Landis, John 1950-

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LANDIS, John 1950-

PERSONAL: Born August 3, 1950, in Chicago, IL; son of Marshall David and Shirley (Magaziner) Landis; married Deborah Nadoolman (a costume designer), July 27, 1980; children: Rachel.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Universal Studios, Universal City, CA 91608. Agent—William Morris Agency, 151 El Camino Dr., Beverly Hills, CA 90212.

CAREER: Writer and director of motion pictures. Director of Schlock, 1973, Kentucky Fried Movie, 1977, National Lampoon's Animal House, 1978, The Blues Brothers, 1980, An American Werewolf in London, 1981, Trading Places, 1983, Into the Night, 1985, Spies Like Us, 1985, Three Amigos, 1986, Amazon Women on the Moon, 1987, Coming to America, 1988, Oscar,, 1991, Innocent Blood, 1992, Beverly Hills Cop III, 1994, The Stupids, 1996, Blues Brothers 2000, 1998, and Dying to Get Rich (also released as Susan's Plan), 2000; coproducer and codirector of Twilight Zone—The Movie, 1983. Also director of The Making of Thriller and of television series Dream On, 1990-94. Crew member of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) film Kelly's Heroes in Yugoslavia and stuntman for "spaghetti westerns" in Europe, 1971; stuntman in motion pictures Schlock and American Werewolf in London.

MEMBER: Writers Guild of America, Directors Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Board of Directors, American Lung Association of Los Angeles.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Jason Shindler and James Robert Parish)

The Best American Movie Writing 2001, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2001.

screenplays

Schlock, Jack Harris Enterprises, 1973.

(With Dan Aykroyd) The Blues Brothers, Universal, 1980.

An American Werewolf in London, Universal, 1981.

(Author of prologue and first episode) Twilight Zone—The Movie, Warner Brothers, 1983.

(With Jonathan Lynn) Clue, Paramount, 1985.

Blues Brothers 2000, Universal, 1998.

Dying to Get Rich, New Line Cinema, 2000.

SIDELIGHTS: John Landis attributes his initial success in the movie industry to good luck, but his cinematic achievements confirm a talent for creating widely popular and profitable motion pictures. Recognized for such pictures as National Lampoon's Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and Trading Places, Landis worked as a mailboy at Twentieth Century-Fox studios in Hollywood while still in his teens. He then went to Yugoslavia to act in Kelly's Heroes and later to Europe as a stuntman for several "spaghetti Westerns." Upon his return to Hollywood Landis began making his first film, Schlock, at the age of twenty-one. Intending to parody "schlocky" horror movies, Landis and twenty-year-old makeup artist Rick Baker collaborated to turn Landis's screenplay into a movie. For Landis's monster role, Baker used "chang-o-heads"—special-effect monster faces capable of metamorphosing on screen. The two planned at this time to reunite later to make An American Werewolf in London, which Landis had written in 1969.

Schlock attracted attention and led to Landis's guest appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. The airing of the program prompted David Zucker of Kentucky Fried Theatre to call Landis and enlist his aid for a movie he wanted to make. Kentucky Fried Movie, a collection of skits that satirizes television and contemporary culture, resulted from the liaison. In the New York Times Lawrence Van Gelder said: "Television is at once this movie's nourishment and onus. . . . It is little wonder . . . that The Kentucky Fried Movie . . . occasionally descends into tastelessness." Richard Schickel in his Time magazine review of the movie referred to some of the movie's skits as "self-parodying," but applauded the quality of the film's humor, saying: Kentucky Fried Movie offers "the hope that television is not bending to the breaking point all the young minds exposed to it. . . . There is a lot of good sense of humor in its assaults on television and the movies' sillier realms."

While still working on Kentucky Fried Movie, Landis began National Lampoon's Animal House, working with Harold Ramis, Chris Miller, and Doug Kenney to revise what he once referred to as the trio's "deeply offensive" script. Set in the early 1960s at the imaginary Faber College, Animal House documents the antagonism between two fraternity houses, Delta and Omega. In the New York Times Janet Maslin described the Deltas as "the kind of guys who bash beer cans against their foreheads, wheel their dates home in shopping carts and think they know the words to Louie, Louie, which they will sing in off-key unison at less than the slightest provocation." The wealthy, refined Omegas, according to David Denby in New York magazine, are "an even sorrier collection of murderously ambitious John Dean types with prom-queen girlfriends."

