Neighbors (1981 film)

Neighbors is a 1981 American black comedy film based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Berger. It was released through Columbia Pictures, was directed by John G. Avildsen, and starred John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Cathy Moriarty, and Kathryn Walker. The film takes liberties with Berger's story and features a more upbeat ending. The screenplay of the film is officially credited to Larry Gelbart, although it was extensively rewritten to Gelbart's public disapproval. Released two and a half months before Belushi's death, the film marks his last film performance.

Plot
Earl Keese is a low-key, ineffectual, middle-class suburbanite. His peaceful, dreary life changes when a younger couple, Vic and Ramona Zeck, move in next door. Upon arrival, the Zecks immediately impose themselves on the Keese household, with Earl infuriated with the loud, gung-ho Vic, and flustered by the sly and seductive Ramona who tries to seduce Earl numerous times. Earl is frustratingly unable to handle them, and can never produce any proof that the couple are deliberately doing anything wrong. Earl's wife Enid and teenage daughter Elaine are unhelpful, and that very night, the antagonism between Earl and the Zecks escalates into full-scale suburban warfare. Earl tries to hide Vic's truck as a joke, only for it to get stuck in a swamp pond beside his house. Vic retaliates by vandalizing Earl's car. When Earl calls for a tow truck to remove Vic's truck from the swamp, Vic locks him in the basement of his own house.

In the morning, after Vic's truck is towed out of the swamp, he retrieves a remote controlled toy model airplane from his truck which he accidentally crashes and burns his house down. Earl offers Vic his own house to stay in, suspecting that Vic set fire to his new house to collect an insurance payment. But the film's climactic twist comes when Vic and Ramona Zeck reveal to Earl that they not only have no money and no insurance, but they are not legally married and that they do not own the house. Vic worked at a nursing home and took the house from one of the elderly patients at the home that Vic would always dress her and she would always ask for Vic and this patient had just died. After some back and forth over where the now homeless Vic and Ramona can live, Earl offers to renovate the garage. Vic is displeased with this and says he and Ramona are going to leave and move away. So then the now regretful Earl offers the master bedroom as Vic had originally preferred and suggested, but Vic now says that he would not live in the neighborhood anyway because it is not a good match for his and Ramona's outgoing personalities. Earl then accuses the Zecks of stealing his checkbook, but Vic points out the location of the checkbook and wallet with all of the money accounted for. Ashamed, Earl signs over his family's car over to the Zecks - much to everyone's surprise.

Initially questioning his own and his ungrateful family's sanity after Elaine returns to boarding school and Enid leaves on a studies class of Native American culture, Earl soon realizes that the Zecks have provided him with the most excitement he has had in the last 24 hours than in all the years of his mundane suburban life. Vic and Ramona offer Earl a promising future, apart from suburbia and away from his family of being their "third wheel" on the road. In the film's closing scene, Earl joins the couple in his car and drives away with them, abandoning his family and setting fire to his own house, burning it to the ground.

Production
Thomas Berger's best-selling novel, Neighbors, was published in 1980. Columbia Pictures acquired the rights to film the novel and assembled a high-profile cast and crew: Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown had produced Jaws (1975); John G. Avildsen had won an Academy Award for directing Rocky (1976); veteran comedy writer Larry Gelbart had developed the hit TV series M*A*S*H (1972–1983); and John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd had been stars of TV's Saturday Night Live (on which they appeared from 1975 to 1979) and the film The Blues Brothers (1980). The film's female leads were played by Cathy Moriarty, who had made her film debut in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), and Kathryn Walker, who had been the girlfriend of Belushi's National Lampoon colleague Douglas Kenney (1946–1980). The production of Neighbors was troubled. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd switched their roles in pre-production, acting against type (usual-wild man Belushi played the meek Earl and usual-straight-arrow Aykroyd played the obnoxious Vic). Belushi and Aykroyd also argued constantly with director John G. Avildsen (as they believed that he had no understanding of comedy), and lobbied to have him removed from the picture. Belushi wanted either Aykroyd, himself or John Landis to direct the film. Avildsen also argued with producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, and screenwriter Larry Gelbart objected to the changes made to his screenplay by Dan Aykroyd. John Belushi's drug problems also impaired the film's production, and Neighbors proved to be Belushi's final film before he died of a drug overdose.

