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First, wow at Ted Mann
Second, not only did this movie have a budget for cocaine, but I can also corroborate that the production received bags of cocaine as gifts... from the city of Chicago.
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/01/making-of-blues-brothers-budget-for-cocaine
>THE COMEDY ISSUE
January 2013
Soul Men: The Making of The Blues Brothers
The pitch was simple: “John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Blues Brothers, how about it?” But the film The Blues Brothers became a nightmare for Universal Pictures, wildly off schedule and over budget, its fate hanging on the amount of cocaine Belushi consumed. From the 1973 meeting of two young comic geniuses in a Toronto bar through the careening, madcap production of John Landis’s 1980 movie, Ned Zeman chronicles the triumph of an obsession.
By Ned Zeman
First thing in the morning, the king of Hollywood receives a phone call. The call always comes from New York. The reason is simple. New York, being three hours ahead of Los Angeles, always has The Numbers. And The Numbers—daily accountings of every dollar spent, every box-office receipt—are all that matter.
That’s how Lew Wasserman sees it. And if Lew Wasserman sees it that way, that’s the way it is. This is what makes him Lew Wasserman, the feared and omnipotent head of Universal Pictures.
It is October 1979, and The Numbers are not to Wasserman’s satisfaction. The culprit is Universal’s big-ticket production The Blues Brothers, a movie that pretty much defies logic and description. Some call it a musical; others, a comedy; others, a buddy movie; others, a bloated vanity project.
One thing is clear. The movie is behind schedule and burning through its budget, which Wasserman considered too big to begin with. That Wasserman feels this way about every film’s budget is incidental.
“Goddammit!” Wasserman says to his second-in-command, Ned Tanen, the president of Universal. Tanen then finds the executive one rung lower. This is Sean Daniel, Universal’s vice president in charge of production. Tanen, shouting “I’m getting killed here!,” orders Daniel to do something, anything, to stanch the bleeding.
Daniel calls the movie’s director, John Landis. Landis then appeals to one of the film’s two stars, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. The latter is always easy to find and to deal with. He is also, by a mile, the best way to reach Belushi.
Everything revolves around Belushi, the most electric and popular comic actor of his time. It would be inaccurate to blame all the movie’s problems on Belushi. He isn’t responsible for the late-developing script or the unwieldy action sequences. It would be even more inaccurate to say Belushi isn’t responsible. He has become a blessed wreck, thanks mostly to his spiraling (and ultimately lethal) addiction to cocaine.
On days when coke gets the best of Belushi, production stalls. And when production stalls, money burns. And when money burns, Lew Wasserman burns.
It begins, as these things do, in a dark bar. The time is November 1973. The bar, a speakeasy called the 505 Club, is in Toronto and owned by Aykroyd, a bizarro 20-year-old with webbed toes, mismatched eyes—one green, one brown—and a checkered past as a two-bit hoodlum and a seminary student.
The club opens at one A.M. because Aykroyd works nights. For the past three years, he has been performing with Second City, the famed comedy troupe based in Chicago but also flourishing in Toronto.
Aykroyd is at the 505, unwinding after a show, when a bullish 24-year-old charges through the back door. This is Belushi, wearing a white scarf, a leather jacket, and a five-point driver’s cap of the sort worn by aging cabbies. Aykroyd wonders whether his guest had somehow mistaken himself for Lee J. Cobb.
The two had met earlier in the evening, backstage at Second City. “We had heard of each other,” Aykroyd recalls. “We took one look at each other. It was love at first sight.”
Belushi is a Second City alumnus, having spent two productive years with the Chicago troupe. But now he works in New York, running and starring in a show called The National Lampoon Radio Hour. He’s in Toronto to poach talent.
Aykroyd says no. He is contractually committed to Second City and happy in Canada, where he was born and raised (in Ottawa, specifically). Plus, he owns a private club, with a jukebox stocked with his favorite music: R&B, soul, and, especially, blues. Chicago blues. Memphis blues. Just a whole hell of a lot of blues, popular (B. B. King) and less so (Pinetop Perkins).
Belushi stops talking and starts listening. His own musical tastes vary only a hair. He likes hard 70s rock (Cream, Bad Company) and harder 70s rock (AC/DC, Deep Purple).
