Ivan Reitman winces when he hears “gross-out” applied to Animal House , the movie that forever changed comedy. He understandably finds the term grossly limiting.
“We were sort of insulted by that term,” the Toronto-reared filmmaker says of his highly influential 1978 college laugher, which he produced and will help celebrate in a July 18 tribute at TIFF Bell Lightbox .
“It seemed too easy a moniker to put on what we thought was a pretty damned sophisticated script and movie. There was physicality to the movie . . . but the zit scene is like 30 seconds in the script!”
Ah, yes, the Animal House zit scene , often cited as a precursor of today’s gross-out movie trend. It’s the one in the campus dining hall where John Belushi’s wild Bluto fills his mouth with mashed potatoes, puffs out his cheeks and then spews the mess like a popped pimple into the faces of his outraged antagonists.
The late Roger Ebert, in his four-star review of Animal House , described the film as “an end run around Hollywood’s traditional notions of comedy. It’s anarchic, messy and filled with energy. It assaults us.”
But does it also gross us out? Maybe not by the standards of today’s movie yukfests like The Hangover franchise and the entire Judd Apatow canon, which feature shotgun vomiting (and other vile bodily emissions) along with penis jokes that likely wouldn’t have made it past the scissors of 1970s censors.
Animal House was made for just $3 million (U.S.), a figure low even by 1970s standards. John Belushi was the top-paid actor, receiving the not-so-staggering sum of $40,000 for his labours.
But the movie grossed more than $600 million at the box office, and has been a lasting influence on comedy of the past 35 years — including the like-minded Van Wilder from 2002, a campus comedy in which Animal House alumnus Tim Matheson played disapproving dad to Ryan Reynold’s rule-breaking title character.
Returning to Animal House 35 years after its release — as Reitman, co-producer Matty Simmons, director John Landis and actors Peter Riegert, Martha Smith and Stephen Furst will do at their on-stage reunion at TIFF — is to marvel at how subversive the movie was, but also how quaint it now seems with its emphasis on character development.
You can follow the bloodlines between Animal House and the comedy classics TIFF is saluting with its companion film series “ Toga! The Reinvention of American Comedy ,” which runs July 17 to Aug. 29 .
The slate includes films directed by Reitman ( Ghostbusters , Meatballs , Stripes , Kindergarten Cop ), Landis ( Animal House , The Blues Brothers , Trading Places , An American Werewolf in London ) and Animal House co-writer Harold Ramis ( Caddyshack , National Lampoon’s Vacation ).
Many other films in the same anarchic vein as Animal House , including Porky’s , American Pie and the more recent Superbad and The Hangover , are also in the series, along with special conversation nights featuring Ivan and Jason Reitman (July 17) and Landis (July 20). Full details are available at tiff.net.
When it came out in the hot July of ’78, under its full name National Lampoon’s Animal House, the film was like a slob revolution, a huge belch and booger flick towards the status quo of comedy and society at large.
Released by Universal Pictures studio suits who didn’t realize what they had, and featuring a star-making turn by Saturday Night Live comic Belushi, Animal House satirized 1962 college life but also spoke directly to its then-youthful Baby Boomer audience.
“ Animal House is a language changer,” says Reitman, who produced the film at age 27 along with National Lampoon founder Simmons (the script was based in part on a Lampoon magazine college parody).
“You had Woody Allen doing certain kinds of things, you had The Graduate and M*A*S*H , but these were all from a fairly adult point of view.
“Now comes Animal House , which really represents young adult teenagers and college-aged kids with its point of view. Even though it’s set in 1962, it really represents the voice of the Baby Boom generation. It started a shift to a whole series of movies — and I made a number of them, as did other people — that I think revealed a whole different attitude in American film comedy.”
Landis agrees.
“ Animal House was contemporary radical,” he says.
“One of the things the film had going for it was that because it’s a period picture, taking place in 1962, we were able to deal with class, race, sex and other things in more outrageous ways than we might otherwise have been able to get away with. We had that buffering layer of time, retrospect.”
