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How John Landis Talked Chevy Chase Out of Animal House

In an excerpt from Wild and Crazy Guys: How the Comedy Mavericks of the '80s Changed Hollywood Forever, author Nick de Semlyen reveals the tumultuous story behind the classic college comedy.

By Nick de Semlyen

May 27, 2019

Director John Landis Bruce McGill and John Belushi

The character description was simple: “Cookie Monster Meets Harpo Marx.” Not so simple: finding a human being who could pull it off.

In fact, the task was keeping John Landis, 27 years old and a hyperactive typhoon of energy himself, up at night. As director of Universal’s frat-house comedy National Lampoon’s Animal House, Landis knew he had to bag the right person for the pivotal role of John “Bluto” Blutarsky, the biggest animal in a movie stuffed with them. Bluto was id incarnate, a Rabelaisian slob with the potential to boost the picture to new outlandish heights. “He’s a cartoon,” was Landis’s take on it. “He is appetite.”

Early in the summer of 1977, the director made a short list of potential Blutos. On it were three names: rock star Meat Loaf, Broadway actor Josh Mostel, and Saturday Night Live’s John Belushi. Really, though, only one of those felt right.

“The other guys were backups,” says Landis. “All of my energy was going into trying to lock down John.”

Belushi was keen to crank up his movie career, which thus far consisted of a voice role in Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle, a wretched 1975 animated comedy that extensively features a masturbating monkey. Animal House seemed like a no-brainer. But the barrel-chested Albanian was the dictionary definition of unpredictable. He was a decent guy, quick to hug and easy to warm to. If a kitten fell asleep on his chest, he’d wait rather than wake it. At the same time, he’d come out of the womb looking for trouble.

In sixth grade, his gym teacher announced in class that he was the worst student in the school; so exasperated was she, she then kicked him in the balls. At S.N.L., he was a human hurricane, a wild man who referred to shows as “goddamn suicide missions.” When his castmates had whispered about how much they hated sharing the billing with Jim Henson’s Muppets, Belushi yelled that he wanted to shoot the felt abominations with a gun. Around the same time, sick of a recurring skit involving a silly costume that he felt made him look fat, he griped to a Rolling Stone reporter: “You cannot put an actor in a bee costume and say, well, that funny dress will make up for the weak writing. Sure, they’ll laugh at the antennae once or twice; after that, forget it, it’s repetitive shit. I hate the fucking bees!”

All of this unsettled the executives at Universal. Belushi’s antics might fly in the seat-of-your-pants world of late-night live TV, but could somebody that volatile be trusted to behave on a movie set, with millions of dollars at stake? Belushi himself kept hemming and hawing. It would be his first real movie role and he wasn’t sure it was the right move.

Landis was undeterred. He saw Belushi as the successor to nimble clowns like Fatty Arbuckle and Jackie Gleason, a gruff teddy bear with a hugely expressive face. As for that edgy energy, which inspired Tony Hendra, director of the stage show Lemmings, to say, “I chose him because he projected the feeling of a homicidal maniac”? Well, that could be harnessed, hopefully, if the star was kept away from booze and drugs.

Picking somebody safer would be, to use Belushi’s favorite slang word, “suck-o.”

Finally, after much greasing up of both the star and the studio suits, Belushi was secured. Landis then found himself facing the opposite challenge: how to get rid of someone from S.N.L. He’d considered Bill Murray for the role of nice guy Boon and talked to Dan Aykroyd about playing biker D-Day. But Aykroyd decided to stay put on the show, not wanting to leave Lorne Michaels shorthanded. There was no such issue with Chevy Chase, now a free agent, and whom Universal was more than happy to cast. In fact, Landis was issued an edict from on high: hire Chase, or else.

Landis wasn’t about to be told what to do.

A lunch was arranged at a swanky Los Angeles restaurant. Producers Ivan Reitman and Matty Simmons were there, plus Universal vice president Sean Daniel. And in the middle, chomping on a big cigar and flanked on either side by an agent, sat Chevy Chase, waiting to be told why he should make this little movie and not Foul Play, a caper with Goldie Hawn that went on to make $44 million.

