After the shot, Landis deadpans to the crowd: "We've just received word. There's been a terrible earthquake, and San Francisco has been destroyed." This provokes both cheers and boos. "Thousands are dead, so if you have any loved ones...No, I was lying."
When a break comes for a camera change, I head with much of the crowd for the sunshine outside--and the roach in the ashtray of my Rent-A-Toyota with AM/FM stereo and two keys--the second's not for the trunk, as in olden days--that obsolete concept was eliminated with liftbacks. It is rather the key to the gas cap, such are times now...On the way back in from my toke break, I spot a kid who'd walked out the same time I did. Fatigue jacket and stringy long hair. His face, formerly pale and pasty, now glows a rosy pink, and he's staring up in awed, amazed wonder at a tree growing in a patch of lawn between the sidewalk and the street.
I agree.
I catch Landis for a few minutes during the lunch break. We talk a little about Animal House, since I was one of the two writers who made the trek to Eugene to watch them shoot it. Landis tells me that working with Belushi is different now that he's a superstar, but doesn't elaborate. Which leads me to ask about the current project.
What happened was, I was going to produce the movie. Before the concert that created the album, they were going to make a movie about these guys. But the album was this phenomenal success--it was like double-platinum, so there was this acceleration.
"Were you here when they performed Soul Man? Mediocre performance of Soul Man. They were tired, or something like that. But the place goes berserk. Belushi and Aykroyd are so well-loved. And these people have been applauding and cheering and working for twelve hours.
Anyway, the process was...John and Danny were making up the legend of Jake and Elwood on their own. And I took elements of that and made up a real simple plot. I gave it to Danny, and they walked away. This is when I was producing it. A long time later, Danny turned in this enormous manuscript. It was like three hundred pages. Unbelievable. It was truly an awesome work, and it had some amazing things in it. But it just wasn't a movie.
"So, now I'm director, and I did what I always do, which is make changes. So I ended up rewriting it. Rewriting doesn't mean that everything in the movie is mine. Because it's not. I literally rewrote it, and I put a lot of things in it, different things..."
I ask him, what sort of things?
"I put in more movie. I made the characters more defined. I also shortened it considerably. The movie is designed to be an epic, and when you see it, it is. In terms of definition, it's epic, and the size is epic. The characters, I believe to be epic characters--you'll have to see the movie for that to make sense. Also, the look at the United States--the scope is enormous. You go from the wealthiest, wealthiest white, to the poorest black and everything in between. Everything from Howard Johnson's to fancy French. It's a movie about America; it's about American music."
While we're talking, Steve Cropper ambles up with a very attractive woman on his arm. To rock-'n'-roll junkies such as myself, Cropper is something of a walking legend and, of all the greats and near-greats running around here, he's the only one I get a rush from meeting. I first saw him perform in a fraternity basement in '64 , with Booker T. & the M.G.s.
"One reason there's been no publicity is that it's a secret that these cameos"--Landis pokes Cropper in his brown western-shirted belly--"actually act. I guarantee the critics will say Aretha Franklin's acting is one of the surprises of the film."
Landis begins jumping up and down happily.
"That's what I love about making the movie! People will walk down the street, point and say, 'You're Steve Cropper!"
Which in fact is nice.
Landis then launches into a story about how he was called into Martha's Vinyard to help fix a then-soggy Jaws. How it was raining , and nothing was happening, and Spielberg was saying to Richard Dreyfuss: "I don't get it. You've been laid dozens of times since we've been here, and I haven't gotten laid once--and I'm the director!" Says Dreyfuss: "Well, I have a head fourteen feet tall.
Seems to be my day for stray showbiz gossip. Backstage I overhear one crewman telling another: "So Kristofferson says to Jon Peters while they were shooting the Streisand thing, A Star is Born...Kristofferson says, and it goes out over the mike, 'If I want any shit from you, I'll squeeze your head!'"
Not far away, Belushi sits on a trunk, next to a delicious sweet peach in gauzy white sultan slacks, lean athletic thighs and a GUEST patch on her gauzy black blouse. He's waggling his famous eyebrows appreciatively at her while discussing Samurai movies.
When he's onstage next, he actually calls out and finds 'ol Alex Burger up in the balcony. He happily stands and salutes the crowd. Belushi has an apparently deserved reputation among his friends as something of a colorful beast. Not for nothing, I hear, did he star in a SatNiteLive skit called "The Thing that Wouldn't Leave," and his lapses from the usual social contracts are legendary. At one point, Belushi himself told me about former friends who, in his judgement, have turned into turkeys: "You gotta have talent to be an asshole. I'm a big asshole, but I'm a big talent, too." He may, in fact, be an asshole--I don't know him well enough to say yet--but there is a piece of him that seems genuinely to be a very nice guy, and his saying howdy to 'ol Alex seems as good an emblem of it as any.
Finally on Friday I get to see the Blues Brothers perform. I walk in on Belushi standing onstage next to a stuntman double. He's the guy who's been wandering around all week with his hair up in curlers--the better to approximate Belushi's devil-may-care locks--and what appears to be a life-preserver belt under his shirt to reproduce the actual Belushi gut over his flat acrobat's stomach. The effect of the two of them standing together is a little startling. Belushi is again talking Samurai movies, this time with his stunt double and Landis' assistant. He's saying that the First Samurai bit he did on SatNiteLive, rebroadcast two days earlier on The Best of... was the best he ever did. The stunt they're trying to do is a running front-flip-hand-slap move that will be Belushi's concert entrance in the movie. Mumbles Belushi, "I don't think it's gonna work." Belushi may be right. The flip repeatedly is a bit...troublesome. Stunt Belushi either lands all right but forgets the slap, doesn't land right at all or, in one heartbreaker, makes the flip and accomplishes the hand slap, barely, only to suffer time-lag balance loss and land on his ass a full second after the slap. Real Belushi sits on the apron to the stage, signing autographs and schmoozing with Landis' assistant. Stunt Belushi tries again and again.
It went on like this, but you don't want to hear about it. Making movies is duller than laying cement. I finally got to see the Blues Brothers perform, sorta live. The band was there and they were actually singing and dancing to Sweet Home Chicago, but the music had all been recorded in Chicago back in July. All concerned were really doing a Dick Clark Bandstand lip sync on the grand scale.
I gave up.
From good canned Sweet Home Chicago, I get on the radio in my Rent-A-Toyota some girl is singing sounds like whipped-cream substitute, in a sappy, Elevator Welk style: "I'm only four-feet eleven, but I'm goin' to Heaven, and it makes me feel ten feet tall..."
That night around midnight, while I'm writing my notes in the West Hollywood apartment of a friend, the doorbell rings. It's some lean guy carrying a guitar case, wearing a black-leather jacket and hair--hair that looks to me like it's somewhere between shocking pink and danger-ahead fuschia. Like Jack Paar, "I kid you not." It looks like electric Pepto-Bismol. Definitely no color any human has ever grown. I'm cool, he's cool, so we don't mention the hair. He's looking for some guy who wants to buy his motorcycle. We talk for a couple of minutes. Finally, I can't take it. The Midwest in me comes out. I ask about the hair.
"Oh," he says, nonchalantly, as though it's so natural he forgot about it, "I'm in a movie."