National Lampoon's Animal House | |
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Directed by | John Landis |
Produced by | |
Written by | |
Starring | |
Music by | Elmer Bernstein |
Cinematography | Charles Correll |
Edited by | George Folsey, Jr. |
Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release date
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Running time
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109 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $3 million |
Box office | $141.6 million |
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack: National Lampoon's Animal House |
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Soundtrack album by various artists | |
Released | 1978 |
Recorded | RCA Studios, New York and Sound Factory West, Hollywood |
Genre | Rock and roll, R&B, film score |
Length | 36:23 |
Label | MCA |
Producer | Kenny Vance |
National Lampoon's Animal House is a 1978 American comedy film from Universal Pictures. It was produced by Ivan Reitman and Matty Simmons, directed by John Landis, and stars John Belushi, Tim Matheson, John Vernon, Verna Bloom, Thomas Hulce, and Donald Sutherland. The film, a direct spin-off from National Lampoon, is about a misfit group of fraternity members who challenge the authority of the dean of Faber College.
The screenplay was adapted by Douglas Kenney, Chris Miller, and Harold Ramis from stories written by Miller and published in National Lampoon. The stories were based on Ramis's experience in the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as Miller's Alpha Delta Phi experiences at Ivy League Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and producer Reitman's Delta Upsilon experiences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
Of the younger lead actors, only the 28-year-old Belushi was an established star, but even he had not yet appeared in a film, having gained fame mainly from his Saturday Night Live television appearances, which was starting its third season in autumn 1977. Several of the actors who were cast as college students, including Hulce, Karen Allen, and Kevin Bacon, were just beginning their film careers, although Matheson had appeared as one of the vigilante cops in the second Dirty Harry film, Magnum Force, released in 1973.