Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  And, of course, it made John Belushi a star before the fool ended that just four years later by shooting a ‘speedball’ cocaine/heroin cocktail and dying in the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Many have tried to emulate his surreal slob as cosmic force of nature performance as Bluto. And all will always fail, as Jack Black is rapidly discovering.

  Despite its knockabout, smutty, slapstick humour, Animal House produces its satirical credentials early on. As Larry (Hulce) and Ken (Furst) are introduced to the Omega frat house initiation cocktail party by the hideous Neidermeyer (the excellently repellent Mark Metcalf), they are, as ‘a wimp and a blimp’, shown immediately and repeatedly to the only suitable corner of the soirée. There sit the gathering’s only black, Asian and disabled guests, with a boy called Sidney who could be sidelined because of his nerdish image . . . or because he looks suspiciously Jewish. If I needed to explain to a small child exactly what social exclusion meant, I’d show them this two-minute scene and go have a cup of tea.

  Director Landis, producer Ivan Reitman and future Ghostbusters writer and star Ramis are all Jewish. And one suspects that much of the film’s depiction of WASPs at an American campus in 1962 is a settling of scores from anti-Semitic bullyings past. The wealthy boys and girls of Omega and its sister house at Faber College are pure Nazi to their Aryan cores, attempting to create an on-campus world – and, by default, a future America – where everyone who isn’t pretty, white and from pure upper-middle-class stock is denied access to both power and basic human dignity. They are encouraged in this by the college head Dean Wormer (the craggily self-parodic Vernon) who the writers admitted was based upon Richard Nixon.

  The film gets its comic momentum from an increasingly nasty war between the fascists and an ad hoc band of outsiders thrown together by social exclusion. The Delta resistance army’s ideas of a good time are entirely based around the ’60s ideals of sex, drugs, black music and doing as little work as is humanly possible. After enduring assaults by the Omega jocks that border on the sado-masochistic (and not funny), the impure Delta house gang get revenge in a violent, gleeful climax that resembles a comedy re-enactment of World War II.

  And even before this, Landis takes plenty of opportunity to humiliate the Aryans without the help of his liberation army, particularly in a car masturbation scene which is spectacularly rude by late ’70s standards and implies that the reason WASP men are so appalling is because – sin of sins! – they can’t get erections. The film forces us with relentless ferocity to identify with what the American establishment would deem ‘losers’, and cheer as every blonde in the film is thoroughly debased.

  Animal House may take its year and its affectionate, jukebox nostalgia cue from American Graffiti, but there is no nostalgia here for pre ’60s values. The more you watch it, in fact, the more it looks like an attack on Lucas’s film and its message that small-town white kids were benign innocence embodied before everything got ruined by long hair, drugs, The Beatles and Vietnam. The film’s climax mercilessly parodies the ‘where are they now?’ captions at the end of American Graffiti, going as far as to suggest that head Omega Nazi Gregg Marmalard will go on to join the Nixon administration and end up raped in prison as a result. As I said, this apparently silly movie has an undertow of dark anger.

  It isn’t a hippy movie, though. Sutherland’s proto-hippy lecturer is a predatory prick, and Bluto acts for us all when he smashes a smug folk singer’s guitar into tiny bits of wood. It’s kind of a punk film, but more a precursor to the Blink 182/Offspring brand of ’90s frat-house punk than anything to do with the late ’70s kind.

  Not that any self-respecting punk would own up to the xenophobia depicted in the Dexter Lake Club scene. Four of the Delta boys and their dates go on a road trip, and stumble upon a gig by Otis Day And The Knights, the soul revue band who had played their toga party. Problem is, they’ve walked blithely into a club full of black people. Cue much hilarity at the white American’s terror of black men, reinforced by the kind of malevolent threat that white Americans seem to feel is inevitable when Whitey stumbles innocently into black territory. It’s one of the most uncomfortably racist scenes in cinema, a mix of stereotyping and white liberal guilt that I’m inclined to skip over in an effort to pretend it isn’t there, making a bad smell in one of my fave films.

