January 8, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Mark Metcalf is best known for his role as the sadistic ROTC officer Douglas C. Neidermeyer in the 1978 comedy Animal House. He is also known for playing the role of “The Maestro” on the hit sitcom Seinfeld as well as for his recurring role as “The Master” on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Mark's life story is as large as the characters he portrays.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
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and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
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and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
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Speaker 2 (00:24):
There are some of our favorites.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Mark Metcalf as an actor, often identified as playing the
role of an antagonist. He is best known for his
role as the sadistic ROTC officer Douglas C. Niedermeyer in
the nineteen seventy eight comedy Animal House, a character he
later emulated in the nineteen eighty four music videos for
the songs We're Not Going to Take It and I
(00:46):
Want a Rock by the heavy metal hair band Twisted Sister.
He is also known for playing the role of the
Maestro on the hit sitcom Seinfeld. Mark Metcalf sat down
with Greg Hangler and shared his story.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Here's Mark.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
I was born in Findlay, Ohio, which is the home
of Tasty Tators and where Ben Roethlisberg grew up and
lived in fact in Hancock County, where Findlay, Ohio is,
which is about seventy five miles south of Toledo. I'm
the second most famous person to ever come out of Findlay, Ohio.
According to the Chamber of Commerce or whoever makes those
(01:23):
things up, Ben Roethlisberg is number one, and I'm number two,
but that's all right, I'll take number two. So I
was born there. My mom was from Ohio and my
dad was from Missouri Saint Louis, and they met during
the war in forty five.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I guess.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
My mother was a wave and she was decoding messages
in an office in Washington, DC. My dad, who had
served most of the war on a carrier in the Pacific,
was back doing some intelligence work, analysis and things like that.
My mother lived in a house. She used to tell
this story. My mother lived in a house with five
(02:04):
other women, all involved in the war effort, and my
father used to come up to their house for dinner,
and every one of the women except my mother, thought
that he was going to ask one of them to
marry them. He was a good looking guy, and he
(02:24):
was in uniform, and he was a smart guy and
a nice guy, and they all thought except for my mother.
She thought because she was kind of tall and a
little gawky, and they never thought that he would ask her.
But he asked her, and my mother one time showed
me the house where I was conceived in Washington, and
(02:46):
I was really surprised, but she proudly told me, pointed
out the house on a little street in Chevy Chase
you work, and said you were conceived in that house.
So it's nice to know where you started.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Ah. And so after I.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Was born, and then I went back to Saint Louis
because my father had a job when he got out
of the Navy, he had a job with a engineering
He had graduated from University of Wisconsin Madison in engineering.
Graduated early. I think he was twenty when he graduated,
went to school at sixteen. He was a real smart guy.
He worked on the crew at furgerif from Parcel that
designed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, which is a twenty
(03:28):
three mile long combination bridge and tunnel across the mouth
of the Chesapeake Bay. National Geographic called it the eighth
engineering wonder of the world. And he was put in
charge of all the tunnel work, and he became the
kind of engineer who at one point was called the
(03:49):
world's foremost expert on tunnels. And I hung out with him.
There are two shipping channels in and out of the
mouth of Chesapeake Bay. They couldn't build bridge over them
because they were the navy shipping channels. All the Norfolk
warships come in and out of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.
So they had to build tunnels under these because if
(04:11):
you build a bridge over it, the enemy could bomb
the bridge into the into the channel and block it.
So they had to So they had to build four islands,
and then they brought the tunnel tubes up from Texas
on big barges and then they filled them with water
and sank them put them into the It was kind
(04:31):
of an amazing engineering feed and that inspired me in
a lot of ways to go to college as engineer.
I went to the University of Michigan and quickly discovered
that engineering was not really for me. It was a
little dry, but I didn't know how dry it was
(04:55):
until I got my roommate my sophomore year, I had
come audition for a couple of plays. They're doing the
three parts of Henry the sixth, and the girls are
really friendly in the theater department. That's what he told me,
and he was right. The girls were a lot friendly
in the theater department. And I got cast and I
(05:15):
think fifteen different parts, and that kind of hooked me
because it seemed like everybody in the Metcalf background was
either a minister Congregationalist minister, or a librarian or an engineer.
So I went from that rather dry atmosphere to these
(05:36):
theater backstage in the theater where everybody's yelling and screaming
at each other one minute and making out passionately the
next minute, and so it's like, oh, brave New world,
what creatures are they here? As Miranda says at the
end of the Tempest, it was really kind of magnificent
in an eye opener, and I got stuck in it,
and I've been doing it ever since. So I just
(05:57):
got it, and I really got into theater. I never
thought i'd get a degree in it. I changed from
engineering to architecture because it was a little bit more creative.
You had to claim a major, so I claimed English
was my major for a while, Psychology was my major
for a while for three was my major for a while,
And I ended up with my degree in theater because
(06:21):
it was the only thing I was taking classes in.
I just stopped going to classes except for theater classes.
In fact, they tried to flunk me out because my
grades were so bad, and the theater department, all the
teachers in the theater department wrote letters to the teachers
in the English department, the teachers in the French department,
the teachers all the classes I was failing because I
(06:42):
wasn't going and they say, you can't fail him.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
You've got to.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Give him, get him a tutor. We'll get him a tutor,
get him a passing grade, because we need him to
do plays. So I became like a theater jock the
way football players got to take the easiest classes, and
I got automatic a's because they were on a football
team at University of Michigan anyway. And that's how I
got my degree. And I'm ashamed of that. Oh I'm
(07:10):
not that ashamed of it. I'm a little embarrassed by it.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
And you're listening to Mark Metcalf tell his story. We
continue with his story here on Our American Stories. Folks,
if you love the great American stories we tell and
(07:33):
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Go to Our American Stories dot com now and go
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(07:53):
American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And
we're back with our American Stories and with Mark Metcalf's story.
Starting off as an engineering major, an English major, a
(08:16):
forestream major. I didn't know there was such a thing.
And ultimately, well he becomes, as he put it, a
theater jock, being bailed out by all the folks in
the theater department who wanted to save him from his
own academic failings. And Mark Metcalf, by the way, well
you know him as Nieda Meyer an Animal House and
(08:37):
you've seen him in Twisted Sister videos, the Maestro in
Seinfeld and the Master in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Let's continue with Mark Metcalf's story.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
When I graduated, I actually wanted to go to graduate
school because I wanted to learn more about the theater.
But also I didn't want to go to Vietnam. I
didn't think the war was a great thing, but primarily
I didn't want to go fight it because I thought
I'd be really good at it. I knew enough about
myself to know that I was good at taking orders
and good at giving orders. So I fit in that
(09:11):
military hierarchy like a cog in that wheel. And I
didn't want to become that guy, so I acted him.
