In his wonderfully titled but
less-than-wonderful memoir, Tell Me How You Love The Picture: A Hollywood
Life, venerable producer Edward S. Feldman
presents the making and distribution of Wired as a heartwarming case of fearless iconoclasts
bravely risking the ire of fearsome Hollywood powerbroker Mike Ovitz so they
could bring John Belushi's story to the big screen in all its ramshackle glory.
Ovitz's Creative Artists talent agency represented Belushi and allegedly put its
considerable power to work on sabotaging the project from its inception, out of
concern that it reflected poorly on its clients.
In a New York Times piece on the film's troubled distribution, Feldman
complained, "We didn't get the usual kind of answers you get when you're
showing people a $13 million dollar picture. The majors turned it down even
though we were going to pay the prints and advertising costs. They wouldn't
turn down your wedding pictures if you pay for the prints and advertising."
That may be true, but it doesn't take into account that the average wedding
picture has more artistic value than Wired. Unless, of course, your wedding pictures also open
with John Belushi's bloated corpse belching, then fleeing his body bag so he
can embark on wacky posthumous misadventures with a wisecracking Puerto Rican
guardian angel cab-driver.
I am not Pollyannaish enough to
imagine that every major studio in Hollywood turned down Wired for strictly, or even primarily, moral reasons. But I'd
like to think that Hollywood treated the film version of Wired like a cancerous boil at least partially because
reputable writers, directors, and actors would, all things considered, rather
not urinate lustily on the decaying corpse of a beloved entertainer. To call Wired an unconscionable act of grave
robbery/defilement would be an insult to the good name of grave-robbers
everywhere. There are snuff films with more integrity.
The battle over Wired is in many ways a skirmish over which image of John
Belushi would endure. Would it be the prodigiously gifted overgrown kid of Animal
House, The Blues Brothers, and Saturday Night Live, or
the wild-eyed, obnoxious, coked-up bully that rampages through the book and
film versions of Wired?
Some images are so powerful that they leave a permanent
impression. For example, there's a scene in Julia Phillips' You'll Never Eat
Lunch In This Town Again where Phillips stumbles
upon an unwashed, coked-up Marvin Gaye absentmindedly masturbating under a filthy
sheet. So now whenever I hear a Gaye song, there is some small part of me that
remains fixated on that indelible image of Gaye in sad disarray. Someday,
somebody will make a Marvin Gaye biopic. Hopefully it will focus on the
beautiful, spiritual man who sang about peace and brotherhood in a voice that
radiated tenderness and soul, and not Gaye the unwashed, coked-up semi-public
masturbator.
So it's understandable why
Belushi's family and friends would be protective of his image. In life, Belushi
had the strange quality of simultaneously seeming indestructible—the
"Albanian Oak" of comedy legend—and deeply vulnerable. The people who
loved Belushi not wisely but too well didn't stop trying to protect him after
he died.
Wired immediately throws down the gauntlet by opening with
a Blues Brothers song that leads to a blank screen and the following exchange:
"You know who we should get for
this movie? John Belushi."
"Leo, he's dead."
"I know everyone's made lousy
movies. Who hasn't made a stiff every now and then?"
"No, you don't seem to understand
me. John Belushi is really dead."
The film then lurches even
further down the rabbit hole of unconscionable bad taste with a sassy black
morgue attendant wheeling around Belushi's corpse while singing a ditty with
lyrics like "I hate to talk about your momma, she's a sweet old soul / She's
got knives on her titties that'll open the door."
Just when it appears that the
film can't conceivably get any tackier, Belushi's ghost belches, bolts upright,
mutters, "Where the hell am I?", and flees his body bag. He then takes off into
the night, where he's picked up by a mysterious Puerto Rican cab driver (Ray
Sharkey) who overdosed on junk eight years ago and is now a guardian angel with
such a thick, unconvincing accent that he calls his hapless charge "Chahn."
Sharkey then takes Belushi (played by young then-unknown Michael Chiklis) on a
sentimental journey through the wreckage of his life. Chiklis keeps trying to
talk to his loved ones, but Sharkey ominously warns him, "Dey cahn't hear you,
Chahn. Dey cahn't see you, Chahn."
Chiklis tries to buy off Sharkey,
though he first bombards him with ethnic slurs. I can see how Belushi's widow
might find this, and every other aspect of the film, deeply offensive. But the
filmmakers have truth on their side: It is a matter of historical record that
John Belushi's ghost was a racist. While alive, Belushi might have been extremely
tolerant, but once he died, he became an ugly, ugly hate-monger. A veritable
Klansman, even. Thank God the filmmakers captured this aspect of his posthumous
personality.
Meanwhile, J.T. Walsh's fake Bob
Woodward decides to launch an investigation into Belushi's life and death. Bob Woodward's
real-life book Wired: The Short Life And Fast
Times Of John Belushi—the supposed basis for the movie Wired—is about as far from New Journalism as you can
possibly get. Woodward talks briefly at the beginning about sharing a hometown
(fabulous Wheaton, Illinois) with Belushi, but otherwise, Woodward keeps
himself wholly absent from the narrative. Yet the film awkwardly shoehorns
Walsh's colorless Woodward into the proceedings at every opportunity. I yield
to no one in my love of the late J.T. Walsh, one of the all-time great
character actors but he gives an utterly lifeless performance here. Unlike his
biographical subject, Walsh's generic truth-seeker doesn't have any personality
flaws, because he doesn't have any personality.