That time buffer is necessary even today, perhaps even more so. Some of the jokes in Animal House could rightly be called homophobic (including use of the slur “homo”).
And a road-trip scene where Tim Matheson’s Delta frat leader Otter leads his all-white friends into an all-black nightclub (“We’re all gonna die!” he wails) depicts African-Americans as a knife-flicking “primitive culture.” Nobody is smiling as they say it, but Reitman insists that Animal House was and still is an equal-opportunity offender that crossed colour lines.
“Black audiences always found that (nightclub scene) extraordinarily funny,” he says.
“I think there was just this sort of very energetic attitude to what we found funny. It’s kind of a miracle that it stayed that way, that it hung in there. I think the movie still plays.”
It does indeed, but also worth noting is how relatively slow-paced Animal House seems, compared to today’s attention-challenged and CGI-filled comedies.
More time was spent on developing characters, perhaps in part because there wasn’t the computer trickery available back then to set up elaborate set pieces, such as the outlandish train chases seen in the current summer film The Lone Ranger .
“Those characters were drawn so beautifully,” says Martha Smith , whose prim southern belle character Babs still brings her wolf whistles of recognition and appreciation.
“That’s what those guys had done so brilliantly. Today, it seems like somewhere on the road to The Wedding Singer and films like it that comedy got fatter and broader and hit you over the head, you know?
“We had slapstick in Animal House , but there was always that character fine line where they spoke the way everybody knew somebody in college or in high school had spoken. Everybody knew a Bluto, everybody knew a Babs and a Boon and a Flounder.”
The movie was far more closely scripted than anyone imagines, she recalls, with the screenplay by Ramis and his National Lampoon co-writers Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller being followed almost to the letter.
An exception was during the zit scene, where Smith’s Babs dresses down Bluto as “a P-I-G!” for his revolting table manners.
“That’s one of my few improvs in the movie. The movie was very tightly scripted and that line was written, ‘That boy’s a pig!’ I just spelled it out. Who knew people would be asking me to say that P-I-G line 35 years later, but they do!”
People today also still like to have toga parties, which Animal House didn’t invent but it certainly popularized. There’s a little bit of Canadian content in that toga party scene, Reitman says, because he based the fast/slow/fast changes in the “Shout” song rave-up with Otis Day and the Knights to “dances I remember doing at in my Jewish school in Toronto.”
Like Smith, Reitman believes Animal House succeeded in large part because of its well-defined characters, something he carried over to the films he directed (he badly wanted to helm Animal House , but Universal wouldn’t let him).
“If you look at Stripes again, which still holds up, and Ghostbusters , it’s all about the characters. The humour comes out of the characters, the silly and funny things they do, and I think that’s a bit of a lost art now.
“I think movies are raunchier now. They’ve gotten coarser. I’m amazed at how many dick and masturbation jokes play in the centre of every comedy today. There was plenty of masturbation in our time, but it wasn’t the centre of every humorous moment. There was a level of sweetness in Animal House and films like it — and I think the sex was sexier, too.”
Would Animal House be as big a hit if it were released today? Possibly, but it would be seen as going against the grain of the prevailing gross-out aesthetic of comedy kingpin Judd Apatow and his contemporaries.
There have been rumours of a possible Animal House remake, updated for the rougher and raunchier 21st century. Reitman has heard them, too, but he’s not party to them. This is one case where lightning really wouldn’t strike twice.
“All I can say,” Reitman chuckles, “is good luck to them!”
THE QUOTABLE ANIMAL HOUSE
Memorable (and printable) lines from the 1978 college comedy:
“That boy is a P-I-G pig.”
“It’s OK, just keep your hands and feet away from his mouth.”
“I’m a zit. Get it?”
“The time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me.”
“My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.”
“Vegetables are sensual. People are sensuous.”
“They took the bar!”
“Christ. Seven years of college down the drain.”
“What? Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!”
“May I have 10,000 marbles, please?”
“Toga! Toga! Toga!”
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