DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION MONTH CONCLUDES: THE ANIMAL HOUSE EXTRAS DVD COMMENTARY

Why is the sight of this poster a source of agony for the proprietor of this blog? How did it smell in that basement during the infamous toga party? Who was the bass player for Otis Day and the Knights? Was John Vernon as cranky as his character Dean Wormer? Who was it throwing those beer bottles from behind the camera during the party scenes?

The answers to these burning questions and others that are at least of the smoldering variety are answered in an exclusive new podcast that I'm proud (and somewhat nervous, actually) to offer you as the concluding post in SLIFR's Double Secret Probation Month celebration of the 30th anniversary of the release of National Lampoon's Animal House. The podcast consists of Your Humble Host and His Best Friend (Bruce Lundy, an actor currently residing in Eugene, Oregon, known to SLIFR readers as frequent commenter Blaaagh), whose friendship began on the set of the movie 31 years ago when they were both cast as members of the Delta Tau Chi house, reminiscing about what it was really like being an extra on a movie that would become a beloved comedy classic. It's a long file designed to be listened to in conjunction with watching the movie, and if the speakers have done their job it will be as much fun for you, the Animal House fan, to sit through as it was for us to record.

All you have to do is cue up the picture to the first few frames of that familiar Universal Pictures logo field of stars, when the first strains of Elmer Bernstein's score kick in. Either the 1998 20th anniversary edition DVD or the 1993 Double Secret Probation DVD edition should work-- and I suppose if you only have an old VHS copy that'll probably do too. The commentary is not always scene-specific, so if it gets a second or two out of sync you'll probably never even know. In addition to closing out the month-long celebration of all things Faber College round these parts, the podcast also serves as the inaugural post on my new blog site, SLIFR: The Noisy Version, a site devoted to audio treats such as these. Posts here will be muuuuuuch fewer and farther between than what has become the norm on Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, but hopefully that old quality-not-quantity bromide will hold true.

So without further delay, the podcast is ready to go and available by clicking right here. Please feel free, as you always do, to leave comments here and/or on the new site. And if you can provide some kind of proof that you sat through the whole thing, I've got one of those nasty cheeseburgers that Bluto crammed into his mouth, originally procured from the student union Fishbowl and remarkably well preserved from 31 years ago, that I would be proud to put in the U.S. Mail for you as an acknowledgment of your incredible dedication and stamina! Happy listening!

(Special thanks to Eric Gottschalk for engineering the audio on this MP3 recording and making it sound 1000% better than it did right after we first recorded it. Eric, you are the best!)

DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION MONTH: NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE TURNS 30 YEARS OLD TODAY

Updated 7/28/08 10:43 a.m.

Thirty years ago today, just as the summer movie season of 1978 was entering its final phase, National Lampoon’s Animal House premiered for the paying public and became a hit on a scale which probably surprised most everyone involved with making it. But by the time I saw it for the first time, on August 4, 1978, at a special invitation-only premiere held for the local cast and crew in Eugene, Oregon at the old National Theater in the downtown district (long since gone), the movie was already a week old. So the Hollywood luminaries that were in attendance were giddy over the degree to which the movie’s good fortunes had already begun to roll. The only major player I remember being there was director John Landis, who addressed the audience, comprised mostly of the movie’s extras, local and university dignitaries, residents of Cottage Grove (where the parade was shot) and others involved directly or peripherally in the movie’s production, before the movie began. Landis’ typical exuberance was amplified on this night as he told the excited audience of the box-office records the movie had already smashed. My friends and I, fellow extras and some production people I had gotten to know whom I hadn’t seen since school finished up for the year that previous June, couldn’t have been more ready to absorb this movie. And then Animal House unspooled for Eugene for the very first time.