Wired has two framing devices, one terminally bland
(Woodward's deeply boring investigation), the other terminally overwrought
(ghostly Belushi's posthumous mystery tour) that overlap and bleed into each
other in ways that are both annoying and conspicuous. Buckaroo Banzai screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch makes Belushi's
ghost cognizant of Woodward's quest. At one point, Chiklis' Belushi
impersonates Woodward as an obsequious, mincing queen who offers to reveal the
identity of Deep Throat to Richard Nixon, as portrayed by Dan Aykroyd in
Conehead garb. (In a further layer of oddity, Dan Aykroyd is played by an
uncannily unconvincing Gary Groomes.) "You scratch my heinie
and I'll scratch your heinie, my heinie," Chiklis leers to Groomes' Conehead Nixon in
a characteristically dire attempt to mirror the irreverent, countercultural
humor of early Saturday Night Live.
Why? Who the hell knows? Watching Wired, the two questions that pop up
constantly are "What the hell were they thinking?" followed by "What the hell
were they smoking, and where can I get some?" Belushi's relationship with
Aykroyd forms the emotional heart of Woodward's book, just as their dynamic
largely defined SNL's early years.
But director Larry Peerce reduces Aykroyd to the man behind Belushi—John
Oates to his Daryl Hall, Andrew Ridgeley to his powerhouse George Michael.
The book contains one scene that's
enormously powerful, but that dies an unmourned death onscreen. In the film,
Groomes' Aykroyd confesses to Walsh's Woodward that if he were with Belushi the
night he overdosed, he probably would have shot up heroin and cocaine alongside
him. It's an enormously revealing statement that derives its shattering
resonance from the nature of their personal and professional relationship.
Aykroyd and Belushi had
antithetical but complementary comic styles. Aykroyd was all about precision
and control: He's as close as American comedy will ever get to a comedy
android. Belushi, meanwhile, was all about attitude and energy. He was sloppy,
anarchic, and gloriously out of control, a consummate comedy punk. So for
Aykroyd to concede that he would willingly surrender control and give in to the
terrifying darkness of shooting up speedballs just so he could feel closer to
his best friend for a few hours is enormously powerful.
But since Wired never presents Aykroyd as anything other than a guy
who was lucky enough to hang out with Belushi, the scene falls flat. Nobody
cares about Oates' angst.
When the film tries to convey the
tenderness of Belushi's relationship with his long-suffering wife, it devolves
into TV-movie schmaltz. As it staggers blearily from low to low, Peerce's
abomination blurs fantasy and reality in ways that diminish both. So the film's
grotesque caricature of Belushi becomes convinced that Woodward is merely
pretending to investigate Belushi's life as a pretense to "snake" his "old
lady." In another cringe-inducing moment, Belushi posthumously tries to get
straight-arrow Woodward to shoot junk, taunting, "How about you, Woody? You
want a hit?"
In the grand tradition of
half-assed biopics, Wired conveys
relevant information about Belushi's career in the most awkward, artificial
manner imaginable. It deftly conveys that its protagonist tried to overhaul his
image with a serious romantic role in Continental Divide by having a coked-up cartoon of a new-waver accost
Belushi in a bathroom and subject him to the following exchange:
"Belush! Hey! How's it going? I'm
really loving your new image, playing a serious romantic role!"
"Oh, you mean Continental
Divide? Time magazine loves it too. You know what they're calling
me? The new Spencer Tracy."
It similarly conveys the
spiraling costs of addiction by having a supporting character spout the
pricelessly awkward line "So, I understand you're spending about a thou a week
on the white stuff."
Belushi struggled his entire
career to escape the straightjacket of "fat man fall down, make funny," but his
ugly insult of a biopic reduces his entire complicated, contradictory existence
to "fat man shoot junk, fall down, make funny, die horrible death." It's
pop-culture shorthand of the ugliest sort.
I will give Rauch's screenplay
this much: it sure is audacious. Watching Man On The Moon, I suspected that Andy Kaufman would have despised
it as the sort of sentimental, formulaic treacle he spent his career railing
against. Rauch apparently set out to write a biopic as irreverent, wild, and
unconventional as Belushi himself. The stakes were high. Had the filmmakers
succeeded, they would have reinvented the biopic by injecting it with vast
ocean of gallows humor, magic realism, and postmodern mindfuckery. The
filmmakers took enormous chances, none of which paid off. They shot for the
moon and fell flat on their asses.
I'd love to be able to report
that Chiklis transcends this whole sordid affair but he sinks to the level of
his material. I don't think anyone could have predicted that the man
flop-sweating his way through this sad little embarrassment would someday
become a revered actor on The Commish
and The Shield. (Not to mention
as Ben Grimm in the Fantastic Four
movies.) It's a testament to Chiklis' talent, determination, and persistence
that he survived Wired at all.
"I want people to see him as he
was: the drugs and more," Belushi's samurai widow pleads with Walsh's Woodward
early in the film. Wired captures the
drugs and the boorish bad behavior in exhausting detail. But when it comes to
the "more" part, the film comes up empty.
Failure, Fiasco Or Secret
Success: Fiasco