Some critics found Animal House to be somewhat offensive, but, as Landis predicted, "innocent" was also a term used to describe the film. Maslin said that while Animal House is "too cheerfully sleazy to be called tame, . . . the film makers have been smart enough to leaven each gross-out with an element of innocent fun." Vincent Canby, in his review for the New York Times, referred to the film as "cinematically sloppy" and full of "supposedly comic scenes that have no adequate punch lines," but nonetheless called the film "frequently very, very funny." Canby added that the film manages "to suggest the sublime, if sometimes infantile joys of chaos and disorder without seriously questioning the system that contains them." Newsweek reviewers Tony Schwartz and Janet Huck called Animal House "smart-ass, gloatingly salacious, everything but uptight, . . . good old college humor—brought back with a vengeance. The enemy in Animal House is not so much Faber College Dean Vernon, who wants to ban the appalling Delta House from campus, or even the goody-goodies at Omega House. It's the more revolting prospect of growing up."

Also a record-setting, box-office hit, Landis's next movie, The Blues Brothers, pitted the musical team of Jake and Elwood Blues (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd) against government, tradition, and order. Jake and Elwood, on a "mission from God," try to save their former orphanage from foreclosure. In the course of fulfilling their duty, they are chased by and successfully evade "all the policemen in Illinois, the American Nazi Party, a troupe of country-western singers and a vengeful ex-girl friend abandoned at the altar," according to Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice.

Despite the commercial success of The Blues Brothers, the movie garnered mixed reviews from film critics. In New York magazine, Denby wrote that the movie, "though often funny and always good-natured, is a bit sloppy. . . . The film has the talent, but the timing is uneven and the editing a bit indulgent." Several critics mentioned that the appearances of Aretha Franklin and Cab Calloway, both of whom perform blues songs in the film, are too short. In reference to Franklin's sequence, Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker that the movie is "good-natured, in a sentimental, folk-bop way, but . . . the sequence that's really alive is relatively small scale." Denby summed up his impression of the movie by saying "The Blues Brothers leaves us feeling dazed, grateful, and frustrated all at once."

Landis's next movie, produced in 1981, features lycanthropic transformations in full gory detail. An American Werewolf in London, which, like Schlock, employs Rick Baker's makeup innovations and special effects, elicited high praise from critics and viewers. In News-week Jack Kroll wrote: Connoisseurs "of monstrous metamorphosis will be thrilled . . . by the scene in which [David] . . . is transformed into a werewolf. None of your hoary 1940s lapdissolves here: you actually see and hear [his] face convulse, bones cracking, features erupting into a snout, ears sharpening to points, claws popping from fingers, follicles sprouting into the hairy hide of a snarling carnivore."

A curious mixture of humor and gore, American Werewolf, like Landis's previous films, was noted for its ability to turn stomachs, but audiences appreciated its occasional glimpses of human fallibility. A reviewer in New York magazine wrote: "The sweetness of Landis's comic method is in imagining how people might try to stay human in completely bizarre situations." Gene Siskel in a review for the Chicago Tribune noted that "what is special about the film is its totally realistic style. . . . The film makes even a conversation between a dead man and a living person thoroughly plausible." Concerning the film's horrific aspects, Newsweek's Kroll described the face of the victim of a werewolf bite as "in an advanced state of putrefaction, liquefaction and general yukkifaction," and Siskel called the film "needlessly gross." "The movie mocks the creaking romantic mysticism of the old horror flicks," Kroll added, "while being infinitely more horrific than they ever were." According to a reviewer for New York, American Werewolf is "one of the rare horror movies that give off good vibes. Couples came out of the theater laughing, and walked down Broadway yelping and howling at each other."

Landis's Trading Places is a contemporary prince-and-the-pauper tale set in Philadelphia. The film lets the audience in on a secret wager between two old billionaires, Randolph and Mortimer Duke. To settle their argument over the influence of heredity versus environment, the brothers arrange for a poor street hustler (Eddie Murphy) and a rich young investment counselor (Dan Aykroyd) to temporarily live each other's day-to-day life. As a New York reviewer described the story, "Arm in arm with the powerful Duke brothers, the beautifully dressed Eddie Murphy looks like a genius, and his street-smarts are taken for extraordinary financial acumen. . . . Dan Aykroyd can't speak three words in his cultivated accent without being laughed at or beaten up."

Reviewing Trading Places for Newsweek, David Ansen found the movie predictable but nonetheless humorous. He said that the "twists" are "telegraphed far in advance," but that he and everyone around him "laughed almost continuously." Richard Schickel remarked in Time that Trading Places is "one of the most emotionally satisfying and morally gratifying comedies of recent times. . . . It has powerful persuasiveness when it moves the audience to the wilder shores of farce." And a reviewer for the Nation commented: Trading Places "advances the proposition that money makes the man, and it finds it to be both true and delightful."

