Dan Aykroyd is perhaps the most versatile of the talented young group of comedians who rose to stardom in the mid-1970s from the cast of the National Broadcasting Company's groundbreaking television comedy show "Saturday Night Live." A gifted impersonator and mimic capable of seamless character transitions, Aykroyd has exhibited a comic range that extends from madcap farce to subtle social satire. He is also an accomplished comedy screenwriter, whose credits include the top-drawing 1984 movie "Ghostbusters" and other feature films in which he has appeared as an actor.
Born in Ottawa, Canada, Aykroyd got his start in professional comic acting at the Second City improvisational theater in Toronto in 1973. In a talented company that included Gilda Radner, John Candy, and Eugene Levy, Aykroyd distinguished himself as an imaginative imitator of regional dialects and characters. After one year, independent television producer Lorne Michaels invited Aykroyd and other Second City actors to try out for the cast of a live comedy-variety show based on improvisational theater, which Michaels was developing for NBC. Though skeptical of the show's potential in a medium dominated by band situation comedies, Aykroyd made the New York audition for "Saturday Night Live" at the urging of his friend John Belushi, a member of the Chicago Second City troupe. Later describing the tryout to David Sheff of People magazine, Aykroyd recalled that he and Belushi had a "bad attitude," and "ultimately that's why Lorne hired us. He knew we'd fight him every step of the way for the things we believed in."
"Saturday Night Live" premiered in October, 1975, and soon became known as the most daring and original comedy show on television. By the end of its second season, the show was a late-night hit for a generally youthful audience. The "Saturday Night Live" Not Ready for Prime Time Players--Aykroyd, Belushi, Radner, Bill Murray, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman--mixed sharp political and cultural satire with wild excess for its own sake in a loosely structured, party-like atmosphere. Consistently antiestablishment, the troupe tolerated no sacred cows, and--though sometimes offensive--was rarely accused of being boring. Among the show's more popular features were Aykroyd's remarkably apt impersonations of such figures as President Jimmy Carter and talk show host Tom Snyder and his fertile repertoire of such invented characters as the sleazy entrepreneur Irwin Mainway, who peddled a children's toy called "Bag o' Glass" and fur coats made from nearly extinct animals. Aykroyd also developed the "Coneheads" routine featuring a bizarre tribe of extraterrestrials whose skulls ended in an elongated point, and he teamed with Steve Martin as a tacky pair of "wild and crazy" Czech brothers on the make.
Besides acting, Aykroyd wrote much of his own material for "Saturday Night Live." During the show's heyday in 1977, Aykroyd, Michaels, and the other writers lived at the NBC studio at 30 Rockefeller Plaza for days at a time, engaged in round-the-clock scripting marathons. Aykroyd had a shower and bunk beds installed in the office he shared with Belushi, and he badgered his comic partner to help write some of their sketches. "John was never patient as a writer; Danny was meticulous," producer Michaels recalled toEsquire 's David Michaelis. "John didn't have the attention span for writing a sketch, whereas Danny would stay there until he died for it." Aykroyd explained that being a disciplined writer "was a gift I knew I enjoyed so much, and it made me feel good and gratified and deeper than just being a performer, so I really wanted John to learn how to do that himself." When not bent over the typewriter, the duo relaxed by spinning frozen pizzas out the window and into the Rockefeller Center skating rink seventeen floors below.
One especially successful Aykroyd-Belushi collaboration was a musical act called the Blues Brothers, which began as a preshow warm-up routine for the studio audience but proved so popular that it soon became a staple of the "Saturday Night Live" telecast. Aykroyd, an amateur harmonica player and longtime admirer of blues music, conceived of the routine, which featured the duo dressed in dark suits, fedoras, and sunglasses as they sang and danced their way through simple rhythm-and-blues numbers. Their success was such that Aykroyd and Belushi dropped the veneer of parody and went to work as professional musicians, hiring a top-flight backup band to perform a live concert tour in 1978. The engagement spotlighted Aykroyd ("Elwood Blues") on harmonica and vocals and Belushi ("Joliet Jake Blues") as the main vocalist, and it spawned the hit single "Soul Man" and the double-platinum album Briefcase Full of Blues. Though some hard-core blues fans and critics dismissed the Blues Brothers act as a patronizing rip-off of black music, veteran soul singer James Brown, for one, declared that the band had "heart and soul." The Blues Brothers later recorded two other albums, The Blues Brothers and Made in America.
The Blues Brothers' success helped persuade Aykroyd to follow Belushi out of "Saturday Night Live" to pursue a film career. After signing a three-picture deal with Universal, Aykroyd took the role of a gung-ho tank sergeant in Stephen Spielberg's farcical wartime flop "1941" and then turned his attention to writing the script for a Blues Brothers film. Initially Aykroyd's screenplay numbered 324 pages, but it was eventually pared down substantially with the help of director John Landis. The story line has Joliet Jake finishing a prison sentence for armed robbery and joining with Elwood to revive the old Blues Brothers band, whose musicians have dispersed all over the country. The duo's special mission is to raise money for their old Catholic orphanage in Chicago, which is about to be closed. As they collect their band members, the deadpan brothers have numerous misadventures on the road in their souped-up "Bluesmobile," and they meet up with some top soul and blues singers, including Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and James Brown.