I have to say it was a disorienting experience. Having lived around two months under the umbrella of this production during my first semester of college the previous fall, I had plenty of time to think about what might or might not be in the finished film and what it might look like. Many things I imagined I would see I did not, and the things that I did see for the most part did not end up looking or sounding the way they did when I saw them being filmed. (My best friend Bruce and I made a lot of hay during the school year about what sounded like Karen Allen’s lame delivery of the line she uses to distract the police and save Boone during the parade-- “Officer! Officer! They’re looting the Food King!”-- but, miracle of miracles, it sounded just fine on the big screen.) There was a major gap between the movie that was still playing in my head and the one crafted for the world in Eugene and Hollywood, and over the next 30 years the version that everyone has gotten to know and love has crowded out much of my original notions of what Animal House might have ended up being. And that’s okay, because, frankly, even though it was at times a lot of fun (it was also, at times, scary as hell for a green freshman roaming relatively free in the big world for the first time) and the experience of being there was one I wouldn’t trade away for the upgraded report card I might have earned had I not been so distracted that first term, I didn’t hold out much hope that the end product would be very good. The comedy seemed too broad and the general atmosphere too chaotic to my eyes on the set—I couldn’t see how it could possibly all come together into a coherent package. (And I still marvel when I see footage taken on the sets of movies far more complex to engineer than Animal House, everything from Seed of Chucky to Magnolia to Hairspray, and think about the degree of difficulty involved in crafting a movie with aspirations to style and art and realizing a particular vision.) Also, there was the singularly strange feeling of seeing myself in a movie. I knew where to look, of course, and so I was able to spot myself several times with ease, and of course there were times I was expecting to see myself where I was either just out of camera range or—one big moment, especially, which I’ll relate in the next post— where I ended up, as they say, on the cutting room floor. (I would get a huge charge later that summer when Pauline Kael mentioned the movie favorably in the context of a passel of movies that came out that year and I couldn’t help but think, “She doesn’t know it, but Pauline Kael saw me!”)

But overall the whole thing just made me feel discombobulated. (It didn’t help that, as a guest of Universal, I accepted an invitation extended to everyone to stay at the National afterward and see the studio’s other big summer release, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, gratis. Talk about discombobulated.) I wouldn’t begin to get a real charge out seeing the movie in the real world until the Labor Day Weekend, when the Friday newspaper trumpeted a full-page ad which I still have in a trunk in my garage somewhere that was packed to the margins with blurbs from the rave reviews the movie was getting. And when my parents took me back to Eugene for my sophomore year in the fall they both wanted to see it. In fact, it was the first movie I am aware of that my dad sat through, screaming with laughter, twice in one night. And it wouldn’t be the last time he’d see it in a theater either, a fact I find remarkable—you would too if you knew my dad. Of course when I came back to school that fall, suddenly being able to say you were in Animal House was something that meant something to the rest of campus. Back in the fall of 1977, people just offered odd looks to the kids with the out-of-date haircuts roaming around classes. But now everybody wanted to talk about the movie, and see it multiple times too (sometimes dressed in togas even), and if you could say you were in it, well...

There are a couple of bits of celebration left to come in this Double Secret Probation Month celebration of the 30th anniversary of Animal House. I have a couple of stories left to tell, I’m still hoping for last-minute responses to interview requests which have not as yet materialized, and there is that special project I’ve occasionally hinted at which, if all goes well, should come together tonight for your enjoyment sometime Wednesday or Thursday. For now, however, I thought it might be fun to share some pictures I took in June 2006 when I was visiting Eugene. Bruce and I took friends Katie and Scott on a tour around campus—Katie and Scott are Corvallis residents who had never seen the University of Oregon, so we seized on the opportunity to show them some of the most recognizable locations that were used in the movie. Here then is the University of Oregon, well-known as the home of Steve Prefontaine and the Olympic Track and Field Trials, but also a movie star of some repute, its greatest role of course being its brilliant portrayal of Faber College in National Lampoon’s Animal House. Time to go back to school…






The Delta House, as seen in National Lampoon's Animal House, was actually a rundown halfway house that was still functioning as such at the time the movie began shooting in the fall of 1977. It was situated along East 11th Avenue just off campus, on a lot located directly in between the houses that were used as the Omega House, on its right (the name of the fraternity that actually lived there escapes me), and the Sigma Nu house on its left, which served multiple functions for the production. The Delta House itself, originally the home of pioneering Eugene citizen A.W. Patterson and at one time a fraternity house itself, was torn down in the '90s and replaced with this office building. This plaque, placed on the street at the front of the lot where the Delta House once stood, commemorates the house's history as well as the movie.


