‘He Was a Radical’: John Belushi Recalls His Wife and Comedy Comrades | Step

VSand you disentangle John Belushi’s life from his tragic death? Did he leave a comedic legacy – or just a model for living fast and dying young? On the one hand, he ran the pioneering comedy show Saturday Night Live, still running 45 years later, becoming his first star with the hit films Animal House and The Blues Brothers. The poster of the latter has since been a staple on the walls of teenage bedrooms. But was it down to Belushi’s comedy – or was it because he had died within two years of the film’s release, victim of addiction and hugely successful pressures?

This week sees the release of a Showtime documentary, Belushi, produced by the team behind Emmy-nominated Brando documentary, Listen to Me, Marlon. This is the first account in Belushi’s history, says his widow Judy Belushi Pisano, to attribute “even-handed” attention to her husband’s life and death. Pisano has always lamented the way Bob Woodward’s 1984 book Wired, an account of the star’s horrific decline, came to define her husband’s memory. “If John had died in his sleep,” she said, speaking to me on the phone, “we would view his life differently. We really would.

The documentary uses animation by Robert Valley, the creator of the Gorillaz videos, as well as personal videos and oral testimonials to chronicle the star’s journey from Wheaton, Illinois, via the comedy / improv club Second City to Chicago. , nationally recognized – first with National Lampoon Radio Hour (in which Belushi conducted and performed) then SNL. It took 10 years for producer John Battsek to get Pisano’s approval for the film, during which time a biopic of the star languished in a development stalemate, with Joaquin Phoenix and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star Emile Hirsch. vying for the title role.

What sets the new doc apart, Pisano says, is that he doesn’t assume – as many do – that Belushi was meant to self-destruct. “I know how John handled things,” she said, “and I see no reason why he couldn’t have solved this problem, just like others have.

What does Battsek say about the film? “What’s powerful about it,” he says via Zoom, “is that it’s a beautiful love story.” In addition to personal photos and newspaper clippings, the film features dozens of letters of worship spanning many years from John to Judy. They indeed offer a fix for Belushi’s idea of ​​one of the “wild and crazy dudes” (title of a book about his generation of SNL comics). You wonder, however, if publishing his most intimate correspondence is the best way to commemorate a man pursued to death by the penetrating gaze of celebrity.

“You make a good point,” Battsek says. “But Judy wanted that aspect of their life revealed was enough for us to feel it was the right way to go. The result is a touching documentary about a sensitive, self-questioned man, clinging to his wife like a rock, all too aware that his battle with drugs could be a fight to the death.

The film also sheds light on Belushi’s past, as the ambivalent son of Albanian immigrants, pursuing his own American dream, and as a figure in which the political and cultural energies of the time crystallized. “He was definitely counter-cultural,” Pisano says. “He was a radical. His comedy was part of the whole transition from the post WWII generation to the next.

“He was,” says director of the film RJ Cutler, “the revolutionary spirit of the time.” And he was undoubtedly the first to bring this iconoclastic energy into comedy. Cutler, like Battsek, grew up idolizing Belushi: the film is a tribute from fans to a comic they strongly identified with as teenagers. “When I saw him on Saturday Night Live,” Cutler says, “he was someone you just wanted to know more about. You wanted to be a part of it, whatever. It was you up there, in a way.

“He was the underdog,” Battsek says, “and we all loved it about him. He didn’t conform in any way – neither in his appearance, nor in his demeanor, nor in the nature of his humor. The documentary contrasts Belushi’s “blue collar” style with that of SNL co-stars Chevy Case and Christopher Guest – private school and patrician versus Belushi’s more primitive comedic energies.

