Blues Brothers as a pot product? No one’s going to Joliet (prison) for it

Maybe it sort of makes sense – John Belushi portrayed amongst his various characters a blues musician and singer (with his brother on harmonica).

It may well play off the idea of bluesmen as notorious reefer addicts. It may also have taken the sensation of marijuana to enable the “Jake Blues” character to endure his stint at the Joliet Correctional Center (for holding up a liquor store to get the money to pay off a motel debt his Blues Brothers Band incurred).

OR IT COULD just be that actor Jim Belushi is truly trying to play off the persona his late brother, John, left during his just over three decades of life (actually, at 37 years, he’s been dead longer than he was alive).

But somehow, there’s just something about the idea of Jim Belushi wanting to get into the marijuana-distribution business (now that it’s gaining the overtones of a legal business opportunity) that seems a little strange.

And not just because most people would have figured the comedic personas of Cheech and Chong would have tried to be the first people to become legal drug dealers.

Crain’s Chicago Business reported this week about how Belushi now operates the Belushi Farms in Oregon, where marijuana production has been legal the past few years. Now that Illinois has passed laws allowing for recreational use of the drug (as in you won’t need a medical prescription to avoid getting pinched by police), Belushi says he wants to gear up to begin sales here.

PRODUCING HIS PRODUCTS under the Blues Brothers brand name. As in it would be the only kind of marijuana product that a discerning customer would choose to use for those moments when he feels he has a “mission for God” to complete.

He talks about wanting to promote his business venture by literally driving the Bluesmobile (which according to the 1980s film was a one-time Mount Prospect police squad car) along Lake Street, with a marijuana “joint” mounted on the car roof rather than the big bullhorn that Jake and Elwood used to promote their big show at the Palace Hotel Ballroom.

I’m sure he’s going for the imagery of driving around under the ‘el’ tracks. But as anyone who remembers the Blues Brothers film, Elwood actually lived in a flophouse on the other end of the Loop – down around Van Buren Street, with the elevated trains roaring right past his window on a near-constant basis.

That is, until Jake’s former fiancé (remember Carrie Fisher) used her explosives stash to blow the building to smithereens.

OR, UNTIL IN reality, a downtown fire managed to destroy the real life building. Yes, I remember that as one of the first news stories I actually covered during my days as a reporter-type person with the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago.

It will be intriguing to see just how all this plays out. Illinois may be the 11^th state to offer up legal versions of marijuana, but that means there are 49 states where it remains illegal.

And it likely will be that some of those states will be absolute holdouts, refusing to even contemplate any notion that marijuana could serve some medical benefits – let alone be something that people ought to be allowed to use if they so choose.

Which is why Belushi is trying to piece together a network that would be ready on that date in the future when marijuana use really can be a national product without any sort of stigma attached to it.

IT COULD BE intriguing if Jim Belushi – whose acting career pretty much peaked with the “According to Jim” television series (where he was partnered up with a pair of women – Courtney Thorne-Smith and Kimberly Williams – most definitely out of his league) ultimately wound up doing something that got him out of the shadow of being nothing more than “John’s Little Brother.”

And kind of humorous if the Blues Brothers image were to live on in ways no one would have dreamed possible back when John Belushi was a living, breathing entertainer.

Remember Bluto Blutarsky? Animal House?

And let’s not forget actress Kathleen Freeman’s “Sister Mary Stigmata” character, who to this day is probably rapping “Jake Blues” across his knuckles every time his behavior gets a touch out of line with none other than The Lord himself.

  -30-

EXTRA: No more for 'mystery' woman packing flamethrower and an M-16

I still recall a moment from a bus tour of Chicago I once took – not one of those floofy types of tours with a double-decker bus where we see the Hancock Building and other downtown structures.

This one was of the Calumet area of Chicago on the Southeast Side, and I still remember at one point our bus was passing through The Bush when the guide pointed out a dumpy little storefront at 85^th Street and Burley Avenue – telling us that it was used as a set for that 1980 film “The Blues Brothers.”
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SURE ENOUGH IT was the building that once had the sign on it identifying it as the “Curl Up and Dye” hair salon – which appeared in one scene where Carrie Fisher (who was the mystery woman out to kill John Belushi’s “Jake Blues” character) was reading the field manual for the proper way to use a flamethrower.

Just one of several weapons she burnished during that film (ultimately relying on an M-16 military-style assault rifle for the scene where she finally caught up with Jake, her one-time fiancé who had spurned her).

