course, winds up making him busier than ever.  The script was co-written by Mary Hale. 

Miller’s screenplay Club Sandwich was crafted with yet another co-writer, David Standish, as a form of therapy after they were practically lobotomized by the horrifying banality of a week at a Club Med.  In 1986 it was produced as Club Paradise starring Robin Williams and directed once again by Harold Ramis. 

Miller has been touring college campuses nationwide since 1973 with his hilarious one-man show, “The Chris Miller Story Hour.”  His performances evoke such reactions as “excruciatingly funny,” “lecture entertainment yet unequalled on our campus,” “a true masterpiece of hilarity” and other over-the-top raves.

Miller‘s particular talents were recognized even in high school where his yearbook named him Class Comedian, noting his possession of an “unusual sense of humor.”  His professional life began at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, a New York ad agency where he worked on the “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” and other prize-winning campaigns.  He has a BA in English from Dartmouth and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business Administration.

Currently, Miller’s college memoir, The Real Animal House, is a best-seller.  Published  by Little, Brown & Co., it is characterized by the New York Times as “a nuclear bomb of political incorrectness” and “utterly hilarious.”  His next project is a second memoir, set ten years later in 1970, his two books thereby bracketing the sixties, that wacko decade America can’t forget.  Miller is determined to get the sixties right, having never seen a movie or read a book that has done so. 

Miller lives in Venice, California with his awesome son, Jack, and a pair of seriously mellow cats.