The Sigma Nu house, in addition to being the central hub for the production when filming was taking place on 13th Avenue, had two separate functions as a location. The interior of the house was used in the film as the interior of the Delta House (no actual filming took place inside the Patterson house that served as the familiar Delta House exterior). The exterior of the house served as the exterior of the sorority house of which Babs and Mandy were members-- it was through the windows of this house that John Belushi peeked while on his ladder. Bruce might have further details, but when I was last in Eugene this past February the Sigma Nu house looked as if it had been abandoned and fallen out of use.


I cannot remember the name of the fraternity that lived in the house that would eventually be known as the Omega House, but it still stands pretty much as you see it here.




The building which Dean Wormer called HQ was Johnson Hall, the actual site of the dean's office and other administrative offices on the University of Oregon campus. It was up these steps that Belushi, along with Bruce McGill and Stephen Furst, led Neidermeyer's horse to his final resting place. I tried to get Scott, Katie and Bruce to strike a Belsuhi-esque pose, but they chose this moment to access their modesty.


This campus building, Gerhlinger Hall, served as the exterior and interior location of Emily Dickenson College, where Otter put the moves on Fawn Leibowitz's roommate, Shelly Dubinski. Eeeewwww!




The Erb Memorial Union Fishbowl, a student recreation and cafeteria facility, looks, with only a little modification, pretty much as it did at the time of the movie's famous food fight scene. It was at the window table above (seen from outside) that John Belushi introduced his anthropomorphized acne bomb to the world.


The University of Oregon Library. On this quadrangle stood the statue of Emil Faber (beheaded in a lost sequence from the movie) which bore the logically indisputable legend "Knowledge is Good." In the movie this location is also seen when Katy and Boone walk with Pinto the home of Professor Dave Jennings and discuss Pinto's sex life.


This dormitory, known as Carson Hall, is where I spent my sophomore year and the first term of my junior year as well. (My room is the one furthest to the right on the fourth floor.) Carson Hall is the building (seen at night) featured under the title of the movie as it comes up during the opening credits.

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UPDATE 7/28/08 10:43 a.m.: Take this quiz written by Rachel Sauer of the Palm Beach Post, wherein resides my good friend Larry Aydlette, which will tell you which Animal House animal best suits you. Thanks, Larry!

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DA BOMB: MAMMA MIA!, THE MOVIE

Allow me some admissions right up front: I’ve always loved ABBA’s “S.O.S.,” one of the most infectious, insidiously hummable pop hits of the ‘70s. I find “Knowing Me, Knowing You” a pleasant-enough concoction. Why, even after Muriel’s Wedding I still don’t mind hearing “Dancing Queen” when I come across it on the radio, or when one of my daughters insists on hearing it in the minivan CD player. The overdubbed vocals of that song (and most of their other hits) layered one on top of the other, sometimes in harmony, sometimes creating a synthetic chorus of two voices multiplied seemingly ad infinitum on the same line, lend themselves splendidly to warbled accompaniment in one’s shower or automobile. (The voices on the records themselves are often artless and unabashed enough to already seem like sing-alongs to songs on which the real lead vocalists have been banished, karaoke style.) And though I was never completely taken by ABBA’s brand of bombastic, phonetic-English disco machinery, I’ve never resented that they existed or that they have been such a consistent and bankable worldwide success. Until now, perhaps.

