The Laughing Man
There was no one on a movie set who was more excited to be there than director John Landis. Dressed in his trademark sportscoat and tie (with jeans), the man behind such lauded films as Animal House, Trading Places and The Blues Brothers was the picture of enthusiasm when he roamed the soundstages or locations during production, cheering actors on after a good take—or booing after a bad one. Landis was inspired to make movies as an eight year old after seeing The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. He still sounds nearly giddy talking about how much he enjoys working behind the camera.
“Making movies is a privilege and a pleasure,” says the 72 year old. “I’ve worked on over 100 films and done every job there is on a film except hair. It’s hard to describe how fun it can be.”
Landis lived for the movies. “I always reached out to filmmakers as a kid. Many of the great filmmakers from the ’40s and ’50s were living in L.A. and not working. So, I made an effort to meet people,” he says. After dropping out of high school at 16, he worked in the mailroom at Twentieth Century-Fox “so I could get near shooting and somehow work on a movie,” he says. Andrew Marton, perhaps best known for directing the chariot race in Ben-Hur, took a liking to the brash young Landis, and in 1968 told him that if he could find a way to Yugoslavia he would give him a job on a film he was working on called Kelly’s Heroes. Landis, who was only 18 at the time, took his life savings and bought a one-way ticket to London, then he hitchhiked and rode the rails across Europe, finally arriving in Belgrade on the underside of a freight train like a Depression-era hobo. (He then discovered he had to sneak out of Yugoslavia in order to enter it legally as part of the film crew.) Landis now had a job as an assistant director, and in essence, he ran away with the circus, never to return.
“It was the best nine months of my life,” he recalls. “A week after we started shooting, the first assistant director had a nervous breakdown and I became indispensable to the film. It was all the joy and excitement of making a movie on a large scale with none of the responsibility. And I made some very good friends: Don Rickles, Donald Sutherland.”
A few years later, when Landis was trying to get National Lampoon’s Animal House off the ground, Universal Pictures threatened to pull its funding because the movie lacked a recognizable star. Landis called Sutherland and begged for help. Sutherland agreed to play a small role in the film, saving it from being scuttled. The 1978 film, made on a shoestring budget of only $2.3 million, went on to make more than $140 million, one of the biggest hits of the decade. Today, Animal House shows up on most polls of greatest comedies, and the film was the subject of a cover story in this magazine in 2018.
Landis followed up Animal House with The Blues Brothers, and both films have been chosen by the National Film Registry for preservation. Dan Aykroyd wrote The Blues Brothers with Landis, and starred in the film with John Belushi, his friend and partner from “Saturday Night Live.” It was a hit. “The success of it is due in massive part to John’s involvement from the beginning,” says Aykroyd. “He contributed immeasurably. It was a beautiful collaboration from the beginning. It was one of the most fun summer and autumns of our lives.” Aykroyd would work with Landis again, costarring with a young Eddie Murphy on the comedy Trading Places, which helped Murphy become a superstar.
“He does march to his own drummer and he doesn’t mince words,” says producer Steven Franks of Landis. “He’s very direct. He expects the greatest from everybody at all times. But he’s a teddy bear under his gruff exterior.”
“He’s very passionate and a very loud guy on set,” says actor Griffin Dunne, whose career was launched in Landis’ An American Werewolf in London. “He talks in decibels because he’s pumped up and excited to work. It’s very infectious.”
Unfortunately for Landis, that excitement feels like a thing of the past. He hasn’t directed a film in 13 years. “I would love to work,” he says. “All I get sent now are terrible horror films. I’m convinced that producers sit around reading scripts and, when they find terrible ones, they say, ‘This is awful. Let’s send it to John Landis.’ I have a script of my own that I like, a western. But I can’t get it made.”
The most common reason directors stop finding work is a lack of hits, and Landis hasn’t scored at the box office since Beverly Hills Cop III in 1994. But some observers believe Landis was sidelined for another reason: long memories about the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two children in a 1982 helicopter accident while filming Landis’ segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. Landis stood trial in the case and, in 1987, was acquitted in a verdict that hinged on FBI forensic evidence about the faulty manufacture of the helicopter’s rotor blade. “It was a terrible accident, a horrible, awful, hideous event in which three people died,” says Landis. “There’s no turning away from that.”
“He was unfairly treated in the end and shunned for a while, to the industry’s detriment,” says Aykroyd. “He has a lot more to contribute. That accident was not a result of his direction.”
While audiences have clearly relished his comedies (Trading Places was one of the top-grossing films of 1984, raking in more than $90 million at the box office, equivalent to $260 million today), critics have rarely given Landis the acclaim imparted to makers of less-amusing movies. Yet there are those who argue that Landis deserves a place in the comedy-director pantheon.
“There’s an element of classical Hollywood to his work,” says film programmer and distributor Jake Perlin. “He’s someone who knows and understands film history. His work is elegant even when it’s anarchic. His films are always smarter than they appear at first glance. He has a real auteur bent.”
So what does Landis like to watch when he’s in the mood for a film? His personal taste leans toward old Hollywood—but he’s watching things like Laurel and Hardy, rather than Citizen Kane. “I’m a big fan of silly,” he says with a chuckle.
