Word: belushi
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...casting: get the country's star investigative reporter to tackle "the unanswered questions" about the grubby death of America's favorite counterculture co median. The fact that the co-author of All the President's Men and The Final Days was on the case invested Belushi's life with a weight and dimension it lacked when he was busy living it. It turns out, however, that there are no unanswered questions that matter. So everyone comes up short: Belushi's widow and his sister-in-law, who first enlisted Woodward in the project; the author...
...Belushi had a kind of reckless, rock-'n'-roll comedic sensibility. He was a volatile combination of Lou Costello and Vlad the Impaler, a performer with a wide appeal but a narrow range, whose talent could ignite television sketches but was quickly being tapped out in movies. He did not have the generative comic gifts of an Albert Brooks, say, or an Andy Kaufman, but he had a gruff, tough persona that exuded phantom wisps of tenderness and set him quite apart. He was the most intriguing of the Saturday Night troupe even as he was demolishing...
Woodward does not attempt to appraise Belushi or to put him into any social or moral perspective. Like Sergeant Joe Friday, Woodward goes for just the facts, and they do not take him very far or deep. Since many of the facts are known from the headlines anyway, Woodward must resort to details. In large part, this means recounting endless rounds of drug blowouts, frazzled work sessions and show-biz parties. There are occasional testimonials to Belushi's sweetness (he and his wife make love on a Martha's Vineyard cliff; he buys his father a ranch...
...book even bypasses the one potentially intriguing question about Belushi's death: Why did the Los Angeles police release Cathy Smith, who was subsequently indicted for murder and for "furnishing and administering" speedballs (potent mixtures of cocaine and heroin) during the final days of Belushi's life? Portrayed by Woodward as a user and sometime dealer of heroin, Smith was able to hotfoot it to Canada, where she is still fighting extradition. Woodward is so absorbed in writing about Belushi's demons that he has barely a moment to suggest where they might have originated. Evoking...
...gets worse as it gets better," Belushi once told a friend in the summer of 1980, two years after Animal House, in which he played the definitive slob frat boy, had become one of the top-grossing movie comedies of all time. It is impossible not to care a little about the man who could make such an observation, just as it is difficult not to be fond of someone who, in the middle of a furious brawl with his brother, could observe, "This is just like East of Eden." But Wired, so full of details, is so short...