Introduction to the New Edition:

My Life with the Animals - Again
by Chris Miller

What I hadn’t anticipated was how real it would feel. The fraternity basement, Otis Day and the Knights, the cute girls in togas, all of it. And that was definitely real beer in those cups, folks. Lots of the Deltas dancing to “Shout” did not have to act drunk. Me, for one. Figured I’d feel less ridiculous doing these old steps if I knocked back a few. I recall the toga party taking a week to shoot. By the second day, reality and fiction were running together. I almost felt I was back at the Alpha Delta Phi house at Dartmouth, and it was 1961 all over again.

Except that every so often our director, John Landis, would shreik “Cut,” and all of us wildly twisting and gatoring Deltas and our dates would come to a full stop, the music cutting off suddenly, and there we were, back in the real world. Just a movie set, after all. Then, once the camera guys had accomplished the next set-up, the music would roar back on and we’d all start dancing again. This meant that you would serially get drenched in sweat and then stand around shivering in the dank, chilly Oregon air, doing nothing for extended periods. The rear door to the basement (we were in a real U. of Oregon fraternity basement) had to be left halfway open in order to allow electric cables to snake inside. This caused a constant draft, bringing to our nasal facilities the distinctive reek of the local paper mill. Lots of the actors and crew guys caught colds. Landis got so sick he had to sit in his director’s chair sipping peppermint tea for several days, his voice practically gone, forbidden to say anything beyond “Roll camera” and “Cut.” Still, the toga party was great fun and I wouldn’t have missed it.

Landis had done a smart thing, I felt. He’d decided it would be great to have writers around should it become necessary to alter scenes or write new ones, and so had invited Doug Kenney and me to join the cast. In the script, there had been a Delta named Mountain, a big, friendly guy with a small part, but they never found an actor to play him. So Landis divided Mountain’s moments between us. Doug became Stork and I suggested they call me Hardbar, after an actual fraternity brother who was famous for beating off more often than your average chimpanzee. Doug cannily made much of his role, donning glasses and one of those breast-pocket pen-holder-things, becoming the perfect ultrageek. He decided Stork was a math whiz and created a holster at his hip for his slide rule. (This was an item once used to multiply and do square roots and the like, before there were calculators. You know, back when people smoked pipes and used typewriters.) He would stand facing himself in the mirror, hand poised above the hook he’d taped to the rule, and I’d yell “Draw!” Doug got so he could whip the thing out and begin calculating in under two seconds. To his sorrow, he never got to display his quick-draw in the movie, as there was never a need for a Delta to calculate anything. But he made his character so unforgettable that Landis let him lead the band down that blind alley. As for me, I just followed John’s directions. I gave Flounder a curious look when he asked “Are you guys playing cards?” I twisted in my toga, yelling “A little bit louder now” with Otis Day. When the man at the parade asked me to move so his little kid could see, I said “No!” It was my only line in the clear and since my voice wasn’t picked up very well by the microphone, Landis later had to loop it in the studio. So that’s actually John Landis’ voice saying “No,” not mine. But I did improvise and yell out “You tell ‘em, Otter!” at the trial.

Meanwhile, when it turned out Donald Sutherland could give us a few days of his acting services, Doug came up with that classroom scene where Professor Jennings admits he finds Milton boring, too. We wrote some other scenes as well. So Landis got what he needed and Doug and I got to watch this bizarre engine known as a movie production roll ever forward.

It has been said that movie shoots have much in common with military campaigns. The director is the general and everyone else is the army, and they’re all supposed to function together to achieve difficult but desirable goals as quickly as possible. No days off! You can’t fuck up! It’s relentless. Landis—who the crew dubbed Outlandish—was the wackiest general to come along since Groucho in Duck Soup. The set was a happy, playful place because of John’s exuberance. He was always surprising the actors with something or other. When the scene was shot with the brothers and new pledges singing “Louis Louis” around the jukebox, Landis stationed me and Doug on the stairs just behind them. He armed each of us with a pitcher of beer and told us we should, at his signal, dump the beer over the heads of the singers, who had no notion such a thing might happen to them. So—he signalled and we poured. The footage did not wind up in the movie, but I definitely enjoyed dumping a gallon of beer over the head of John Belushi.

People always ask about John. They seem to want some Belushi horror story. You know, he snorted a whole can of Drano the night before the parade sequence or something. Well, sorry, but my experience of John Belushi during the Animal House shoot was of a complete professional working at the peak of his powers. He was always on time and always knew his lines. He was focused, co-operative, and crafted a brilliant Bluto—the other actors were in awe. And he was commuting each week between New York and Oregon, so he could continue his work with Saturday Night Live as well. I had total respect for this heroic feat; it took a strong, strong man to handle all that he was handling, and all at the same time. There were no Belushi horror stories. He was a genial presence, as was his wife, Judy.

John was the only actor to get his own house. He was becoming quite the star. Back in New York, several of us associated with the Lampoon lived within a few blocks of each other in the Village—me, Doug, P. J. O’Rourke, Gerry Sussman, Rick Meyerowitz, and the Belushis. Before the shoot began I met John one Saturday morning on Bleeker Street to have breakfast at Al & Ann’s Luncheonette. So many people came up to talk to him that it took us an hour to walk the one block to the restaurant.

Everyone else in the movie company was quartered at a large motel complex outside Eugene called The Roadway Inn. There must have been three hundred rooms at that place. The actors were all in the same area. At night, different groups of us would coalesce, smoke weed, and sing and fool around until the middle of the night. Karen Allen played great guitar and gave good folk song. Each night a couple of us would steal the motel’s piano and roll it to Bruce McGill’s room, on the first floor by the stairs, and the music would go nonstop. Each morning the motel guys would come and roll the piano back again.

