Miller, Chris 1942-

views updated

Miller, Chris 1942-

PERSONAL:

Born 1942; children: Jack. Education: Dartmouth College, B.A., 1963; Tuck School of Business Administration, M.B.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Venice, CA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Author and screenwriter. Former advertising copywriter; National Lampoon, New York, NY, contributing editor, 1971-96.

WRITINGS:

(With Doug Kenney and Harold Ramis) Animal House (screenplay), Universal, 1978.

Club Paradise (screenplay), Warner Bros., 1986.

Multiplicity (screenplay), Columbia, 1986.

The Real Animal House: The Awesomely Depraved Saga of the Fraternity That Inspired the Movie, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to Playboy, National Lampoon, Rolling Stone, Screw, SV Entertainment, Wall Street Journal, and Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS:

A former copywriter for an ad agency, Chris Miller earned recognition in the 1970s as a short-story writer for National Lampoon. His most popular series of stories was based on his experiences as a fraternity brother at Dartmouth College, and Miller used the material to eventually write a screenplay with National Lampoon colleagues Doug Kenney and Harold Ramis. The result was 1978's immensely popular movie Animal House. Nearly thirty years after the movie's release, and more than forty years after his own ribald fraternity days, Miller wrote an uncensored account of his time with Alpha Delta Phi, titled The Real Animal House: The Awesomely Depraved Saga of the Fraternity That Inspired the Movie. Christopher Buckley, writing for the New York Times Book Review, commented: "His book is sophomoric, disgusting, tasteless, vile, misogynist, chauvinist, debased and at times so unspeakably revolting that any person of decent sensibility would hurl it into the nearest Dumpster. I couldn't put it down…. [It] also manages somehow to be elegiac. How Miller accomplishes that is beyond me, but he does. By the end, he has you—depraved me, at any rate—almost sighing for the good old days. Polymorphously perverse it may have been, still it all sounds like it was a blast." Booklist reviewer David Pitt described the account as "loud, raucous, infantile, racy, and very funny."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 2006, David Pitt, review of The Real Animal House: The Awesomely Depraved Saga of the Fraternity That Inspired the Movie, p. 15.