“There’s a marvelous Hollywood saying: ‘Do you know the difference between a brownnose and a shithead?’ ” says Landis. “The answer: ‘Depth perception.’ Chevy was just being impossible and they’re all kissing his ass. So when it comes to my turn to talk, I said, ‘Listen, Chevy, our picture is an ensemble, a collaborative group effort like Saturday Night Live. You’d fit right in, whereas in Foul Play, that’s like being Cary Grant or Paul Newman, a real movie-star part. Don’t you think you’d be better off surrounded by really gifted comedians?’ ”

It was a bit of reverse psychology worthy of Brer Rabbit. As Reitman furiously kicked Landis under the table, Chase sat back, puffed out cigar smoke, and considered. Then he took the bait. He announced that while he’d love to work with them someday, he had decided to make Foul Play.

Landis works with Chevy Chase on the set of Three Amigos!, 1986.© Orion Pictures/Photofest.

In Hollywood’s eyes, as well as Chase’s, National Lampoon’s Animal House was far from a sure bet. The script had originated with Chris Miller, a Madison Avenue advertising executive who’d been fired for putting marijuana in his soup during a business lunch. He started writing short stories; one of these, titled “The Night of the Seven Fires” and based on his fraternity initiation at Dartmouth College, was a bawdy shocker that featured one freshman drunkenly puking on another’s penis.

The bigwigs at National Lampoon magazine saw so much potential that they not only printed it in their October 1974 issue but decided it had the makings of the first-ever Lampoon movie. Miller, Harold Ramis, and Doug Kenney got together to bash out a 114-page treatment, a document so stuffed with ideas it was later described as “War and Peace on speed.” Over the next few years, it mutated through 18 drafts, picking up the title Laser Orgy Girls before finally becoming Animal House.

The president of Universal, Ned Tanen, was exactly the type of puffed-up establishment square the Lampoon guys specialized in deflating. Nevertheless, he decided with some reluctance to green-light the project. “Everybody is drunk, or high, or getting laid,” he grumbled to the writers at an early meeting. “I’d never make this movie—except you’re the National Lampoon.” The story slowly softened (a projectile-vomiting sequence was cut, at Landis’s behest) and a good-versus-bad narrative emerged, with the party-loving outcasts of Faber College’s Delta House pitted against the stuck-up stiffs in Omega. All while the authority figure Dean Wormer raged, “No more fun of any kind!” Universal expected a modest hit at best.

The controlled chaos of the writing room, where Miller, Kenney, and Ramis typed with one hand while holding joints with the other (they called this “marijuana production”), continued on-set. Turning up at the University of Oregon, the only campus that had welcomed the controversial production, several young cast members, including Tim Matheson, Karen Allen, and Bruce McGill, decided to check out a real frat party. They ran into a group of drunk jocks spoiling for a fight, and a pummeling ensued. John Belushi, arriving the next day from New York, had to be talked out of heading to the frat house to get revenge.

John Landis set out to turn the production into a fraternity itself. He organized an “orientation week,” during which the cast watched a World Series game in Belushi’s hotel room and enjoyed a series of rowdy dinners. Then began the 30-day shoot. It was a tough schedule, an average of 35 set-ups a day with just a single camera, forcing the team to race from set to set to capture the tale’s sexy pillow fights, toga parties, and horse-based slapstick. The fact it drizzled almost the entire time didn’t help. Landis’s biggest challenge was to keep up the collective energy.

“THAT SUCKS!” he’d bellow at his actors mid-take. “IT WAS AWFUL! BE FUNNY! BE FUNNY!”

When that didn’t work, Landis would fling pens at them. “I was trying to create an ambience of high energy and chaos,” he was to explain. “Because that’s the movie.”

Belushi struggled with stamina more than most. He still had Saturday Night Live to worry about: his hellish weekly itinerary involved working on Animal House from Monday to Wednesday, then taking a puddle-jumper plane to San Francisco and the red-eye on to New York, rehearsing and performing the show, then flying back to Oregon at six A.M. on Sunday. This was the biggest break of his career so far, and he was dead on his feet.

On paper, the role didn’t look so daunting. Bluto has fewer than 50 lines of dialogue and is never on-screen for long: he’s forever making big entrances and explosive exits. Belushi was getting paid only $35,000, prompting him to complain, “Bullshit money, no points, but I’m gonna be a fucking star anyway, those cheap bastards.” But he knew just how critical he was to the movie’s success. Bluto is the heart of Animal House, a shambling hippo of a man who had to be as lovable as he is wild.
It was the only way they’d get away with scenes like the one in which he climbs a ladder to spy on an undressing sorority girl. After some lurid topless shots, the ladder slowly topples backward, Bluto’s erection having pushed him away from the building. What makes it not only palatable but funny is the fourth-wall-breaking look to the camera that Belushi delivers before the fall, eyebrows waggling like randy caterpillars. “He made everyone in the house a co-conspirator,” was Landis’s take on it. “And it was a great moment because it took the edge off.”