“This is a nice record,” Belushi says. “What is it?”
“A local blues band,” Aykroyd replies. “The Downchild Blues Band.”
“Blues, huh? I don’t listen to too much blues.”
Brief silence. “John,” Aykroyd says, “you’re from Chicago.”
The platonic love affair between Belushi and Aykroyd defies reason—Belushi, who scribbles ideas on wrinkled scraps of paper; Aykroyd, whose mad-scientist digressions are such that Belushi, when asked to translate their meaning, says, “I have *no idea*.”
Granted, both are young comic geniuses from the Greater Great Lakes region, with its shortage of sunlight and abundance of Polish sausage. But Belushi is an overgrown teenager, a celebration of willful chaos, a hugger. He couldn’t hide his emotions if he tried, and he never tries. Formality is his enemy. When Belushi first meets you, he calls you “Pal.”
Aykroyd is precise, disciplined. He evinces a genial Canadian aloofness, a square-peg formality. When Aykroyd first meets you, he calls you “Sir.”
Aykroyd lives and dies for the blues, his command of the subject falling somewhere between encyclopedic and monomaniacal. His blues evangelism transfixes Belushi, a man who embraces nothing halfheartedly. Suddenly it’s all blues, all the time. Within a year, Belushi’s apartment contains hundreds, maybe thousands, of blues recordings.
Larger than Life
In the spring of 1975, Belushi and Aykroyd join the original cast of Saturday Night Live. Everyone knows what comes next—that big, shiny blur of samurai swords and Little Chocolate Donuts; of the Super Bass-o-Matic ’76 and Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute; of “No Coke, Pepsi” and “Jane, you ignorant slut.”
And the Blues Brothers enter the equation—although, technically, they were conceived back on that first night in Toronto, when it became known that Aykroyd’s passions include, in addition to U.F.O.’s and high-tech weaponry, the harmonica.
Belushi always wants to play music. He’s been this way since high school, where he was the drummer in a garage band called the Ravens. This despite his bandmates’ utter rejection of Belushi’s singing ability. “Oh, John, I don’t know,” one of them would say. “Maybe you can do a Ringo song.”
Aykroyd mentions an idea he’s been mulling. The idea, he recalls, “is based on two classic recidivist American characters. It’s based on a love of the city of Chicago and the music that came out of there.”
One of Aykroyd’s friends, Howard Shore, chimes in. (Shore is an aspiring movie composer, who would go on to win three Oscars and four Grammys.) “You should call yourselves the Blues Brothers,” Shore says.
But Aykroyd’s idea doesn’t gel until the early S.N.L. days, when he and Belushi fully morph into Elwood and “Joliet” Jake Blues, blood brothers outfitted like John Lee Hooker gone Hasidic: black suits, skinny ties, Ray-Ban sunglasses. Aykroyd is Elwood, the laconic, harmonica-playing straight man; Belushi is Jake, the swaggering belter fresh out of the state prison in Joliet.
Aykroyd exhibits an almost spooky faith in Belushi, whose singing voice is O.K. but no great shakes. Then again, Belushi isn’t just a singer. He’s a *front man*. “The alpha Illinois male,” Aykroyd calls him. “One of those people like Teddy Roosevelt or Mick Jagger. He was just one of those great charismatics who turned heads and dominated a room.”
After the Blues Brothers play gigs around town for a while, Lorne Michaels lets them warm up the S.N.L. crowd before shows. Airtime proves harder to come by. Michaels isn’t quite sold. A compromise is reached. The Blues Brothers go live from New York on January 17, 1976. Dressed as bees.
The compromise, which exploits S.N.L.’s popular “Killer Bees” skit, is mercifully short-lived. Two years later, during a show hosted by Steve Martin, Jake and Elwood finally take the stage, performing “Hey, Bartender.”
Three months later, Belushi’s first movie opens. This is Animal House. Belushi, having played Bluto, the gluttonous rascal who rallies Delta House to glory, becomes a Major Movie Star.
