Word: woodwarding
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...financing delayed the shooting until last summer. And not until last week, after months of turndowns, did the producers find a company willing to distribute the film. The stumbling block, say Wired's backers, was a Hollywood community that closed ranks against a picture it wanted to squelch. Says Woodward, an adviser on the film: "A large portion of Hollywood didn't want this movie made because there's too much truth...
...heart of this conspiracy drama is the specter of the powerful Creative Artists Agency, headed by superagent Michael Ovitz. Ovitz was Belushi's agent, and his company's star-packed client list includes several of the comedian's friends who were angered by Woodward's book, among them fellow Saturday Night Live star Dan Aykroyd, SNL producer Lorne Michaels and brother Jim Belushi. Reluctance to alienate Ovitz and his clients, claim the film's producers, is what frightened most of Hollywood away. "In this town," says co-producer Edward Feldman (Save the Tiger, Witness), "the word was put out that...
...morgue, escapes in a gown resembling the toga he wore in Animal House and meets a guardian angel in the guise of a taxi driver (Ray Sharkey). Their conversations are intermingled with time- jumbled flashbacks of Belushi's life, snippets of his comedy material and scenes of Woodward pursuing the story...
...film tiptoes around much of Woodward's most sensational material. Missing, for example, is a portrayal of such Hollywood stars as Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, reported in the book to have used cocaine with Belushi. Except for Aykroyd (Gary Groomes), Belushi's wife Judy (Lucinda Jenney) and Cathy Smith (Patti D'Arbanville), the woman who allegedly gave Belushi his fatal drug injection, most real-life characters are given pseudonyms, and none are shown indulging in drug use with Belushi. Only a couple of scenes offer hints that Hollywood might share any blame in Belushi's death...
...book was so widely disliked in Hollywood that Woodward found little interest when he sought to peddle the movie rights in 1984. Feldman and his partner, Charles Meeker, eventually bought the rights for a relatively modest $300,000. They started feeling pressure almost immediately. Attorneys representing several Creative Artists clients and other Belushi colleagues, like director John Landis (The Blues Brothers), wrote letters warning that portraying them in the film would be an invasion of privacy. Ovitz himself phoned, says Feldman, and "told me it wasn't a good idea to make this picture." (Ovitz says he was simply giving...