Mamma Mia, the movie version of the runaway stage cash cow in which a dozen-and-a-half or so ABBA songs are clumsily jerry-rigged and slotted into a flimsy plot revolving around a young girl who surreptitiously invites three of her mother’s former lovers, one of which may be her father, to her Greek island wedding, ought to test the resolve of anyone who ever held a tune like “Fernando” or “Honey Honey” dear. And the movie certainly ought to offend anyone who cares anything about the quality and enduring legacy of movie musicals. For it turns out that Mamma Mia is shockingly bad as both a musical and a movie. The big numbers are often girded with a near-subliminal chorus that sings along with the stars (the original ABBA recordings have been shelved) in order to beef up their tepid voices and provide sonic reassurance of the familiar ABBA-style vocals, while the cast and dancers cavort on the beaches and byways of this movie-fantasy Greek paradise guided by a cheerleading troupe’s idea of choreography. What’s worse, the songs don’t express anything about the characters or their feelings—they’re used to goose the audience, and the movie, with a specious sort of plasticized exuberance that the filmmakers (a term used very lightly here) hope will be easily mistaken for a good time. (The movie’s artifice is further blemished by memories of the other movie in 2008 to feature familiar and not-so-familiar rock and pop tunes successfully reinterpreted and given new meaning by unlikely voices, the flawed but moving documentary Young at Heart.)

Meanwhile the songs, stripped of the arid, slightly robotic production values which gave the original recordings their eerie energy, and put into the mouths of a cast of actors whose vocal talents range from thin, lovely fragility (Amanda Seyfried) to confidence (Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski) to ghastly ineptitude (Pierce Brosnan, Julie Walters and just about everyone else, none of whom could find their way around a tune even with the assistance of the most advanced G.P.S. tracking system), are themselves exposed as goofy at best, but more often just gross, dumb and fatuous. And the actors fare even worse. Oliver Reed jack-hammering his way through Tommy at least had that movie’s stylish excess to help elaborate the pub-crawling creepiness of his vocal characterization. But first-time director Phyllida Lloyd, working from Catherine Johnson’s script (both are veterans of the original stage production), leaves folks like Streep and Brosnan, and Walters and Baranski and Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgaard twisting atonally in the Mediterreanean breeze. And she brings near-zero sense of filmmaking craft to bear on the tenuous connective tissue that passes for dramatic scenes in between each big musical fizzle. What are we to make of Streep’s character, the titular mamma who spends the first half hour of the movie reunited with her insufferable pals in gales of fake laughter, pouring on the forced high spirits of middle-age reclaiming lost youth? (This is the movie’s M.O. in a nutshell). The way this woman vacillates between excitement and distress and hysteria when she finds out those three men from her past have arrived for the wedding borders on split-personality psychosis. (The inconsistency is exacerbated by the performance of the chirpy title tune, which is shoehorned in between Streep’s fits of fretting and hand-wringing to produce yet another literally show-stopping sequence.) The Oscar-winner is so busy selling her character’s free spirit that she never bothers to ground her in a recognizable human scale of emotion—every note, both sung and spoken, is infused with a fine actor’s attempt to breathe some kind of life into this gossamer-thin conceit, but the end result is fussy, strained, overmodulated, and not just a little embarrassing.

The director “opens up” the stage show in every obvious, clunky way—characters spend a lot of time running along beaches and up steep pathways—but Lloyd never tailors the material for anything resembling the real world; everything is played as though the cast were projecting to a neighboring island dotted with fake trees. And the whole of the movie feels like someone’s shapeless home movies of an exotic holiday in which all sense of the location’s beauty is dumped (has the Greek coast ever before looked so nondescript and unappealing on film?) in favor of a grueling chronicle of the host’s every drunken moment of karaoke glory. (Like most booze-inspired public warbling, this movie would seem to require severe inebriation as a prerequisite for proper appreciation.)