  Ah well, nobody’s perfect. And anyway, the most memorable scenes in Animal House will always belong to the late John Belushi, who was instructed to play Bluto as a cross between Harpo Marx and the Cookie Monster and came up with the most subversive slob in screen history. There’s the canteen-zit scene, of course, and his brilliant cartoon version of cat-burgling, involving much staccato frog-jumping and moronic staring. But the Belushi scene that has been ripped off and parodied many times is the bit where he climbs a ladder to a window of the sorority house and witnesses a topless pillow-fight, such an enduring male fantasy image that it even gets parodied in an episode of Buffy. We get his awestruck reaction as a reflection in the window, before he bounces the ladder, noisily and impossibly, along to the window of Gregg’s frustrated girlfriend Mandy, where he watches her strip for bed. Mandy, played by Mary Louise Weller, faces the window, blind to Bluto’s presence in a way you only can be in comedy’s parallel universe. She begins to give us a dreamy, distracted, pre-masturbation soft-porn show. Before he topples backwards in the inevitable pratfall, Belushi gives us the look that serves as his epitaph. He turns to the camera, side on, grinning without leering somehow, looking directly at all the guys in the audience as if the women aren’t there at all . . . and flips a simple double-eyebrow twitch that says more about the pervy male’s inexhaustible – and conspiratorial – pleasure in voyeurism than a library full of Freud. Genius.

  So, Animal House is rabidly sexist. And dodgy on race. And puerile. And hugely pleased with itself and it’s boys club atmosphere. And it’s responsible for hundreds and hundreds of bad films – the four worst movies I endured in researching this book are Porky’s, Lemon Popsicle, Revenge Of The Nerds and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, which is a truly desperate attempt to revive Animal House’s Otter character (played, incidentally, with almost impossible amounts of charm by future The West Wing star Tim Matheson), and they are all runty offspring of this movie, and are probably just the tip of an iceberg of misogynist and mirthless campus comedies.

  But . . . Animal House is also hilarious, and the best bit of modern slapstick comedy direction this side of Airplane!. Landis got more laughs out of an object whistling past an oblivious Belushi’s head, or a horse having a heart attack, than Richard Curtis has got out of his entire career. His use of crashing sound is hooligan genius. His love of his actors’ faces and ability to shoot their over-the-top reactions at just the right angle and hold for just the right amount of milliseconds is second-to-none. It’s Landis’s best work, the world-changing Thriller video and 1983s class and race satire Trading Places notwithstanding.

  Animal House is a movie that does exactly what The Marx Brothers did at their best – it makes you forget about logic and the rational world and frees you from your principles, hang-ups and politically correct baggage for 90 joyful minutes. I can vouch for its safety, having watched it at least a dozen times and never felt the necessity to hit myself on the head with a can, talk to my naked and strikingly handsome best male friend about ‘porking’ Marlene Desmond yet kid myself that I’m not completely in love with him, leave my wife with a black man while running and screaming in terror, nor describe breasts as ‘major league yabboes’. Or maybe it’s ‘yarboes’. Whichever . . . all I’m saying is that it’s the funniest male-bonding anti-Nazi movie in existence, and it’s given me too much pure pleasure to feel guilty about.

  GREASE

  1978

  Starring: John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Stockard Channing, Jeff Conaway

  Dir.: Randal Kleiser

  Plot: Why girls are great and boys are rubbish.

  Key lines: ‘I could stay home every night/Wait around
for Mr Right/Take cold showers every day/And throw my life away/On a dream that won’t come true.’

  From ‘There Are Worse Things I Could Do’

  Who the fuck is Randal Kleiser?

  For shame, Garry. I’ve already written about this movie in my previous book Popcorn, with the much-needed assistance of my lovely wife Linsay. I’ve seen the damned thing a million times. And I’ve only just noticed that the director of the most popular film musical ever is . . . some bloke I’ve never heard of. Randal Kleiser. Ring any bells? No? Didn’t think so. Best we find out who he is, then, and see if there are any clues as to why the guy remains completely obscure.

  Kleiser hails from Philadelphia and was a University of Southern California room-mate of George Lucas, even playing a bit part in Lucas’s graduation short. He earned his shot at features by directing for TV, including a couple of episodes of Starsky And Hutch. The big break came in 1976 with TV movie The Boy In The Plastic Bubble, a cult true-life potboiler about a boy who lived in a plastic bubble, ’cos he was allergic to everything. The star? John Travolta.

