Harold Ramis has been Chris’ friend since they met in Philadelphia in 1975. He was costarring with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and Brian Doyle-Murray in a comedy review called The National Lampoon Show, that was in its out-of-town tune-up phase; it later ran in Manhattan for a while. Since this predates Saturday Night Live, the cast was quite an auspicious little group of future legends. Chris and Harold chatted after the show, then met again in 1976 when it came time to write the script for Animal House. They reuned creatively in the eighties, when Harold directed a script that remotely resembled one Chris originally co-wrote (with David Standish) called Club Sandwich. It wound up as Club Paradise. In the ninties, another conjunction, as Multiplicity, written by Chris and his wife, Mary Hale, was also directed by Harold. He is a fine fellow, who lives with his awesome wife and kids in Glencoe, Illinois, and tackles one cool project after another, including Caddyshack, the Ghostbusters films, and everybodys' favorite, Groundhog Day. And this one, the introduction he wrote to The Real Animal House, which answers the question how did that crazy Animal House movie ever get made, anyway?
A Real Foreword
by
Harold RamisChris Miller got to Dartmouth in 1959, joined the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, and I guess we could say that the rest is apocryphal. By the time we met in 1975, Chris’s “Tales of the Adelphian Lodge” were among the most popular stories published in the National Lampoon, and Chris was frequently out of New York reading those and other stories of his to college audiences all around the country. How I came to be at the Lampoon in those days is a long chapter for the book I’m currently too lazy to write, but this is the relevant part.
In early ’75, I was performing in The National Lampoon Show in a New York cabaret with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Joe Flaherty. Our producers were Matty Simmons, publisher of the Lampoon, and Ivan Reitman, at that time a successful young Canadian producer with great entrepreneurial instincts who had made considerable money producing and distributing exploitation films like Cannibal Girls (“They eat men!”). But Ivan was looking beyond another off-Broadway Lampoon cabaret show; what Ivan imagined, and what he proposed to Matty Simmons was the first Lampoon feature film.
Our show had opened to mixed reviews and so-so business, but the run extended through the summer of that year, when Lorne Michaels came talent-scouting for his new NBC venture, Saturday Night (the Live would be added later). Lorne took John Belushi and Gilda, then the ill-fated Howard Cosell variety show came and took Bill and Brian Murray, along with the brilliant Christopher Guest, a veteran of the Lampoon’s hit off-Broadway show Lemmings, and a standout on NatLamps’s Radio Hour. I had left the Lampoon show a couple of months earlier to direct a PBS series in LA for my good friend Michael Shamberg––which is not to say I would have been cast on SNL had I been there––but this sets the stage for the genesis of Animal House, the movie.
Before they all went their separate ways, Ivan Reitman asked Brian, Bill, and John to write a treatment for the first Lampoon movie using material from our show and some appropriate articles from the magazine. He offered to pay them $2500, but, astute businessmen that they were, they demanded $2500 EACH! “Forget it,” Ivan must have said. “I can get Ramis to do it alone for $2500.” And so he did. Faced with the assigned material, I looked for a unifying setting and theme and it was at that point that Anne, my wife at the time, said, “Why don’t you write a college movie?” In fact, I had some extraordinary experiences at Washington University in St. Louis, had joined a fraternity and lived for two years in the Zeta Beta Tau house, then another two years in an off-campus apartment.
What characterized my college years, 1962-1967, was the dramatic shift in mood and focus that began with the Kennedy assassination, and continued through the onslaught of the free speech movement, the civil rights struggle, and the anti-war movement, all fueled and somewhat intensified by what I call a “national voluntary drug-testing program.” In that period, fraternities were becoming increasingly marginalized as students converted their anarchic energy to legitimate political protest and activism, and the free-form social experiments of counter-cultural life styles like communes and collectives. In that new context, the old Greek system made less and less sense, and the film treatment I wrote attempted to describe that shift. I called it Freshman Year, but when I submitted it to Matty and Ivan, it was clear that nobody liked it enough to move forward. What we all recognized was that it lacked the spirit and hard comic edge of the Lampoon, so at that point I suggested working with a Lampoon editor, Doug Kenny, Harvard Lampoon alum and one of the founding partners of the National Lampoon.
Doug was a Harvard graduate from Chagrin Falls, Ohio and the Lampoon’s leading comic authority on puberty and adolescence. He had edited and compiled Lampoon’s highly successful high school yearbook parody and among many others had authored two classic Lampoon pieces, First Lay Comics, and First High Comics, elements of which later found their way into the screenplay for Animal House. Given Doug’s particular bent (he’d also written a novel called Teenage Commies from Outer Space), we set aside the notion of doing a college movie and instead laid out a high school film. Our story concerned Charles Manson in high school, a strangely seductive, demented loner living in the white bread world of a typical Midwestern suburb, corrupting the local youth and forming a depraved cult of flying saucer worshipping teenage zombies. We called it Laser Orgy Girls. The marketing slogan for the popular America Graffiti had been, “Where were you in ’62?” Ours was, “Where was he in ’63?” To Matty and Ivan’s credit, they actually liked it, but after a moment’s reflection, suggested we go back to the idea of doing a college movie.
Enter Chris Miller, the lanky, good-natured Long Island gentile whose boundless enthusiasm for the golden age of fraternity life instantly set us back on the right track. Doug and Chris were Lampoon colleagues, and the three of us bonded quickly. What followed was an initial three month period of forty hour weeks on the eleventh floor of the Lampoon building at 59th and Madison, banker’s hours spent totally debriefing each other on the American college experience. Working with Chris’s treasure trove of published Adelphian Lodge stories, Doug’s Harvard experiences, and my own fraternity days at Washington University, we compiled a virtual data base of every funny thing that ever happened to any of us, every distinctive character we’d known, all the extraordinary and outlandish things we heard about fraternity life from our fathers, uncles, brothers and cousins, and finally, every single college myth we could remember hearing. Furthermore we looked back and discussed classic gang comedy, from Our Gang to Archie comics, identifying relevant archetypes for our emerging narrative. But what galvanized all our thinking right from the start was the term “animal house,” not just as a title, but as the organizing thematic element from which everything else flowed.
In the pages of Chris’s stories you will, of course, find characters and incidents depicted in the film. What didn’t make it into the film were some of the really hardcore events, true stories that the producers and executives at Universal found too shocking or disgusting to include in a film intended for general release, even with its R rating. In fact, we were told that the president of Universal, Ned Tannen, when he read the script for the first time, appeared disturbed and said, “I don’t get it. These are the heroes?” Reassured by the studio’s younger executives, principally Thom Mount and Sean Daniels, they proceeded, and the movie went on to become in 1978 the highest-grossing comedy of all time.
Those too-disgusting stories? They’re right here. Because finally the real Pinto is telling all, his unique experiences in one of the truly legendary “animal houses,” expressed in his own distinctive voice. “Sickness is health, blackness is truth, drinking is strength,” the perverse and subversive motto of both the Deltas and the ADs, colors these pages as Chris lovingly, ironically, and sometimes ruefully recalls a time when Eisenhower was in the White House, Ozzie and Harriet were on TV, and Holden Caulfield was in all our heads. Go nuts.
Harold Ramis
June 16, 2006
