The director of Animal House and Trading Places talks topless scenes.
The porno theater scenes for An American Werewolf in London
When I wrote Werewolf in 1969, London had all these “cartoon” cinemas. There were twelve of them – one in Victoria Station, Leicester Square, Picadilly Circus. They showed cartoons and newsreels and were for parents to drop off their kids when they were shopping on High Street. Back then, they were showing Road Runner cartoons. When I came back in 1981 to shoot the film, it had become a porno theater, and that was the only change in the script, so I said we’ve got to shoot this porno. It’s making fun of those English “Whoops! My Knickers!”-type movies, the really silly stupid ones they made in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I remember the first day of shooting the movie, we shot the porno, and I just remember the Werewolf crew looking around and thinking, “What the fuck kind of movie are we doing?” Boom mike in the shot? Don’t worry about it!
The coming attraction preview for Catholic High School Girls In Trouble in Kentucky Fried Movie
I knew it was going to be silly. That was meant to be as outrageous as possible. Most of those girls were girls who did those movies — Uschi Digard, the girl in the shower, was a Russ Meyer girl — so they had no problem.
Jamie Lee Curtis’ topless scene in Trading Places
You don’t want to make your actress uncomfortable, so for that brief scene it was closed set. I also knew that she had such an amazing body that the moment would stop traffic, which it kind of does.
John Belushi’s Peeping Tom scene in National Lampoon’s Animal House
That scene is so shameless. There’s no way around it! John’s looking in the window – in the script, it says that Mandy slowly puts her hands in her panties and starts to masturbate, and I’m thinking, “What the fuck — I have no — this is so – “ and I realized that when I was shooting it, there was inspiration on the set, and that was John. He was such a communicator with his face that I had him break the fourth wall to the audience and do that eyebrow, and essentially he made everyone a co-conspirator! It just took the edge off. I was blessed with John Belushi.