This is good. During an out-of-town car trip, Belushi asks Aykroyd to stop the car, saying, “Watch this! Watch this!” Aykroyd recounts that “he gets out of the car and starts knocking on the ground-floor windows of this primary school, knowing he’ll get a reaction. By the time we left, all the windows are up and the whole school is chanting, ‘Bluto! Bluto!’ ”
Suddenly Steve Martin is asking them to open his nine-night stand at the Universal Amphitheater, in Los Angeles. The opportunity presents a vexing problem. The band has no band.
They turn to Paul Shaffer, S.N.L.’s bandleader. Shaffer draws up a list of candidates. All are crack musicians, highly paid and hard to get.
Belushi rallies, cold-calling the candidates at inappropriately late hours. “This is John Belushi,” he tells Steve Cropper, a noted guitarist. “We’re putting a band together. I need you here tomorrow.”
“There’s no way,” Cropper replies. “I’m mixing an album.”
“I gotta have you.”
“No way. Can’t do it.”
“I gotta have you.”
This continues for an hour.
Within days, the whole team is in New York: Shaffer and Cropper plus lead guitarist Matt “Guitar” Murphy, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, drummer Steve Jordan, and a horn section composed of Alan Rubin, Lou Marini, Tom Maloney, and Tom Scott. Shaffer mans the keyboards. After two weeks of rehearsal, they all fly to Los Angeles.
They kill. This has something to do with musicianship and a lot to do with showmanship. Belushi and Aykroyd execute perfectly choreographed dance routines. They play it half-straight, half-comic. Taking the stage, to Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” Aykroyd carries a briefcase; Belushi, the key that unlocks it. Inside is Aykroyd’s harmonica.
They sign with Atlantic Records, which wants to record a live album at one of the shows. The show’s plotline is finessed during late-night brainstorming sessions in New York, at Belushi’s place, on Morton Street, or at Belushi and Aykroyd’s private club, the Blues Bar, at the corner of Hudson and Dominick.
Often these sessions include Belushi’s wife, Judy, and their friend Mitch Glazer, a young music journalist. Glazer writes the album’s liner notes and then an article in Crawdaddy magazine, a smallish alternative to Rolling Stone. Both expand on the legend of Jake and Elwood. They were raised by Curtis, a blues-playing janitor. They need $5,000 to save the orphanage. Adventure ensues.
The album, Briefcase Full of Blues, goes double platinum. Meanwhile, on January 24, 1979—his 30th birthday—Belushi hits an unprecedented trifecta. The previous year he’d had a No. 1 album, a No. 1 TV show, and a No. 1 movie.
The old studio system is finally dead. Stars, not studios, run the show. Never has this been more apparent. “I say we make the thing into a movie,” Belushi says.
“Agreed,” Aykroyd replies.
They call Belushi’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, a Hollywood player who looks like a Jewish Santa. “Sounds good,” Brillstein says.
Suits descend on S.N.L. A young executive at Paramount Pictures, Don Simpson, is among the fiercest suitors. A neck-and-neck race develops between Simpson and Sean Daniel, a relatively green executive at Universal. Daniel supervised Animal House. Belushi likes Daniel. So there it is.
The director is a no-brainer. John Landis, a bearded comic prodigy, has already guided Belushi and Animal House to runaway success. Belushi covets his approval. Late at night, after especially good S.N.L. shows, he calls Landis, asking, “You see the show?”
“No,” Landis replies.
“Fuck you,” Belushi says, and slams down the receiver.
Things progress swiftly, perhaps too swiftly. Daniel doesn’t even sit down with his immediate boss, Ned Tanen, or with Universal’s boss of bosses, Lew Wasserman.
Daniel simply calls Tanen and says, “Belushi, Aykroyd, Blues Brothers, how about it?”
“Great,” Tanen replies. “I’ll tell Lew.”
Wasserman trusts Tanen, who had persuaded him to make Universal’s smash American Graffiti. Tanen knows a deal when he sees it. Belushi gets $500,000, Aykroyd $250,000. The studio gets a potential blockbuster and quite possibly a franchise. “There was no inter-company conversation,” Tanen recalls. “It was simple: Don’t fuck with love.”
