Caddyshack Page 9
“I remember getting the script and reading it for the first time at the unemployment office on 90th and Broadway,” recalls McGill. “It wasn’t a cheerful place, but I was just laughing out loud. I thought to myself, Can they really be making this movie?”
Landis knew that a certain amount of rewriting would have to happen on the set, so he asked Ramis, Miller, and Kenney if they wanted to come along and play extras. Ramis was still smarting about being passed over for Boon. “I thought, Fuck that, I’m not hanging around to be an extra.” Miller and Kenney jumped at the chance, with Miller playing a Delta named Hardbar, and Kenney as the fraternity’s four-eyed pencil-necked geek weirdo, Stork, who delivers one of the script’s most indelible lines: “What the hell are we supposed to do, ya moron?”
In October of 1977, the Animal House cast and crew arrived at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Landis had a thirty-day shooting schedule and a budget of $2.7 million. The producers, Matty Simmons and Ivan Reitman, had a hard time finding a college that would allow them to shoot on its campus after they’d read the cavalcade of hard-R depravity in the script. But Oregon’s dean jumped at the chance to host a Hollywood film crew. It just so happened that a decade earlier, he’d turned down another film looking for a location, and he was still kicking himself.
“I asked the dean if he wanted to read the script,” says Reitman. “He said, ‘Look, I’m the guy who said no to The Graduate. Obviously, I have no idea how to read a script, so why should I read yours? You can shoot here.’”
Kenney savored the adventure, driving cross-country from New York to Eugene in his Porsche. Deep down, he’d always harbored fantasies of being an actor. He’d even come up with a name for his movie-star alter ego: Charlton Hepburn. He’d had a bit part in a 1977 movie called Between the Lines, about the staff of an underground Boston newspaper. Says Reitman, “Doug loved the idea of dropping out of his life for a while and acting in a movie.”
On set, Landis put both Kenney and Miller into service, asking Kenney to write a classroom-lecture scene for Sutherland near the beginning of the film. Kenney pounded out the actor’s speech about John Milton (and the long-suffering Mrs. Milton) during lunch. Kenney had also suggested the writhing, epileptic toga-party dance called The Gator. When he and Miller weren’t punching up dialogue on set or filling the background as glorified scenery, they were partying and smoking dope with the Deltas at the Rodeway Inn—the local motel where the cast was staying. They both thought that they could get used to the movie business.
McGill had hijacked a piano from the motel’s lobby and stealthily wheeled it across the parking lot and into his room, which became a hub of after-hours indulgence. One night, the Animal House actors crashed a party at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house on the Oregon campus and barely escaped with their lives. “They were all jocks, so I was a bit intimidated,” recalls Jamie Widdoes, who played Animal House’s frat brother Hoover. “Some guy put his hand out for me to shake and said something and I popped his beer into his face like a fool. I ended up on the ground getting kicked. I was in the dentist’s chair at 8 a.m. the next morning because I got my teeth knocked in.” Adds McGill, “I got stomped bad. I got a black eye and I told Landis that I got it playing touch football. But he found out.”
Although Landis was more or less the same age as his actors, he was a straight arrow who steered clear of drugs. “I was like the principal,” he says. “If I walked in and they were smoking a joint, it got stashed right away.” Ironically enough, the one person who rarely hung out in McGill’s room was John Belushi. Due to his commitment to Saturday Night, he would work on the film from Monday through Wednesday, then head back to New York to rehearse and perform the show at 30 Rock. It was a grueling schedule, and Landis made sure that his star stayed away from trouble by renting him and his wife, Judy, a house close to the university instead of having them bunk at the Rodeway.
“Belushi would have been partying with us, I guarantee you,” says Tim Matheson. “But they wanted to keep John away because they knew his tendencies.” Landis insists that Belushi was clean throughout shooting (although he would be deep in the throes of cocaine addiction just a couple of years later when he reunited with Landis for The Blues Brothers). But one actor recalls Belushi’s pulling out a vial of coke one night at a restaurant, taking a healthy bump in each nostril, then passing it around.
