National Lampoon's Animal House Was Offered To Some Of Hollywood's Finest Directors
John Landis' 1978 comedy "Animal House" would change the game for many; not only was the college campus laugh-fest a launchpad for several of its stars — including the already famous "SNL" star John Belushi, who would soon get a call from Steven Spielberg about an upcoming comedy project — but it also heralded a new age of irreverent comedy, one that celebrated contemporary filmmakers didn't quite see at the time.
In Mick de Semlyen's book "Wild and Crazy Guys," producer Ivan Reitman reasoned:
"Before 'Animal House' they were all watching Bob Hope and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis ... 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."
That expression would see the story's central troupe of "fat, drunk, and stupid" college students launching food fights, thumbing their noses at authority, frightening a horse to death (accidentally), and derailing a community parade. To boot, the movie made exponential box office returns on its $3 million budget, cementing it as one of the most lucrative comedies of all time. But when the story was being shopped around, screenwriters Douglas Kenney, Chris Miller and Harold Ramis had as much trouble getting a bite from the Tinseltown establishment as a pledge looking for a Friday night date.
In a 2018 oral history of the movie, Landis tells the NY Times how many rejections the story pitch racked up:
"They offered it to John Schlesinger ["Midnight Cowboy"], Alan J. Pakula ["All the President's Men"], Mike Nichols ["The Graduate"], George Roy Hill ["The Sting"] — the most unlikely directors — and they all threw it back. It shows you just how low-priority the movie was that they gave it to me, a 27-year-old with long hair who had made 'Schlock' and 'The Kentucky Fried Movie.'"
A long road to Double Secret Probation
As Belushi's Bluto points out to his fellow fraternity brothers, it wasn't over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, and nothing is over until the guys decide it is. As great as it would have been to have the director of the equally foul-mouthed "Slap Shot" chronicle the misadventures of Faber College's Delta Tau Chi, the shaggy-haired 27-year-old John Landis, it turns out, was perfectly suited to make a bawdy farce.
"Animal House" (or its alleged early title "Laser Orgy Girls") is a strange and wild beast; at one point – according to John Landis – a pre-"Ghostbusters" Harold Ramis and Harvard's "National Lampoon Magazine" founder Douglas Kenney penned a version of the movie that follows infamous cult leader Charles Manson through the high school experience. At one point, both Ramis and producer Reitman had ambitions to direct the movie, but neither Ramis' "Lemmings" stage show writing nor Reitman's production credit on David Cronenberg's "Shivers" could overshadow the résumé of John Landis, whose prior effort, "The Kentucky Fried Movie," wrangled staples and veterans of both the Groundlings and Second City comedy troupes to craft gut-busting send-up sketches of American culture like "Scot Free," a fictional board game based on JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
"National Lampoon" hired pen Chris Miller would join Ramis and Kenney to revise and fill out the story with their own tawdry college experiences, and "Animal House" would morph into the version we laugh and drop our jaws at today, an early stop along Landis' directing trajectory before back-to-back gems "The Blues Brothers" and "An American Werewolf in London" would cement him as a household name.