Fat, Drunk, and Stupid: The Inside Story Behind the Making of Animal House

In 1976 the creators of National Lampoon, America's most popular humor magazine, decided to make a movie. It would be set on a college campus in the 1960s, loosely based on the experiences of Lampoon writers Chris Miller and Harold Ramis and Lampoon editor Doug Kenney. They named it Animal House, in honor of Miller's fraternity at Dartmouth, where the members had been nicknamed after animals.

Miller, Ramis, and Kenney wrote a film treatment that was rejected and ridiculed by Hollywood studi...