As a native of the nearby South Chicago neighborhood, it always amused me to think that Fisher (who by that point had already given us her hair-bun adorned performance in Star Wars that most people are remembering Tuesday as the high point of her career) was actually once in The Bush.

Which was, at its peak, a neighborhood for the people who actually lived in the nearby steel mills that used to exist, and now is a place for their extended families who for whatever reason haven’t been able to move on with their lives.

NOT EXACTLY THE kind of place that would be expected to have a Hollywood-style tinge to it. Although the nearby 95^th Street bridge over the Calumet River is the one that will forevermore live for the scene where the Blues Brothers drove their car over its open expanse.

That is what popped into my mind when I learned Tuesday that Fisher, who was 60 (which is barely older than I am), died from complications due to that heart attack she suffered during the Christmas holiday weekend while riding on an airplane.

Fisher, who appeared in, and directed, a string of films during an interesting career that also included authoring some books, is no longer with us physically. Although her memory will live on through the output of her work -- which really does consist of more than just an absurd hairdo or a "gold" bikini -- that we’ll be able to check out for decades to come.

Then, there's the great unanswered question -- is Fisher's mystery woman character now traversing the heavens in search of Belushi's "Jake Blues" still seeking revenge? Or does Jake finally "do right" by his woman, and they spend eternity happily ever after?

  -30-

Is Hoffman the new century’s Belushi?

All the reports these days about the death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman have been bringing about three-decade old memories of that moment when we learned that actor John Belushi had died.

Because the ultimate story of both of their lives will turn out to be the same – someone who let their drug use get the best of them, while taking out a talent that will make us all speculate for years to come just how much more would we have been entertained from future productions that will never be made!

NOW I KNOW that the two don’t have identical life and career cycles.

Belushi – born in the Humboldt Park neighborhood and raised in suburban Wheaton – only got into five film productions before his 1982 death at age 33. Hoffman, by comparison, appeared in about 60 film roles prior to passing on at age 46.

There are many aspiring actors who would love to have a career anywhere as extensive as Hoffman’s. And they’d certainly fall sort of the Academy Award Hoffman took for his starring role in “Capote.”

Heck, Belushi never came close – although I suspect the image of him as “Bluto” in Animal House sticks out in some peoples’ minds as much as any Oscar-winning role.

ULTIMATELY, IT’S GOING to be the end of their stories that will draw comparisons.

A woman wound up doing prison time for being the one who allegedly gave Belushi an injection into his arm (a “speedball” cocaine and heroin mixture, if memory is correct) that caused him to die at a borderline raunchy hotel in Hollywood.

While in the case of Hoffman, we’re going to forever live with the image of his body being found with a hypodermic needle still sticking in it. Police also found something anywhere between 40 and 70 bags of heroin in his apartment (depending on which newspaper account you read).

They’re still investigating to see if the heroin was mixed with the pain reliever fentanyl. This will be the trivial detail people will remember for years to come when Hoffman’s name comes up.

AND HIS NAME will come up, because the man had so many roles in a variety of films. It wasn’t just “Capote,” or the other films (“Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Doubt” and “The Master”) for which he was nominated for Oscars.

In fact, films I most associate with him were ones where he had supporting roles, such as “The Big Lebowski,” “Moneyball” and “Almost Famous.” His take on the 1970s rock journalist Lester Bangs is a bit part more memorable than many starring roles these days.

Just as I consider Belushi in “Continental Divide” to be an underrated role – even if the only thing believable about his portrayal as a newspaper columnist was a certain aversion to the outdoors.

But to a certain degree, none of this is going to matter. Both of their lives were cut short by the substance abuse. Both of them struggled with the drugs during their lives, and ultimately became a little too wrapped up in them.

TO THE DEGREE that when Washington-based journalist Bob Woodward tried to take on the Hollywood culture, his biography of Belushi turned into a final third of the book that was a blow-by-blow account of all the drugs he consumed in the final couple of weeks of his life.

Is this what we’re destined to get in coming weeks and months, as more details come out about the sordidness of Hoffman’s drug use (which he tried to resist, but ultimately gave in to)?
 

Let’s only hope the collective bodies of work for the two will not get buried in the minutia!

  -30-

Our cinematic image preservation also gives Illinois some economic benefits

I’ll be the first to admit that I get a kick out of film and television productions where I can recognize Chicago in the background – even if it’s a Chicago of the past.