Landis says that the moment he knew that Belushi would become a movie star was when they were shooting the cafeteria scene in which Belushi slides his tray along the counter and binges on junk food. “I was behind the camera going, ‘What is that? A hamburger? It looks good. I think we should eat the hamburger!’ And Belushi could just do it so fast. Then, I’d go, ‘Uh-oh, an éclair!’ He truly was the Cookie Monster.” The director also says that Kenney impressed him a lot as an actor, citing his famous parade scene at the end where Stork hijacks the local marching band and leads it into a dead-end alley.
When filming on Animal House wrapped, Landis returned to Los Angeles to edit it. There he was told by Sean Daniel and Thom Mount that not only had they been high on the dailies he’d been sending back from the set, but that all of the studio’s young, fresh-out-of-college employees were begging to see them, too. After Landis cut together a rough version of the film, he extended an olive branch to Ramis and invited him to Screening Room 2 at Universal to see what he’d missed. According to a source close to the film, Ramis told Landis after it was over: “You fucked it up!” But Kenney and Miller thought differently. Kenney was convinced that not only was Animal House great, it would also be a box-office hit—even bigger than the top-grossing comedy to that point, Blazing Saddles. As for Miller: “I thought it would be a popular movie, but not that it would be Gone with the Fuckin’ Wind!”
Still, the toughest audience had yet to see the finished film: Ned Tanen’s heavyweight boss at the company, Lew Wasserman. Wasserman was sixty-five and a Hollywood titan of the old school. Four weeks before Animal House was released, the studio set up a sneak preview in Denver. Wasserman was in the audience. “The theater was jammed,” recalls Reitman. “Somehow the word got out in the ether. From the first joke, when the mannequin gets thrown out of the Delta House window, the audience started bouncing. They just went nuts.” Peter Riegert, who played Boon, remembers Landis’s calling him up after the screening and playing him a tape over the phone that sounded like a sonic boom. “I said, ‘John, what is that?’ And he said, ‘That’s the audience!’ He’d taped the crowd’s reaction as they were watching the movie.” Says Landis, “After that, we went from being criminals to heroes.”
National Lampoon’s Animal House opened on July 28, 1978. It was the number-one movie in America for eight straight weeks. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars, writing, “The movie is vulgar, raunchy, ribald, and occasionally scatological. It is also the funniest comedy since Mel Brooks made The Producers.” By the end of its run, Landis’s little movie that had cost less than $3 million would end up taking in more than $140 million, becoming the biggest comedy of all time. Kenney’s prediction about knocking off Blazing Saddles had proved to be dead-on. Naturally, the muckety-mucks at Universal convinced themselves that they knew they’d been sitting on a hit all along.
Thom Mount says that in the giddy initial days and weeks after Animal House’s release, the studio realized that it had not only backed a winner, but had also found a sorely needed identity. “Paramount owned sophisticated movies, Fox owned romantic pictures, and Warner Bros. owned all of the action films. When the numbers for Animal House started coming in, I had the studio operators answer the phones by saying ‘Comedy Central’ instead of ‘Universal.’ We wanted to send a signal that we owned comedies.”
By late October, when Animal House had already raked in more than $60 million, National Lampoon was comfortably profitable again for the first time since the crippling buyout deal. Matty Simmons would walk around the office at 635 Madison with a copy of Variety in his fist and a shit-eating grin on
his face. Magazine sales were hitting an all-time high thanks to the success of Animal House (and the arrival of a new star writer, John Hughes). The film also goosed Saturday Night Live’s ratings, especially after a toga-clad John Belushi smirked on newsstands from the cover of Newsweek. The headline read “College Humor Comes Back.” The accompanying article was a predictably hypey, star-is-born magazine profile about the white-hot twenty-nine-year-old actor whose barnyard charm had stolen the film. But it also broadened into something of a psychological snapshot of comedy’s New Wave (which seemed especially new to the graying editorial board at Newsweek). Born in the pages of the Lampoon, bred on television with Saturday Night Live, the New Wave was now fully maturing on the big screen, poised to take over and transform Hollywood.