A few details remain unresolved. Wasserman wants the movie done for about $12 million. The creatives are thinking $20 million. The executives want filming wrapped by August 1979—just six months away. The creatives wonder whether that’s possible, let alone desirable. They envision The Blues Brothers as a large-scale production involving grand set pieces, special effects, and a cast and crew of hundreds.
There’s also the matter of a script. There isn’t one.
Without a script, it’s damn near impossible to produce anything. Belushi urges Mitch Glazer to collaborate with Aykroyd, saying, “Just go figure something out.”
Glazer begs off. This is Aykroyd’s baby. He’s an Emmy winner, the author of many or most of his best S.N.L. skits. There’s just one catch, production-wise. This runaway train hinges on a screenwriter who has never in his life written or even read a screenplay.
Again Belushi does what he does best. Another flurry of inappropriately late phone calls draws the band to Belushi’s place. Judy is out of town. So Belushi and Glazer find themselves in the garden, lighting candles. Belushi wants everything to be perfect. This is about the team.
“O.K., we’re going to do this movie,” he announces. “It’s going to be called The Blues Brothers, and it’s about … ”
The band’s doubts become evident. Never mind any concerns they have about being a white band playing black music. This is a band: cracks have formed. “John would give one of them a raise, then the others would get mad and demand the same,” Glazer says. “And of course John had told each of them they were the ‘heartbeat of the band.’ ”
“Come on!” Belushi implores them, in his middle-linebacker way. “This is what we’re going to do! And I want you all to be a part of it!”
He corrals the band but loses its architect, Paul Shaffer, who has obligations in New York. Belushi, unmoved, circulates a memo of sorts. “Shaffer is out,” it reads. “He will *never* be a Blues Brother.”
Belushi can afford to pick fights now that his own exit from S.N.L. is inevitable. Last season, his fourth, was messy. He spent too much time bouncing between New York and Los Angeles while starring in 1941, Steven Spielberg’s exuberant comedy about a Japanese invasion of California. Belushi has grown tired of S.N.L., and it of him.
The drugs aren’t helping. By now Belushi’s appetites for fun and adventure are fueled by quaaludes, mescaline, LSD, and amphetamines. But all of them combined take a backseat to cocaine. One line is never enough. Coke fuels his performance, Belushi says. It helps him be John Belushi.
And Belushi is “the boss of the Blues Brothers,” as Aykroyd calls him. Whenever a band member has a problem, he turns to Belushi. Belushi always handles it. Somehow he manages to be both a father and a son. “He was *very* loyal,” says guitarist Steve Cropper. “And he was like a big child, everybody’s teddy bear. He just wanted to keep the party going. He was afraid that, if he went to sleep, he’d never wake up.”
During pre-production, Belushi and Aykroyd decamp to Hollywood. Aykroyd literally lives in the office, in a bungalow on the Universal lot. It’s free. It’s quiet. It’s close to the Frankenstein Village set.
At night he “borrows” cars from Universal’s motor pool. Alone, or with Belushi, he drives to the top of Universal City, smokes a joint, and gazes out at Beaver Cleaver’s house (which is still on the lot today).
Finally, in March, the film’s producer, Bob Weiss, gets a call. “Be on your property tonight,” the caller says, and hangs up.
Weiss heads home to find an ominously thick package, its contents wrapped within the cover of a phone book. This is Aykroyd’s screenplay, titled The Return of the Blues Brothers. Its writing credit reads, “By Scriptatron GL-9000.”
Weiss calls Sean Daniel. “Good news,” Weiss reports. “The first draft finally got here.” It is not the typical 120-page draft. “It’s 324 pages,” Weiss says. “We have a lot of work to do.”
The script contains great scenes and inspired ideas but is written in a kind of free-verse style. It includes lengthy, Aykroyd-esque explications of Catholicism, recidivism—you name it. It gets meta, with separate story lines detailing the recruitment of all eight backup musicians.
“The script is never-ending,” Ned Tanen thinks. “It doesn’t really work. It’s like a long treatment or something”—a treatment being a detailed outline the writer produces *before* writing a script. The Blues Brothers is scheduled to begin shooting in two months.
Landis, script in hand, locks himself away. He cuts, shapes, tones. Then he cuts some more. Three weeks later, he emerges with a script that’s down to size and, as they say, shootable. More or less. It still lacks certain basics, such as stage directions.
