Toga! Toga! Toga! On the 40th anniversary of its premiere, here are some fun facts about Animal House that’ll bring you right back to your college days.
1. THE MOVIE WAS ORIGINALLY ABOUT CHARLES MANSON.
The first draft of the screenplay by Harold Ramis and Douglas Kenney was entitled Laser Orgy Girls, and was about the cult leader and murderer in high school. The script was immediately rejected.
2. THE FINAL SCRIPT WAS THE RESULT OF A THREE-MONTH BRAINSTORMING SESSION.
During a cram writing session, the writers all contributed stories about their Greek life hijinks: Chris Miller of his time in Alpha Delta Phi at Dartmouth, Ramis in Zeta Beta Tau at Washington University in St. Louis, Kenney in the Spee Club at Harvard, and producer Ivan Reitman in Delta Upsilon at McMaster University.
3. THE FILMMAKERS HAD OTHER ACTORS IN MIND FOR THE LEAD ROLES.
They originally wanted Dan Aykroyd to play D-Day, Brian Doyle-Murray to play Hoover, Bill Murray to play Boon, and Chevy Chase to play Otter.
4. CHRIS MILLER'S REAL FRATERNITY PLEDGE NAME FOUND ITS WAY INTO THE FILM.
His pledge name, like Thomas Hulce’s character's in the movie, was “Pinto.”
5. DOUGLAS KENNEY HAS A BACKGROUND ROLE AS A FRAT BOY.
He plays Stork, the Delta brother everyone thinks is “brain damaged.”
6. YOU CAN THANK DONALD SUTHERLAND FOR THE MOVIE'S CREATION.
Universal Studios only greenlit the movie because Sutherland, who was a recognizable star, signed on to appear as Professor Jennings.
7. IT MADE JOHN BELUSHI A STAR.
Belushi had appeared on SNL for three years, but Animal House was his big screen debut. During the film’s production, he shot the movie Monday through Wednesday and flew back to New York to do SNL Thursday through Saturday.
8. IT WAS KEVIN BACON'S FIRST MOVIE.
Bacon plays Omega pledge Chip Diller.
9. FABER COLLEGE IS ACTUALLY THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON.
It was the only school that would let the production shoot on campus.
10. THE OREGON DEAN ACQUIESCED TO FILMING BECAUSE OF A PREVIOUS MISSED OPPORTUNITY.
Years earlier, he had rejected the offer to have the production of The Graduate shoot on campus. Not wanting to let another go at Hollywood pass him by, he approved the production without reading Animal House’s script. He gave them such carte blanche that his own office was used to film Dean Wormer’s office in the movie.
11. THE STUDIO DIDN'T LIKE JOHN LANDIS'S CHOICE OF COMPOSER.
Landis tapped composer Elmer Bernstein to do the score because Landis was childhood friends with Bernstein’s son. At that point his career, Bernstein was known for scoring epics like The Ten Commandments and serious dramas like To Kill a Mockingbird, so the studio was skeptical he’d be a good fit for a gross-out comedy. They were won over after Landis had Bernstein score the comedy as if it were one of his serious dramas, thus playing up the absurdity of what happens onscreen.
12. LIKE ANY GOOD FRAT, DELTA TAU CHI HAS A LATIN MOTTO.
Delta’s motto is “Ars Gratia Artis,” Latin for “Art for art’s sake.”
13. BELUSHI DIDN'T ACTUALLY CHUG A FIFTH OF JACK DANIELS.
Contrary to rumors, it was iced tea—and not real whiskey—in the bottle that Belushi chugs after Delta is expelled from campus.
14. OTIS DAY CHANGE HIS NAME TO HIS CHARACTER'S IN REAL LIFE.
Actor DeWayne Jessie played Otis Day, the leader of the band at the Dexter Lake Club, and legally changed his name to Otis Day after gaining popularity following the release of the movie. He still tours with the band Otis Day and the Knights to this day.
15. ANIMAL HOUSE SPAWNED A SHORT-LIVED TV SPINOFF IN 1979.
Delta House, which aired on ABC, was cancelled after three months. Ramis, Miller, and Kenney wrote the pilot episode, while the actors who play Dean Wormer, Flounder, D-Day, and Hoover all reprised their roles. The show also featured the television debut of Michelle Pfeiffer, who played “The Bombshell.”
John McClane was just a New York City cop trying to visit his wife and kids for Christmas, and then it all went wrong. Since being released in theaters 30 years ago, director John McTiernan’s Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis, has earned its spot among the best action movies of all time. But how well do you know McClane’s gun-toting adventures through Nakatomi Plaza?
Say, “yippee ki-yay” cowboys, because here are some things you might not have noticed in the action classic.
