John belushi biography wired magazine

A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama’s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would “regret” taking a position that would soon be shown to be false.

A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward’s behavior. Was he cynically trumping up the administration’s “threat,” or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status?

I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, , Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles—which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially think.*

Two years after Belushi died, Bob Woodward published Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi. While the Watergate sleuth might seem an odd choice to tackle such a subject, the book came about because both he and Belushi grew up in the same small town of Wheaton, Ill. They had friends in common. Belushi, who despised Richard Nixon, was a big Woodward fan, and after he died, his widow, Judy Belushi, approached Woodward in his role as a reporter for the Washington Post. She had questions about the LAPD’s handling of Belushi’s death and asked Woodward to look into it. He took the access she offered

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It all started in May. Wired: The Short Life & Fast Times of John Belushi, by Bob Woodward, was officially published on June 4th, , two years after the comedian died of an overdose of cocaine and heroin. Judy Jacklin Belushi, and the friends who circle around her like satellites, had received advance copies of the book, and the entire situation was a mess from the start. There had been such a sense of expectation about — not only had John Belushi&#;s widow initiated the project, but she had also read her diaries to Woodward and persuaded her friends to talk— even the famous ones, like Dan Aykroyd and John Landis. She had, above all else, hoped for a sympathetic biography. Instead, she got pages of cold facts, the majority of them drug related and ugly. &#;The man in Wired is not the man I knew,&#; Jacklin said. And with that began the controversy.

She had already had misgivings. &#;There were innumerable problems with Bob getting the manuscript to me,&#; Jacklin said later. &#;It was, &#;Oh, your sister is supposed to send you a copy&#;. No, it was Federal Expressed to you.&#; That went on for two weeks.&#; Yet when she finally did receive Wired, she didn&#;t read it immediately — she was working on another project Two days later, Jacklin read a part of the book (&#;It&#;s very long, you know&#;), and although she had been warned by her sister, Pam Jacklin, who had been involved with Wired from its inception, to expect the worst, Judy was &#;hopeful for the rest of the book. It didn&#;t seem terribly negative. But two days later, I read more. By then, it was pretty disturbing.&#;

It wasn&#;t a fair portrait of John, she said. There was no joy in the book, no balance. &#;I loved John because he was warm,&#; Jacklin said. &#;He was a very likable person. He had a terrific presence, and Woodward missed all that.&#; Wired, Jacklin claimed, was only about drugs a

book by Bob Woodward

Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi is a non-fiction book by American journalist Bob Woodward about actor and comedian John Belushi. The hardcover edition includes 16 pages of black-and-white photos, front and back.

Interviews

Many friends and relatives of Belushi, including his widow Judith Belushi Pisano, Dan Aykroyd, and James Belushi, agreed to be interviewed at length for the book, but later felt the final product was exploitative and not representative of the John Belushi they knew. Pisano wrote her own book, Samurai Widow (), to counter the image of Belushi portrayed in Wired.

Reception

In , Tanner Colby, who co-authored the book Belushi: A Biography with Pisano, wrote about how Wired exposes Woodward's strengths and weaknesses as a journalist. While in the process of researching the anecdotes related in the book, he found that while many of them were true, Woodward missed, or didn't seek out, their meaning or context.

For example, in Woodward's telling, a "lazy and undisciplined" Belushi is guided through the scene on the cafeteria line in Animal House by director John Landis, yet other actors present for that scene recall how much of it was improvised by the actor in one single take. Blair Brown told author Tanner Colby that Woodward had "tricked" her into describing her and Belushi’s preparation for a love scene in Continental Divide, and Brown remained angry at Woodward years later while telling the story of Woodward’s deceitfulness. Colby notes that Woodward devotes a single paragraph to Belushi's grandmother's funeral, where he hit a low point and resolved to get clean for the filming of Continental Divide, while Woodward diligently documented every instance of drug abuse over a period of many years that he turned up. "It's like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the s