Later on, when I did Niedermeier, I sort of acted
that guy because I knew where that guy lived inside me,
and I thought I would be good at it, but
I didn't want to become him. I wanted to become
(09:33):
something else. I didn't know what it was, but I
wanted to become something else. So when I graduated, I
just took off for the West Coast. I hitchhiked. I
got one straight one ride all the way to San
Francisco from ann Arbor. Guy I can't remember his name,
but he had a nineteen forty eight pickup truck that
(09:54):
you had to jumpstart every time he started it. So
whenever we stopped for gas, we had to try to
find a gas station where you could push it pretty
easily to jump started. Whenever we stopped for the night
and slept in the back, which is what we did,
or camped, we had to park it on the hill,
so we'd get up in the morning and jump started
really easily, and it ran out of oil about every
(10:18):
one hundred and twenty miles, so we had to carry
oil with us. We were real cowboys. We had a
great time, but we took us two weeks or so
to get across the country to San Francisco. We dropped
me off in San Francisco because that's where I thought
the Summer of Love was nineteen sixty eight. It turns
out the Summer of Love was nineteen sixty seven, and
(10:39):
by sixty eight it had gotten pretty sour. The day
before I arrived on hate Ashbury, two kids had died
because somebody had sold them acid that was draino, just
a capsule, and it was draino and ate through their
stomach and they died. So it was not a wasn't
(11:00):
peace loved granola. It was it was the dirty side
of being a hippie. I stayed there for a while.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
And then I.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Hitchhiked down to la and then I felt like I
needed to keep moving because the draft board was still
looking for me. I guess I didn't talk to my
parents so I didn't want them to know where I
was because my parents were the kind of people that
would have told the draft Board where I was so
they could come and get me. And I didn't want
to be gotten, so I hitchhiked up to I mean,
(11:32):
I drove up to Portland first and then took a
write and went out to Mount Hood. But I got
a job as the assistant in the rental and repair shop,
so I had to learn how to repair skis. After
i'd been there for a couple of months, I was
skiing on rental skis and I had a pair of
skis back home with my parents in my parents' house
in New Jersey. So I contacted my parents and I
(11:56):
asked them if they'd send my headmasters, and they did,
but they put in the box with the skis, they
put the letter from the draft Board saying you have
to show up at a certain time and a certain
date in Newark, New Jersey for your physical And this
is kind of person that I was then and still
(12:17):
I am. Probably my figuring was that if I never
got the letter, it didn't matter. But once I had
the letter, I had to do it, so.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
But I didn't.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I really didn't want to do it, so I tried
to get into Canada. I tried to walk into Canada.
I got to ride up to the way up in
the Panhandle, got to ride a little north of there,
and then I got out and I just thought, well,
i'll walk. Canada's just over there on the map, you know,
like an inch away, one hundred miles. I can walk
one hundred miles through the wilderness. I've been living in
(12:50):
the wilderness. But no, it's real tough country up there.
So I hitchhiked back closer towards Seattle. I thought, well,
I'll go across on a road rather than try to
cross in the middle of the wilderness. And I got
to the border, and Bob Schmaltz, knowing I was trying
(13:10):
to get out of the country, had given me his
driver's license, and not his passport, but his driver's license,
and I think I even had a birth certificate of his.
But I changed my name because I figured in my
stone paranoid state that the government would be looking for
me at the border. That's why I had to sneak across.
(13:31):
So I tried to go across as Bob Schmaltz. But
I got turned away at the border because they found
my two different sets of ID as Bob Schmaltz and
as Mark Metcalf, and they didn't want me in Canada
because I looked bad and I was, you know, I was.
I had long hair down the middle of my back,
dirty on the road, I wore high fringed moccasins. I was,
(13:55):
you know, I was a hippie. So I hitchhiked back
to New Jersey. I didn't have a lot of guys
from my high school were there at the same time,
and they all had briefcases filled with letters from doctors
about their bone spurs or whatever else they might have
(14:15):
had that kept them from going to Vietnam. And I
didn't have any of that stuff. But I was just
really crazy and they saw that right away and they
gave me a four F so I didn't have to
worry about it anymore. So they had these auditions in
Chicago for regional theaters all over the country, and I
(14:38):
did that and they got offered a job at Milwaukee REP.
So I went to Milwaukee and did a season up there,
and when that season was over, they didn't hire anybody back,
and so I didn't know where to go or what
to do, and a bunch of the people that had
been working there were from New York and were heading
(14:59):
to New York to try to work in the theater
New York, and I just went to New York. And
so for the next twenty five years I lived on
Saint Mark's Place between First and A from nineteen seventy
until nineteen ninety three, so I guess twenty twenty three years.
The first five years I was in New York, I
(15:19):
didn't want to do movies or TV. I just said
nod all that because it was beneath me. I was
a stage actor. I wanted to do Shakespeare and Chekhov
and Ibsen and people like that, but they pay you
nice money. And the first movie I ever did, I
was doing a play on Broadway called Streamers, and somebody
(15:40):
saw it and they had me come in an audition
for I didn't even have to audition. I just had
to meet with the producer and the director, Fred Zinnemann
directed it. It was a movie called Julia. They were
going to shoot it in England. I only had three days.
It was a one scene part with Jane Fonda, and
(16:00):
I quit the play. I was doing the play Streamers
in New York for Joe papp and I lived in
England for six weeks. I worked for three days, they
paid me for six weeks. I thought, this is what
the movies were always like. You got to go to
fancy places, they paid way too much money, and you
got to do work that was just plain fun. And
(16:22):
so I thought the movies were like that. So I
started saying yes to movies. It turns out they're not
all like that, but they're mostly fun for the most part.
The next one I did was Animal House. A friend
of mine named John Hurd. He and I lived across
the street from each other. I was living with a
woman named Pamela Reid, an actress, was engaged to marrier,
(16:43):
and he was living with a wonderful woman named Patricia Triani.
And we went to see a play in Central Park.
But we took a picnic, and Pamela and Patricia made
potato salad and fried chicken and it was a real
American feast. And while we're sitting there outside the theater,
(17:04):
this big, heavy guy with long hair, big face comes
walking towards us. And John Heard, who had lived in
Chicago and worked in Chicago for a while. He had
met John there because John had been working at Second
City there, so he said, hey, John, come on over,
and nobody knew who John Blushi was, but we invited
him to sit down, have some chicken if you want.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
What are you doing?
Speaker 1 (17:28):
And you've been listening to the story of Mark Metcalf
and what a story indeed, from hippie trying to escape
the draft to actually going to Newark for all the
right reasons and somehow avoiding becoming that person, that guy
he didn't want to be. When we come back more
of the life story of Mark Metcalf here on our
(17:49):
American Stories. And we're back with our American Stories and
the story of Mark Metcalf. Let's pick up where we
(18:10):
left off with Mark telling the story of bumping into
then unknown John Belushi while enjoying a picnic with his
friend John Hurd, who by the way, is the father
in the movie Home Alone and their girlfriend in New
York City. Here again is Mark Metcalf.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
And he starts to tell us his story about how
they wanted him to do this live sketch comedy show
on television late night eleven thirty on Saturday night Saturday
nights and Lorne Michael's This Crazy Guy I wanted to
do it, and Belushi said, and I don't want to
do it. I went in there to see him, and
(18:49):
I told him, I don't want to work in the system.
I want to work outside the system. I want to
tear the system down because the system is evil and bad.