1. JOHN MCCLANE’S TEDDY BEAR HAS BEEN AROUND.
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When off-duty NYPD officer John McClane (Bruce Willis) steps off the plane in Los Angeles to visit his kids and estranged wife, he’s carrying a giant stuffed teddy bear as a Christmas gift. But the huge bear is more than just a present—the stuffed animal is a trademark of director John McTiernan, who later used the bear as a prop in his 1990 film The Hunt for Red October.
2. WHAT’S HOLLY MAIDEN NAME AGAIN?
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When McClane makes it to Nakatomi Plaza and signs in on the computer system with his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), he’s forced to check in using her maiden name. The touch-screen computer lists her surname as “Gennaro.” But when he touches the name it switches to “Gennero.” So much for wanting to be a McClane.
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3. THERE ARE SUBTLE DIGS AT A COUPLE OF BIG-NAME ACTION STARS.
Die Hard remains a classic due to the fact that its fallible lead character was unleashed on the world during a 1980s action movie landscape that featured indestructible on-screen heroes like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both Stallone and Schwarzenegger turned down the role of John McClane, and the movie makes some inside baseball jokes at their expense for the snub.
Terrorist Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) makes fun of McClane as a kind of one-man army out of a Stallone movie, and McClane also makes a sly dig by saying the explosives on the Nakatomi roof are “enough to orbit Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
4. THE TERRORISTS GET AROUND WITH THE SAME COURIER SERVICE.
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Gruber’s terrorist group arrives at Nakatomi Plaza in a green box truck that says "Pacific Courier" on the side. A similar truck that says "Atlantic Courier" on the side was used in the New York City-set Die Hard: With A Vengeance, which featured Hans Gruber's brother Simon as the villain. "Pacific Courier" also appears in Speed. All three movies featured the same production designer, Jackson De Govia.
5. NAKATOMI PLAZA WAS 20TH CENTURY FOX.
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The exteriors of the film’s marquee location were shot at Fox Plaza, the real-life headquarters of 20th Century Fox, the film studio that made the film. The computer system Ellis hacks into sports the exact address of the actual building, and the (now defunct) emergency contact phone numbers were allegedly the actual numbers for the management of Fox Plaza. The building was under construction during filming, and the scenes that show it half-finished were filmed exactly as the building was at the time.
6. THE NAKATOMI ARCHITECTS MUST LOVE FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT.
The 34th floor of the Nakatomi building, where Holly's company Christmas party is being held, is supposed to be a recreation of the interior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
7. JOSEPH TAKAGI HAS A LINK TO PEARL HARBOR.
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Joseph Takagi (James Shigeta) defends his homeland of Japan with a clap back at McClane’s snark by telling him, “Pearl Harbor didn't work out, so we got you with tape decks.” That’s not the only Takagi family connection to December 7, 1941.
“Akagi” is the password that opens the Nakatomi Plaza's bank vault, and was also the name of one of the aircraft carriers that took part in the fateful attack.
8. THE POLICE CHIEF WAS RIGHT ABOUT BRUCE WILLIS'S OTHER JOBS.
Lovable police officer Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) tries to convince Deputy Police Chief Dwayne Robinson (Paul Gleason) that McClane is a cop by referencing his ability to spot a phony ID on the terrorists in the building. But Johnson doesn’t believe him, saying, “He could be a f***ing bartender for all we know!” It’s a funny quip, but also true: Willis used to be a bartender in New York before getting into the acting business.
9. WILLIS SUFFERED PERMANENT HEARING LOSS BECAUSE OF THE FILM.
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McTiernan wanted to give the gunshots in the movie an overly realistic feel, so he had the production rig the blanks to be extra loud. Much to Willis’s detriment, the move cost him parts of his hearing. In the scene where Willis shoots a terrorist through a table, the actor is holding the gun extremely close to his face. The resulting shots caused the actor permanent hearing loss.
In a 2007 interview with The Guardian,Willis recalled the scene, saying, “Due to an accident on the first Die Hard, I suffer two-thirds partial hearing loss in my left ear and have a tendency to say, ‘Whaaa?’"
10. THERE ARE SOME REAL FALLS.
In the scene where McClane makes an epic jump into an elevator shaft, the stunt man was supposed to grab onto the first vent—but missed completely. The resulting footage shows the actor slipping further down the shaft. McTiernan and co-editor Frank Urioste kept it in the final cut because it made the scene more harrowing.
Similar trickery happened during the filming of Gruber’s death scene stunt: McTiernan allegedly told Rickman—who did his own stunt for the scene—that he would be dropped 70-feet on a count of three. But to get a look of real terror on Rickman’s face, McTiernan had him dropped on the count of two, hence Gruber’s memorably terrified look before he plunges to his death.
11. THERE ARE LOTS OF VISIBLE STUNT PEOPLE.
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Willis attempted to do as many of hisown stunts as he could, saying, “I think doing my own stunts whenever possible adds a lot to the production value of the film,” and “John [McTiernan] can get the camera close, because he doesn’t need to disguise the stuntman.” But the production hired as many as 37 stuntmen to pull off McClane’s death defying stunts—and a lot of them are visible. Be on the lookout for Non-Bruce Willises in most fight and explosion scenes.