But as lost as Lloyd is as a storyteller, she is equally clueless at staging music and dance. The big production numbers (“Dancing Queen, Does Your Mother Know?, Voulez-vous”) are bad enough—one gets the idea that the director’s input amounted to getting her cast hammered and telling them to just go out there and feel it, baby. But it’s those intimate ballads, back-loaded into the film’s second half, where Mamma Mia careens from the merely misconceived to the genuinely grotesque. The movie’s finest, most delicate, most convincing moment is the unadorned staging of “Slipping through My Fingers,” as Streep’s (Ma)Donna reluctantly helps her daughter Sophie (Seyfried) prepare in the moments before the wedding. Here Streep’s strenuous attempts at acting the song work because the effects—a plaintive glance, a bittersweet smile, a laugh-- are scaled down. They build the emotion of the moment rather than work against it. And the song, a relatively restrained, uncharacteristically delicate ballad, is a good showcase for the vocal talents of Streep and Seyfried, easily the best singers in the cast. Unfortunately, “Slipping through My Fingers” is preceded by Brosnan braying his way through “S.O.S.” (My head hung several times out of sheer embarrassment), so some of its potential power is diminished by the after-effects of the actor’s rummy, undisciplined tenor still ringing in the ears. Worse, however, is the fact that the genuine connection between Streep and Seyfried, a moment where the movie actually delivers on the examination of mother-daughter dynamics to which it has up to now only paid facile lip service, is undermined by what follows-- the absolute nadir in a musical already packed to the rafters with low blows. On the way to the picturesque hillside chapel Brosnan confronts Streep about their shared past, and Streep counters with “The Winner Takes It All,” in which she pushes her timid director aside (Lloyd seems plenty content to just flip the camera’s “on” switch and walk away) and overacts the already bombastic tune with a battery of grandstanding gestures and italicized, boldfaced sincerity that might make Ethel Merman blush. The “winner” here, as it turns out, is Brosnan, who had the good sense to keep far enough away from Streep during this number that he spends a goodly portion of it off-screen.

There’s no pleasure in denigrating an obvious disaster like Mamma Mia. But there’s even less pleasure to be had in sitting through it. I sincerely hoped this movie might be as much fun as was last summer’s Hairspray, a movie for which I had no expectations whatsoever. But where Hairspray’s every moment was suffused with the genuine giddy joy of performing, the cheerful enthusiasm on display in Mamma Mia couldn’t be more synthetic and predigested. I can absolutely believe that the stage show might feel completely different. The very fact of Mamma Mia’s existence under a proscenium automatically lends a degree of forgiving stylization to this gussied-up revue that is completely beyond Phyllida Lloyd as a film director—she displays absolutely no sense, moment to moment, of what makes a film work, what makes a film a film. My wife, in that way she has of summing up things succinctly (a quality which makes our co-existence pretty hilarious in itself), said Mamma Mia reminded her of nothing less than a wide-screen Mentos commercial run amok, and by God, that’s precisely what it feels like. As the post-wedding party winds down (don’t worry—I wouldn’t dream of revealing the movie’s shocking twist!), stunned and disillusioned by the whole experience, I welcomed the plaintive vibrato of Seyfried’s tender, unaffected voice as the ballad that began the movie seemed to now end it. Would that it were so. The end credits are underscored by Streep and gal pals doing the obligatory and frightening liquored-up-chicks-doing-“Dancing Queen”-in-gaudy-‘70s-costumes bit, followed by Brosnan and the other leathery boy toys joining them for “Waterloo,” both numbers punctuated by the most skin-crawling shattering of the fourth wall ever committed to film. If, after all this, you can still say you were entertained by Mamma Mia, then God bless and may you enjoy it countless times in the privacy of your own home on DVD. But I have to believe that any movie that invites comparison with Can’t Stop the Music, any movie that makes me wish even for a second that I was watching Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band instead, deserves my heartiest derision. Mamma Mia? Madre de dios!

THOUGHTS INSPIRED BY BLOCKBUSTERS AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM (or are in them…)

THE CRIMES OF MSSRS. EDELSTEIN AND UHLICH

Just how big an offense is it to not love (or lurrrrrrvvvvv) The Dark Knight? Well, David Edelstein and Keith Uhlich might have some thoughts on that. I have not yet seen the film myself, and though I very much appreciated Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s first foray into Gotham City geography, I find it strange how predigested the anticipation has been about this blockbuster, so much so that fans who hadn’t even seen the film yet were roasting Edelstein for not rubber-stamping their excitement and the other pre-release raves. And of course those that had seen it and took exception to a dissenting view let both Edelstein and Uhlich know just how unqualified they were as reviewers because of their opinions.

