'He was a radical': John Belushi remembered by his wife and fellow comics

[marmar]

'He was a radical': John Belushi remembered by his wife and fellow comics
The gruesome decline and drugs-related death of the comedy icon has overshadowed his legacy, says his widow Judy, who welcomes a new film showing him as a sensitive star full of doubts

Brian Logan
Tue 24 Nov 2020 09.11 EST


(Guardian UK) Can you disentangle the life of John Belushi from his tragic death? Has he left a comic legacy – or just a template for living fast and dying young? On the one hand, he spearheaded the pioneering comedy show Saturday Night Live, still running 45 years later, becoming its first breakout star with smash-hit movies Animal House and The Blues Brothers. The poster for the latter has been a fixture on teenagers’ bedroom walls ever since. But is that down to Belushi’s comedy – or because he was dead within two years of the film’s release, a victim of drug addiction and the pressures of extreme success?

This week sees the release of a Showtime documentary, Belushi, made by the team behind the Emmy-nominated Brando documentary Listen to Me, Marlon. It’s the first telling of Belushi’s story, says his widow Judy Belushi Pisano, to apportion “even-handed” attention to her husband’s life and death. Pisano has always regretted how Bob Woodward’s 1984 book Wired, a fix-by-fix account of the star’s gruesome decline, came to define her husband’s memory. “Had John died in his sleep,” she says, speaking to me by phone, “we would view his life much differently. We really would.”

The documentary uses animation by Robert Valley, maker of the Gorillaz videos, as well as home videos and oral testimony to trace the star’s journey from Wheaton, Illinois, via the Second City comedy/improv club in Chicago, to national prominence – first with the National Lampoon Radio Hour (which Belushi directed as well as performed in) then SNL. It took producer John Battsek 10 years to secure Pisano’s approval for the film, during which time a biopic of the star has languished in development gridlock, with Joaquin Phoenix and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star Emile Hirsch in the running for title role.

What distinguishes the new doc, says Pisano, is that it doesn’t assume – as many do – that Belushi was destined for self-destruction. “I know how John worked through things,” she says, “and I don’t see any reason why he couldn’t have worked through this problem, just as others have.”

What does Battsek think marks the film out? “What’s powerful about it,” he says via Zoom, “is that it’s a beautiful love story.” Alongside the personal photos and newspaper clippings, the film features scores of adoring letters over many years from John to Judy. They do indeed offer a corrective to the idea of Belushi as one of the “wild and crazy guys” (the title of a book on his generation of SNL comics). You do wonder, however, whether publishing his most intimate correspondence is the best way to memorialise a man hounded to death by the penetrating gaze of fame. ...........(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/nov/24/he-was-a-radical-john-belushi-remembered-by-his-wife-and-fellow-comics

[North Shore Chicago]

1. From 2011

Jane Curtin appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” on Tuesday as part of a panel on women in comedy, sitting alongside Tina Fey and Chevy Chase, among others. Known for her Coneheads sketches and Weekend Update anchoring, Curtin said that the women writers on the show were often unable to contribute their work thanks to sabotage by the show’s men. Especially breakout star John Belushi.

“Their battles were constant. They were working against John, who said women are just fundamentally not funny,” Curtin said. “So you’d go to a table read, and if a woman writer had written a piece for John, he would not read it in his full voice. He felt as though it was his duty to sabotage pieces written by women.”

Fey said that she was indebted to Curtin, and thanks to her, things had changed at “SNL” by the time she got there.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/john-belushi-sexist-jane-curtain_n_848646

[mr_lebowski]

3. Not excusing it entirely but in the 1970's there was still a very strong mindset that there was

certain things that men did well, and certain things that women did well, and vice-versa.

We've grown a lot in the years since but it was extremely common for people to have those sorts of views in the 70's.

I remember thinking there's no women guitarists that could shred when I was a kid in the 70's and just kinda thought women are not as good at guitar-playing as men. Nothing AGAINST women, it wasn't really a talent that any of them had ... not that they couldn't play at all, just like ... there'd never be a girl-version of Eddie Van Halen or Jimi. They had other talents and things they better than men at though for sure. I just thought that's how it is, whatever. Seemed right at the time.

[USALiberal]

2. Ready sad he is gone! Nt