And Lorne Michael said, very calmly, while Belushi is ranting
and Raving said, well, the best way to tear the
system down is to work inside the system. So why
don't you do this? Because this is not a system
kind of thing. So he was trying to make up
(19:10):
his mind whether to do this thing or not. And
he must have talked for forty five minutes. We'd sat
there for an hour listening to him. We'd say, John,
it's TV, it's money. How can you turn it down?
It's live TV, and you do sketch comedy. He met,
It's just like doing theater. What a great thing. He'd say, yeah,
I know, but I'm working for NBC and I want
to work for those guys. And we noticed he finally
(19:33):
got up and just kept going. He hadn't made up
his mind about anything. We hadn't changed his mind. We
were just listening and talking and having a conversation about
this kind of what this theater would be like, this
thing would be like. But we noticed after he walked
away that the fried chicken was all gone and the
potatoes album was all gone. He talked all this time
(19:54):
and eaten everything that we had. That was the first
time I ever met John Beluci. And then I went
and I did Animal House. I was sent into audition
for the Matheson part for Otter, the guy who got
all the girls. I thought that would be great, That's
who I really wanted to be. But as soon as
I walked through the door, Landis, the director, looked at
(20:15):
me and said, do you know how to ride? And
I said, without missing a beat, I said yeah. I
was practically born on a horse. My mother's water broke
when she was out on a trail ride and our
ranch in Montana, and she slid off the horse. My
father helped her off. He delivered the baby right there
in the shade of the horse, and then we got
back on the horse and I was in my mom's
arms and we rode back in and Landis looked at
(20:37):
me and said, yeah, sure he knew I was lying.
I'd made the whole thing up, so I told him
five more lies about how I knew how to ride,
and the next day he called me and said, I
want you to do this part. He must have liked
the way I lied or something, but I said, oh great, okay, good.
(20:58):
Do you think you can get Universal again? Give me
some money so I can learn how to ride. So
Landi's cast me without me actually having the audition. I
didn't have to read lines, but I did have to
prove that I would be all right to the executives
at Universal. So he said, it's just a formal thing.
You just got to come in and do the audition.
(21:18):
And I read with Michael Chinich, who was the casting director,
who was a great guy. It was his casting that
put all these people together. Him and Landis that put
this group of people together. The chemistry was so good.
So he played flounder and I got to and I
had to script in my hand, even though I didn't
need it because I knew the lines. But I got
(21:39):
to beat him with the script, and he had fun
to because I'll always remember him trying not to crack
up as I was beating him and yelling at him
and spitting on him. Because we did that scene Tuck
up those pajamas. Is that a pledge pit on your uniform?
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (21:59):
So he did all this so that that was the process.
And then and they told me I had.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
It fact disgusting slum.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
Redo those buttons, dress that belt buckle, straighten it cap
and touch up those pajamas.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
What's that on your chest?
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Mister?
Speaker 4 (22:24):
It's a place pincer clench pin on your uniform.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
So, uh, you can't go away. John Landis had all
the Delta House guys, Blushie, Jamie Widows, Bruce McGill as
d Day, Matheson, Otter Boone, Regert had them all come
out five days early before they started shooting, and then
(22:53):
had the omegas. Myself and Jimmy Dawton come out later,
and Kevin Bacon, I think, came out just for a
couple of days near the end. But I was there
for the full thirty two days. I didn't shoot every day.
I had allot of free time. But when you get
to a movie set, the first thing you do is
go to the production manager's office and get your per diem,
(23:13):
so you've got some money to get out of town
if they change their mind. So I went in there
and Peter mcgagor Scott, who was the production manager, gave
me my per diem, and then he said, John Landis
is over in the coffee shop and the roadway in
across the parking lot from where we were staying. He
(23:33):
wants to see you right away, So leave your stuff
here and go on over there and see John. You'll
recognize him because you saw him when he auditioned, right
And I said, yeah, sure. So I went across the
parking lot, went into this crowded coffee shop and I
see John in the corner at a table at a booth,
and I start walking towards him and wave to John,
and John waves and waves me come on over. I
(23:56):
get about ten or fifteen feet away from the table,
and land As says, that's him, that's Niedermeyer.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Get him.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
And they start throwing food at me, real food at me,
and yelling at me and calling me names in the
middle of this crowded That was my introduction to animal House.
So I went I knowing it was all a gag,
and understanding immediately what Landis was doing, that he was
separating the two houses and creating this tension between them.
(24:25):
Right away, I sat down and you know, settled out
of my friends and and but you know, I knew
I wasn't wanted, and I didn't want to be wanted
by these guys anyway, so I left early and then
later on a couple of days later. A day later,
McGill sold a piano out of the lobby of the
roadway in and wheeled it across the parking lot to
his room. And his room became party central. So I
(24:49):
had the hotel move my room so it was right
above his room. So I because I wasn't going to
go to party central, because Niedermeyer would never do that,
but myer I would want to be close and take
notes on who was there. So I had to move
my room to write above his room. So the noise
kept me up, and it would make me I'd sit
up all night long as long as they went on
(25:10):
spit polishing my boots and studying my script and just
getting madder and madder and taking names and writing notes
down to myself and developing my characterization. That was Yeah,
that was a great shoot because it was we were
all the same. The genius of that movie is the
script is really smart, really good. But also Landis and
(25:33):
Ivan Reitman. They didn't cast any stars. Belushi wasn't really
a star yet he was doing I think it was
we shot in seventy seven. I think seventy six was
the first season of Saturday Night Live, so he was
in the second season. People knew who he was, but
he wasn't a big star yet. Everybody wanted us to
(25:55):
put all wanted them to put all Saturday Night Live people.
They wanted Chevy to do the Tim Matheson part, Danny
to do d Day. They wanted to stack it that
way that they didn't like it at Universal said that
the only way to get this thing to make money
was to stack it with with a lot of stars,
(26:16):
a lot of movie stars. But Landis didn't want to
do that. He held to he stuck to it. But
he cast it all with actors, with real people who
had the craft and people who knew what they were doing.
When it hit, it was you know, there was a
lot of Universal hated it and really thought they were
just kind of dump it and it wasn't gonna last
at all.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Universal hated it and wanted to dump it. They didn't
think it would last at all. And so often you'll
hear about these artistic instincts of not stacking a movie
with stars, and think about a lot of your favorites,
whether it's Breaking Bad or it's the Sopranos.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
No stars.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
They were stars after, but they weren't stars at the beginning.
And that's the office, and that's Seinfeld, and on and on.
When we come back more of this remarkable storytelling and
a fascinating life.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Mark Metcalf's life is life story.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Here on our American stories, and we continue with our
(27:38):
American stories.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Let's pick up where we left off with.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Mark Metcalf telling the story of how Universal Pictures hated
Animal House, and we're ready to dump it before its
release in theaters.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Here's Mark.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
They did a screening and Denver, a test screening in Denver,
and it happened to be on the same weekend that
there was a big conference with the Greek the fraternity
organization conference, and they invite a lot of these guys,
these Greeks, these fraternity people got invitations to come to
(28:14):
the screening, and they laughed so loud you couldn't hear
the jokes because it was all about them. And Landis
ran to the phone and called the people at the
Universal and held the phone up to the where the
audience was and said, listen to this, and they're laughing
their heads off. And the universals suddenly changed their mind
(28:34):
and decided they had to hit so As I said,
I lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and
I would walk across Saint Mark's to get on the subway.