"The Blue Brothers" was a commercial success, but several critics faulted the film for overproducing an essentially simple story and failing to fully exploit the comic potential of its two stars. Costing more than thirty million dollars to make, the movie featured numerous big dance numbers and spectacular car crashes, including the Bluesmobile's destruction of an entire suburban shopping mall. In hisNew York Times review, Vincent Canby commented that Aykroyd and Belushi function more as "emcees who introduce the specialty acts" than as comic characters.
Aykroyd and Belushi joined forces for the last time in the 1982 Columbia feature comedy "Neighbors," which cast Aykroyd as a sleazy con man who alternately terrorizes and fascinates his dull suburbanite next-door neighbor, played by Belushi. In March, 1982, not long after the film was released, Belushi was discovered dead of a heroin and cocaine overdose in his Hollywood hotel bungalow. Aykroyd was devastated by the loss of his close friend and business partner. Insisting that Belushi was not a habitual user of hard drugs, Aykroyd told People's Michael Heaton that he would have "slapped all this stuff out of his hands" had he ever seen his friend try to shoot drugs. "I think this basically came out of the nightlife he led," the actor remarked. "But he wasn't like that all the time. There was an extremely home-loving and book-reading and clean side to John."
Left on this own, Aykroyd appeared in the prologue of Landis's "Twilight Zone--The Movie" and starred in two feature comedies released in 1983, "Doctor Detroit" and "Trading Places."Playboy 's Bruce Williamson described "Doctor Detroit" as a "runaway comic vehicle" for Aykroyd in the role of a timid college professor who finds himself obliged to pose as an underworld crime boss. "Trading Places" cast Aykroyd as a stuffy young business manager who becomes the victim of a role-reversal experiment when his unscrupulous employers wager they can ruin him and successfully promote in his place a feisty black street hustler played by Eddie Murphy. Praising Aykroyd and Murphy for their performances, Williamson called the movie "a rousing, madcap comedy of the old school."
In 1984 Aykroyd scored his biggest success yet as an actor-screenwriter with "Ghostbusters," a comedy-adventure that became one of the top-grossing films in Hollywood history. Scripted by Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, the movie starred Bill Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis as a trio of former college professors of parapsychology who run a ghost- and demon-exterminating service in New York City. Murray had the major comic role of a laid-back, lascivious fraud, with Aykroyd and Ramis cast as his dedicated, humorless assistants.Newsweek 's David Ansen remarked that "the scriptwriters, and Ivan Reitman, the director, have the good sense to know that every round of a comedy doesn't have to end with a KO. They win on points: a hip feint here, a jab to the funnybone there, a bolo punch for surprise."
Aykroyd's next writing-acting effort, the 1985 release "Spies Like Us," was poorly received by critics but proved commercially successful. Aykroyd and Chevy Chase played a pair of bumbling civil servants who are sent on a decoy spying mission to the Soviet Union.Chicago Tribune 's Larry Kart wrote that Aykroyd "fits neatly into the role of a scholarly `Mr. Fixit' whose off-the-wall expertise turns out to be just what the situation requires." Kart deemed the movie itself, however, "an uneasy blend of `seriousness' and farce." According to New York Times's Janet Maslin, the screenplay--written by Aykroyd, Lowell Ganz, and Babaloo Mandel--"runs out of steam," although it's "potentially funnier than many of the scripts from which other New Comedies have been made."
"Displaying his almost mystic abilities as a mimic," according to Dave Kehr in the Chicago Tribune, Aykroyd stars as Sgt. Joe Friday in another screenwriting collaboration, "Dragnet 1987." Based on the popular television police drama series, the film garnered mixed critical reviews. This "beloved cop caper," wrote Sheila Benson in theLos Angeles Times , offers "patches of bright dialogue" in its script while recalling fond memories of the defunct program that started Jack Webb. But the screen version's employment of a ritualistic "band of hedonistic zealots....as the centerpiece of its plot," commented Benson, serves to undermine the "delicious banter" provided by Aykroyd and his co-stars, making the "film seem absolutely schizophrenic." Similarly, Kehr faulted an "over-reliance on...car chases and mass action scenes" for detracting "from the richer, more original character comedy" featured in this "surprisingly fresh, warmhearted" parody. The movie's "real focus," Washington Post reviewer Rita Kempley asserted, is "the growing tolerance and friendship between two guys forced to ride around all day in the same squad car." An "enjoyable chemistry" results between Aykroyd's character and his counterpart--played by Tom Hanks--in this "lively screenplay," averred Kempley. The two comedians "blend like mocha and java," noted Toronto Globe and Mail writer Rick Groen, who called the film's villains "just as delicious." But "as a feature-length movie," Groen concluded, "Dragnet 1987" gradually "degenerates" into monotony despite its "playful tension....delightful mix of past and present," and the "brilliant second coming" produced by Aykroyd's performance as Sgt. Friday. Most critics agreed, however, with Kehr's assessment that "Dragnet 1987"--with its "classic configuration"--"manages to transform its premise into a funny, affectionate" rendering of its television predecessor.
In addition to the aforementioned credits, Aykroyd has pursued several screenwriting, acting, and producing projects. He was executive producer for the Canadian comedy feature "One More Saturday Night," released in 1986, and Maclean's reported that Aykroyd has begun scripting a "top secret" sequel to "Ghostbusters." The new movie "will go beyond busting ghosts," asserted the comedian. "With 11 known planes of psychic energy, it's wide open."
Newsmakers 1989, Issue 4. Gale Research, 1989.
Transcribed by L. Christie