Sean C. Morgan
Sweet Home Junior High School teacher John Mithen is an animal.
He’s been one since 1978 when he was a featured extra in Nat ional Lampoon’s Animal House.
The Cottage Grove Chamber of Commerce is hosting an upcoming celebration of the movie. A parade scene in the movie was filmed in Cottage Grove.
With talk of the upcoming celebration, Mithen shared his experience in the famed John Belushi college picture.
The movie was mostly filmed around the University of Oregon campus.
“I was working at Agripac Cannery stuffing corn into boxes,” Mithen said. At the same time, about 1978, he was acting in plays at a local theater.
“There was a couple of guys I went to acting school with,” Mithen said. That school was at Lane Community College.
The extras worked about 10 to 12 hours per day for about a month.
“The toga party was done in a fraternity,” Mithen said. “They were supplying us kegs all the time.”
Total, Mithen was in about four shots in the film. All of them were short. They included the toga party, the parade in Cottage Grove and the food fight in the Fishbowl, an old restaurant area in the Erb Memorial Union at University of Oregon.
“Everyone was trying to get in front of the camera,” Mithen said. “I didn’t care. I was just hanging out.”
Mostly, the extras just sat around earning minimum wage plus an a few bucks extra when they were in publicity photos.
“They’d have us in the background,” Mithen said. For two weeks, “we walked around in togas.”
The actors were friendly and social, Mithen said. He didn’t really get to talk to the late John Belushi, but he did meet other actors, who went on to do a variety of other movies, during filming.
Mithen was fascinated by the filmmaking process, which resembled a jumbled mess.
“I was going, how can they make a movie out of it,” Mithen said. The best part of being involved was “to find out it was a famous film later on, and it was interesting to see how they put films together.”
“I had no idea it would become a famous movie,” Mithen said. He signed on just to do something different. “I thought it would be novel to be a movie extra…. We were just pieces of furniture, but we were featured furniture.”
Mithen, with other “Animal” extras, were featured on posters with the cast. His character was even given a name, but it was an R-rated movie and cannot be printed here.
He also was an extra in Muriel Hemingway’s “Personal Best” a year later at the University of Oregon.
Mithen was about 24 years old at the time and was studying performing arts.
He enjoyed theater the most. He was involved in a variety of musicals, plays and behind-the-scenes jobs.
He had just completed his work at Lane Community College and had lived and worked briefly in Portland before returning to Eugene.
He also completed required courses in science and other core subjects to go toward a bachelor’s degree. He moved to Sweet Home in 1982 and began a teaching career about seven or eight years ago. He worked for two years as a PE teacher in Corvallis then took a job in Sweet Home teaching special education at Sweet Home Junior High in language arts and math. He has worked in Sweet Home five or six years.
Mithen hasn’t acted in plays in years, he said. “I just like playing music.”
He plays guitar and ukulele at local hula dances. He also plays Tahitian and Hawaiian drums.
Mithen doesn’t plan to attend Cottage Grove’s celebration. He said he would enjoy a reunion with the people he worked with on the film.