Trivia / The Blues Brothers

• All-Star Cast: Has its own page, if you want to see everyone.
• Backed by the Pentagon:
  • The Chicago Police Department gave support and allowed the production to use genuine insignia and markings. Then the film came out and the CPD saw how they were portrayed and refused to allow any other production such a right for decades until The Chicago Code in 2011.
  • While not so during the production of the movie, in recent years the Vatican's newspaper has admitted to finding it a good movie with good, Catholic religious themes and attitudes.
• Career Resurrection:
  • James Brown's appearance — all five minutes of it — brought him to the attention of a white audience and won him many new white fans, revitalizing his career. In the '80s, he played to larger and more racially-mixed crowds than he ever had before; by the end of the '90s he was pop music royalty.
  • Cab Calloway in particular benefited a great deal from his appearance in this movie, where unlike most of the other musicians he played a significant supporting character rather than just making a cameo. He was by far the oldest musician appearing in the film as his heyday had been in the '30s and '40s, but his show-stealing performance of "Minnie the Moocher" brought him back into the public eye.
  • This trope could be applied to most of the cast; the only musician in the cast who was actually working at the time of the production was Ray Charles.
• Completely Different Title:
  • In Greece, the film became "Οι ατσίδες με τα μπλε" (the smart guys in blue — note that blue is *only* a color, it doesn't resemble the "blues")
  • In Latin America the film became "Los Hermanos Caradura" ("The Stone-Faced Brothers", probably because of their borderline Comically Serious approach to a lot of the weird crap that happens around them).
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Elwood says "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" is a Wilson Pickett song after they finish their rendition of it. While Pickett did cover the song in 1966, it was originally performed and co-written by Solomon Burke. Pickett, however, had the hit with it. When performing the theme to Rawhide, Elwood claims it is "an old Rowdy Yates tune". Rowdy Yates was merely Clint Eastwood's character on the show; the theme was in fact written in 1958 by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington and was originally performed by Frankie Laine.
• Creator Couple: John Belushi's wife Judy Jacklin has a cameo as a waitress in the scene where Jake and Elwood meet with Murph and The Magictones.
• Cut Song: The Blues Brothers recorded and filmed Johnny Horton's song "Sink the Bismarck" for the gig at Bob's Country Bunker. When it was decided not to use the song, the footage disappeared, and remains lost.
• The Danza:
  • Ray Charles as the proprietor of Ray's Music Exchange.
  • With the exception of the brothers themselves, all the members of the Blues Brothers Band have the same full names as the musicians who portray them.
• Deleted Scene: Lots of scenes were deleted from the film (the original cut was a whopping 160 minutes), later restored in an extended version. More interactions between Jake and Elwood were cut from the film, along with extended scenes from Bob's Country Bunker, the cops investigating Elwood's apartment, and the epic chase scene at the end, most noticeably when the Nazis start chasing Jake and Elwood.
• Descended Creator: Dan Aykroyd co-wrote the film.
• Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: Played With, as the film is quite vague about whether Ray Charles's character is blind. He can spot a shoplifting kid from across a room (and he can certainly shoot straight), but he can't hang a poster up the right way round.
• Dueling Works:
  • Came out the same day as Can't Stop the Music, the movie starring The Village People. If you don't know which one won that fight, you probably shouldn't be surfing the Internet unsupervised.
  • The film also had a bit of a rivalry with Caddyshack, as both films were spearheaded by creatives who worked on Animal House^note Blues Brothers featured that film's director (Landis), star (Belushi), and studio (Universal), while Caddyshack featured its writers (Douglas Kenney and Harold Ramis) and were released in summer 1980. While both films are highly regarded today, Blues Brothers had a better critical reception and box office performance.