Landis and Aykroyd haggle over bits the latter wants to restore or change. Aykroyd wants a scene explaining why Elwood’s car, the Bluesmobile, has magical qualities. Landis doesn’t but agrees to film it. He knows he’ll just cut it later.
They head to Chicago. Universal places an ad in the trades. “It’s too late,” the ad reads. “Production has begun.”
Wind at Their Back
As filming begins, in July 1979, things somehow run smoothly. Belushi and Aykroyd occupy the top two floors of the Astor Tower, a louvered high-rise in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood.
For this they owe a debt to their friend Stanley Korshak, who wangled a discounted rent for them. Korshak happens to be the son of Chicago’s own Sidney Korshak, the notorious Mob lawyer and Hollywood “fixer” whose client list happens to include Lew Wasserman, who happens to have an in with Chicago’s mayor, Jane Byrne. “Let’s just say we were welcomed by the mayor,” Daniel says and smiles.
Aykroyd spends his free time speeding through outskirts and befriending coroners. Belushi, being Chicago’s favorite son, does anything he wants. Everything about him—his lunch-bucket charm, his utter lack of pretense—makes Belushi a figure of such resounding local popularity that Aykroyd calls him “the unofficial mayor of Chicago.”
A trip to Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, boggles Landis. “Like being with Mussolini in Rome,” he remembers. Belushi, having entered one of the stadium’s crowded bathrooms, smiles and shouts, “O.K., *stand back*!” Everyone retreats from the urinals. Belushi does his business. Then, zipping his fly and beaming, he says, “O.K., back you go!”
“John would literally hail police cars like taxis,” Mitch Glazer says. “The cops would say, ‘Hey, *Belushi*!’ Then we’d fall into the backseat and the cops would drive us home.”
Naturally, Belushi and Aykroyd require yet another private bar, also called the Blues Club. Here Belushi’s local friends mix with the cast and crew, among them Carrie Fisher, who plays Jake’s maniac ex-girlfriend. In reality, Fisher is Aykroyd’s girlfriend. It is an arranged romance of sorts. One day Belushi decided they made a good couple and presto!
For a month, production hums along. Landis *gets* Belushi. As in Animal House, as in reality, Landis sees him as the boyish scamp, the Cookie Monster, a silent-movie star in a spoken world. Occasionally Landis rides Aykroyd, urging him to tone it down and play Elwood wholly deadpan.
All three leave their marks. A lady asks Jake and Elwood, “Are you the police?” Elwood replies, “No, ma’am. We’re musicians.” Pure Aykroyd. Landis produces the movie’s signature line: “We’re on a mission from God.” And who but Belushi can turn to a family and ask, as Jake does, “How much for the little girl?”
The film’s budget is $17.5 million, then an expensive proposition, particularly for a comedy. Or whatever it is. Nobody quite knows. There’s comedy and lots of it. There are car chases and crashing helicopters. But all of the above revolve around four giant song-and-dance numbers, each starring a different music giant: Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Cab Calloway. Not to mention the performances by Jake and Elwood.
“You could tell there was confusion,” Landis says. “I told some of the crew, ‘This is a *musical*.’ They were so confused. They didn’t know what the fuck they were making.”
By August, though, everyone knows one thing. The production is falling behind, and fast, and the trend is largely attributable to Belushi, who stays out until all hours. Usually he can be found at his speakeasy. Sometimes he can’t be found at all. Except by cocaine, which finds him everywhere.
Friends, fans, and hangers-on literally throw it at him. They slip vials into his hands and pockets. “Every blue-collar Joe wants his John Belushi story,” says Smokey Wendell, who would soon become Belushi’s anti-drug bodyguard. “Every one of those guys wants to tell his friends, ‘I did blow with Belushi.’ ”
It is 1979. Rare is the actor who doesn’t snort, pop, or guzzle. Landis, a teetotaler, misses the bigger picture. “We had a budget in the movie for cocaine for night shoots,” Aykroyd says. “Everyone did it, including me. Never to excess, and not ever to where I wanted to buy it or have it. (But) John, he just loved what it did. It sort of brought him alive at night—that superpower feeling where you start to talk and converse and figure you can solve all the world’s problems.”
