Word: belushi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...respectable press. We're not counting National Enquirer junk--or the apologia, enjoyable as it often is, that comes out of p.r. magazines like People or Rolling Stone. We're talking serious, nuts and bolts journalism, the kind that will look, say, at the life of a John Belushi with the toughness with which a seasoned political writer will look at Richard Nixon. Perhaps because it only serves to show how human the stars are, how frail they are like the rest of us, this kind of toughness seems unwelcome in our sometimes squeamish culture. This was made clear...
Wired is tough and brutal. John Belushi, one off the funniest men to come along in the last decade, also happened to take a lot of drugs, as Woodward makes painfully clear. More drugs than most people think a hundred people could do in a lifetime. Belushi did them fast and frequently. One of his doctors, Woodward writes, put this down in a file about Belushi's medical history...
That was in 1976, five years before Belushi died of overdosing on cocaine and heroin--before he really hit the hard stuff...
...reports detailing the dope usage of rock TV, and movie stars is now an established feature of modern newspapers, and moreover, society has virtually accepted wholesale the social use of many once-forbidden and shadowy substances. If that had been the focus of Woodward's book--as apologists for Belushi who have read only shallowly claim--not only would Wired have amounted to a virtual rabbit-punch, but it would have been boring to boot...
...CLAIMS THAT Woodward misrepresented Belushi, that he explored his great excesses while ignoring his compassionate side, came off in the end as nothing more than the whines of entertainment industry pros who aren't used to dealing with real reporters, rather than flaks, who should have shut up when Woodward knocked on their doors. The point here is that Woodward approached his prey with the careful, methodical reporting with which he approached his more traditional, acceptable Washington targets--from the Nixon Administration to the Supreme Court. Just as All the President's Men or The Breinren offered a window...