There was no big drug scene during the shoot beyond weed, which was ubiquitous. After a while, the local dealers became aware of our presence and began showing up with exotic varieties of locally-grown shit. There may have been coke around, but the only time I saw any was after a meal one night, the first week we were there, around a long table in the Roadway Inn dining room. There must have been twelve of us; it was late and we had the place pretty much to ourselves. We’d drunk a bunch of wine and were in good spirits. After the waiter cleared the table and went off to find our desserts, one of those little bottles with a spoon attached came out of someone’s pocket and made a single circuit of the table, each of us consuming a nice one-and-one. The conversation quickly became brighter and louder. This post-prandial toot seemed clearly superior to brandy, all agreed.

The album of the shoot was Aja by Steely Dan. Everyone seemed to have it. You walked down the hallways of the Inn and heard it coming from multiple rooms.

One day Ken Kesey and fellow Merry Prankster, Ken Babbs, showed up as we were shooting a scene in an outdoor location. They lived in the Eugene area, we were told. I came alive. My crazy pals and I, back in New York, had devoured Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and thought the Pranksters were totally cool. A little group of actors and crew (and writers) stood around as Babbs pulled out a couple of Js, lit up and passed them around. We felt that with this gesture the Kesey people were stamping our work with their imprimature of hipness.

It felt that way when Sutherland showed up, too. The cast was mostly young, just getting their starts, and they had stars in their eyes at the sight of this veteran actor. Sutherland had been in the much-admired (though not by me) MASH, and his credentials both as a hipster and a movie star were impeccable. The inclusion of his deft, countercultural touch in the film once again felt like a certification of our coolness by the previous hip generation.

A very young Kevin Bacon was cast to play an obnoxious Omega pledge named Chip Diller. It was his first movie. In those days, Kevin’s nose was more pushed up than it is now, making his nostrils flare dramatically. Each time he’d approach, Doug Kenney would cry “Ewwwww! You can see his brains!”

When the scene in which Otter picks up the dead girl’s roommate was shot, the crew kept cracking up. Take after take, they’d explode with laughter. “Dead? Why, that minx! Did she put you up to this?” The camera guy, the gaffer, and the electrician roar anew. “Take 26,” Landis says tiredly. Matheson smiles, all charm. “And could you get three dates for my friends?” “HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR!” goes the crew.

The actors were great fun to know. Bruce McGill was a fount of energy and laughter, a gas to hang out with. Karen Allen was a sweet, refreshing presence; there was many a crush on her, through cast and crew. John Vernon would plant himself at a table in the Roadway Inn bar nightly and down a long procession of drinks, gradually becoming incoherent. Boon and Otter, uh, I mean Peter Reigert and Tim Matheson, became like real fraternity brothers to me. Indeed, I began to think of all these movie people—not just the Deltas but everyone, really—as one big, coed fraternity, as dedicated as my old college frat was to forcing life to be fun. There’s some very intense bonding on location shoots. Later, people go on to other movies or back to their lives and and the thing fades, but then returns to life each time the cast, writers, producers and director are called together for some occasion, such as the 25th Animal House Anniversary in 2004, when Universal recreated the Faber College Homecoming Parade on Hollywood Boulevard. We love seeing each other. In case you were wondering, everyone feels a little awed at having been a part of the famous, iconic movie.

We knew Universal was starting to pay attention to what the crazies up in Oregon were doing when one day they sent us a crane. Landis, thrilled, started doing overhead shots left and right. The crane was another stamp of our authenticity; it meant the dailies we sent back to the studio were making the execs laugh. The further we went into the production, the happier Universal became, and so the happier we became. I think all that fun and enthusiasm on the set is right there on the screen when you watch the movie. What must it be like to be in the cast of a prison movie, or a smallpox epidemic movie, or a torture-chamber movie? Animal House, it occurs to me, is the absolute opposite of such films. It’s about many things, but most importantly it’s about freedom, man, and this may be a clue to its unending popularity. Who doesn’t love freedom?

When Thanksgiving rolled around, there were only a few days of shooting left. Most of the leaves had fallen fallen from the trees and, looking up, one beheld a Jackson Pollock of bare branches against a steely-gray sky. Universal threw a turkey dinner for one and all at the Roadway Inn dining room. D-Day, uh, Bruce had rolled the piano back himself this morning. It had sustained multiple body dings during its many transits but still sounded pretty good as people took turns playing it. When Cesare Danova, who portrayed the mobbed-up mayor of Faber, Carmine DePasto, strolled in with his wife, whoever was playing shifted abruptly to the Theme from The Godfather, and the entire room sang along. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-daaaah. Cesare smiled broadly and made Pope-like gestures with his hands.

And then it was over. The production had utterly consumed all of us who worked on it. We’d grown used to its rhythms, and to having the shooting schedule structure our lives. Suddenly it was gone. Shit, now Doug and I would have to go back to New York, just as it became an arctic wasteland for the next three months, and start working for a living once again. I was supposed to write and edit the book version of the movie. I don’t know what Doug was supposed to do. He was practically despondent. He’d been there from the start and now stood stubbornly in the freezing parking lot as the last of the generator trucks and honey wagons pulled out, never to return to the Roadway Inn. Was that a tear dangling from Dougie’s eye? I seconded his emotion. But life went on. Later, though we were both involved with many other movies, none of them gave us the happy rush that working on Animal House had. To paraphrase Flounder, “Oh, boy, was it great!”

The End

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(above) Chris Miller and co-writer Doug Kenney in character as Delta brothers, Hardbar and Stork.
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