John Belushi

The gilt fell off Saturday Night Live’s reputational gingerbread almost from the moment of its inception. Long before the arrival of Bob Woodward’s Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi (1984) — its antihero dead at the age of thirty-three — whatever luster the show had possessed had been well-nigh obliterated by a tide of scuttlebutt. The girls were (apparently) all bulimics and anorexics. The guys were coke fiends and egomaniacs. Misogyny (exemplified by Belushi’s dislike of sketches written by women) and back-stabbing were endemic; drug dealers sat in on the writing sessions.

A good place to start with The Blues Brothers, Daniel de Visé’s engaging account of the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd comedy classic, is in the spring preceding the movie’s summer 1980 release. By this stage, the production was mired in controversy and a martyr to industry scuttlebutt. Press reports put the expenditure at anywhere between $35 million and $40 million (in fact it sailed home at a mere $27.5 million) — and this at a time when over-subsidized box office calamities such as Steven Spielberg’s 1941 and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate had prompted many a lament about Hollywood hubris. The rough cut came in at a mammoth three hours, at a time when two were reckoned excessive.