Old School
Three depressed guys in their thirties start a fraternity, and Will Ferrell's Frank the Tank goes streaking through the quad. Todd Phillips' 2003 comedy turned a midlife crisis into a toga party and helped define the decade of R-rated comedy that followed.
Todd Phillips premiered the documentary Frat House at Sundance in 1998 and won the Grand Jury Prize — which caught the eye of Ivan Reitman, producer of Animal House, who recruited Phillips to help revive the frat-comedy genre. Their first collaboration, Road Trip (2000), did well enough that Phillips and co-writer Scot Armstrong pitched Reitman a twist on the formula: a fraternity comedy about grown men instead of college kids. DreamWorks released the result, Old School, on February 21, 2003.
Luke Wilson plays Mitch, a real-estate attorney who moves into a house near campus after walking in on his girlfriend's infidelity; Vince Vaughn is Bernard "Beanie," the fast-talking family-man ringleader who smells opportunity; and Will Ferrell is Frank "The Tank" Ricard, a newlywed whose relapse at the "Mitch-a-Palooza" house party ends with him streaking through town — right past his mortified wife and her friends. The fraternity they found fills with misfits, including Joseph "Blue" Pulaski (Patrick Cranshaw), the elderly World War II veteran who dies mid-match during a KY-lube wrestling bout at his own birthday party — the kind of gleefully dark gag that defined the movie's register.
Critics were mixed, but audiences weren't: made for $24 million, Old School grossed $87.1 million and became a cornerstone of the 2000s R-rated comedy wave. For Ferrell, fresh off Saturday Night Live, Frank the Tank was the role that proved he could carry a movie — the launchpad of one of the decade's defining film careers, and the reason a generation still can't hear the word "streaking" without grinning.
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