Landis's Twilight Zone—The Movie, released in the same year as Trading Places, is presented in five parts and was modeled after Rod Serling's television series of the same name. Four directors—Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller—collaborated on the film, which Washington Post reviewer Gary Arnold described as "an exhilarating flight of fancy." Landis wrote and directed the prologue and the first segment of Twilight Zone. Critics liked the prologue but found Landis's episode weaker than the other three. In the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel wrote, "It's a shame the entire movie isn't as funny or as frightening as the prologue."

Landis's episode tells the tale of a bigot who is made to undergo prejudicial treatment: discriminated against in turn by all the groups for whom he has harbored hostility. During the filming of the segment, actor Vic Morrow actually lost his life on the set when two explosives, set off too early, resulted in damage to a low-flying helicopter which crashed onto Morrow and the two children he was carrying. Landis and four of his associates were indicted on charges of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the incident, the major issue being whether they were criminally negligent. The trial began in July of 1986, with all five defendants pleading not guilty, maintaining that the accident was "unforeseeable" and that it should not involve criminal negligence charges. Landis and his codefendants were subsequently acquitted. In the wake of these events, the film industry has made serious efforts to improve the safety of movie sets.

Following the tragic events of Twilight Zone, Landis continued to direct and received moral support from other directors, several of whom made cameo appearances in his 1985 films Into the Night and Spies Like Us. A mystery story with comedic elements, Spies Like Us follows two bumbling espionage agents around the globe as they serve as decoys to draw attention away from a pair of competent spies. Brian D. Johnson said in Maclean's that Spies Like Us "satirizes a panorama of movie cliches—from the orchestral surges of the score of Dr. Zhivago to the military madness of Dr. Strangelove. . . . Although the humour is sophomoric, the satire is often on target." Maslin wrote in the New York Times that the film is extravagant and created in the "oversized, overpriced New Comedy mode," but conceded that it features "some inspired clowning," "funny antics," and "affable" stars.

Into the Night, also a film about "intrigue," has a surrealistic twist. The protagonist, Ed Okin, suffering from insomnia, depression, and an unfaithful wife, drives to the Los Angeles airport during a sleepless night. While he sits in his car and contemplates an escape, he is jolted from reverie by a woman who, chased by several men, runs to his car for safety. What ensues is a journey "into the night, . . . a world alternately nightmarish, sexy, farcical, [and] as sleep-inducing as twenty shots of caffeine," noted Michael Wilmington in his review for the Los Angeles Times. New York Times critic Vincent Canby found the gore excessive in Into the Night, calling it "a supposedly lighthearted caper comedy in which throats are slit, chests are stabbed, stomachs are shot, and artificial blood flows like beer at a fraternity house on homecoming weekend." Despite the violence, sensitivity and depth of character are also apparent in this film, according to David Ansen, who in Newsweek wrote that, "For the first time in a Landis movie, real pain reaches the surface."

In 1998 Landis wrote and directed Blues Brothers 2000, with Dan Aykroyd reprising his Elwood character and John Goodman standing in as Mighty Mack McTeer. Landis and cowriter Aykroyd had a lot of scripting problems to solve in a sequel made eighteen years after the original. The convention is that Elwood has just been released from prison eighteen years after the mayhem of the first Blues Brothers. He finds out that not only his partner Jake but also their surrogate father-figure Cab Calloway are now dead. Undeterred, Elwood puts the band together one more time. "Predictably," wrote Joe Leydon in Variety, "much of the pic plays like a smudged carbon of the original. Just about every character and plot complication from the first pic has some sort of equivalent here; again there's a subplot involving a group of nasty right-wing zealots, this time a radical militia group."

In Dying to Get Rich Landis again tackled an "adult" movie, and again achieved mixed results. A black comedy, the film is based on a classic premise: Susan (Nastassia Kinski) conspires with her lover to murder her ex-husband for insurance money—although they have been divorced for three years, she is still named as his beneficiary on the insurance policy. The conspiratorial lovers locate two morons who somehow bungle the job, and the film evolves into a snowballing conspiracy to finish him off.

In 2001 Landis branched out into film criticism. The Best American Movie Writing 2001, edited by Landis, Jason Shindler, and James Robert Parish, is an eclectic selection of the year's best writing about the movies. "Most of the essays are political, and generally have a progressive, edgy tone," commented a contributor in Publishers Weekly. Although the collection was considered lightweight and without serious, analytical criticism, Gordon Flagg wrote in Booklist that "Landis's choices may appeal to more readers than would the kind of selections that cineastes might approve."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 26, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television, Volume 25, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Halliwell, Leslie, Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion, 9th edition, Scribner (New York, NY), 1988.