There’s even an otherwise-forgettable Bruce Willis film “Red” from a few years ago that I only remember because its story chose to have its tale of international intrigue wind up in the Second City – of all places.

POLITICAL CORRUPTION AND murder on a world-wide scale being resolved here. As if we didn’t have enough local political hacks and plots to contend with.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Because Gov. Pat Quinn on Tuesday tried to score himself some political points by boasting of the number of entertainment projects that are made in Chicago.

He cited $358 million being spent during 2013 – creating the equivalent of 4,200 full-time jobs. Which is nearly double the $184 million that was spent during 2012 – which previously had been considered a record-setting trend.

Are we in Chicago just that entertaining? Or gritty looking? Or are we generic enough that we can pass for the set of just about any place on Planet Earth?

I’M NOT GOING to get into the economics of it so much. All I know is that I find it amusing when I suddenly see a location on the film screen (yes, I still prefer the idea of seeing a film in a theater, rather than putting money into a red box to get a copy) that I routinely pass through.

Sometimes, even some fairly obscure spots that I’m amazed anyone else has ever heard of.

Heck, I know how residents of the Bush, a little subsection of the South Chicago neighborhood, still go on about how a little storefront once passed for the "Curl Up and Dye," a neighborhood beauty salon where actor Carrie Fisher could be seen reading technical manuals about flame-throwers and antipersonnel mines in her on-going plot to kill John Belushi's "Jake Blues" character in "The Blues Brothers."

 

For his part, Quinn went Tuesday to the set of “Chicago Fire,” a new television drama about firefighters in our fair city – which had better not dare think it could shoot anywhere else. Although anyone who ever saw the Blues Brothers sequel – “Blues Brothers 2000,” knows that the only thing worse than actor John Goodman trying to be a Belushi-like character was the sight of Toronto trying to think it could resemble Chicago.

OF COURSE, MUCH of the reason why so many productions are willing to come to Chicago is because the local government likes the idea of being used as a background for so many stories.

It’s quite a change from the days of “M Squad,” a 1950’s-era police cop show where actor Lee Marvin’s “Frank Ballinger” character gave us an image of a tough cop so over the top that one could argue that Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” character was a wimp, by comparison.

An image that helped influence then-Mayor Richard J. Daley into thinking that “Hollywood” attention just wasn’t worth the “bad” press!

Watching those “M Squad” episodes now, one realizes how limited the Chicago settings were – because film crews were usually trying to elude the authorities who would have cited them for the lack of a permit (that the city never would have issued).

IT’S NOT LIKE the later year films such as “The Blues Brothers,” which might be a simple-minded film with a sketchy story line – but which also used so many gritty Chicago scenes that the film truly is a tribute to a Chicago that isn’t truly with us anymore.

Similar to the old “Call Northside 777” film starring James Stewart as a Chicago Times reporter. Those scenes of Stewart wandering about the Back of the Yards back when it was a Polish enclave truly are something – along with other scenes depicting downtown sites that we have to think twice about what is there now.

In short, films that make the “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” moments at Wrigley Field or the Art Institute look just a bit simple, and lame, by comparison.

Although one of my favorite Chicago-based films to watch may well be “Medium Cool,” a late 1960s film that definitely is dated in its sensibilities and its look.

BUT HOW MANY other films could give us real-life moments of the now-infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention (it helped create an image that resulted in us getting Richard Nixon as president) and the protests that spouted out as a result of its presence in Chicago?

And how many other films could give us a candid moment with one of its own camera crews getting caught in the teargas that police used on said protesters?

Although the beauty of Grant Park throughout the years also manages to come through, despite the chaos that took place within it.

  -30-

Illinois’ take on ‘The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave’ Do we need sequel?

There’s the old Saturday Night Live sketch in which John Belushi played a houseguest who couldn’t take a hint that the evening was over and he should go home.

“The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave!” A parody of old, cheesy horror films. In my mind, I can still hear Jane Curtin’s blood-curdling scream.

AND IN MY mind, I heard it again on Monday when I stumbled across the news report about how former Gov. George Ryan’s criminal appeal has been resurrected.

Ryan, of course, was found guilty by a judge in the U.S. District Court for Chicago and northern Illinois, and a Chicago-based appeals court panel has upheld that verdict – which is why he is serving time in prison through July 4 of next year.