What’s odd/amusing/disturbing about the (over)reaction here is that many of the folks who have condemned these writers have done so on grounds of highfalutin’ pretentiousness, usually sparked by the critics' use of big words (words that these angry mobsters probably don’t understand themselves—Edelstein dared invoke George Bernard Shaw and a vocabulary that included words like “verbiage”). The commenters are, essentially, pissed off at these guys for taking this movie seriously, something which, I suppose, would be okay if their own views on it were being validated. Personally, I understand the hype that surrounds just about any big Hollywood release as being the work of masterful publicity machinations which seep into the blood of those prepared to dig the scene—that’s business as usual. But there’s something different going on here, and fan reactions to dissenting views like Edelstein’s and Uhlich’s often seem more like Joker-esque dementia than protectiveness over a pet film. (Not all, of course—some who like/love the film and find Edelstein and Uhlich’s arguments weak have said so with relative eloquence and lack of fury, but they seem to be the exception.) Does a spectacular with a $185 million production budget, probably at least that much in an advertising budget, and a record-breaking opening weekend really need such a vehement, hypersensitive defense? I mean, my goodness, on the other end of this scale rave reviews for this film have not been exactly hard to come by, and the most enthusiastic of them are tossing around phrases like “masterpiece” and “best American film so far this year” and “best American film since The Godfather Part II.”

So why the rage when one or two critics offer a dissenting perspective? (One of my favorite comments comes from Edelstein’s blog The Projectionist, where he ends with this: “*Note to readers: You blunt the force of your attack when you write to an author to say, “No one cares what you think” — because, uh, at least one person does.”)

When I do see The Dark Knight, if I’m as enthralled by it as some seem to be I will have no qualms in saying so. But in the face of such build-up, forgive me if I allow myself not to get swept away just yet, because I will have just as few qualms about saying so if I end up not.

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FILM CRITIC AS PHYSICIST

Eric Riddle of NBC-TV, Seattle would like us to know something about the new family-oriented action epic Journey to the Center of the Earth (3-D) that may rattle the very foundations of those quantum physicists who couldn’t get tickets to see The Dark Knight this week and instead found themselves putting on a pair of keen polarized glasses for a Saturday matinee:


Who knew that just another Brendan Fraser CGI epic would have such serious repercussions for decades of scientific theory? But how exactly is 3-D redefined? Will I be able to actually touch the molten lava that erupts from the volcano, or feel the hot breath of the T rex as it stomps its way into my popcorn bucket? Shrek 4-D already exists, as we well know, so that’s out. Is Riddle intimating some fifth dimension waiting to explored? No, we’ve already checked that out by way of a beautiful balloon. Then what? If only Hal Fishman were alive, he’d be on this tighter than Christian Bale’s bat suit. But his bosses would still make us wait for the report until after sports and the scheduled 10:56 p.m. report on the water-skiing squirrel. Guess I’ll just have to take my girls and find out what 6-D is all about…

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MAKE UP YOUR MIND, JEAN-PAUL SARTRE!

Maybe that whole redefining 3-D thing has something to do with being two opposing things at once:


Or is this just the first existential movie blurb? Oh, well, by itself or in a group, Hellboy II: The Golden Army was truly enthralling, a spectacular fantasy epic that feels almost hand-made...

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THE SWEDE WHO WOULD BE REUBEN KINCAID

I find it interesting that, in all the discussion about the merits of Mamma Mia (or lack thereof), no one has yet mentioned the movie’s single most disturbing and inexplicable occurrence—somehow Stellan Skarsgard (far right-- click to enlarge) has become Dave Madden.


My thoughts on Mamma Mia coming soon...

DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION MONTH: THE MARK METCALF INTERVIEWS

Douglas Neidermeyer may have been killed by his own troops in Vietnam, but the man who played him is doing quite nicely for himself in the year 2008, in Wisconsin, as it turns out. Mark Metcalf, who so ably embodied the psychotic heart of the Omega House as Neidermeyer in National Lampoon’s Animal House, is now, in addition to his occasional duties as an actor, a restaurateur in Mequon, Wisconsin and a raconteur-reviewer-columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. Recently, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the release of Animal House, which debuted 30 years ago this coming Monday, July 28, Metcalf reconnected with some of his old cast mates and interviewed them for his column. The result was a series of informal, unruffled and very entertaining profiles which I am glad to direct you to now as part of SLIFR’s own Double Secret Probation Month celebration.

The Mark Metcalf Interview Archive includes:


Karen Allen on being the Delta Tau Chi Voice of Reason…


Otis Day (the artist formerly known as Dewayne Jessie, who so identified with his role as the Delta’s favorite bandleader that he had his name legally changed…)


Stephen Furst remembers being tagged “worthless and weak” and demands an apology…


Peter Riegert explains it all for you, and he’s on a roll…


Martha Smith reveals exactly what is in store for those who dare to ask for Babs…

Earlier this summer I sent an e-mail with some questions of my own for Mark Metcalf, which I hoped would form the spine of a mini-interview of my own for this feature, but as of this writing I have not yet heard back from him. If perchance I do before the end of July and our little tribute, I’ll definitely share that with you. But for now, these five interviews oughta do!

THE SLIFR-ANIMAL HOUSE OPEN FORUM

Several participants in the most recent SLIFR film quiz, when asked to name what they felt was the most “important” film comedy of the last 35 years, bandied about National Lampoon’s Animal House as a contender. The film was most frequently earmarked as “important” not only because of its popularity, but because of its influence, for good, bad and worst, on the trajectory of American film comedy, introducing heretofore unheard-of levels of profanity and raunchy humor into mainstream movie theaters. (I’ll never forget my rather sheltered aunt’s reaction, after a screening in my hometown, expressing genuine shock over the contents of Otter’s black medical bag.) In honor of Double Secret Probation Month here at SLIFR, I’m throwing the question open to further discussion.

In what ways has Animal House been a good thing for film comedy?

What are some of the elements rippling through movie culture that have roots in the film’s popularity which you could have done without over the past 30 years?

What is your favorite moment in the movie? Your favorite line?

What is the best post-Animal House movie comedy that bears the obvious stamps of its influence?

And what is the worst, most crass attempt to cash in on the glory of Delta Tau Chi?

These are all questions on which I hope we shall ruminate over the weekend in the comments column as commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the movie’s release on July 28 draws nearer. Now drop and give me 20!

DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION MONTH: ON THE SET OF ANIMAL HOUSE WITH JOHN BELUSHI AND JOHN LANDIS

During the filming of the parade sequence in Cottage Grove, Oregon, local Eugene television station KEZI (Channel 9) sent a film crew down to gather a load of footage to be used for various stories focusing on the shooting of National Lampoon’s Animal House. Other than on local broadcasts, I was unaware of seeing any of this footage until the release of the 20th anniversary DVD in 1998. On that DVD, as part of a fine added-value feature entitled “The Yearbook: An Animal House Reunion” (which makes another appearance on the “Double Secret Probation” edition of the Animal House DVD released in 2003), some of that footage resurfaced, and it paints a vivid picture in motion of what life was like on the set. You can even glimpse me in it a few times, shuffling around the periphery again in that goddamned ubiquitous yellow sweater-- check out the nerd on the sidewalk behind John Landis, Tim Matheson, Ivan Reitman and company around minute 24.

(Seeing that footage made me really annoyed at myself for not shooting more photos on the set. I have a couple of shots taken inside the Cottage Grove armory, which served as headquarters for the cast and crew during the filming of the parade, and one or two photos of the second unit crew setting up one of the cameras outside a pharmacy, but otherwise no other pictures from the set.)

In this clip from that footage, John Belushi, at the insistence of his director, does some impromptu mugging for the KEZI news camera and creates an indelible portrait of the actor’s easy-going manner and flexibility as a comic performer.