  Grease was Kleiser’s first feature film. And here’s where it all goes a bit Orson Welles. He followed it up with The Blue Lagoon, a remake of a 1949 hit which was a none-too-subtle attempt to exploit the under-age sexuality of 15-year-old model Brooke Shields. It was an expensive and legendary turkey, and once you make one of those in Hollywood it’s tough to come back. Kleiser was typecast as a kids’ director, his only minor hit a Disney sequel Honey, I Blew Up The Kid. After attempting a remake of Hitchcock’s Shadow Of Doubt in 1998, he has mostly been teaching and developing the digital technology around film-making. His house was used to shoot scenes in Scream 3. It’s all a bit . . . disappointing, shall we say. Imagine how that feels: your very first film is the biggest musical ever, and . . . that is basically that.

  This has surely got to be a case of bad luck rather than lack of talent. Because Grease is extraordinary work for a first-time director, mainly because so much is happening so entertainingly onscreen that you don’t notice a director at work. And that, perhaps, was the problem. What would anyone refer to as ‘the Kleiser style’?

  But Kleiser did make a key decision that has made Grease the kind of mega-hit that endures. Warren Casey and Jim Jacobs’ musical may have been a hit on stage since 1971. The songs and the all-important ’50s nostalgia setting may have been bequeathed to him. And no one can deny how cleverly screenwriters Bronte Woodard and Allan Carr mixed innocent family fun and cynical smut in their screenplay. But somewhere along the line the director chooses the emphasis of any movie. And the emphasis Kleiser chose was the right one, commercially, aesthetically, morally. Because Grease went out of its way to be the first mainstream kids’ movie to assure teenage girls that wanting sex was healthy. And then punched the point home by giving the female characters a rounded, mature and honest attitude to sex, while the male characters were children so out of their depth about sexuality that their only real agenda, until being civilised by the girls, was impressing each other with lies about shagging. In that sense, Grease completes the work begun by Henry Levin’s proto-feminist 1960 gem, Where The Boys Are (see here).

  Travolta’s Danny Zucco may have been the film’s big box office draw. And it may feel, to some boys especially, like Grease is Danny’s story. But his real mirror character isn’t Sandy, but Betty Rizzo, made into one of cinema’s most subversive teen characters by the wonderful Stockard Channing. Rizzo is the force of nature and the bringer of truth. While the lyrics of ‘Summer Nights’ finger Danny as an insecure liar – shown up by the delicious beach-movie-parodying irony of the opening scene – Rizzo’s ‘There Are Worse Things I Could Do’ tells the truth about teenage sexuality and gives a good, hard kicking to the perennial coming-of-age story of boy-who-fucks-is-cool, girl-who-fucks-is-whore. The result is ’70s movie gender roles turned upside-down . . . Rizzo is the central protagonist and the rounded character. By the end of the film, Danny is nothing more than the pretty dunderhead. The gender reversal is even reflected by names: we know Danny by his first name. We know Rizzo by her surname. Who even recalls that her given name is Betty?

  Whether Grease improved things for generations of schoolgirls I severely doubt. But it did establish a new attitude to female sexuality in popular entertainment that becomes increasingly obvious as you read this book and see how many more strong and sexualised female characters take centre-stage in teen films from 1979 onwards. So Randal Kleiser didn’t just do something very right. He did something brave too, because, if Grease, with its celebration of adolescent female sexuality and graphic references to tit, pussy and periods, had fallen foul of paranoid parents and moral guardians and resolutely bombed . . . well, he probably wouldn’t have got to make Honey, I Blew Up The Kid, and then where would we be?

  As I’m figuring that anyone who buys a book about 100 teen movies has seen Grease more than once, I’m not going to waste your time with the plot, which, after all, is just a knowing parody of cheap ’50s teen romances packed with enough holes to drop songs into. I thought, instead, that I’d chew over a few Grease factlets that give rise to a few choice ‘What ifs?’

