To this day, Jim Belushi despises Bob Woodward, and every word of “Wired”, Woodward’s biography of Belushi’s brother John. He’s slagged the book every time he’s been asked about it, and reportedly threatened the people who produced the film version. (Perhaps he could have provided them with his own insight?) Dan Aykroyd has been less vitriolic, but claims that the bio was “really inaccurate” because Woodward allegedly “handed it over to his researcher”.
Now, I didn’t know Belushi, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the bio. But I’ve read it, and accurate or not, it didn’t seem to be an unsympathetic portrait. It’s other sources (word of mouth and magazine articles that mentioned Belushi as part of a larger story, rather than focusing on him specifically), that left me with the impression that he was an out-of-control monster.
“Wired” actually cleared a lot of things up for me. For instance, I’d heard someone accuse Belushi of blowing his money on “drugs and a broad who was not his wife.” Wrong—there was no “broad”. He was sexually faithful to his wife; drugs were the mistress. Similarly, Woodward provided no basis for the claims of violent behavior that I’d heard; he showed Belushi as being obnoxious and occasionally destructive, but never abusive.
So what I read in “Wired” was the story of an irrestistible force (Belushi) who met a very movable object (the excess of the '70’s, to put it in a nutshell) and continued spinning until he burned himself out. Basically the story of a nice guy, good friend, faithful husband, raw talent, high energy…who just happened to do a lot of drugs at a time when few people knew better. Not a character assassination at all.
So what, if anything, did Woodward get wrong, and how, if at all, was “Wired” disrespectful?
From what I can gather, Dan Aykroyd, Jackie Belushi and others in John Belushi’s circle lobbied Bob Woodward, the Hero of Watergate, to take on this project and blow the lid off the establishment conspiracy that killed their beloved John. Woodward’s research led him in a very different direction, one that indicted Belushi and those close to him, and who wanted to hear that?
They also discovered what many subjects of Woodward’s books have, i.e. Woodward’s agenda isn’t exactly in line with that of the Baby Boomer American left.
I’ve seen the movie. I expected it to be more or less a documentary, a sort of docudrama based on the book.
The movie, on the other hand, is played as a sort of surreal black comedy, beginning with Belushi’s awakening on the morgue slab after his death, whereupon he and his guardian angel (Ray Sharkey) then go through a sort of “This Was Your Life” situation, complete with Bob Woodward wandering in and out of it, climaxing in Woodward trying to interview Belushi as he lies dying in bed. “I can’t breathe… breathe for me, Woodward…gak”
Surreal. Bizarre. Not terribly respectful of Belushi, or of the facts, or even of Woodward’s book. And small wonder Aykroyd and the Belushi family hated it. If the book didn’t piss 'em off, the movie would certainly have driven them insane…
That’s weird, after “Plan of Attack” came out, all the right-wing pundits were telling us that Bob Woodward was just another liberal lefty hack-writer. Do you mean to tell me that Limbaugh and O’Reilly and Coulter were lying? :eek:
Hm. Well, I didn’t think the book was an indictment of Belushi’s associates, any more than it indicted him. It seemed fairly even-handed, again bearing in mind that I don’t know any of these people IRL.
As for the movie, I knew there was one, but I don’t expect any movie to be faithful to its source material.
Well, if I recall correctly, the book was a fairly straightforward work of investigative journalism. I could be misremembering, but Woodward cited the holy hell out of everything he wrote, I think. If the facts made Belushi look bad, well, it’s not like he really had anyone else to blame.
The movie, on the other hand, was not investigative journalism, nor was it a documentary. The movie was… well, friggin’ surreal. If they wanted to make a weirdy-assed drug-addled version of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” they could have done better than to put Woodward’s name and book title on it.
Much less include him in it as a character.
There is “faithful to the source material,” and there is “not faithful to the source material.”
But there is also “way the hell out in left field in relation to the source material,” and “not even in the stinkin’ ballpark with the source material.”