“There was some girl who would hang out at the Blues Bar,” Carrie Fisher says. “She cleaned the fishtank and provided mescaline. There were always these people that were enabling the party to continue.”
Belushi endlessly breaks and mends fences. He takes offense at a comment made by his friend Michael O’Donoghue, an S.N.L. writer. Belushi refuses to even see him. O’Donoghue sends Belushi a taped and unusually candid explanation. Belushi, having listened to it, destroys the tape. “No one else should ever hear this,” he tells Mitch Glazer before making a teary call to O’Donoghue.
Belushi, as Jake, sounds increasingly congested. Sometimes he shows up hours late. Or he shows up but spends most of the time in his trailer, sleeping it off.
“I’m fine,” Belushi tells Judy. “I can’t stop now until I finish the movie. It’ll be fine when it’s over.”
Ned Tanen, the executive who green-lit The Blues Brothers, has a theory about wayward productions: “You go in thinking, This is going to be great! About the 20th day in, you think, This is the worst piece of garbage out of hell. Nobody will see it. I’m going to be assassinated for making it.”
The studio is not helping things. It wants “fresh” contemporary acts. It wants, in place of Aretha Franklin, Rose Royce, the band that sings the hit theme from Car Wash. The creatives refuse. The suits (except for Daniel) want Jake and Elwood to periodically lose the Ray-Bans and reveal their eyes. The creatives refuse. (In the end, Jake reveals his eyes only once.)
Such battles pale by comparison, because now everyone has a Lew Wasserman Problem. Each morning, having received his call from New York, Wasserman sees that which he least wants to see. The numbers are, as they say, trending upward.
Still, filming continues despite a collective worry about the final budget. There isn’t one. Neither Landis nor Weiss sees the magic number until a month or so into filming. At which point Weiss turns to Landis and says, “I think we’ve spent that already.”
He’s joking. And yet. They both know that every lost day, every extra hour of overtime pay to union workers, brings “overages” and therefore the wrath of Wasserman.
“Lew would nail me every day,” Tanen says. “I wasn’t getting phone calls. He would be in my office. He comes in and says, *‘Goddammit.’* ” Or, when scenes take too long to shoot, Wasserman says, “God damn this thing—they’ve only got two and a half minutes to do it.” Or, increasingly, he says, “God damn that director.”
The more Tanen defends Landis, the less he can explain the overages. Blaming Belushi isn’t an option. “I couldn’t say to Lew, ‘We have another kind of problem.’ It’s not what he wanted to hear. You didn’t tell him somebody was stoned or couldn’t get out of his trailer. You just didn’t do it.”
Instead, Tanen screams at Sean Daniel. “For Chrissake!” Tanen yells. “Wasserman’s eating me alive with this thing because it’s going over and over! You’d better protect me, Sean, because I can’t hold the fort much longer!”
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Daniel replies. “I’ve done everything I can.”
Belushi is in free fall. “John was fucked up,” Landis says. “It became a battle to keep him alive and to keep him working on the movie.”
When Carrie Fisher arrives on location, Landis gives her the same spiel he gives everyone. “For God’s sake,” he says, “if you see John doing drugs, stop him.”
Seventies and Snowy
Only two people can get to Belushi. The first is his wife. With Judy, and especially at their vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard, John returns to his natural state of lazy quietude. “I wouldn’t call John a high-energy person,” says Judy. “He had a great energy, and he could pull it out of nowhere, (but) he would sit down and watch TV for hours. And he could do so without a remote and without ever getting up to change a channel because somehow he’d always convince you to do it. And (his brother) Jimmy once said something about how you wanted to serve him.”
Then there’s Aykroyd. Yes, Belushi occasionally tries his patience. At one point, Aykroyd smashes his wristwatch, shouting, “Do you want to end up like this?” But he always protects and never judges. “There was a sense that, no matter what John did, Danny wouldn’t abandon him, that he didn’t think John was this awful person,” Carrie Fisher says. “He was really taking care of John.”
