Frat House

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frat House
Directed by	Todd Phillips Andrew Gurland
Produced by	Todd Phillips Andrew Gurland
Music by	J.F. Coleman
Editing by	Salamo Levin
Release date(s)	21 January 1998 (premiere at Sundance)
Running time	60 mins
Country	USA
Language	English
IMDb profile

This article refers to the documentary. For the campus housing facility, see Fraternity house.

Frat House is a documentary film exploring the darker side of fraternity life. The film was directed by Todd Phillips and Andrew Gurland, and largely filmed at Allentown, Pennsylvania's Muhlenberg College; the majority of the film was shot in the house of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, which has since been banned from Muhlenberg.^[1] Frat House won two Sundance Film Festival awards in 1998, but has been attacked for allegedly containing sequences that were staged for the cameras.

Frat House was originally intended to be shown on the HBO TV channel, but was never aired after receiving allegations that much of the final portion of the film was staged. The sequences concerned involved 'hazing', in which aspring members of the fraternity (known as 'pledges') are seen undergoing humiliating initiation rites. The allegation is that the pledges who appear on screen were in fact already members of the fraternity: the fraternity chapter was paid $1500 to film the events, and several members were paid $50 each to pretend to be pledges and re-enact things that were rumored to happen during fratenity pledging rituals. The filmmakers signed non-binding forms stating that the school and fraternity names would not be used, and that the events did not reflect the behavior of the fraternity. The deceit was noticed because the film was shot in the Spring, but Muhlenberg College did not rush during the Spring.^{[citation needed]}

Phillips and Garland claim their film is completely accurate, but they have not refuted the claim that pledging did not happen during the Spring at Muhlenberg College.^{[citation needed]} While not admitting to have done it himself, Phillips argues that staging re-enactments of true events is a technique used by well-known documentarians such as Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore.^[2]

[edit] References

Rapkin, Mickey. "Burning Down The House". The Cornell Daily Sun. October 15, 1998.
Daly, Steve. "Hazed & Confused". Entertainment Weekly. Iss 466, pp. 19-20. January 8, 1999.