But every time i'd pass the corner bright by the
gem Spa there, a panhandler would say. You know, he'd
reach for money and I wouldn't give money, and he'd
say You're worthless in a week, and I was really
hurt by this. I mean, I'd already done a couple
(28:55):
other plays and was producing this movie and doing a
lot of different things, so it never occurred to me
that he was quoting this movie. And I just thought,
he this is he's mad because I don't give money.
And I had made a decision because so many people
have their hands out in New York and he can't
give money to all of them. So I had made
a decision to not give money to any of them
(29:17):
unless they were playing a violin.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Or really told me a good story.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Every day he was there, I'd say no, sorry, and
I'd look right at him and say no, I didn't
ignore him. I'd say sorry, I haven't got can't say,
and he'd say, You're worthless. In a week and weeks later,
I was sitting in a bar drinking a rolling rock
in the West Bank cafe with a friend of mine
and I tell telling him a story about this guy
(29:42):
who keeps telling me I'm worthless. And week we're talking
about the homeless problem in New York. And the guy said,
you idiot, he's quoting the movie. And I said, oh, yeah,
I had that line, didn't I. Yeah, You're all worthless?
Speaker 2 (29:57):
And week.
Speaker 5 (29:59):
Draped.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
I didn't give me.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
Twenty so I didn't realize how big it was. Probably
really see we made it came out in seventy eight,
so six years later, eighty four, it was when d
Snyder called me and asked me to do the Twisted
Sister video. And I didn't. I didn't have a TV.
Even I didn't have I didn't know what MTV was.
(30:22):
I didn't certainly didn't listen to that kind of music
because I always say after Beethoven died, I stopped listening
listening to popular music, which isn't true. I listened to
a lot of blues, but I didn't know what that
heavy metal rock and roll was, or hairbands or any
of that stuff. And when he called me and said,
would you do this thing? We've been doing year lines
(30:45):
in our and our act all up and down the
Hudson River and all over Long Island for years. We
love this movie and we love this character. We want
you to be in our video. And that's when I
think I realized then that it was a big thing.
And then a friend of mine, the son of a
friend of mine, had gone to Annapolis, and I visited.
(31:07):
He came over and he was saying, yeah, in Annapolis,
we used to call our drill instructors Toll, but now
we call him Niedermeyer. I figured I'd done something good then, yeah.
So first of all D asked me to do it.
I said yeah. So they flew me out Sunday after
I did the matinee, and then we flew out on
(31:28):
the Red Eye and D picked me up at the airport.
So there's this big guy, six foot two six three
really kind of I call him the ugliest man in
the world, which is not true, but he's he's pretty
ugly and long blonde hair with you know, I found
out later as a lot of it is extensions. And
(31:50):
he's a big muscular guy and he met me, but
he's like this big puppy dog. He's so excited to
meet Niedermeyer. And he drives me back to where I'm
going to stay, which I didn't know where I was
going to stay. I thought I would stay in a hotel,
but they didn't couldn't afford a hotel, so I slept
on Marty Callner's couch. Marty Colner was the director of it.
And they picked me up, not in a limo or
(32:12):
anything like that, but in a little Dotson or some
kind of car. And as we're driving back to Calner's house,
so I could uh D is telling me what this
thing is that we're going to do, because I had
no idea. It's like a Roadrunner cartoon. You're a wiley
coyote and we're the road runner and you just all
kinds of bad things happen to you. But we want
(32:34):
you to open it up by doing it like a
you know, one two minute monologue yelling at your son.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I know what that is. That's music.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
And the only and you've got to write this tonight.
You've got to write this because we're going to film
it tomorrow. The only thing you have to do is
you have to finish with the line what do you
want to do with your life? That's the and and
then we answer I want a rock And that's then
the music starts. All right, mister, what do you think
(33:08):
you're doing?
Speaker 5 (33:10):
You call this a room, This is a big style.
I want you to straighten up this area. Now you
are a disgusting slop. Stand up straight, Tuck in that
shirt or just that built buckle, tie those shoes. What
kind of a man are you?
Speaker 4 (33:31):
You're worthless and weak.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
You do nothing. You are nothing.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
You're sitting here all day and play that sick, repulsive
electric twanger. I carry an M sixteen and you you
carry that's that's guitar.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Who are you?
Speaker 5 (33:53):
Where do you come from?
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Are you listening to me?
Speaker 4 (33:59):
Who do you want to do with your life?
Speaker 3 (34:04):
So I went and got from a friend of mine,
Rex Winer, and we drank beer and talked about this
thing all night. He's a writer. He'd created a character
name called Ford Fairlane that Andrew dice Clay played. So
he and I wrote to shape this sort of little
monologue yelling at my son. My favorite line of his
was I carried him sixteen in the war, and you
(34:26):
carry that electric twanger. But after I did it and
it played every five minutes on MTV, I guess. But
people started recognizing me then, not from Animal House, but
from that. Stuff starting happening. And then I get a
letter from Universal that basically says, you can't do that character.
(34:47):
We own that character. So they said, if you do
it again, we'll sue you. I also get a letter
from Screen Actors Guild because it was not a union gig.
I got those two letters threatening me, and like the
next day or something like that, uh D calls and said,
we're gonna they really like this video. Obviously we're gonna
(35:07):
do it again. I said, all right, let's go.
Speaker 5 (35:10):
Mister sister.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
What kind of a man desecrates a defenseless textbook? I
got a goodn't mind to slap your fat face. You
are destroying your life for that that jarbage.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
All right, mister sister.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
I want you to tell me no better yet, stand
up and tell a class, what do you wanna do
your life?
Speaker 1 (35:47):
I want to laugh.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
So I didn't care. I didn't care what they said,
and they never came after me. They never sued me,
they never threw me out of the union. I'm really
proud of the work. I really like the work. The
problem that I had with it is that I let
myself be typecast. I let myself just do that part.
And an actor has a bigger range than what people
(36:12):
tend to know him as, and so it's nice to
have one to three parts. Really, because there's a whole
generation of young women mostly who grew up loving Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, and I play a character called the
Master in the first season of that the you know,
the oldest, meanest vampire around Seinfeld. Great bunch of people
(36:39):
to work with, really good writers, some of the best
writing on TV.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Hey, my stroll, I'm in here.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
I's going I'm sorry, my stroke.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
This is a surprise, h I just wanted to drop
off this Chinese bomb for your burns.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Supposed to be great stuff.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
It's all herbal, my Strow, What.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Do you do? And you don't have to do this?
Do you believe this?
Speaker 5 (37:08):
My Stroll's nothing?
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Hello, well hello, and who might you be? I might
be late.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
This is Bob cop my stroke.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
It is my very great pleasure. Oh so I've been
really lucky getting good writers and getting those three parts.
But there's three parts that are all different parts of me.
