Gone 25 years, Belushi’s impact still felt

Belushi didn’t consider himself an addict despite increasingly prodigious drug use, said Tanner Colby, co-author of the 2005 biography “Belushi” (written with Belushi’s widow, Judith Belushi Pisano).

“John Belushi, deep down, was a stable guy who knew who he was, had a lot of confidence, wasn’t superficial but with no great internal trouble,” Colby said. “I think that what happened to him was largely due to fame. For a year and a half, he was as big as Elvis.”

Colby is working on a biography of Chris Farley, a later-generation “Saturday Night Live” star who was a drug-overdose victim in 1997, also at age 33. Director Landis had an unsettling encounter with Farley some six months before, in which Farley declared his admiration for “Animal House” and his desire to emulate Belushi.

“I found myself saying, ‘You know, Chris, John is not the best role model. John is dead,”’ Landis recalled.

(Farley’s family runs the Chris Farley Foundation to educate young people about the dangers of substance abuse and how to avoid peer pressure.)

Farley was in and out of rehab. Belushi lived in an era with fewer treatment options and, according to some accounts, much more acceptance of drug use.

In her autobiography “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” the late Oscar-winning producer Julia Phillips (“The Sting”) said she and friends dining at a posh Beverly Hills restaurant back then dumped cocaine on a dinner plate to “toot it off the ends of our steak knives.”

Friends tried to step in
Some close to Belushi said they tried to stop him.

“Many times,” Landis said. “Do you know any drug addicts, alcoholics? ... It’s very, very difficult. It’s like saying to a person who has cancer, ‘Stop fooling around. Stop this [expletive] at once.”’

His friend faced a difficult fight, Belzer said.

“On some level he was gallantly struggling to straighten himself out, but the nature of the business, the nature of his personality and some of the people around him just made it harder,” he said. “That happens to a lot of celebrities, when no one can say ‘no’ around them.”

Landis saw the dire results. In 1978’s “Animal House,” Belushi was a disciplined and collaborative actor who took the “crazed, wild character” of frat boy Bluto and made him lovable, said the director.

“By the time of ‘The Blues Brothers’ (1980), he had a very bad drug problem,” Landis said, and it started undermining his work. His last project was 1981’s “Neighbors” with Aykroyd; he was set to make “Ghostbusters,” which filmed after his death with Bill Murray replacing him.

What might a clean Belushi have gone on to do? His career could have paralleled that of Murray, his former “Saturday Night Live” co-star who traveled from “Caddyshack” to a 2004 Oscar nomination for his poignant performance in “Lost in Translation.”

“I think John had a depth to his talent that would have allowed him to reinvent himself,” Michaels said.

Landis agrees. “He could have done anything.”

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