Joe Rocco
Comedian Rodney Dangerfield stands near the top of Bascom Hill, looking toward the Capitol. “Boy, what a great-looking place,” he says. “When I used to dream about going to college, this is the way I always pictured it.”
As dialogue goes, it wasn’t Citizen Kane. But Dangerfield’s Back to School, which was released on June 13, 1986, established Madison’s cinematic legacy. The comedy hit was set at fictitious Grand Lakes University (Go Hooters!), with Dangerfield playing an obnoxious rich guy who enrolls to help his awkward son get through the experience.
Although it didn’t win any Oscars, the film has, somewhat surprisingly, endured.
Cast and crew remember Madison fondly. “It was so beautiful,” recalls star Sally Kellerman, who lives in Hollywood. “Oh, it was just lovely. The campus was beautiful.”
Teresa Lyons-Hegdahl, assistant professor at St. Catherine University in the Twin Cities, says Back to School is still a part of her students’ culture, even though they’re a generation removed from the film’s release. As a UW graduate student, she had a small speaking role. “It’s funny, because I’m teaching theater, and students are very familiar with it still. I was surprised how well it did.”
“A lot of people saw it when it was out, but the run on television — it was like everybody saw it,” says the film’s director, Alan Metter. It was the sixth-highest-grossing film during a year that also saw the release of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Aliens, Top Gun and Platoon. Adjusted for inflation, it earned $236 million.
“I was delighted,” says Kellerman, best known for playing Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the movie version of M*A*S*H. “I don’t know if I was surprised or not, but it was sure fun. It’s fun to be in a hit.”
Back to School alumni are everywhere, on big screens and small ones. Ned Beatty played the university’s dean. Scream-queen Adrienne Barbeau played Dangerfield’s wife. Another screamer, ultra-loud comedian Sam Kinison, would die just six years after the film’s release, at the age of 38. Burt Young, Dangerfield’s chauffeur, had played the brother-in-law in Rocky. Robert Picardo would play the holographic doctor on Star Trek: Voyager. The second ingénue, Terry Farrell, later starred as Jadzia Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. And the plucky sidekick who romped through the UW campus? Robert Downey Jr.
“Back to School is a rock-solid comedy all around, cleverly written, smartly plotted and full of quotable lines and moments,” says film critic Nathan Rabin, a UW graduate and former head writer for The Onion’s entertainment section, “The A.V. Club.”
“Like Caddyshack, Back to School smartly casts Dangerfield [who died in 2004] as a force of nature whose bottomless vulgarity and white-trash love of life is an enormously liberating force, for other characters in the film and the audience alike,” he says. “With his power and vulgarity, Dangerfield was like a non-evil version of Donald Trump.”
“We almost didn’t make the movie,” says Metter. Now retired, he divides his time between Florida and Cape Cod, Mass. “We couldn’t get a script we liked. The studio was pushing us to start filming, and we didn’t like what we had.”
Dangerfield had worked with the late director-writer Harold Ramis on Caddyshack. The two had dinner, and he seemed interested in helping. Metter went to Ramis’ office the next day.
“He said, ‘What kind of movie do you want to make with Rodney Dangerfield?’” recalls Metter. Unlike Caddyshack, in Back to School the comic would be called upon to actually act, and carry the film as a romantic lead. “I said, ‘I want to make the movie he goes down in history with.’ He said, ‘Good answer. I’ll write it.’ That was it. He was such a wonderful guy, Harold, he really was.”
Rodney Dangerfield brought his signature brand of crude comedy to the UW campus.
To stretch his relatively low budget ($11 million, according to the Chicago Tribune), Metter assembled a sterling crew, including production designer David Snyder, who had picked up an Oscar nomination for his art direction on Blade Runner.
But where to film? Metter took his cue from the star. “Rodney’s image always appeared to me to be about 1940s America,” says Metter. “A sort of throwback to another time and comedy — his shtick, his one-liners.” The director wanted a campus with a parallel image, a Big Ten school that would evoke college sports films of the ’40s.
“We’d work all week in L.A., long hours, and then we’d get on a plane on Friday night and fly out to college campuses and try to find a location,” remembers Metter. “Each week I was disappointed in the schools.”
The search had already gone on too long. The studio had a release date and was pushing hard for production to begin. Meanwhile, whirlwind campus visits were taking their toll. Metter felt sick. A visit to a Texas college was serendipitous.
“So we’re walking up to a dormitory on the Southern Methodist [University] campus,” Metter recalls. “These two girls came walking out, and one of them said to the other as they passed us, ‘God I wish I was home this weekend.’ And I was so depressed. I said, ‘Where’s home?’ She said, ‘Madison, Wisconsin.’ I look at Chuck Russell, the producer, I look at David Snyder. I said, ‘Let’s get on a plane and go to Madison.’”
They came here that same weekend. “Really, the campus and Madison sold itself,” says Brian Fielkow, who was then president of UW’s student government.
Filming went from Friday, Oct. 11 through Sat., Oct. 19, 1985. Metter timed shooting to catch autumn leaves at their peak. Locations included the Memorial Union Terrace, Library Mall, Observatory Hill, Science Hall, Helen C. White Hall, Slichter Hall and the Red Gym.
A native of Cedar Rapids and alumnus of the University of Iowa, cinematographer Thomas Ackerman was in awe when he visited as a student. “Madison had a beer hall at the student union! This was mind-boggling for those of us in Iowa City. We thought that was the ultimate libertine collegiate atmosphere.”
“It was clear that this was absolutely the iconic, perfect campus,” says Ackerman. “There’s hardly a way to frame it, or a direction to point the lens that did not convey ‘the halls of ivy.’ It was perfect for us.”
Except that it rained the first day. “People were very worried,” Ackerman says. “You never like to start a major motion picture for a studio and get rained out.”
“But then we had the most beautiful weather, as you see in the film. The autumn leaves at their peak. Lovely light. It was just a terrific time, photographically. And the very day we left, a huge windstorm rolled through and basically denuded the trees. All the leaves were knocked off. We rode the bus to the airport thinking, ‘Wow, are we lucky.’”
Metter, too, recalls Madison as lucky, filled with charming coincidence.
“I mean, if I hadn’t said, ‘Where’s home?’ the film might never have come to Madison,” he says. “It was that kind of magical thing that happened throughout the film.”
