EUGENE, Ore. – It’s Faber College – uncovered.
“The Real Animal House: The Awesomely Depraved Saga of the Fraternity That Inspired the Movie,” written by Chris Miller one of the classic comedy’s three screenwriters, along with Harold Ramis and Douglas Kenney, is the memoir of the landmark 1978 movie filmed in Eugene and Cottage Grove.
It turns out Miller, of Venice, Calif., is the real Pinto from the movie. And Miller says that in a way, the memoir started before the movie came out.
He wrote a few chapters in the early 1970s and one, “The Night of the Seven Fires,” was a hit with college students when it was printed in the National Lampoon, where Miller was a longtime writer. It was about initiation rites at Dartmouth College’s Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, where Miller attended from 1959 to 1963.
“And the Lampoon was looking to make a movie, so it was a perfect marriage,” Miller says of the script that he, Ramis and Kenney (who played “Stork” in the movie) co-wrote.
This “mostly lucid memoir,” as it says below the title on the book’s cover, tells the real-life story of Pinto, Otter, Flounder and others. And although you won’t read about Boon and D-Day and Bluto Blutarsky (John Belushi’s character) in the book, you do get to meet some of their real-life counterparts – Rhesus Monkey, Rat, Huck Doody, Doberman, Coyote and Snot.
Miller, who served as the grand master of the parade during Cottage Grove’s 25th anniversary celebration of the film in 2003, played a bit part in the movie as one of the Delta House members. He had one line, the word “No” when asked by a man with his child to move during the parade scene. In addition to writing for National Lampoon for years, Miller wrote ad copy (think “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs”) before he segued into film writing.
In telling the way it really was, Miller doesn’t leave much to the imagination in this tale that centers mostly on, what else, serious binge drinking, losing one’s virginity and horseplay that could be classified as criminal.
There’s Doberman licking bugs off the windshield of a hearse so Flea can see while he drives. There’s Seal, a model for Belushi’s character in the film, pouring a giant jar of mustard over his head and crawling around on all fours, biting co-eds on the backside.
And there’s the story of how the Alpha Delta Phi house at Dartmouth got its nickname, “Animal House”: Some members were haplessly chasing a chicken around the yard, eager to kill it for dinner, only to be brought up short when an upperclassman (known as “The Man”) plugged the chicken from his upstairs room with a .45 slug.
“Up to now, I’ve thought of the jacket-and-narrow-tie-wearing youth of that era as ‘The Quiet Generation,’ writes Christopher Buckley, author of “Thank You for Smoking,” in The New York Times Book Review of Nov. 5. “No longer. There is nothing quiet about Pinto, Otter, Coyote, Snot, Black Whit, Giraffe, Rat or any of the other AD brothers, unless they’re passed out facedown in the snow with the blood-alcohol content of an embalmed corpse.”
He also says, “I couldn’t put it down.”
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