This new comedy revolution was a middle finger to the pious seriousness of the ’60s, when college students could delude themselves into thinking they could stop the war just by growing their hair long. If you looked just beneath the surface of Animal House’s gross-out gags and food fights, you could see a serious statement being made. After all, here was a movie where the losers win, the winners lose, and the straight establishment (embodied by John Vernon’s Nixonian Dean Wormer) is brought low by a bunch of immature miscreants out for a drunken good time. It would prove to be both a tidy metaphor and self-fulfilling prophecy for the people who’d made it.
They were outsiders who were on the verge of becoming insiders. The counterculture was becoming the culture.
5
Tinseltown Gold Rush
CLICHÉS BECOME CLICHÉS in large part because they contain more than a nugget of truth. As soon as it became clear that Animal House was not just a box office hit but a massive, industry-disrupting blockbuster, the old saying that “success has many fathers” couldn’t have better described what was about to happen next. Everyone involved with the film began jockeying for credit: the young executives at Universal with their eyes on a corner office; the film’s producers, Matty Simmons and Ivan Reitman; its director, John Landis; and its trio of Lampoon-affiliated writers—Doug Kenney, Harold Ramis, and Chris Miller. Had you spoken to any one of them in the late summer of 1978 when Animal House was firmly lodged atop the box office, you would have got an earful of self-congratulation and credit-grabbing. It was like an egocentric version of Rashomon: Everyone had a different, self-serving story about why they were responsible for the out-of-nowhere film’s success. What had been a cordial and collaborative yearslong process turned into a predictable game of Hollywood self-puffery and chest-thumping.
Landis, who certainly reaped his fair share of the credit for Animal House’s success, recalls a conversation he had with Kenney shortly after the film came out. “Doug said, ‘For a long time it was my movie, then it became Harold’s and mine, and then Harold’s and Chris’s and mine. And then all of a sudden John Landis comes in and it’s his movie. And then when it comes out, it’s John Belushi’s movie.’” Landis couldn’t argue with Kenney’s astute interpretation of events. Landis might have even felt the same way when Belushi appeared on the cover of Newsweek. But the subtext of what Kenney was saying was that on his next film, he intended to have more control. He wanted to make a Doug Kenney movie.
Though Kenney and the other screenwriters hadn’t made much money for the Animal House script (they split $30,000 three ways, plus a few thousand extra here and there for each subsequent draft), they had been given five points on the back end to split. Typically, back-end points come in two varieties: gross points (which means the participant gets a cut of the movie’s box office haul from the moment it opens) and net points (the participant’s cut doesn’t kick in until the movie recoups its production, marketing, and overhead costs). The writers had the far less favorable net points—about 1.6 of them each. That didn’t sound like it would amount to much (if anything) before Animal House opened. But after the movie began making money hand over fist and the box-office receipts kept piling up, it turned into about $500,000 apiece. “Net points are kind of like monkey points; they’re meaningless,” says Miller. “But this movie was so cheap to make and made so much money, they couldn’t hide it. There was no accounting creative enough to deprive us of our points. We got some very nice checks.”
Landis had been paid $50,000 to develop the script and direct Animal House, which also may not sound like much, but he was a twenty-seven-year-old just happy to be making his first studio picture. In Hollywood, the saying goes: You don’t get rich on your last movie, you get rich on the next one. As it was becoming clear that the film was headed to new, record-breaking heights, Ned Tanen gave Landis one net point as a gesture of goodwill (and no doubt an incentive for the now hot director to make his next movie at Universal). The majority of the profits, however, went to the studio, Simmons, and Reitman. While Simmons would end up making somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 million from Animal House (most of which went to refill the depleted Lampoon coffers), Reitman’s cut would come to roughly $4 million.
Kenney remained fairly blasé about his windfall. After all, he was already a millionaire a couple of times over thanks to his well-timed cash-out from the Lampoon. “Doug’s attitude about money was so cavalier,” says Kenney’s friend and eventual producing partner, Alan Greisman. “He once called me up and said, ‘Hey, can you look in the back of your car; I think there might be a check from Universal for $45,000. And I went and looked in the backseat and there was a crumpled check for $45,000. He was doing that all the time.”