One night at three, while filming on a deserted lot in Harvey, Illinois, Belushi disappears. He does this sometimes. On a hunch, Aykroyd follows a grassy path until he spies a house with a light on.
“Uh, we’re shooting a film over here,” Aykroyd tells the homeowner. “We’re looking for one of our actors.”
“Oh, you mean Belushi?” the man replies. “He came in here an hour ago and raided my fridge. He’s asleep on my couch.”
Only Belushi could pull this off. “America’s Guest,” Aykroyd calls him.
“John,” Aykroyd says, awakening Belushi, “we have to go back to work.”
Belushi nods and rises. They walk back to the set as if nothing happened.
Sean Daniel dreads the mornings at Universal, where all the higher-ups use the same elevators. “I would stand there going, ‘Elevator doors close, please, before Lew walks in,’ ” Daniel says. “Then Lew walked in and said, ‘Mr. Daniel, I see that yesterday you went another day over. That puts you at 14 days over.’ He was always right, to the dollar. I would say, ‘I couldn’t agree more. I’m working on it.’ ”
Wasserman and Tanen had valid questions. How many car crashes does one movie need? Is the cameo by Twiggy really necessary? “I can’t shield this anymore!” Tanen shouts. “Get this fucking thing finished! You have to do whatever you do. Cut scenes—whatever! I can’t do this much longer!”
Bob Weiss makes a judgment call. Tanen, unlike Daniel, has never actually seen what Universal is paying for. The production is a production unto itself, and an impressive one. Weiss calls Tanen, saying, “Ned, get Sean and come out to Chicago. I want to show you what we’re doing.”
Weiss takes Tanen into the “war room,” where action sequences are engineered, and to the building where vehicles used in these sequences—70 police cars alone!—get repaired and sometimes built. “They got a full feeling for the size of the production,” Weiss says. “They also caught an earlier flight home. I saw a distinct ashen pallor on Ned’s face.”
By now overages are into the millions, the $17.5 million budget a pipe dream. Filming in Chicago is scheduled to wrap in mid-September (before continuing in Los Angeles). Alas. September comes and goes, and October is no picnic, either.
Landis, beyond frustrated, heads to Belushi’s trailer. There, on a table, Landis sees a mountain of cocaine.
“It’s like Tony Montana,” Landis says, referring to the main character in Scarface. “It’s like a joke. I scoop it all up and flush it down the toilet. Probably a lot of money’s worth. So I’m on my way out of the trailer, and John comes in and says, ‘What’d you do?’ Then he pushes me, mostly to get to the table. It’s pathetic. He’s trying to get to the table to save the cocaine.”
They scuffle. It lasts about 15 seconds. “At which point,” Landis says, “John hugged me and started sobbing and apologized. He and I are sitting there, both crying, and I’m going, ‘John, this is insane.’ ”
Tanen’s options are none. They can’t use a “double” for Jake. Nobody can double Belushi. They can’t shut down the production and wait for Belushi to go through rehab. Belushi won’t go. Even if he does go, the ensuing costs and media madness will send Wasserman around the bend. Finally, carefully, Tanen tells Wasserman, “Lew, there is a core problem, a basic problem with John Belushi, and we’re just getting through it.”
Wasserman betrays nothing. “Finish the movie,” he says. “Get on with it.”
Filming finishes in Los Angeles, in and around the Universal lot, where Aykroyd again takes up residence. John and Judy rent a house in Coldwater Canyon. “By the time we got to Los Angeles,” Aykroyd says, “(the shoot) was a well-oiled machine.”
By comparison, anyway. Production goes more or less on schedule, and Los Angeles injects its energy: parties at the Playboy Mansion, nights with De Niro and Nicholson.
Belushi summons periods of sobriety. By now he has met Smokey Wendell, a kind of bodyguard/anti-drug enforcer for Joe Walsh, a guitarist for the Eagles. “If I don’t do something now,” Belushi tells Wendell, “I’m going to be dead in a year or two.”
Belushi is on his best behavior while in the presence of the movie’s other musical stars: Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Cab Calloway. They, too, are in fine form. Even Charles, the crankiest of the bunch, laughs and laughs, usually while retelling the same dirty joke. The Blues Brothers presents a real opportunity for all of them, since all but Charles are in commercial ruts.