The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that there is nothing about the reasons given by the Appellate Court for upholding the conviction in Ryan’s specific case that is questionable enough that they need to get involved.

Except, …

THAT SAME COURT on Monday made a statement telling them they need to review the Ryan case again. Not because the high court is saying they did anything wrong.

It’s just that during the time that Ryan has been in prison, the Supreme Court has ruled in a case on the issue of “honest services” fraud. The appeals judges based in Chicago will have to decide if Ryan’s case falls into this category.

His attorneys, of course, will argue that it does. They have always argued that. But it wasn’t until that Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that anyone was willing to acknowledge the issue.

From Belushi to Ryan?



In theory, if the “honest services” concept is found to be relevant to Ryan, it could result in at least some of the “guilty” verdicts being overturned.

IN THEORY, IT could mean that Ryan has already served his sentence, or may have even served too much time.

It wouldn’t be in time for Ryan to return home to wife Lura Lynn (she died last year, remember?). But I’m sure he’d prefer to be free sooner, rather than later. And at Ryan’s age (he's 78, now), there’s no guarantee he’ll make it to Independence Day of 2013 – which would make his term literally a life-sentence.

As to whether or not the appeals court will take this seriously, I don’t know. The appeals court will get the legal briefs related to the case in June, but there's no hard-and-fast deadline by which the court must complete its review. I suppose they could do their review and come back, saying that they decided it doesn’t apply to Ryan.

My own gut reaction says it might. But then again, I’m not a law school student. I’m a reporter-type who has hung around enough courtrooms to get a crude knowledge of the law.

WHICH MIGHT BE more than the cashier who works at the Popeye’s chicken across the street from the Criminal Courts building at 2650 S. California Ave., but would be less than many of the defendants who wind up stopping in there for a bite to eat after making an appearance in their own court cases.

“Honest services” comes down to how much should we really expect from our government officials, and to what degree is their incompetence and foolishness something that should be punished by criminal proceedings.

There are some cases that have worked their way through the federal court system where people have argued that public officials got sent to prison for being stupid, rather than criminal.

Is that what Ryan is going to have to argue – “I was too dumb to know that my employees in the Secretary of State’s office were shaking down unqualified drivers in order to justify giving them the commercial driver’s licenses?”

IN MY MIND, that doesn’t make Ryan look good. But then again, he’d probably be willing to say it if it meant erasing a part of the prison time that he will have to do otherwise.

All of which means that those people who are desperate to believe that Ryan is venal and warrants much more punishment than he received are going to be disgusted that this case has cropped up yet again.

It truly won’t go away.

Although if I had to predict now what will happen in this case, I will say that Ryan will wind up having to do all the time he is now sentenced to.

FOR WHILE I honestly believe much of the intensity of animosity toward Ryan is motivated by his actions as governor against the death penalty (Pat Quinn would never have been in a position to abolish it in Illinois last year if Ryan hadn’t implemented the moratorium against it nine years earlier), my gut reaction is that the legal step that ultimately winds up clearing Ryan’s reputation likely won’t come until after he serves the full sentence.

A presidential pardon as Barack Obama’s last action before leaving office in early 2017? There are a lot of things that have to happen between now and then for such a moment to be possible

Then again, anything’s possible.

  -30-

It’s too easy to shift blame

I cared less about the criminal trial of Dr. Conrad Murray, and actually went out of my way to avoid watching the live coverage of the legal proceedings.

In part, it is because I think real-life court hearings are deadly dull to sit through – even when gruesome criminal details are being discussed. Something about legalese manages to bleach the “life” out of them.

YET THERE IS something about the joy that so many people are feeling now that Murray has been found guilty of a criminal charge that is attracting my attention. If anything, it kind of bothers me.

Because now, we’re going to be asked to think of the Michael Jackson saga as some sort of sad story, with the Michael who sang “ABC” growing up into a man who was taken advantage of and killed by the gross negligence of someone else.

Almost as though he’s the victim in this whole saga.

When as I see it, he was the one who took the substances that ultimately messed him up physically and killed him at age 51 (considering that I’m 46, I can appreciate how much life Jackson should still have had ahead of him).

IF IT READS like I’m writing that a lot of this blame ought to go on Jackson for letting himself get carried away to the point that he overdosed, then you’d sort of be correct. I view the Jackson saga as one where those substances got the best of someone who should have known better.