• Executive Meddling: Universal kept pressuring John Landis to replace some of the African American musical stars in the cast like Cab Calloway and Aretha Franklin with acts like Rose Royce who were more contemporary and successful (the notable exception was Ray Charles). Such changes would have contradicted much of the Aesop behind the movie, to give respect and attention to blues, jazz and R&B's rich history and traditions, which were being neglected as new trends in music were emerging and traditional black musicians were being forgotten. Landis refused the changes, but as a result Mann Theatres refused to book it into their theaters in white neighborhoods.
• Fake American: Canadian-born Dan Aykroyd does a spot-on Chicago accent.
• Life Imitates Art: The shopping mall scene has a Toys "R" Us as part of a traditional enclosed shopping mall. While none existed at the time (the storefront used for the Toys "R" Us scene was actually a former Walgreens drugstore), the first Toys "R" Us store to be part of an enclosed shopping mall opened in California in 1985.
• Missing Episode: Quite a bit of footage is missing from even the Collectors edition as the original cut ran 160 minutes and that version was only ever screened once. Landis wanted to restore all the cut footage, but to his dismay found out that Universal had thrown out quite a bit of it, meaning the full 160 minute version is pretty much gone for good.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The trailer has Curtis ask Jake and Elwood, "How are you gonna raise $5,000 in eleven days without ripping off somebody?" This line doesn't appear in the film.
• Production Nickname: John Belushi was nicknamed "The Black Hole" on the set, as he went through hundreds of pairs of sunglasses during production. He would do a scene and then lose the pair before filming the next one.
• Real-Life Relative: The "woman on the cutting-room floor" (Shirley Levine) in the credits is actually John Landis's mother.
• The Red Stapler: The popularity of the film boosted the Ray-Ban Wayfarer, which was yet experiencing some renewed popularity thanks to the rise of the "New Music" movement. From a few thousands sold through the mid-1970s, sales rose to 18,000 during 1981 partly because of the film (and Risky Business two years later), bringing the model out from the verge of withdrawal.
• Star-Making Role: For Dan Aykroyd, this is the movie that made him recognized by a worldwide audience.
• Throw It In!: During the dance number outside Ray’s Music Exchange there are quick shots of people on the street and on the L platform dancing too. These were just random people watching the filming and decided to dance along as well.
• Troubled Production: While it's obvious from all the on-screen mayhem why the movie cost so much to make (they actually dropped the Ford Pinto from a mile up, requiring a special FAA permit), there were a lot of other issues that aren't obvious on-screen, as this ''Vanity Fair'' article showed:
  • Universal won a close bidding war with Paramount for the project, and of course, they were overjoyed to have John Belushi, coming off a year when he'd starred in both a top-grossing film and a top-rate TV show and had a number one single. But they didn't have a script. After an experienced writing partner was unable to help him, Dan Aykroyd, who'd never even read a movie screenplay before, much less written one, took his time writing it. He delivered a 324-page monstrosity formatted more like free verse. Landis spent two weeks just cutting it down and converting it to something filmable.
  • The script was finished, but the studio and the creative people hadn't settled on a budget. After the first month of filming in Chicago, where Landis kept Belushi under control and things went well, they finally saw it. "I think we've spent that much already," producer Robert K. Weiss half-joked when he saw that it was $17.5 million.
  • And then things went to hell. Belushi went everywhere in Chicago when he wasn't on set—and when he did, everybody was slipping him vials and packets of coke. That was in addition to what he could procure, or have procured for, himself, often consumed in his trailer or at the private bar on set he had built for himself, his longtime friends, the cast, and any visiting celebrities. Carrie Fisher, whom Landis had warned to keep Belushi away from drugs if she could, said almost everyone who had a job there also dealt, and the patrons could (and did) score almost anything there. Dan Aykroyd, who unlike Belushi or Fisher kept his use under control, says there was money in the budget set aside for coke for night shoots.