But they also also they do reflect this sort of
authoritarian notion, which is a thing that I've fought against
(37:46):
all my life and really don't like authoritarians. So I
guess there's a little self loathing in my work or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
I don't know, And thanks as always to Greg Hangler
for getting us this great story.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Mark Metcalfe's story here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
There are some of our favorites.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Mark Metcalf as an actor, often identified as playing the
role of an antagonist. He is best known for his
role as the sadistic ROTC officer Douglas C. Niedermeyer in
the nineteen seventy eight comedy Animal House, a character he
later emulated in the nineteen eighty four music videos for
the songs We're Not Going to Take It and I
(00:46):
Want a Rock by the heavy metal hair band Twisted Sister.
He is also known for playing the role of the
Maestro on the hit sitcom Seinfeld. Mark Metcalf sat down
with Greg Hangler and shared his story.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Here's Mark.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
I was born in Findlay, Ohio, which is the home
of Tasty Tators and where Ben Roethlisberg grew up and
lived in fact in Hancock County, where Findlay, Ohio is,
which is about seventy five miles south of Toledo. I'm
the second most famous person to ever come out of Findlay, Ohio.
According to the Chamber of Commerce or whoever makes those
(01:23):
things up, Ben Roethlisberg is number one, and I'm number two,
but that's all right, I'll take number two. So I
was born there. My mom was from Ohio and my
dad was from Missouri Saint Louis, and they met during
the war in forty five.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I guess.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
My mother was a wave and she was decoding messages
in an office in Washington, DC. My dad, who had
served most of the war on a carrier in the Pacific,
was back doing some intelligence work, analysis and things like that.
My mother lived in a house. She used to tell
this story. My mother lived in a house with five
(02:04):
other women, all involved in the war effort, and my
father used to come up to their house for dinner,
and every one of the women except my mother, thought
that he was going to ask one of them to
marry them. He was a good looking guy, and he
(02:24):
was in uniform, and he was a smart guy and
a nice guy, and they all thought except for my mother.
She thought because she was kind of tall and a
little gawky, and they never thought that he would ask her.
But he asked her, and my mother one time showed
me the house where I was conceived in Washington, and
(02:46):
I was really surprised, but she proudly told me, pointed
out the house on a little street in Chevy Chase
you work, and said you were conceived in that house.
So it's nice to know where you started.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Ah. And so after I.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Was born, and then I went back to Saint Louis
because my father had a job when he got out
of the Navy, he had a job with a engineering
He had graduated from University of Wisconsin Madison in engineering.
Graduated early. I think he was twenty when he graduated,
went to school at sixteen. He was a real smart guy.
He worked on the crew at furgerif from Parcel that
designed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, which is a twenty
(03:28):
three mile long combination bridge and tunnel across the mouth
of the Chesapeake Bay. National Geographic called it the eighth
engineering wonder of the world. And he was put in
charge of all the tunnel work, and he became the
kind of engineer who at one point was called the
(03:49):
world's foremost expert on tunnels. And I hung out with him.
There are two shipping channels in and out of the
mouth of Chesapeake Bay. They couldn't build bridge over them
because they were the navy shipping channels. All the Norfolk
warships come in and out of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.
So they had to build tunnels under these because if
(04:11):
you build a bridge over it, the enemy could bomb
the bridge into the into the channel and block it.
So they had to So they had to build four islands,
and then they brought the tunnel tubes up from Texas
on big barges and then they filled them with water
and sank them put them into the It was kind
(04:31):
of an amazing engineering feed and that inspired me in
a lot of ways to go to college as engineer.
I went to the University of Michigan and quickly discovered
that engineering was not really for me. It was a
little dry, but I didn't know how dry it was
(04:55):
until I got my roommate my sophomore year, I had
come audition for a couple of plays. They're doing the
three parts of Henry the sixth, and the girls are
really friendly in the theater department. That's what he told me,
and he was right. The girls were a lot friendly
in the theater department. And I got cast and I
(05:15):
think fifteen different parts, and that kind of hooked me
because it seemed like everybody in the Metcalf background was
either a minister Congregationalist minister, or a librarian or an engineer.
So I went from that rather dry atmosphere to these
(05:36):
theater backstage in the theater where everybody's yelling and screaming
at each other one minute and making out passionately the
next minute, and so it's like, oh, brave New world,
what creatures are they here? As Miranda says at the
end of the Tempest, it was really kind of magnificent
in an eye opener, and I got stuck in it,
and I've been doing it ever since. So I just
(05:57):
got it, and I really got into theater. I never
thought i'd get a degree in it. I changed from
engineering to architecture because it was a little bit more creative.
You had to claim a major, so I claimed English
was my major for a while, Psychology was my major
for a while for three was my major for a while,
And I ended up with my degree in theater because
(06:21):
it was the only thing I was taking classes in.
I just stopped going to classes except for theater classes.
In fact, they tried to flunk me out because my
grades were so bad, and the theater department, all the
teachers in the theater department wrote letters to the teachers
in the English department, the teachers in the French department,
the teachers all the classes I was failing because I
(06:42):
wasn't going and they say, you can't fail him.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
You've got to.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Give him, get him a tutor. We'll get him a tutor,
get him a passing grade, because we need him to
do plays. So I became like a theater jock the
way football players got to take the easiest classes, and
I got automatic a's because they were on a football
team at University of Michigan anyway. And that's how I
got my degree. And I'm ashamed of that. Oh I'm
(07:10):
not that ashamed of it. I'm a little embarrassed by it.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
And you're listening to Mark Metcalf tell his story. We
continue with his story here on Our American Stories. Folks,
if you love the great American stories we tell and
(07:33):
love America like we do, we're asking you to become
a part of the Our American Stories family. If you
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Go to Our American Stories dot com now and go
to the donate button and help us keep the great
(07:53):
American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And
we're back with our American Stories and with Mark Metcalf's story.
Starting off as an engineering major, an English major, a
(08:16):
forestream major. I didn't know there was such a thing.
And ultimately, well he becomes, as he put it, a
theater jock, being bailed out by all the folks in
the theater department who wanted to save him from his
own academic failings. And Mark Metcalf, by the way, well
you know him as Nieda Meyer an Animal House and
(08:37):
you've seen him in Twisted Sister videos, the Maestro in
Seinfeld and the Master in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Let's continue with Mark Metcalf's story.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
When I graduated, I actually wanted to go to graduate
school because I wanted to learn more about the theater.
But also I didn't want to go to Vietnam. I
didn't think the war was a great thing, but primarily
I didn't want to go fight it because I thought
I'd be really good at it. I knew enough about
myself to know that I was good at taking orders
and good at giving orders. So I fit in that
(09:11):
military hierarchy like a cog in that wheel. And I
didn't want to become that guy, so I acted him.