  Travolta had played minor Grease character Doody on Broadway, but was still considered too young to play Danny onstage. Ms Neutron-Bomb had not acted at all since a disastrous 1970 British sci-fi-rock flick called Toomorrow (directed by B-movie king Val Guest, who did pull off a classic musical with Expresso Bongo in 1959), which was made before her pop career took off. She had so little confidence in her ability that it was she that insisted she do a screen test when the producers had already made their minds up.

  Rumours persist that Sandy was initially offered to Marie Osmond who turned it down because she was too virginal to do the bad girl stuff at the end, but this is possibly apocryphal. What does appear to be true is that first choice for Danny was originally Henry Winkler aka The Fonz, who decided that he didn’t want to be typecast as a ’50s tough teen.

  Henry Winkler. In love scenes with Olivia Newton-John. And singing, and dancing. Oh Lord . . . can you imagine? Still, at least he didn’t get typecast, eh?

  If you notice blurry signs inside the Frosty Palace soda bar, you’re right, they do look like Coca-Cola signs. That’s because the producers took money for Pepsi product placement and neglected to tell the director. So, to save money reshooting the Frosty Palace scenes, the Coke signs got fuzzied.

  The original choice for Coach Calhoun was a porn star called, wait for it, Harry Reems. Someone came to their family movie senses and cast comedy legend Sid Caesar. And . . . Grease has a legendary ‘cut scene’. Kleiser originally shot a bit involving a row between Rizzo and Kenickie (Conaway) which was so angry and brutal that one of the crew members compared it to Martin Scorsese. It was such a bizarre change of mood for the film that they snipped and chucked it, which presumably means we’ll never get to see Stockard Channing say, ‘You think I’m funny? What, I amuse you?’ before shoving Kenickie’s head in a vice.

  The drive-in scenes – where an animated hot dog does an outrageous symbolic in-and-out with a bun onscreen behind Travolta as he sings ‘Sandy’ – were shot at the Burbank Pickwick Drive-In in LA. It’s now – you guessed it – a shopping mall.

  And the last thing is personal. When Grease was released I was a punk rocker, so I wouldn’t allow myself to like that clip of Travolta and Newton-John doing ‘You’re The One That I Want’ in black leather at a fairground that was on Top Of The Pops for ever as the record stayed at No. 1 for weeks. How Danny Zucco, now I think about it. But I watch it now and I really do get chills, and bugger me if they ain’t multiplyin’. A big old delayed reaction, I guess, to a song and piece of film that I share with my entire generation, which is something that is going to happen less and less in the fractured post-internet age.

  I’m sorry Randal Kleiser didn’t become as big as his swotty classmate George. But I don’t feel sorry for anyone who has pulled off a piece of mass entertainment which co-i
nvented everything from Dirty Dancing to Buffy to Glee, and which will be delighting people and educating teens about gender hypocrisy long after me, you and good old Randal Kleiser are long gone. There are worse things he could have done.

  HALLOWEEN

  1978

  Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles

  Dir.: John Carpenter

  Plot: The Plato’s Republic of teen slasher movies.

  Key line(s): Laurie: ‘Was that The Boogeyman?’

  Dr Loomis: ‘As a matter of fact, it was.’

  Halloween is the definition of the movie that punched above its weight. Made for just $320,000, John Carpenter’s third film had, by 2010, grossed over $200 million, largely through video and DVD rentals. Beyond the number-crunching, this simple B-movie with its homemade soundtrack and largely unknown actors created enough firsts and influenced so much of what is good and bad about cinema that its legacy is daunting to examine. But let’s give it a go.

  First, what Halloween isn’t. Halloween isn’t the first teen slasher movie. That honour could go to 1974’s Black Christmas (see here), or maybe Dario Argento’s disorienting 1976 bloodfest Suspiria, or perhaps even Wes Craven’s cheap and nasty 1972 debut Last House On The Left, which isn’t in this book simply because it’s far more interested in its murderers than its two teen girl victims. Likewise, the backwoods psychos of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) may terrorise youngish people rather than teens, but most of the basic rules and recurring stylistic motifs of the teen slasher movie were invented by Tobe Hooper’s notorious ‘video nasty’.