  • After Belushi's late nights partying, he'd either be really late for unit calls, tanking almost a whole day's worth of shooting, or only an hour or two late... but then he'd go back to his trailer and sleep it off. One night, he wandered away from the set to a nearby house, where Aykroyd found him conked out on the couch after he'd raided the owner's fridge. On another, Landis went in to Belushi's trailer and found a gigantic pile of coke on a table inside, which he flushed down the toilet. Belushi attacked him when he came back, Landis knocked him down with a single punch and Belushi collapsed into tears.^note It should be noted, however, that this incident, or at least the part about Landis punching Belushi, while widely reported during the film's production and after Belushi's death, was denied by Landis himself after it was depicted in the Belushi biopic Wired.
  • Meanwhile, there was Executive Meddling to deal with. Fuming about the skyrocketing cost of the movie, Universal kept trying to get the filmmakers to replace the blues and soul stars like Aretha Franklin and Cab Calloway in the case with more contemporary, successful acts like Rose Royce. Landis stuck to his guns, but because he did, some large theater chains refused to book it into theaters in white neighborhoods.
  • The production returned to Los Angeles for the last month of shooting, already way behind schedule and over budget. Fortunately, Belushi calmed down and got it done. But right before shooting the final scene, which required him to do all sorts of onstage acrobatics while performing at the LA Palladium in front of an audience of hundreds of extras, he tried out some kid's skateboard... and fell off and seriously injured his knee. Lewis Wasserman, president and CEO of Music Corporation of America, Universal's then parent company, called the top orthopedist in LA and made him postpone his weekend until he could shoot Belushi up with enough anesthetics to get him through filming.
  • Fortunately, the movie was a box-office smash that has since become a Cult Classic.
• What Could Have Been: Dan Aykroyd's original script was said to have been over 300 pages long, roughly the size of a phone book, since in his zeal over writing his first official screenplay, he ended up writing not just a single film but two films—the first film and a sequel that he called The Return of the Blues Brothers which in at least one documentary he described as "the Bible of the Blues Brothers" containing various bits of back story on all the characters and where they came from, but it was deemed too long and thus was scaled back. A similar thing would happen with Aykroyd's other famous property, Ghostbusters (1984).
  • The original script reportedly included special recruitment scenes for each band member. These scenes and many others cut from the original script are in the novelization of the film.
  • Legend has it that, as a gag, Aykroyd actually dressed up his first draft to look like a phone book when he turned it in.
  • Little Richard was asked to appear and perform in this film. He declined because he was only performing gospel, as opposed to secular music, at the time this film was made.
  • Jake's jilted fiancée was originally supposed to be blonde.
  • In the original script, The Magictones were originally Mexican immigrants. Also, The Blues Brothers Band was scattered across three states. Among their new lives: Willie Hall (aka "Too Big") is a drug dealer, Steve Cropper (aka "The Colonel") is a pool shark-turned-Hutterite and Donald Dunn (aka "Duck") and Lou Marini (aka "Blue") work in different parts of security. The band took over a house in a developing neighborhood for rehearsal. To avoid the owners, Elwood detonates the home with cans of hairspray. Also, the Illinois Nazis were trying to buy the orphanage and set it up as their new headquarters.
  • The original cut of the film was 160 minutes long and Landis originally wanted to present it as an old-fashioned Roadshow-style theatrical release, but Universal head Lew Wasserman demanded the film be cut down after an early screening so it could have more showings per day. That turned out to be a wise decision since Roadshow-style theatrical presentations would be killed off pretty much for good as a mere five months after this film, Heaven's Gate came out and was such a massive Box Office Bomb that it had fewer than five Roadshow theatrical showings and it would be the last film for over two decades to use the Roadshow-style format.
  • An Animated Adaptation created by Film Roman was initially greenlit in 1997 by UPN. However, after eight of the thirteen ordered episodes were made, the series was cancelled before any of them made it to air (beyond a few cels◊, none of the show has been found by the internet). Supposedly, the main actors' brothers (Peter Aykroyd and James Belushi) would've filled their original roles.
  • Cab Calloway initially wanted to have Minnie the Moocher be remixed in disco, but John Landis convinced him to have the song be done in its original big band jazz style.

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