Later on, when I did Niedermeier, I sort of acted
that guy because I knew where that guy lived inside me,
and I thought I would be good at it, but
I didn't want to become him. I wanted to become
(09:33):
something else. I didn't know what it was, but I
wanted to become something else. So when I graduated, I
just took off for the West Coast. I hitchhiked. I
got one straight one ride all the way to San
Francisco from ann Arbor. Guy I can't remember his name,
but he had a nineteen forty eight pickup truck that
(09:54):
you had to jumpstart every time he started it. So
whenever we stopped for gas, we had to try to
find a gas station where you could push it pretty
easily to jump started. Whenever we stopped for the night
and slept in the back, which is what we did,
or camped, we had to park it on the hill,
so we'd get up in the morning and jump started
really easily, and it ran out of oil about every
(10:18):
one hundred and twenty miles, so we had to carry
oil with us. We were real cowboys. We had a
great time, but we took us two weeks or so
to get across the country to San Francisco. We dropped
me off in San Francisco because that's where I thought
the Summer of Love was nineteen sixty eight. It turns
out the Summer of Love was nineteen sixty seven, and
(10:39):
by sixty eight it had gotten pretty sour. The day
before I arrived on hate Ashbury, two kids had died
because somebody had sold them acid that was draino, just
a capsule, and it was draino and ate through their
stomach and they died. So it was not a wasn't
(11:00):
peace loved granola. It was it was the dirty side
of being a hippie. I stayed there for a while.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
And then I.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Hitchhiked down to la and then I felt like I
needed to keep moving because the draft board was still
looking for me. I guess I didn't talk to my
parents so I didn't want them to know where I
was because my parents were the kind of people that
would have told the draft Board where I was so
they could come and get me. And I didn't want
to be gotten, so I hitchhiked up to I mean,
(11:32):
I drove up to Portland first and then took a
write and went out to Mount Hood. But I got
a job as the assistant in the rental and repair shop,
so I had to learn how to repair skis. After
i'd been there for a couple of months, I was
skiing on rental skis and I had a pair of
skis back home with my parents in my parents' house
in New Jersey. So I contacted my parents and I
(11:56):
asked them if they'd send my headmasters, and they did,
but they put in the box with the skis, they
put the letter from the draft Board saying you have
to show up at a certain time and a certain
date in Newark, New Jersey for your physical And this
is kind of person that I was then and still
(12:17):
I am. Probably my figuring was that if I never
got the letter, it didn't matter. But once I had
the letter, I had to do it, so.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
But I didn't.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I really didn't want to do it, so I tried
to get into Canada. I tried to walk into Canada.
I got to ride up to the way up in
the Panhandle, got to ride a little north of there,
and then I got out and I just thought, well,
i'll walk. Canada's just over there on the map, you know,
like an inch away, one hundred miles. I can walk
one hundred miles through the wilderness. I've been living in
(12:50):
the wilderness. But no, it's real tough country up there.
So I hitchhiked back closer towards Seattle. I thought, well,
I'll go across on a road rather than try to
cross in the middle of the wilderness. And I got
to the border, and Bob Schmaltz, knowing I was trying
(13:10):
to get out of the country, had given me his
driver's license, and not his passport, but his driver's license,
and I think I even had a birth certificate of his.
But I changed my name because I figured in my
stone paranoid state that the government would be looking for
me at the border. That's why I had to sneak across.
(13:31):
So I tried to go across as Bob Schmaltz. But
I got turned away at the border because they found
my two different sets of ID as Bob Schmaltz and
as Mark Metcalf, and they didn't want me in Canada
because I looked bad and I was, you know, I was.
I had long hair down the middle of my back,
dirty on the road, I wore high fringed moccasins. I was,
(13:55):
you know, I was a hippie. So I hitchhiked back
to New Jersey. I didn't have a lot of guys
from my high school were there at the same time,
and they all had briefcases filled with letters from doctors
about their bone spurs or whatever else they might have
(14:15):
had that kept them from going to Vietnam. And I
didn't have any of that stuff. But I was just
really crazy and they saw that right away and they
gave me a four F so I didn't have to
worry about it anymore. So they had these auditions in
Chicago for regional theaters all over the country, and I
(14:38):
did that and they got offered a job at Milwaukee REP.
So I went to Milwaukee and did a season up there,
and when that season was over, they didn't hire anybody back,
and so I didn't know where to go or what
to do, and a bunch of the people that had
been working there were from New York and were heading
(14:59):
to New York to try to work in the theater
New York, and I just went to New York. And
so for the next twenty five years I lived on
Saint Mark's Place between First and A from nineteen seventy
until nineteen ninety three, so I guess twenty twenty three years.
The first five years I was in New York, I
(15:19):
didn't want to do movies or TV. I just said
nod all that because it was beneath me. I was
a stage actor. I wanted to do Shakespeare and Chekhov
and Ibsen and people like that, but they pay you
nice money. And the first movie I ever did, I
was doing a play on Broadway called Streamers, and somebody
(15:40):
saw it and they had me come in an audition
for I didn't even have to audition. I just had
to meet with the producer and the director, Fred Zinnemann
directed it. It was a movie called Julia. They were
going to shoot it in England. I only had three days.
It was a one scene part with Jane Fonda, and
(16:00):
I quit the play. I was doing the play Streamers
in New York for Joe papp and I lived in
England for six weeks. I worked for three days, they
paid me for six weeks. I thought, this is what
the movies were always like. You got to go to
fancy places, they paid way too much money, and you
got to do work that was just plain fun. And
(16:22):
so I thought the movies were like that. So I
started saying yes to movies. It turns out they're not
all like that, but they're mostly fun for the most part.
The next one I did was Animal House. A friend
of mine named John Hurd. He and I lived across
the street from each other. I was living with a
woman named Pamela Reid, an actress, was engaged to marrier,
(16:43):
and he was living with a wonderful woman named Patricia Triani.
And we went to see a play in Central Park.
But we took a picnic, and Pamela and Patricia made
potato salad and fried chicken and it was a real
American feast. And while we're sitting there outside the theater,
(17:04):
this big, heavy guy with long hair, big face comes
walking towards us. And John Heard, who had lived in
Chicago and worked in Chicago for a while. He had
met John there because John had been working at Second
City there, so he said, hey, John, come on over,
and nobody knew who John Blushi was, but we invited
him to sit down, have some chicken if you want.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
What are you doing?
Speaker 1 (17:28):
And you've been listening to the story of Mark Metcalf
and what a story indeed, from hippie trying to escape
the draft to actually going to Newark for all the
right reasons and somehow avoiding becoming that person, that guy
he didn't want to be. When we come back more
of the life story of Mark Metcalf here on our
(17:49):
American Stories. And we're back with our American Stories and
the story of Mark Metcalf. Let's pick up where we
(18:10):
left off with Mark telling the story of bumping into
then unknown John Belushi while enjoying a picnic with his
friend John Hurd, who by the way, is the father
in the movie Home Alone and their girlfriend in New
York City. Here again is Mark Metcalf.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
And he starts to tell us his story about how
they wanted him to do this live sketch comedy show
on television late night eleven thirty on Saturday night Saturday
nights and Lorne Michael's This Crazy Guy I wanted to
do it, and Belushi said, and I don't want to
do it. I went in there to see him, and
(18:49):
I told him, I don't want to work in the system.
I want to work outside the system. I want to
tear the system down because the system is evil and bad.
And Lorne Michael said, very calmly, while Belushi is ranting
and Raving said, well, the best way to tear the
system down is to work inside the system. So why
don't you do this? Because this is not a system
kind of thing. So he was trying to make up
(19:10):
his mind whether to do this thing or not. And
he must have talked for forty five minutes. We'd sat
there for an hour listening to him. We'd say, John,
it's TV, it's money. How can you turn it down?