If Kenney was nonplussed by his financial success on Animal House, Ramis was just the opposite. The thirty-three-year-old had a family at home and had been struggling and hustling for a decade since he’d first got to Second City. Now he could finally breathe easy for the first time in his life. “I literally took a copy of the newspaper review of Animal House to the bank to get the down payment on a house in Santa Monica,” said Ramis. “I said to the loan officer, ‘Look, I have a piece of this movie. I’m sure I’ll be solvent.’ That was my collateral. The guy laughed and gave me the loan right there.”
Everyone involved with Animal House profited in one way or another. At Universal, Thom Mount and Sean Daniel both got promotions and would, in years to come, each take their turn running the studio in the post-Tanen era. John Landis signed a three-picture deal at Universal that would soon lead to The Blues Brothers. Matty Simmons got a development deal at the studio, too, and moved forward on a toothless Animal House spinoff show for ABC called Delta House. And John Belushi, who had now become the post-Chevy face of SNL, negotiated his own three-movie pact at Universal at ten times what he had been paid to pour mustard on himself as Bluto. He’d now be making $350,000 per picture. Unfortunately, the first fruit of his Universal deal would turn out to be pretty bruised and rotten—Steven Spielberg’s colossal WWII comedy dud, 1941.
If anyone felt shut out from all of the Monday-morning dealmaking, it was Ivan Reitman. Sure, he’d made millions from Animal House, but he was beginning to feel as if everyone but him was getting the credit. “All of the smart Hollywood money was trying to grab all of us in different ways,” says Reitman. “And I was sort of the unknown producer even though I put the whole thing together. Matty Simmons took a producing credit, John Landis was handed the funniest screenplay in a generation, and guys like Thom Mount and Sean Daniel, who were very important in getting the movie made, were also taking creative credit for it. It all sort of reduced how forefront I was in that group. I was sort of stuck outside. We were all suddenly very competitive with each other. We all had big egos.” Reitman decided that the only way he would be taken seriously—or as seriously as he felt he ought to be taken—was to direct his own movie. Before Animal House had even been in theaters two weeks, Reitman was back in Canada shooting a low-budget summer-camp comedy called Meatballs, starring SNL new guy Bill Murray in his first lead.
It was one thing to be the director of a game-changing comedy such as Animal House, or even to be the studio that backed it. But by the late ’70
s, it was the creators, the comic minds, who were most in demand. There was a growing feeling that the sort of comedies that were considered sure-fire hits just a year or two earlier (Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit, George Burns in Oh, God!, Peter Sellers in the endless string of Pink Panther movies) were now, in the post–Animal House, post–National Lampoon, post-SNL world, as arthritic and unfunny as Henny Youngman working the Catskills. A generational fault line had opened up and swallowed yesterday’s style of comedy. Soon, Steve Martin, Cheech and Chong, and Lorne Michaels’s 30 Rock stable of cracked comic minds would replace them with their stoned observations, barbed satire, and absurd meta-shtick. Big-screen comedy was now a young person’s game.
By 1979, 90 percent of movie ticket buyers would fall between the ages of twelve and thirty-nine. A premium was now being placed on those who could speak the new comedy language. It didn’t matter if middle-aged suits such as Ned Tanen got it; it was enough to recognize that this was where the business was headed.
“I think the feeling in Hollywood was that we had introduced a new kind of comedy,” said Ramis. “To us, it wasn’t new because that’s what we’d been doing at Second City and the Lampoon, but it was new to the movies.”
Adds Sean Daniel, “After Animal House, everyone wanted to be in business with Doug and Harold. It was a total free-for-all.”
The signs couldn’t have been clearer if they were in flashing neon. It was time for Kenney to join Ramis and move to Los Angeles. He said goodbye to the Lampoon once and for all, hopped in his Porsche, and headed West to begin his new life as the Dream Factory’s latest surefire star. The man who had built his career in large part by calling out phonies, was now headed to their mecca. Chris Miller, for reasons he still can’t entirely explain, decided to stay behind in New York and kept writing filthy stories for the Lampoon. “I was not very quick on my feet,” he says. “Doug and Harold immediately transplanted themselves to Hollywood. I didn’t do that. I was more of a hippie than those guys. I thought we had a good thing going as outsiders and I wanted to preserve that. But Doug was excited about the move, and of course, he went out there and really got into cocaine. And that was all she wrote as far as Doug was concerned.”