Pendergast, Tom, and Sara Pendergast, editors, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

periodicals

American Film, May, 1982.

Booklist, December 15, 2001, Gordon Flagg, review of The Best American Movie Writing 2001, p. 695.

Chatelaine, July, 1991, Gina Mallet, review of Oscar, p. 43.

Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1983.

Entertainment Weekly, March 12, 1993, Ty Burr, review of Innocent Blood, p. 70; June 3, 1994, Owen Glieberman, review of Beverly Hills Cop III, p. 34; November 11, 1994, Glenn Kenny, review of Beverly Hills Cop III, p. 89; September 13, 1996, Bruce Fretts, review of The Stupids, p. 116.

Kirkus Reviews, November, 2001, review of The BestAmerican Movie Writing 2001, p. 1534.

Library Journal, December, 2001, Stephen Rees, review of The Best American Movie Writing 2001, p. 125.

Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1983; February 22, 1985; November 20, 1986; February 18-20, 1987; April 26, 1991, Daniel Cerone, article on John Landis, p. F1; September 2, 1996, Kevin Thomas, review of The Stupids, p. 6; February 6, 1998, Jack Mathews, review of Blues Brothers 2000, p. 6.

Maclean's, June 30, 1980; March 4, 1985; December 23, 1985; May 6, 1991, Victor Dywer, review of Oscar, p. 53.

Monthly Film Bulletin, November, 1981.

Nation, July 19-26, 1980; July 23-30, 1983; March 16, 1998, Stuart Klawans, review of Blues Brothers 2000, p. 34.

New Statesman, August 5, 1998, Suzanne Moore, review of Coming to America, p. 44.

Newsweek, August 7, 1978; October 2, 1978; October 23, 1978; September 7, 1981; June 20, 1983; June 27, 1983; March 11, 1985.

New York, July 31, 1978; June 30, 1980; September 14, 1981; July 25, 1988, David Denby, review of Coming to America, p. 44; June 6, 1994, David Denby, review of Beverly Hills Cop III, p. 53.

New Yorker, August 14, 1978; June 30, 1980; July 7, 1980; July 11, 1983.

New York Times, August 11, 1977; July 28, 1978; November 19, 1978; December 3, 1980; August 21, 1981; June 27, 1983; December 4, 1983; February 2, 1984; February 12, 1984; May 9, 1984; February 23, 1985; December 6, 1985; July 23, 1986; September 4, 1986; November 30, 1986; December 2, 1986; December 7, 1986; February 19, 1987; September 25, 1992, Janet Maslin, review of Innocent Blood, p. C6; May 25, 1994, Caryn James, review of Beverly Hills Cop III, p. C16; November 25, 1994, Peter M. Nichols, review of Beverly Hills Cop III, p. D18; August 31, 1996, Lawrence van Gelder, review of The Stupids, p. 16; February 6, 1998, Lawrence van Gelder, review of Blues Brothers 2000, p. E14; June 29, 1998, Vincent Canby, review of Coming to America, p. C20.

People, August 4, 1980; July 18, 1983; February 25, 1985; July 9, 1990, David Hiltbrand, review of Dream On, p. 9; October 12, 1992, Ralph Novak, review of Innocent Blood, p. 20.

Premiere, March, 1991, Kitty Bowe Hearty, review of Oscar, p. 12.

PR Newswire, June 30, 2000, interview with Landis.

Publishers Weekly, November 12, 2001, review of TheBest American Writing 2001, p. 47.

Rolling Stone, August 7, 1980; July 7, 1983; June 30, 1994, Peter Travers, review of Beverly Hills Cop III, p. 81.

Saturday Review, March, 1985.

Sight and Sound, September 1991, Philip Strick, review of Oscar, p. 43; August 1993, Trevor Johnston, review of Innocent Blood, p. 43; July 1994, Ben Thompson, review of Beverly Hills Cop III, p. 38; October 1996, Geoffrey Macnab, review of The Stupids, p. 52; July, 1998, Geoffrey Macnab, review of Blues Brothers 2000, p. 36.

Time, August 29, 1977; June 13, 1983; June 6, 1994, Richard Schickel, review of Beverly Hills Cop III, p. 66.

Variety, June 29, 1988, review of Coming to America, p. 13; April 29, 1991, review of Oscar, p. 91; March 24, 1994, Michael Dare, interview with Landis; May 30, 1994, Richard Natale, review of Beverly Hills Cop III, p. 42; February 9, 1998, Joe Leydon, review of Blues Brothers 2000, p. 70; November 2, 1998, Leonard Klady, review of Dying to Get Rich, p. 50.

Village Voice, July 2, 1980.

Washington Post, June 24, 1983; December 13, 1985.