It's live TV, and you do sketch comedy. He met,
It's just like doing theater. What a great thing. He'd say, yeah,
I know, but I'm working for NBC and I want
to work for those guys. And we noticed he finally
(19:33):
got up and just kept going. He hadn't made up
his mind about anything. We hadn't changed his mind. We
were just listening and talking and having a conversation about
this kind of what this theater would be like, this
thing would be like. But we noticed after he walked
away that the fried chicken was all gone and the
potatoes album was all gone. He talked all this time
(19:54):
and eaten everything that we had. That was the first
time I ever met John Beluci. And then I went
and I did Animal House. I was sent into audition
for the Matheson part for Otter, the guy who got
all the girls. I thought that would be great, That's
who I really wanted to be. But as soon as
I walked through the door, Landis, the director, looked at
(20:15):
me and said, do you know how to ride? And
I said, without missing a beat, I said yeah. I
was practically born on a horse. My mother's water broke
when she was out on a trail ride and our
ranch in Montana, and she slid off the horse. My
father helped her off. He delivered the baby right there
in the shade of the horse, and then we got
back on the horse and I was in my mom's
arms and we rode back in and Landis looked at
(20:37):
me and said, yeah, sure he knew I was lying.
I'd made the whole thing up, so I told him
five more lies about how I knew how to ride,
and the next day he called me and said, I
want you to do this part. He must have liked
the way I lied or something, but I said, oh great, okay, good.
(20:58):
Do you think you can get Universal again? Give me
some money so I can learn how to ride. So
Landi's cast me without me actually having the audition. I
didn't have to read lines, but I did have to
prove that I would be all right to the executives
at Universal. So he said, it's just a formal thing.
You just got to come in and do the audition.
(21:18):
And I read with Michael Chinich, who was the casting director,
who was a great guy. It was his casting that
put all these people together. Him and Landis that put
this group of people together. The chemistry was so good.
So he played flounder and I got to and I
had to script in my hand, even though I didn't
need it because I knew the lines. But I got
(21:39):
to beat him with the script, and he had fun
to because I'll always remember him trying not to crack
up as I was beating him and yelling at him
and spitting on him. Because we did that scene Tuck
up those pajamas. Is that a pledge pit on your uniform?
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (21:59):
So he did all this so that that was the process.
And then and they told me I had.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
It fact disgusting slum.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
Redo those buttons, dress that belt buckle, straighten it cap
and touch up those pajamas.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
What's that on your chest?
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Mister?
Speaker 4 (22:24):
It's a place pincer clench pin on your uniform.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
So, uh, you can't go away. John Landis had all
the Delta House guys, Blushie, Jamie Widows, Bruce McGill as
d Day, Matheson, Otter Boone, Regert had them all come
out five days early before they started shooting, and then
(22:53):
had the omegas. Myself and Jimmy Dawton come out later,
and Kevin Bacon, I think, came out just for a
couple of days near the end. But I was there
for the full thirty two days. I didn't shoot every day.
I had allot of free time. But when you get
to a movie set, the first thing you do is
go to the production manager's office and get your per diem,
(23:13):
so you've got some money to get out of town
if they change their mind. So I went in there
and Peter mcgagor Scott, who was the production manager, gave
me my per diem, and then he said, John Landis
is over in the coffee shop and the roadway in
across the parking lot from where we were staying. He
(23:33):
wants to see you right away, So leave your stuff
here and go on over there and see John. You'll
recognize him because you saw him when he auditioned, right
And I said, yeah, sure. So I went across the
parking lot, went into this crowded coffee shop and I
see John in the corner at a table at a booth,
and I start walking towards him and wave to John,
and John waves and waves me come on over. I
(23:56):
get about ten or fifteen feet away from the table,
and land As says, that's him, that's Niedermeyer.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Get him.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
And they start throwing food at me, real food at me,
and yelling at me and calling me names in the
middle of this crowded That was my introduction to animal House.
So I went I knowing it was all a gag,
and understanding immediately what Landis was doing, that he was
separating the two houses and creating this tension between them.
(24:25):
Right away, I sat down and you know, settled out
of my friends and and but you know, I knew
I wasn't wanted, and I didn't want to be wanted
by these guys anyway, so I left early and then
later on a couple of days later. A day later,
McGill sold a piano out of the lobby of the
roadway in and wheeled it across the parking lot to
his room. And his room became party central. So I
(24:49):
had the hotel move my room so it was right
above his room. So I because I wasn't going to
go to party central, because Niedermeyer would never do that,
but myer I would want to be close and take
notes on who was there. So I had to move
my room to write above his room. So the noise
kept me up, and it would make me I'd sit
up all night long as long as they went on
(25:10):
spit polishing my boots and studying my script and just
getting madder and madder and taking names and writing notes
down to myself and developing my characterization. That was Yeah,
that was a great shoot because it was we were
all the same. The genius of that movie is the
script is really smart, really good. But also Landis and
(25:33):
Ivan Reitman. They didn't cast any stars. Belushi wasn't really
a star yet he was doing I think it was
we shot in seventy seven. I think seventy six was
the first season of Saturday Night Live, so he was
in the second season. People knew who he was, but
he wasn't a big star yet. Everybody wanted us to
(25:55):
put all wanted them to put all Saturday Night Live people.
They wanted Chevy to do the Tim Matheson part, Danny
to do d Day. They wanted to stack it that
way that they didn't like it at Universal said that
the only way to get this thing to make money
was to stack it with with a lot of stars,
(26:16):
a lot of movie stars. But Landis didn't want to
do that. He held to he stuck to it. But
he cast it all with actors, with real people who
had the craft and people who knew what they were doing.
When it hit, it was you know, there was a
lot of Universal hated it and really thought they were
just kind of dump it and it wasn't gonna last
at all.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Universal hated it and wanted to dump it. They didn't
think it would last at all. And so often you'll
hear about these artistic instincts of not stacking a movie
with stars, and think about a lot of your favorites,
whether it's Breaking Bad or it's the Sopranos.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
No stars.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
They were stars after, but they weren't stars at the beginning.
And that's the office, and that's Seinfeld, and on and on.
When we come back more of this remarkable storytelling and
a fascinating life.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Mark Metcalf's life is life story.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Here on our American stories, and we continue with our
(27:38):
American stories.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Let's pick up where we left off with.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Mark Metcalf telling the story of how Universal Pictures hated
Animal House, and we're ready to dump it before its
release in theaters.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Here's Mark.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
They did a screening and Denver, a test screening in Denver,
and it happened to be on the same weekend that
there was a big conference with the Greek the fraternity
organization conference, and they invite a lot of these guys,
these Greeks, these fraternity people got invitations to come to
(28:14):
the screening, and they laughed so loud you couldn't hear
the jokes because it was all about them. And Landis
ran to the phone and called the people at the
Universal and held the phone up to the where the
audience was and said, listen to this, and they're laughing
their heads off. And the universals suddenly changed their mind
(28:34):
and decided they had to hit so As I said,
I lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and
I would walk across Saint Mark's to get on the subway.