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12. HANS GRUBER AND HIS GOONS DON’T ACTUALLY SPEAK GERMAN.
Americans might think the German language that Gruber and his goons speak to one another sounds legit, but it’s actually gibberish. The grammar, diction, and pronunciation don’t actually match up. In the German release of the movie, Gruber’s group were described as being from "Europe" instead of Germany.
Weirdly enough Willis was actually born in West Germany to an American father and a German mother.
13. GRUBER’S GOONS ARE CLUMSY.
In the shot where some of Gruber’s men enter Nakatomi Plaza, the terrorist on the left as they walk through a doorway almost runs into the door frame. The camera cuts away before he actually does, but the gaffe doesn’t bode well for Gruber or his men for the rest of the movie.
14. THE TERRORISTS ARE ALSO REDUNDANT.
The rocket launcher Gruber's men use to stop the LAPD’s armored vehicle breaks the same window in two different scenes.
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15. MCCLANE ISN’T ALWAYS BAREFOOT.
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McClane spends much of the movie running through broken glass with bare feet, which must have been terrible for Willis—except it wasn’t. The actor was given a pair of specially made rubber feet as a safety precaution. The fake appendages can be seen in the scene when McClane jumps off the ledge as the FBI shoots at him from the helicopter.
16. NAKATOMI PLAZA STANDS ALONE.
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The scene where McClane glances out of the window of Nakatomi Plaza to see a woman couldn’t actually happen. Shots of the Nakatomi building in the movie show that there are no buildings close by or buildings of comparable height that close for McClane to see.
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17. THE HO-HO-HO TERRORIST MIGHT STILL BE ALIVE.
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When McClane fights and kills the grey-sweatshirt-wearing terrorist and leaves his famous “Now I Have a Machine Gun—Ho, Ho Ho” line written on him for Hans to find, the terrorist might not be as dead as we realized. When Hans goes to move the terrorist’s head, the actor playing him blinks.
18. THE INCREDIBLE DISAPPEARING AND APPEARING AMBULANCE.
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When Gruber’s terrorists enter the Nakatomi building, they leave out of the Pacific Courier box truck with nothing else inside. Later in the movie, Ellis attempts to carry out their getaway plan by driving an ambulance out of the back of the same truck, even though the extra vehicle—which would be hard to miss—wasn’t there earlier in the movie.
In a behind-the-scenes twist, Gruber’s planned getaway vehicle was actually a last-minute decision on the set, which explains the incongruity.
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19. HOW DID MCCLANE KNOW GRUBER WAS A BAD GUY?
In the scene where McClane unwittingly stumbles on Gruber—who identifies himself as Bill Clay and puts on a convincing American accent—it’s never made 100 percent clear how McClane realizes that Clay isn’t who he says he is. Chalk it up to a NYPD-veteran hunch, or a deleted scene.
Gruber’s watch allegedly tips McClane off before he hands the terrorist an empty gun, but nothing about the watch is introduced in the actual movie. There was supposed to be a scene where Hans Gruber and his team synchronize the exact same watch they all wear, and, according to screenwriter Steven E. De Souza, “When Bruce offers the cigarette to Alan Rickman, Bruce sees the watch. You see his eyes look at the watch. That's how he knows that he is one of the terrorists.”
The timepiece scene was cut, but the audience never really noticed the plot hole.
Nearly 40 years after his cinematic debut, Danny Torrance is returning to the big screen. As IndieWire reports, director Mike Flanagan has wrapped production on Doctor Sleep, a movie based on the Stephen King's follow-up to The Shining.
Doctor Sleep picks up with a grown-up Danny Torrance, played by Ewan McGregor, decades after the events at the Overlook Hotel transpired. Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Bruce Greenwood, Zahn McClarnon, Jacob Tremblay, and Emily Alyn Lind make up the rest of the primary cast.
Doctor Sleep won't be a direct sequel to the 1980 horror classic. Rather, it will be an adaptation of Stephen King's sequel to his original novel, which is notably different from the Stanley Kubrick version. King described the first adaptation as a "Cadillac with no engine," and was so dissatisfied with the film that he even made The Shining into a separate made-for-TV-movie in 1997.
Viewers will have to wait until January 2020 to see if Flanagan's movie does better service to King's source material. In the meantime, the filmmaker praised the author and his book in a Facebook post, writing, "I read the novel as soon as it came out back in 2013, fascinated and moved by the epic story of Dan Torrance and Abra Stone, but I never imagined for a moment that I’d be the person to bring it to the big screen. It’s been an honor to spend the last five months with this fantastic cast and crew, and to be trusted with Stephen King’s extraordinary story."
Flanagan is no stranger to adapting beloved horror books for the screen; he gained attention this past October for his Netflix original series The Haunting of Hill House.
