Development Animal House was the first film produced by
National Lampoon, the most popular humor magazine on college campuses in the mid-1970s. The periodical specialized in satirizing politics and popular culture. Many of the magazine's writers were recent college graduates, hence its appeal to students all over the country.
Doug Kenney was a
Lampoon writer and the magazine's first editor-in-chief. He graduated from
Harvard University in 1969 and had a college experience closer to the Omegas in the film, having been president of the university's elite
Spee Club. Reitman had put together
The National Lampoon Show in
New York City featuring several future
Saturday Night Live cast members, including
John Belushi. When most of the
Lampoon group moved on to
SNL except for
Harold Ramis, Reitman approached him with an idea to make a film together using some skits from the
Lampoon Show. Kenney and Ramis started working on a new film treatment together, positing
Charles Manson in a high school, calling it
Laser Orgy Girls. They agreed that Belushi should star in it and Ramis wrote the part of John "Bluto" Blutarsky specifically for the comedian, having been friends with him while at
Chicago's
The Second City. Ramis, Miller and Kenney were all new to screenwriting, The studio greenlit the film and set the budget at a modest $3 million. Landis claims his big contribution to the film was that there "had to be good guys and bad guys. There can't just be bad guys, so there became a good fraternity and bad fraternity". There was also early friction between Landis and the writers because the director was a high-school dropout from Hollywood and they were all college graduates from the
East Coast. Ramis recalled, "He sort of referred immediately to
Animal House as 'my movie.' We'd been living with it for two years and we hated that". In August 2018, Aykroyd explained that although Michaels permitted him to do
Animal House, he ultimately chose to stay behind on
Saturday Night Live so as not to leave Michaels understaffed. Belushi, who had worked on
The National Lampoon Radio Hour before
Saturday Night Live, Belushi said he developed his ability to communicate without talking because his Albanian grandmother spoke little English. At the time, Belushi was considered a supporting actor and Universal wanted another star. In 1969, Landis had been a crew member on the film ''
Kelly's Heroes'' and had become friends with actor
Donald Sutherland; Landis sometimes would babysit his son
Kiefer. Universal then offered him his day rate of $25,000 or 2% of the film's
gross.
DeWayne Jessie, who played singer Otis Day, purchased the rights to the character name and formed a real-life band called Otis Day & The Knights.
Locations at the Dexter Lake Club (2012 photo) The filmmakers' next problem was finding a college that would let them shoot the film on their campus. The president of the
University of Oregon in
Eugene,
William Beaty Boyd, had been a senior administrator at the
University of California in
Berkeley in 1966 when his campus was considered for a location of the film
The Graduate. After he consulted with other senior administrative colleagues who advised him to turn it down due to the lack of artistic merit, the college campus scenes set at Berkeley were shot at
USC in
Los Angeles. The film went on to become a classic and Boyd was determined not to make the same mistake twice when the producers inquired about filming in Oregon. After consulting with student government leaders and officers of the Pan Hellenic Council, the Director of University Relations advised the president that the script, although raunchy and often tasteless, was a very funny spoof of college life. Boyd even allowed the filmmakers to use his office as Dean Wormer's. The interior of the Phi Kappa Psi house and the Sigma Nu house were used for most of the interior scenes, but the scenes in Otter (Matheson) and Hoover's bedrooms were filmed on a soundstage. The Patterson house remained vacant after filming ended in 1977 and was demolished in 1986, despite some attempts to preserve it due to its connection to the film. The site () is now occupied by
Bushnell University's School of Education and Counseling. A large boulder placed to the west of the parking entrance displays a bronze plaque commemorating the Delta House location. The concluding parade scene was filmed on Main Street in downtown
Cottage Grove, about south of Eugene via
Interstate 5.
Principal photography Filming began at the University of Oregon on October 24, 1977 and concluded in mid-December 1977. Although the cast members were admonished against mixing with the college students, Landis had no trailer or office and could not watch
dailies for three weeks. His wife,
Deborah Nadoolman, purchased most of the costumes at local thrift stores and she and Judy Belushi made the party togas. Landis and McGill staged a scene for reporters visiting the set where the director pretended to be angry at the actor for being difficult on the set. Landis grabbed a breakaway pitcher and smashed it over McGill's head. He fell to the ground and pretended to be unconscious. The reporters were completely fooled and when Landis asked McGill to get up, he refused to move. The studio became more enthusiastic about the film when Reitman showed executives and sales managers of various regions in the country a 10-minute production reel that was put together in two days. The reaction was positive and the studio sent 20 copies out to exhibitors. The first preview screening for
Animal House was held in
Denver four months before it opened nationwide. The crowd loved it and the filmmakers realized they had a potential hit on their hands. The original cut of the movie was a lengthy 175 minutes and more than an hour was dropped; the deleted scenes included: a John Landis cameo as a cafeteria dishwasher who tries to stop Bluto from eating all the food. Landis is dragged across a table and thrown to the floor by Bluto who then says "You don't fuck with the eagles unless you know how to fly", a scene where Boon and Hoover tell Pinto the tales of legendary Delta House frat brothers from years before who had names like Tarantula, Bulldozer, Giraffe and his girlfriend, Gross Kay, two different deleted scenes with Otter and a couple of his girlfriends (one played by
Sunny Johnson—listed in the credits as Otter's Co-Ed although her scene was deleted—and the other played by location scout Katherine Wilson, whose deleted scene can be seen in the theatrical trailer) and an extended version of the scene where Bluto pours mustard on himself and starts singing "I Am the Mustard Man." ==Soundtrack and score==