TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042489/04248900.016

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.5 KB | 142 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 90

Finally, the Belushi Story


Wired heads for the theaters despite Hollywood's hostility


    From the moment his body was found in a Hollywood hotel room
in March 1982, the victim of a drug overdose at age 33, John
Belushi became the subject of an inevitable barrage of media
scavenging. First came the newspaper stories, detailing the
cocaine and heroin abuse that led to the Rabelaisian comic's
early death. Then a book, Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times
of John Belushi, written by Watergate chronicler Bob Woodward.
The tell-all tome implicated several of Belushi's Hollywood
friends and associates for condoning, or at least ignoring, his
self-destructive behavior.

    The next step in the media onslaught, of course, is the
movie. But that is where this Hollywood story hit a snag. Plans
for a film version of Wired were set in motion more than four
years ago. But problems in getting financing delayed the
shooting until last summer. And not until last week, after
months of turndowns, did the producers find a company willing to
distribute the film. The stumbling block, say Wired's backers,
was a Hollywood community that closed ranks against a picture
it wanted to squelch. Says Woodward, an adviser on the film: "A
large portion of Hollywood didn't want this movie made because
there's too much truth in it."

    At the heart of this conspiracy drama is the specter of the
powerful Creative Artists Agency, headed by superagent Michael
Ovitz. Ovitz was Belushi's agent, and his company's star-packed
client list includes several of the comedian's friends who were
angered by Woodward's book, among them fellow Saturday Night
Live star Dan Aykroyd, SNL producer Lorne Michaels and brother
Jim Belushi. Reluctance to alienate Ovitz and his clients,
claim the film's producers, is what frightened most of Hollywood
away. "In this town," says co-producer Edward Feldman (Save the
Tiger, Witness), "the word was put out that this was a project
not to be touched."

    While admitting that he had reservations about the film "to
the extent that it would be exploitative," Ovitz denies that he
led a campaign to suppress it. "This movie will rise or fall on
its own merits," he says. "There is nothing anyone can do to
stop it." Bolstering his argument is the fact that the film,
for all its troubles, has found a distributor: Atlantic
Entertainment Group, an independent company that has handled
such films as Teen Wolf and Wish You Were Here. Some contend
that Wired's producers are simply trying to generate
controversy over a bad film with poor box-office prospects. "The
only thing that the producers have to hang on to is the image
of Wired as `the movie that Hollywood tried to stop,' " says
Bernie Brillstein, Belushi's former manager. "I think this is
a very good plan to get some excitement for the movie."

    As a commercial project, Wired has its problems. Belushi,
the brilliant, volatile star of Saturday Night Live and films
like National Lampoon's Animal House, has become a posthumous
icon, a symbol of the raucous counterculture comedy that
Saturday Night Live spearheaded in the '70s. But cinematic
tales of drug abuse (Less Than Zero, Clean and Sober) have
fizzled at the box office, and Wired is an especially downbeat
example. What's more, with Belushi's work so vividly remembered
(and still widely available in TV reruns), a movie re-creation
might seem morbidly gratuitous, even by Hollywood standards.

    Nor does the film offer the easy pleasures of a conventional
movie bio. Earl Mac Rauch's script mixes fantasy and fact in an
ambitious, if muddled, attempt at surrealistic psychodrama. In
the opening scene, the dead Belushi (played by newcomer Michael
Chiklis) wakes up in a morgue, escapes in a gown resembling the
toga he wore in Animal House and meets a guardian angel in the
guise of a taxi driver (Ray Sharkey). Their conversations are
intermingled with time-jumbled flashbacks of Belushi's life,
snippets of his comedy material and scenes of Woodward pursuing
the story.

    The film tiptoes around much of Woodward's most sensational
material. Missing, for example, is a portrayal of such Hollywood
stars as Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, reported in the book
to have used cocaine with Belushi. Except for Aykroyd (Gary
Groomes), Belushi's wife Judy (Lucinda Jenney) and Cathy Smith
(Patti D'Arbanville), the woman who allegedly gave Belushi his
fatal drug injection, most real-life characters are given
pseudonyms, and none are shown indulging in drug use with
Belushi. Only a couple of scenes offer hints that Hollywood
might share any blame in Belushi's death. In one, Woodward asks a
studio executive about the $2,500 a week reportedly paid to
Belushi for drugs. In another, a Belushi assistant admits that
he gave the star uppers before a recording session.

    The book was so widely disliked in Hollywood that Woodward
found little interest when he sought to peddle the movie rights
in 1984. Feldman and his partner, Charles Meeker, eventually
bought the rights for a relatively modest $300,000. They
started feeling pressure almost immediately. Attorneys
representing several Creative Artists clients and other Belushi
colleagues, like director John Landis (The Blues Brothers),
wrote letters warning that portraying them in the film would be
an invasion of privacy. Ovitz himself phoned, says Feldman, and
"told me it wasn't a good idea to make this picture." (Ovitz
says he was simply giving Feldman "friendly advice" that "a lot
of people we deal with -- clients and nonclients -- really
didn't want to see John's memory exploited.") In the summer of
1986, Jim Belushi stormed into Feldman's editing room at
Paramount, trashed his desk and told the secretary, "Tell him
I was here." (Her reply: "Who are you?")

    When no Hollywood studio came through, Feldman and Meeker
got backing from a New Zealand company, Lion Screen
Entertainment Ltd. The producers put up $1 million of the
film's $13 million budget themselves. They hired Larry Peerce
(Goodbye Columbus) to direct and chose Chiklis, a little-known
New York actor, for the lead role after auditioning more than
200 aspirants. Following several delays, shooting began last
May.

    When the producers started showing their finished film to
studio executives, the response was another collective cold
shoulder. "It becomes a matter of power," contends Feldman. "
`We didn't want you to make this movie, and you did. Now you're
going to suffer.' " Studio executives scoff at Feldman's
conspiracy charges. "We passed on the movie because it was
totally uncommercial and pretentiously arty," says one. Yet
several prospective deals seemed to dissolve suspiciously,
including one with New Visions Pictures, an independent company
headed by director Taylor Hackford.

    Now, however, Atlantic Entertainment has come to the rescue
and is making plans for a July or August release. Then Wired can
finally be judged by the people it was intended for: the
audience. But repercussions from the unpopular project may not
be over. Actor J.T. Walsh, who plays Woodward in the film, was
set to appear next in Loose Cannons, a comedy co-starring Dan
Aykroyd. According to insiders, Walsh was let go after just one
day on the set, to avoid upsetting Aykroyd. All of which may
simply set the stage for another round of the Belushi media
blitz. Anyone for The Making of Wired?