But every time i'd pass the corner bright by the
gem Spa there, a panhandler would say. You know, he'd
reach for money and I wouldn't give money, and he'd
say You're worthless in a week, and I was really
hurt by this. I mean, I'd already done a couple
(28:55):
other plays and was producing this movie and doing a
lot of different things, so it never occurred to me
that he was quoting this movie. And I just thought,
he this is he's mad because I don't give money.
And I had made a decision because so many people
have their hands out in New York and he can't
give money to all of them. So I had made
a decision to not give money to any of them
(29:17):
unless they were playing a violin.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Or really told me a good story.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Every day he was there, I'd say no, sorry, and
I'd look right at him and say no, I didn't
ignore him. I'd say sorry, I haven't got can't say,
and he'd say, You're worthless. In a week and weeks later,
I was sitting in a bar drinking a rolling rock
in the West Bank cafe with a friend of mine
and I tell telling him a story about this guy
(29:42):
who keeps telling me I'm worthless. And week we're talking
about the homeless problem in New York. And the guy said,
you idiot, he's quoting the movie. And I said, oh, yeah,
I had that line, didn't I. Yeah, You're all worthless?
Speaker 2 (29:57):
And week.
Speaker 5 (29:59):
Draped.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
I didn't give me.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
Twenty so I didn't realize how big it was. Probably
really see we made it came out in seventy eight,
so six years later, eighty four, it was when d
Snyder called me and asked me to do the Twisted
Sister video. And I didn't. I didn't have a TV.
Even I didn't have I didn't know what MTV was.
(30:22):
I didn't certainly didn't listen to that kind of music
because I always say after Beethoven died, I stopped listening
listening to popular music, which isn't true. I listened to
a lot of blues, but I didn't know what that
heavy metal rock and roll was, or hairbands or any
of that stuff. And when he called me and said,
would you do this thing? We've been doing year lines
(30:45):
in our and our act all up and down the
Hudson River and all over Long Island for years. We
love this movie and we love this character. We want
you to be in our video. And that's when I
think I realized then that it was a big thing.
And then a friend of mine, the son of a
friend of mine, had gone to Annapolis, and I visited.
(31:07):
He came over and he was saying, yeah, in Annapolis,
we used to call our drill instructors Toll, but now
we call him Niedermeyer. I figured I'd done something good then, yeah.
So first of all D asked me to do it.
I said yeah. So they flew me out Sunday after
I did the matinee, and then we flew out on
(31:28):
the Red Eye and D picked me up at the airport.
So there's this big guy, six foot two six three
really kind of I call him the ugliest man in
the world, which is not true, but he's he's pretty
ugly and long blonde hair with you know, I found
out later as a lot of it is extensions. And
(31:50):
he's a big muscular guy and he met me, but
he's like this big puppy dog. He's so excited to
meet Niedermeyer. And he drives me back to where I'm
going to stay, which I didn't know where I was
going to stay. I thought I would stay in a hotel,
but they didn't couldn't afford a hotel, so I slept
on Marty Callner's couch. Marty Colner was the director of it.
And they picked me up, not in a limo or
(32:12):
anything like that, but in a little Dotson or some
kind of car. And as we're driving back to Calner's house,
so I could uh D is telling me what this
thing is that we're going to do, because I had
no idea. It's like a Roadrunner cartoon. You're a wiley
coyote and we're the road runner and you just all
kinds of bad things happen to you. But we want
(32:34):
you to open it up by doing it like a
you know, one two minute monologue yelling at your son.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I know what that is. That's music.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
And the only and you've got to write this tonight.
You've got to write this because we're going to film
it tomorrow. The only thing you have to do is
you have to finish with the line what do you
want to do with your life? That's the and and
then we answer I want a rock And that's then
the music starts. All right, mister, what do you think
(33:08):
you're doing?
Speaker 5 (33:10):
You call this a room, This is a big style.
I want you to straighten up this area. Now you
are a disgusting slop. Stand up straight, Tuck in that
shirt or just that built buckle, tie those shoes. What
kind of a man are you?
Speaker 4 (33:31):
You're worthless and weak.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
You do nothing. You are nothing.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
You're sitting here all day and play that sick, repulsive
electric twanger. I carry an M sixteen and you you
carry that's that's guitar.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Who are you?
Speaker 5 (33:53):
Where do you come from?
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Are you listening to me?
Speaker 4 (33:59):
Who do you want to do with your life?
Speaker 3 (34:04):
So I went and got from a friend of mine,
Rex Winer, and we drank beer and talked about this
thing all night. He's a writer. He'd created a character
name called Ford Fairlane that Andrew dice Clay played. So
he and I wrote to shape this sort of little
monologue yelling at my son. My favorite line of his
was I carried him sixteen in the war, and you
(34:26):
carry that electric twanger. But after I did it and
it played every five minutes on MTV, I guess. But
people started recognizing me then, not from Animal House, but
from that. Stuff starting happening. And then I get a
letter from Universal that basically says, you can't do that character.
(34:47):
We own that character. So they said, if you do
it again, we'll sue you. I also get a letter
from Screen Actors Guild because it was not a union gig.
I got those two letters threatening me, and like the
next day or something like that, uh D calls and said,
we're gonna they really like this video. Obviously we're gonna
(35:07):
do it again. I said, all right, let's go.
Speaker 5 (35:10):
Mister sister.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
What kind of a man desecrates a defenseless textbook? I
got a goodn't mind to slap your fat face. You
are destroying your life for that that jarbage.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
All right, mister sister.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
I want you to tell me no better yet, stand
up and tell a class, what do you wanna do
your life?
Speaker 1 (35:47):
I want to laugh.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
So I didn't care. I didn't care what they said,
and they never came after me. They never sued me,
they never threw me out of the union. I'm really
proud of the work. I really like the work. The
problem that I had with it is that I let
myself be typecast. I let myself just do that part.
And an actor has a bigger range than what people
(36:12):
tend to know him as, and so it's nice to
have one to three parts. Really, because there's a whole
generation of young women mostly who grew up loving Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, and I play a character called the
Master in the first season of that the you know,
the oldest, meanest vampire around Seinfeld. Great bunch of people
(36:39):
to work with, really good writers, some of the best
writing on TV.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Hey, my stroll, I'm in here.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
I's going I'm sorry, my stroke.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
This is a surprise, h I just wanted to drop
off this Chinese bomb for your burns.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Supposed to be great stuff.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
It's all herbal, my Strow, What.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Do you do? And you don't have to do this?
Do you believe this?
Speaker 5 (37:08):
My Stroll's nothing?
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Hello, well hello, and who might you be? I might
be late.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
This is Bob cop my stroke.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
It is my very great pleasure. Oh so I've been
really lucky getting good writers and getting those three parts.
But there's three parts that are all different parts of me.
But they also also they do reflect this sort of
authoritarian notion, which is a thing that I've fought against
(37:46):
all my life and really don't like authoritarians. So I
guess there's a little self loathing in my work or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
I don't know, And thanks as always to Greg Hangler
for getting us this great story.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Mark Metcalfe's story here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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