...Anyway, the point is that Harold and Doug wrote a script that was basically "Charles Manson in high school." I did read that one and it did have some brilliant stuff in it but it was too outrageous. It could probably get made now. But it had one of my favorite openings of a movie ever. The exterior of that prison and the camera moves into this fortress prison and through the thick walls and down the hallways and it's this brutal fortress to keep people in and you go deeper and deeper into this fortress prison until you get to this heavily barred and gated doors and into a padded doorway into a padded cell and in the corner is this man in a straight jacket and you move deeper and deeper in until you see that it's Charles Manson with the hair and the swastika carved into his forehead. And he looks at the camera and says, "Is it hot in here or am I crazy?" It went on from there.
When Doug and Harold turned in that script, Matty went, "Holy Shit!" So he said, "You can't have all this gangrape stuff. Put it in college!" [laughs] And at that point they brought in Chris Miller, because Chris Miller wrote a whole series of pieces for National Lampoon about his fraternity experiences at Dartmouth. So they were all at Ivy League schools in 1962 and they wrote "Animal House."...
