Wired (book)

Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi is a 1984 non-fiction book by American journalist Bob Woodward[1] about the American actor and comedian John Belushi.[2] The hardcover edition includes 16 pages of black-and-white photos, front and back.

Cover photo
AuthorBob Woodward
Cover artistGeorge Corsillo
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SubjectJohn Belushi
GenreBiography
PublisherSimon & Schuster (Hardback), Pocket Books (Mass-market Paperback)
Publication date
1984
Media typePrint (Hardback, Mass-market Paperback)
Pages461 (Hardback)
ISBN0-671-47320-4
OCLC10605685
792.7/028/0924 B 19
LC ClassPN2287.B423 W66 1984

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.[3] Pisano wrote her own book, Samurai Widow (1990) to counter the image of Belushi portrayed in Wired.

Reception

In 2013 Tanner Colby, who had co-authored the 2005 book Belushi: A Biography with Pisano, wrote about how Wired exposes Woodward's strengths and weaknesses as a journalist.[4] 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.[5]

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 Colby she was still angry about how Woodward "tricked" her in describing her and Belushi preparing for a love scene in Continental Divide. 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 that film, while diligently documenting every instance of drug abuse he turned up. "It's like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn't very good at playing basketball," he concluded.[5]

Dan Aykroyd denounced Wired publicly. Interviewed on television by Bobbie Wygant for NBC 5 in 1984, Aykroyd responded to the question of whether Woodward had interviewed him before writing the book:

[Woodward] spoke with me about an hour and a half, and you know there's things in [the book] I don't remember saying to him, and first of all, the book, I've skimmed through excerpts of it, it's really pulpy and trashy, it's not well-written at all, and Bob Woodward...here was a man with a very respectable career - All the President's Men, The Brethren, and his research and newspaper work - and all of a sudden he does a book called The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, what a kind of a cheap, you know... He's just stepping down into that seedy world, and I think he's really avoided many issues in the book. He certainly has avoided the issue of what a funbag John was, what a great guy he was, what a warm, humorous, really, you know...concerned, and bright, educated, well-read individual this guy was. How did he get to be so successful? He was smart, you know, he wasn't just given his break, and he had to work for what he had, and Woodward completely skirts that, and it's a depressing, sordid, tragic book, he jumps around the issue of the police probe, and the fact that some of the people that were purveying drugs to John were friends of police force members in Los Angeles, and this is something that he wimped out on, and I've heard that he really didn't write most of the book, that it was John Anderson, his researcher, who put down most of the material on paper, and for my part I just think that it's really depressing reading.

Film adaptation

The book was later adapted into a critically panned 1989 feature film also called Wired, in which Belushi was played by Michael Chiklis and Woodward was played by J.T. Walsh.[6][7]

References
  1. BOOKS OF THE TIMES; CLOSE-UP OF JOHN BELUSHI - The New York Times
  2. I Read Every Bob Woodward Book. Here's How They Stack Up. - POLITICO Magazine
  3. Hirschberg, Lynn (27 September 1984). "The Controversy Over Bob Woodward's Belushi Bio 'Wired'". Rolling Stone.
  4. The Other Belushi Biography Breaks Down 'Wired' - Vulture
  5. Colby, Tanner (March 12, 2013). "Regrettable". Slate. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
  6. 'WIRED' REPEATS FACTS, ADDS NOTHING TO BELUSHI STORY - Orlando Sentinel
  7. Wired|Chicago Reader
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