Not that this changes any of them. Marini, one of the horn players, spots Franklin taking a cigarette break. He approaches sheepishly, saying, “I just want to tell you how much I enjoy your work.” Franklin turns, glancing at the number on Marini’s football jersey. “Sixty-nine, huh?” she says, and turns away.
One day Aykroyd and Belushi raid the wardrobe department. Tanen happens to be in Wasserman’s office when Wasserman takes a call notifying him that two of Universal’s biggest stars, dressed as Nazi SS officers, have driven off the lot and onto the freeway. Tanen finds this hilarious. Wasserman does not.
Behind the scenes, it’s a different story. Daniel and Weiss are spent. And now they’re confronting the movie’s climactic concert scene. The finale requires Belushi and Aykroyd to do cartwheels, dance steps—the whole deal. It requires hundreds of extras. It requires the Hollywood Palladium.
Daniel gets a call from Weiss. “You better get down here,” Weiss says. When Daniel arrives, Weiss explains. A kid had ridden past Belushi on a skateboard. Belushi asked to ride the board. Belushi fell off the board.
Daniel finds the star clutching his knee and in serious pain. “This was bad,” Daniel recalls. “We had to deal with it in the most effective and emergency-like way. And there was one person who was wired into the Los Angeles medical community better than anyone else.” Wasserman. “I was one of the last people he wanted to hear from,” Daniel says. “The only thing he wanted to hear from me was ‘We’re done.’ ”
Wasserman calls the top orthopedist in town. “It’s Thanksgiving weekend,” the doctor points out. “I’m on my way to Palm Springs.”
“Not yet,” Wasserman replies.
Thirty minutes later, the orthopedist wraps and injects Belushi, who then grits his way through the finale.
End of story.
Or not. In the weeks preceding the movie’s theatrical-release date (June 20, 1980), Landis screens The Blues Brothers for major theater owners—“the guys with white belts and white shoes,” as he describes them.
The owners, who call themselves “exhibitors,” are Hollywood’s ultimate gatekeepers. They hold a movie’s fate in their hands. “Most of them said, ‘This is a black movie and white people won’t see it.’ Most of the prime houses wouldn’t book it.”
Granted, Landis et al. have themselves created a few roadblocks. Belushi’s previous movie, Spielberg’s 1941, has crashed and burned, thereby earning The Blues Brothers the nickname 1942 and inspiring O’Donoghue to distribute buttons that read, “John Belushi, Born 1949, Died 1941.”
Also, The Blues Brothers clocks in at two and a half hours, not including the *intermission*. Wasserman, exiting a preview screening, spots Landis and gestures with two fingers, in a scissoring motion.
Landis cuts 20 minutes. In the meantime, another bomb explodes. “Lew calls me up to his office,” Landis says. “I go in there and he says, ‘John, do you know Ted Mann of Mann Theaters?’ ” Mann owns many of the country’s top movie houses, among them the Bruin and the National, both located in Westwood, a prosperous white neighborhood. “Lew says, ‘Ted, tell Mr. Landis what you just told me.’ ”
Then, Landis remembers, the conversation goes accordingly:
Mann: “Mr. Landis, we’re not booking The Blues Brothers in any of our national or general theaters. We have a theater in Compton where we’ll book it. But certainly not in Westwood.”
Landis: “Why won’t you book it in Westwood?”
Mann: “Because I don’t want any blacks in Westwood.”
Then, Landis says, Mann explained why whites won’t see The Blues Brothers: “Mainly because of the musical artists you have. Not only are they black. They are out of fashion.”
The typical big-budget movie gets booked into about 1,400 theaters. The Blues Brothers gets about 600 bookings. This, coupled with frequently heckling reviews—“a ponderous comic monstrosity,” The Washington Post calls it—spells epic disaster.
The Blues Brothers, having exceeded its $17.5 million budget by $10 million, is needlessly long and clearly flawed. In New York, Belushi drives from theater to theater, gauging audiences. Aykroyd watches the movie in a theater in Times Square.
He detects laughter.
The Blues Brothers makes $115 million, becoming one of Universal’s most enduring hits and by far its greatest farce.
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