The excess of his comedy is very noticed: “He went from zero to 100 so fast,” Pisano says, “and that surprised people.” Battsek quotes the SNL skit in which berserker Belushi destroys the set while listening to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Knowing what happened to Belushi, you might attribute this shtick to an out of control personality. But Pisano claims the opposite. “It’s like throwing a baseball,” she says. “You throw it 1,000 times to gain control of it, and then your muscle memory, your skills, and your mind work together from there. It’s the same with comedy: John was very familiar with what he was doing – but he went into pure instinct while he was doing it.

The film leaves no doubt that Belushi continues to be, as Cutler puts it, “a very meaningful artist in the lives of those who have experienced his work.” He has less to say about Belushi’s legacy to modern comedy. Fair enough, maybe – as his widow Judy points out, he wanted to be an actor, and the comedy was just the way he chose to make it happen. But he also lit American comedy institutions Second City, National Lampoon, and SNL, and starred in what was then the highest-grossing comedy film of all time, Animal House. Did this short but stellar career leave a mark?

For Battsek, the answer is a clear yes. The film’s US premiere, he points out, was hosted by Judd Apatow. Belushi is voiced in the film by former SNL student and Belushi fan Bill Hader. “The Seth Rogens of this world,” he said, “would all say they are deeply influenced by John.” For Cutler, Belushi didn’t just influence comedy: “He invented the art of performance a full decade before it boiled in the East Village. I mean what was the Blues Brothers? Is it music? Is it the performance? Are they playing characters? ”

In this elusive hybrid of fact and fiction (though easier to pin down than, say, the wrestling antics of Belushi Kaufman’s SNL teammate Andy Kaufman during the same period), Cutler traces the roots of post-modernity. -truth. “The lines are so blurry. And now we are living it! We have a fictional character in the White House. John foreshadowed the culture we all live in.

In the UK, claims for his legacy are more tenuous. Matthew Highton is a British comic who, like Belushi did, roams in packs. In Highton’s case, it would be the comedy collective Weirdos, which gave Edinburgh World Comedy Prize winner John Kearns, among others. Belushi, said Highton, “doesn’t look like a stand-up, does it? You can feel the improv scene kick in. He’s one of those people who live in the moment, take something and get it done. “

For the British, Belushi and the legacy of his generation were first encountered through the movies. “These are the people,” says Highton, “that a lot of comics first understood that they like what funny is.” For those who have subsequently delved into Belushi’s SNL work, his importance lies in this “rolling with him” and element of risk. “In live comedy, you see this all the time,” Highton says. “That chaotic energy and spirit of ‘If we fail, it’s good.’ But to see someone in such a big medium play in the moment and find out what’s funny, it’s really exciting.

“What I love most about acting,” he continues, “is when you see people on stage together and they don’t really know what the other is going to do. That’s what you have with Belushi, and I don’t think it would’ve been seen before, certainly not in the mainstream.

Comedian Nick Helm, who had a huge poster of Belushi in his old apartment, agrees: “You had this well-rounded cast. [on SNL], and then you had this guy cut everyone off, and that was Belushi. As Animal of the Muppets, he was everyone’s favorite. But Belushi’s work isn’t sure to last. “He presented [the idea of] funny people not just like rock stars, but like gods, ”says Helm. “They owned New York, basically. And I think the funny side maybe came after the lifestyle. Helm is a devotee of one of Belushi’s followers, Chris Farley (who also died of a drug overdose at age 33). “Farley is instinctive and Belushi is more reflective. I think he’s trying to be cool. And I don’t really see a place to be cool in comedy.

But does that just bring us full circle, to the point where the legend of “live fast, die young” rises up and devours man? Helm says, “It’s hard to look at these SNL sketches and not smell of alcohol and drugs. They just smell the excess. But for others, it’s the iconoclastic fervor of a “man on a mission” to overturn the status quo, as his widow describes it. Showtime’s documentary gives us a clearer picture than ever of the man behind the myth – but doesn’t leave us any closer to unraveling his comedy from the compulsions that destroyed him.

• Belushi is on Sky Documentaries and Now TV at 9 p.m. on November 27.