ACME Animal House Filming Locations - College as it should have been

LOCATIONS
It was the Deltas against the rules... the rules lost!

FABER COLLEGE was founded in 1904 by Emil Faber, philanthropist, father of the modern American lead pencil and brother of Germany's Eberhard Faber. The campus, nestled in Pennsylvania's beautiful Saquatashog river valley, was once the site of the original Faber Pencil Works. The pencil mill was built in Faber because of the town's happy proximity to a natural graphite quarry, forests of virgin pencilwood trees, and plentiful wild eraser-root.
As the vogue for lead pencils grew, Emil Faber prospered. Now rich and powerful, he still regretted never having received a college diploma. Thus he funded the construction of FABER COLLEGE in the town he founded, and was soon granted an honorary doctorate in education from the college which, then as now, bears his name, Faber.

Because of the tight budget Universal Pictures allotted for Animal House (about $2.7 million), John Landis had to find a college campus for the filming. After 12 colleges in six states said "no" to filming the movie on their campuses, the University of Oregon (map, web site) President William P. Boyd agreed to let Landis use the Eugene campus without even reading the script first. Earlier in his career, as a dean at another school, Boyd turned down filming of The Graduate, saying it was vulgar and outrageous.

The location shooting had to be done in thirty days, which meant a six-day work week, if they wanted to stay within budget. Unlike most films, where only the exteriors are filmed on location and the interior scenes are done on a soundstage, the entire Animal House was filmed in Oregon, utilizing several campus interiors, along with a few interior sets filmed at the Armory.

The building used for the Delta House exteriors was located at 751 East 11th Ave. At the time, it was a halfway house for convicts. The building continued to fall into disrepair and was finally torn down in 1986. The bricks from the house were sold as souvenirs for $5 each. Today there is a stone with a plaque on the property that reads:

SITE OF THE HOME OF A.W. AND AMANDA PATTERSON. HE WAS A PIONEER
LANE COUNTY DOCTOR AND SURVEYER WHO PLATTED A GREATER PART OF EUGENE.
IN 1853, PATTERSON WAS ALSO A MEMBER OF THE OREGON LEGISLATURE AND
WAS INSTRUMENTAL IN ESTABLISHING THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON.
AMANDA PATTERSON CAME ACROSS THE GREAT PLAINS IN THE FIRST WAGON
TRAIN OF 1843. THEIR DAUGHTER, IDA, WAS A EUGENE SCHOOL PRINCIPAL.
IN THE 1950S AND 1960S THE HOUSE WAS USED BY A FRATERNITY AND
POPULARIZED IN THE LATE 1970S BY THE FILM "ANIMAL HOUSE"

The movie opens with Faber College freshmen roommates Larry Kroger and Kent Dorfman walking across campus to attend fraternity rush parties. As the credits roll, they leave Carson Hall, then walk past

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum Of Art building and on past

Johnson Hall, the university's administration building, is the school bulding where they took the horse. The scenes in Dean Wormer's office were filmed in the actual first floor office of William P. Boyd, the president of the University of Oregon.

Next Larry and Kent walk past the Knight Library with the statue of Emil Faber out front. The inscription on the statue read

EMIL FABER
FOUNDER - A.D.1904
KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD

The Phi Kappa Psi house at 729 E. 11th Ave., was used for both the exterior and interiors of the snooty Omega House. The house had fallen into disrepair long before filming in 1977 but Landis helped with further House repairs, and allowed them to keep the furniture used during the film production.

The Sigma Nu fraternity at 763 E. 11th Ave. was used for the Tri Pi sorority front exterior, where Greg Marmalard dropped off Mandy Pepperidge. Its interior was used as the home of Flounder, Otter, Bluto and the rest of the rebel Deltas. If they're hanging out on a Saturday afternoon, the friendly Sigma Nus may be happy to show you the stairs that D-Day climbed on his motorcycle and the dingy basement room that held the legendary toga party, a cavelike space that reeks of decades of beer.

The Fishbowl Dining Area, near Subway® in the Erb Memorial Union (EMU), was the location for the famous "zit" scene and subsequent food fight. The Fishbowl was also a convenient lunch spot for the cast and crew throughout the filming.

Room 110 in Fenton Hall was the site of the film's courtroom scene.

Gerlinger Hall stood in for fictitious Emily Dickinson College where Otter used Fawn Liebowitz' death in a kiln explosion as a ruse to get dates for himself and his three friends.

Room #6 at the Rainbow Motel is where some of the Omegas "do a little dance" on Otter's face. The motel is in Cottage Grove, at the north end of town. It had large fir trees in back, so it looked remote; but about 1990 the trees were removed. The photo at right shows the motel as it looks today. [Thanks, Matt!]

Clorette DePasto lived with her parents, Mayor and Mrs Carmine DePasto at 2160 Potter Street. [Thanks, again, Matt!]

Pinto and Clorette made out in the middle of Autzen Stadium while the other Deltas were building the Deathmobile.

The town of Dexter, home of the Dexter Lake Club (39128 Dexter Rd, Dexter, OR 97431), is about seventeen miles southeast of Eugene, off highway 58.

The Homecoming Parade scenes at the end of the movie were filmed on Main Street in Cottage Grove, Oregon (population 8,000), twenty-one miles south of Eugene on Interstate 5. The actors and production workers were big customers of The Bookmine, Cottage Grove's first bookstore. Director John Landis, a fan of children's story character Paddington bear, bought the store's entire supply of rubber Paddington pencil tops, 144 in all.

The University of Oregon campus has been used in several popular films before and since Animal House, including Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), Five Easy Pieces (1971), Stand By Me (1986) and Without Limits (1998). Stand By Me also had some scenes that were filmed in Cottage Grove, Oregon.