The idea that he was forced by his doctor to take this stuff is just a bit too absurd for me to accept. I wouldn’t have thought it a great injustice if Murray had somehow been acquitted of all criminal charges against him, even though I believe his ability to call himself a "doctor" ought to be terminated.

Although I suspect if he had, the people who are now expressing joy at the “guilty” verdict would be trying to claim that his acquittal was a greater injustice than that of Casey Anthony earlier this year.

That’s the problem with these celebrity criminal trials. Any sense of perspective goes out the window. People get way too wrapped up emotionally and they want the knee-jerk reaction.

IT’S AS THOUGH we’re not that too far removed from those generations whose reaction to just about anything was the lynch mob – seriously believing that they were carrying out “justice” with their rash reactions.

Which is a thought that scares me greatly. We already have too many ideologues in our society who want our politics to go back to the 19^th Century. I’d hate to have our criminal justice system do the same.

Of course, I’m not about to say that Murray is an innocent – although I think labeling him a “quack” is more accurate than saying he’s a “criminal.”

For I do appreciate that medical doctors are supposed to use their expertise to advise their patients. It should have been Murray’s duty to realize how reliant, how strung out, Jackson was becoming to those substances, and should have been doing everything he possibly could to wean him away from them.

INSTEAD, IT SEEMS that he sat back and became an enabler. But that merely means he assisted. Which means Jackson himself had to permit this to happen.

I didn’t pay attention to every blow-by-blow moment of the trial (in fact, I specifically avoided most moments of testimony broadcast live). But I did see some of the summaries.

And for me, the moment that will stick in my mind about this whole affair was that Jackson himself referred to his drug, his medication, as his “milk.” As though it was a substance he needed to have to stay alive – instead of being the substance that ultimately caused his death.

My initial reaction to hearing that word used was to think that someone should have realized Jackson’s troubles long before it reached that point. Perhaps instead of having criminal prosecutors spending taxpayer dollars to push for charges that would have put Jackson in prison as a convicted child molester, someone should have looked into the possibility of having him committed.

AS IN HOSPITALIZED. Institutionalized. Locked away for treatment. Whatever phrase you prefer to use.

He might still be alive today (even if his musical career in this country had been dead for so many decades that his physical presence really didn’t matter so much anymore).

This whole mess also reminded me of the outcry that occurred about three decades ago when long-time Washington-based reporter wrote the John Belushi biography entitled “Wired!”

The last third of that book is literally a moment-by-moment diary of Belushi’s last week of life – which was a near-constant pursuit of more drugs to satisfy his developing habit.

BELUSHI FANS CLAIMED the book “missed the point” of the actor’s life and career – his humor and talent. I’d argue it caught the real significance of Wheaton-native Belushi’s life – a potentially-great talent lost to drugs.

That book deprived Belushi fans of a chance to “blame” his death on someone. Whereas fans of the Gary, Ind.-native Jackson now have a name and face they can blame, while overlooking Michael’s own behavior that led to his early demise.

Let’s just hope nobody tries to make as awful a film about Jackson’s life and death like they did back in 1989 about Belushi.

  -30-

Royko columns provide fuel for films

When it comes to the newspaper commentary of Mike Royko, one piece I still remember were his thoughts on the day in the early 1990s when then-President George Bush stopped off at the Billy Goat Tavern during a Chicago appearance and started asking questions like “Where does Royko sit?”

Royko couldn’t get over the fact that the so-called Leader of the Free World would care about where he sat in a Chicago tavern, or that Bush the elder would be deluded enough to think that such talk would make him sound like “a regular guy” to those who happened to be in the bar at the time.

ROYKO, WHO DURING his career in the Chicago news business won a Pulitzer Prize for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News, and also wrote for the Sun-Times and Tribune, made a point of saying he avoided the Billy Goat that day, making it sound to some like he was snubbing the president.

But for those of us who relied on the Chicago newspapers of the day for our perspective of the news, such an irreverent attitude toward a president was not surprising, since he made a career of pointing out the vapidity of the political culture that prevailed (and of which some elements continue to live on) at City Hall.

Which is why I must admit I’m finding it hard to believe that a potential film maker is putting together a movie meant to be a love story, and he’s using the old newspaper columns of Royko (who I met only once, briefly, at the Billy Goat when he was in a good mood) as his source material.

It’s true. Norman Skul told both the Wisconsin State Journal and the Chicago Tribune of his plans for a trio of films – all of which would be attempts to turn Royko’s newspaper columns into stories for the screen.