Belushi was the only cast member given permission to go off script, and he rewarded his director’s trust. Fearsomely committed when he believed in a project (on Lemmings, he’d sometimes turn up high on quaaludes and ask his colleagues to punch his kidneys to clear his head), he threw himself ferociously into the role. From his first appearance, in which he pisses on two new guys’ shoes while clutching a gargantuan goblet of beer, to the end-credits roll, which reveals that Bluto will one day become a senator, it’s a performance studded with iconic moments. Some were guided by Landis, like Bluto’s attempt to cheer up Flounder (Stephen Furst), before which the director suggested to Belushi: “Imagine you’re trying to make a baby laugh.” But the legendary food-fight sequence, filmed in a single morning at the Erb Memorial Student Union, was wholly improvised by Belushi.

“See if you can guess what I am now,” Bluto tells a huddle of Omegas, having loaded his tray with half of the canteen’s comestibles. He stuffs mashed potato into his mouth, stares his enemies down for five seconds, then thumps his fists into his cheeks, splattering them with an icky mess. “I’m a zit. Geddit?”

Cue an almighty fracas, soundtracked by the Chris Montez tune “Let’s Dance” and capped off by Belushi turning to the camera and yelling, “FOOD FIIIIIGHT!” At this point in the film, during screenings all across America, popcorn would be flung in the air with wild abandon.

The star’s grin suggests he knew it would happen.

Although it’s set back in 1962, Animal House’s shit-kicking vibe connected with 70s America in a huge way. Vietnam was history, young people were ready to have fun again, and here was a trumpet call for the good times ahead. “The audience went berserk,” remembers Matty Simmons of a test screening in Denver. “After the movie ended they were standing on their chairs, applauding and screaming. I was there with Sid Sheinberg, the president of Universal, Ned Tanen, Ivan Reitman, and Landis; we walked out single-file and nobody said anything. It was so crazy, what had just happened.”

All over America, toga parties broke out. Greek fraternities became cool again. Audiences hollered and went back for more, rocketing the movie to the number-one slot at the box office in June 1978. The final tally was an astonishing $141.6 million. The film had proven to be revolutionary, comedy’s answer to Easy Rider. As Reitman reflects, “It was the marking point. I always felt it changed the comedic language. Before Animal House they were all watching Bob Hope and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. M*A*S*H was the transitional one—a little bit of both—and then this was the first film really made by kids who were postwar and in their early twenties, with a different way of expressing what’s funny.”

It felt like the floodgates were open. Something new and exciting was happening.

Whatever it was, John Belushi was right in the middle of it. Dazed by the outbreak of Blutomania, the star treated himself to a pair of expensive Bally shoes from Switzerland, then hired a limousine to ride around Manhattan and look at the lines snaking around movie theaters. People were going back to see it again and again.

“I like Bluto a lot. He’s someone that could have been my friend,” he’d said at a press junket a few weeks before. Now everyone else wanted to be Bluto’s friend. During an out-of-town trip with Aykroyd, Belushi stopped the car and began knocking on the ground-floor windows of an elementary school. Before long, the windows were up and the whole school was chanting, “BLUTO! BLUTO! BLUTO!”

Even more satisfyingly, Belushi had overtaken Chevy Chase, the rival he often described as a “brick.” Saturday Night Live producer Bob Tischler said: “John was sure he would be the first person to become a star. It just killed him when Chevy was the first.” Chase had bagged the bigger movie, and the bigger salary, but now the overweight underdog had his revenge. Around this time, the two ran into each other in the bathroom at a club in New York’s East Village. Belushi sniped at Chase, “I make more money in movies than you, boy.” Chase forced a smile, washed his hands, and moved on.

Belushi had gotten attention before, but mostly from the cracked end of the spectrum: one female fan repeatedly sent him tampons stuffed with pot. Now he was big-time: when he was roaming Washington, D.C., one day and decided on impulse to visit the White House, he was admitted even though he’d forgotten to bring any ID. And his phone was ringing off the hook, A-listers offering congratulations and opportunities. One of the callers was more famous than most: Steven Spielberg. And he had a job offer.

Excerpted from Wild and Crazy Guys: How the Comedy Mavericks of the ’80s Changed Hollywood Forever. Copyright © 2019 by Nick de Semlyen. Available May 28, 2019, from Crown Archetype, an imprint of Penguin Random House.