Tom Scott was originally assigned to compose the score for Neighbors but was replaced by Avildsen's frequent collaborator Bill Conti. John Belushi unsuccessfully tried to have the film finish with a song written and performed by the punk rock group Fear (Belushi had discovered the band and brought them to Cherokee Studios to record songs for the film). Music producing partners Steve Cropper and Bruce Robb remember recording the band's music, but nobody knows exactly what happened with the final soundtrack which was ultimately replaced in the film by Conti's more traditional movie score. "How can I describe what it was like recording in the early days of punk?" said music producer and Cherokee owner Bruce Robb. "We had decided to track the song selection in order, and were on track 4 before the band realized they were all using different set lists. The irony is we couldn't tell." Upset with Belushi's antics and believing that Fear's music was inappropriate for Neighbors, the movie studio eventually forced the band off the soundtrack project. To make up for it, Belushi got them a guest spot on Saturday Night Live.

A comprehensive look at the troubled production of Neighbors can be found in the books Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi by Bob Woodward (1984) and Belushi: A Biography by Judith Belushi Pisano and Tanner Colby (2005).

Critical reception
For one test version of the film, the head of Columbia Pictures, Frank Price, made the contentious decision to have quotations from positive press reviews of Berger's book assembled into a caption that would serve as a prologue to the film (this move prompted an angry missive from Dan Aykroyd). The final version of Neighbors was released to cinemas in December 1981 and it received mixed reaction from both critics and from some fans of Belushi and Aykroyd, who did not like that they played the complete opposite character types that they usually would. Columbia Pictures made sure to open the film in a larger than expected number of theatres because they anticipated it would draw a very large initial turnout from fans of its two stars, and could do well for the holiday season before being derailed by poor word-of-mouth. Per Box Office Mojo, "Neighbors" earned almost $24million of its ultimate $30million grosses in only a few weeks of release at the end of 1981. The movie thus made a profit because it only cost $8million to produce.

David Ansen, writing for Newsweek Magazine, wrote:

"Thomas Berger's paranoid comic novel could have been made a fascinating movie in the hands of, say, Roman Polanski, who knows how to make a comedy of menace. John G. Avildsen (Rocky) doesn't have a clue: you can't twist reality if you can't establish a reality to twist. Belushi and Aykroyd obviously got cast because they're 'bankable,' but no one seems to have asked if they were appropriate. The parts demand subtle comic acting – they do TV turns. Just how much blame falls on Larry Gelbart's disjointed script is hard to say (Avildsen could make any writer look bad), but without question Bill Conti has come up with the year's most offensive score – a cattle prod of cartoonish cuteness that only underlines the movie's desperate uncertainty of tone. The ads for Neighbors call it 'a comic nightmare;' it's more like a sour case of creative indigestion."

Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, awarded the film three stars out of four, and wrote that "Neighbors is a truly interesting comedy, an offbeat experiment in hallucinatory black humor. It grows on you." Ebert also wrote approvingly of Belushi and Aykroyd as the leads, citing it as "brilliant casting, especially since they divided the roles somewhat against our expectations." In his book Guide for the Film Fanatic, Danny Peary wrote, "I think this surreal comedy is imaginatively done, and perfectly conveys the lunacy of the two comics...I'm glad they went against type because both actors are at their absolute best." Peary argued that the "final picture is faithful to Thomas Berger's zany, satirical novel" but noted that he prefers "the film's happier ending."

Neighbors holds a 57% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Soundtrack
In December 2007, Varèse Sarabande released the Neighbors soundtrack on CD. The CD contains the score by Bill Conti as heard in the film (tracks 1-30), as well as the unused score by Tom Scott (tracks 31–49).

While the film features the songs "Hello, I Love You" by The Doors, "Holiday In Cambodia" by Dead Kennedys, and "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees, none of the songs are included on the soundtrack album.