“Officials giving movie ‘bad reviews.’”
That was the headline of a newspaper article on June 1, 1978, the day National Lampoon’s Animal House was released. And it wasn’t talking about critical reception, either. The movie has a 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Time and Roger Ebert called it one of the year’s best and it still  routinely gets put on Top 100 comedy film lists.
This headline was talking about University of Oregon officials, who had signed a deal with Universal Studios that they wouldn’t make the location of Animal House’s filming public.
If you’ve seen Animal House, it’s not hard to imagine why the university would be eager to protect its name. Written by Harold Ramis of Ghostbusters and two other National Lampoon writers, based on their experiences in fraternities, this movie is full of anti-establishment high jinks, pranks and academically undesirable fraternity behavior.
Though Animal House was a spin-off of National Lampoon magazine, the magazine had not signed a similar agreement with the UO to not release anything. In one of its advertisements for the film, National Lampoon revealed that Animal House was filmed at the UO. The university was frustrated but also helpless to do anything about it, because its contract was with Universal Studios and not National Lampoon.
At the time the movie was filming, local news had covered it as well (university officials said this was because it was a “dull” season for news), so it was not possible for the UO to keep the information embargoed.
This wasn’t actually the first time the UO faced a problem like this. Eight years earlier, Jack Nicholson directed a film called “Drive, He Said,” filmed on the UO campus, and the same thing had happened.
University spokesperson Muriel Jackson ended the article by saying the university wasn’t too worried about the entire thing.
“I trust that we are sufficiently regarded academically so we haven’t sustained any damage because of it,” Jackson said.