THE STATE JOURNAL, one of the newspapers of Wisconsin’s capital city of Madison, reported that Skul was in Wisconsin last week shooting scenes for the first film, which is based off a column Royko wrote when his first wife, Carol, died suddenly in 1979 following a stroke.

The column was a reminiscing of how he had met his wife when they were both children, and of their early years together when they would take vacation trips to southern Wisconsin as a way of escaping urban life for a few days at a time.

It also was a reminiscing of a time before Royko was anybody anyone would have heard of – in short, when he was an ordinary schnook just like the rest of us.

Some people read the piece as merely a loving tribute to one’s spouse. But as a news professional, I was always particularly impressed because it was obvious the piece was written in the moments right after learning of his wife’s death.

THAT WOULD HAVE been the point when he was most grief-stricken, and most people (perhaps even myself) would have been incapable of articulating any kind of thoughts – let alone a piece that would inspire a decades-later attempt at a film.

But Royko was a certain type of old-school news professional – one who put aside his own tears until his copy was filed.

Skul told the newspapers that he hopes his films (which he is not sure will air as films in theaters, at film festivals, or perhaps as special television programs) will help resurrect interest in the copy of Royko, who literally kept working until just about one month before his death in 1997.

Skul told the newspapers he hasn’t decided yet which other Royko columns will inspire the other two films he has planned – each of which will be about a half-hour in length.

I GET THE sense that Skul is looking for something more human in scale, and will avoid some of the blatant political nitpicking pieces that showed just how craven Chicago political people could be.

Too bad, because it could be interesting to see a short film about Richard J. Daley – as inspired by the viewpoint of the man whose only book that wasn’t a collection of newspaper columns – “Boss” – remains one of the classic pieces of literature about Chicago and urban politics.

But if I had the chance to make a suggestion about a Royko column that should be preserved, so to speak, on celluloid, it should be one of the pieces that Royko wrote throughout the years about his love of baseball – specifically the Chicago Cubs.

Royko was always showing off his infatuation for the ball club that was worthwhile when he was a young child in the 1930s, but was godawful embarrassing for much of his adult life.

IN FACT, IT was a Royko column that first introduced the theory of a Northern Illinois University professor that says a baseball team with too many ex-Cubs players on its rosters is destined to lose in the World Series.

But the ones that come to my mind were the pieces he wrote in the late 1970s when he became disgusted at what he saw as an egotistical type of modern ballplayer on the Cubs who wanted money above all.

Royko actually renounced his Cubs fandom, and wrote in a column that he would root for the White Sox. That encouraged then Sox owner Bill Veeck to turn the sentiment into a stunt – with pictures remaining of the day Royko pledged an oath of allegiance to the White Sox on Veeck’s wooden leg.

But when the next baseball season came around, Royko was back with the deluded Cubbie faithful, his lifelong allegiance just too strong a part of his personal character to suddenly switch teams. He went to his grave a Cubs fan.

PERHAPS IT IS just me, but I see a short film that could study the role sports play in our society, and why people feel so compelled to be infatuated with an entity such as a sports team that NEVER wins.

There is one thing I have to admit would be pleasing in seeing a trio of Royko-inspired films. They could help eliminate the blot created by the film “Continental Divide.”

Released in 1981, the film starred John Belushi as a Royko-like newspaper columnist in Chicago who fell in love with a nature lover whose work had her living in a cabin in the Continental Divide.

Belushi just wasn’t romantic comedy material, particularly since most of his fans prefer to think of him as Bluto Blutarski, the “Animal House” frat house member who smashed someone’s guitar for singing a particularly schmaltzy version of “the Riddle Song” (“I gave my love a cherry, …”)

YET THAT MEDIOCRE film gets brought up whenever someone tries to talk of the greater cultural significance of Royko’s work. It would be nice if Skul could create something more worthy of the late columnist.

About the best thing that could be said of “Continental Divide” is that Belushi’s take on a Chicago newspaper columnist would kick the butt of Nick Nolte’s attempt at portraying a Chicago newspaper columnist a decade later in the dreadful film, “I Love Trouble.”

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: A trio of films based on the newspaper columns of Mike Royko is an (http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/column/moe/308770) intriguing cinematic concept, particularly if it could eliminate the image that John Belushi created of Royko from his 1981 film (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-talk-royko_11oct11,0,6696510.story) “Continental Divide.”