Mentioned Landis, “Ned Tanen stated, ‘In case you don’t get me one goddamn film star, I’m not makin’ the image.’ So I believed, properly, the one film star I do know very well is Donald Sutherland. So I known as Donald and I stated, ‘I need you to be in Animal Home,’ and he stated, ‘What’s Animal Home?’ I stated, ‘It’s a film for Common.’ He stated, ‘Effectively that’s MCA, I can’t try this for scale, you gotta pay me.’”
Thus started negotiations between Common and Sutherland on a film the place each the director (Landis) and headlining star (Belushi) had been solely being paid $50,000 every. The costliest participant on the movie was a horse/horse coach combo who bought paid $100,000. For the 2 days’ work of portraying Professor Dave Jennings—together with one classroom scene, a scene the place he smokes reefer along with his college students, and a scene the place Peter Riegert’s Boon finds his girlfriend Katy (Karen Allen) post-coitus with Jennings—Sutherland initially requested Common for $250,000 {dollars} (a tough no from MCA), then went right down to round $50,000 {dollars}. The studio counter-offered $20,000 plus two p.c of the image’s back-end income. The actor had zero curiosity in changing into a revenue participant.
“I informed them, ‘No, it’s good to pay me my each day fee,’” Sutherland defined to Selection in 2014. “So I bought $25,000 for the day, after I may have ended up with $14 million.” That last quantity is typically reported as $35,000 to $45,000.
Thankfully/sadly, that small function—little greater than an prolonged cameo—which Sutherland did as a favor to a pal (whereas additionally taking pictures Invasion of the Physique Snatchers in San Francisco) wound up being in one of the profitable comedies ever made. Based on Enterprise Insider, Nationwide Lampoon’s Animal Home introduced in $141 million on the field workplace (round $674 million adjusted for inflation) and nonetheless ranks because the 62nd highest-grossing R-rated film of all time domestically (which doesn’t rely for inflation).
The actor suggests he misplaced $14 million by opting out of factors on the film whereas Landis thinks his pal may have earned as a lot as $20 million in late ‘70s {dollars}. In 2012, whereas showing on The Opie and Anthony Present, Sutherland was bluntly requested, “Have you learnt what would two p.c roughly have translated into?” The actor responded with a smile, “I don’t wish to know.”
There’s, after all, a silver lining to this. Not solely did Sutherland most definitely earn respectable residuals on the very profitable and perennially proven film regardless of not having these juicy factors, he was additionally singularly liable for it being made in any respect. It’s been stated that success is 90 p.c displaying up, and if Sutherland hadn’t proven as much as Eugene, Oregon to shoot these few scenes—made up on the fly by screenwriter Doug Kenney particularly for the actor—then we might not have Belushi screaming “FOOD FIGHT!” We’d not have Tim Matheson delivering his rousing “futile and silly gesture” speech. And would The Isley Brothers’ “Shout” nonetheless be a karaoke/get together staple at present? Most likely, however the film helped. Animal Home was inducted into the Nationwide Movie Registry for preservation in 2001.
