before hiring John Landis, who got the director job based on his work on Kentucky Fried Movie. That film's script and continuity supervisor was the girlfriend of Sean Daniel, an assistant to Mount. Daniel saw Landis' movie and recommended him. Landis then met with Mount, Reitman and Simmons and got the job. Landis remembered, "When I was given the script, it was the funniest thing I had ever read up to that time. But it was really offensive. There was a great deal of projectile vomiting and rape and all these things". Landis claims his big contribution to the film was that there "had to be good guys and bad guys. There can't just be bad guys, so there became a good fraternity and bad fraternity". There was also early friction between Landis and the writers because the director was a high-school dropout from Hollywood and they were all college graduates from the East Coast. Ramis recalled, "He sort of referred immediately to Animal House as 'my movie.' We'd been living with it for two years and we hated that". According to Landis, he drew inspiration from classic Hollywood comedies featuring the likes of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and the Marx Brothers. The initial cast was to feature Chevy Chase as Otter, Bill Murray as Boon, Brian Doyle-Murray as Hoover, Dan Aykroyd as D-Day, and John Belushi as Bluto, but only Belushi was interested. Chase turned the film down in favor of Foul Play; Landis, who wanted to cast unknown dramatic actors such as Bacon and Allen (the first film for both) instead of famous comedians, takes credit for subtly discouraging Chase by describing the cast as an "ensemble". Landis has also stated that he was not interested in directing a "Saturday Night Live movie" and that unknowns would be the better choice. The character of D-Day was based on Aykroyd, a motorcycle aficionado. Aykroyd was offered the part, but he was already committed to Saturday Night Live; according to Landis, the show's producer Lorne Michaels threatened to fire Aykroyd from the show's cast if he took the role of D-Day, which ultimately went to Bruce McGill and provided him with his breakthrough role. In August 2018, Aykroyd explained that although Michaels permitted him to do Animal House, he ultimately chose to stay behind on Saturday Night Live so as not to leave Michaels understaffed. Belushi, who had worked on