Wired Was An Insult To John Belushi

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Let's assume everything Woodward wrote in Wired was more or less true. Fine. Now, does cherrypicking instances of drug binges present an accurate, well-rounded portrait of a human being? Or is it a case of being selective and choosing to highlight only the sordid, darker impulses of John Belushi's life, intentionally making him seem little more than a hopeless drug addict who did virtually nothing other than get high? THAT's the qualm I have with Wired, both the book and the movie. Yes, Belushi used drugs, his habit turned into an addiction and eventually killed him. Yes, he died young and because of that was probably a bit over-rated. While Wired the book made some passing attempts to highlight instances of his life other than his use of narcotics, Wired the movie essentially stayed fixated on his drug use because that was the sole agenda of the movie: to chronicle his descent into his fatal overdose...and infer that he went to hell because of it! In the poorest taste. Chiklis was adequate, but neither the book nor the movie really made an attempt to explain WHY Belushi became famous in the first place (hint: Belushi didn't become famous because he snorted a lot of cocaine, it was because of his performances on tv, in the movies and on records).

It's like a deeply unsettling version of Scrooged, based upon the life of a real person. I can understand why his friends and family were outraged, however, to an interested bystander it looks like an oddly fascinating - albeit imperfect - movie.

It's character assassination, which doesn't in itself mean this is a bad movie, just a distasteful one. I thought it was a really good film. Perhaps one that should never have been made, but maybe that's why it's so powerful.






This is where the magic happens... and by "magic", I mean nothing.

The person who made this movie went by the exploitive book of the same name by Bob Woodward. He only focused on the drug abuse era for John and he never went into depth on the rest of John's personal life.

The movie to me looked made by somebody who just read the book and found it good, but didn't even think the main subject was a human being. No grudges, no revenges, just too literal.
Bookwise I don't think Woodward was envy of Belushi when he wrote the book and I don't see him as a Salieri of some sort. He is a journalist and he brought his style into a biography. I got he had to dig into that side of the story to appeal his own taste and the one of his readers. I don't think moviegoers or Belushi fans were of his concern while he was writing it though, it doesn't polish the facts and probably is the reason why I liked "Wired" the book so much as a kid.
Well, in the book Woodward pointed out that he didn't know the man personally and he used mostly interviews, footage, reports or documents to describe Belushi (one of the many, many, many parts literally screened in this movie... The "he used to do me" piece. And that was just the Prologue) I read it too long ago to remember everything, but I would assume some of his sources were not so clean as he claimed or just plain out of fiction, so I would understand if people like Dan Aykroyd or Judy were so much against it, it's not just about being in denial, is more to do with truth or advertisement.

Wired was an insult - period.

http://blackholereviews.blogspot.com/2010/07/wired-1989-and-bad-movies-about-movie.html

https://littlebitsofgaming.com/2017/05/10/wtf-hollywood-wired/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1989-08-25-8901070545-story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1989/05/19/wired-up-let-down/6066a6b2-6468-4c0c-9222-6382f0ac50a0/?noredirect=on

http://vhsrevisited.blogspot.com/2015/08/wired-1989.html

https://drafthouse.com/news/for-john-belushi-every-night-was-saturday-night.-see-wired-in-35mm

http://articles.latimes.com/1989-04-13/entertainment/ca-1870_1_caa-belushi-friends-wired

https://unobtainium13.com/2017/03/18/a-movie-a-day-70-wired-1989-directed-by-larry-peerce/

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Horrible/LiveActionFilmsNToZ

Wired (AKA "the movie Hollywood doesn't want you to see") is a notorious biopic about the late John Belushi based on the book of the same name by Bob Woodward, which was criticized for being exploitative and sensationalist and derided by John's family and friends, with good reason. The movie treats Belushi as a stereotypical drug addict, and thus treats its message like an Afterschool Special. The film also contains moments that never happened in John's life, like him being punched by a John Landis lookalike while being high on coke (which Landis refuted) or performing live in concert as The Blues Brothers; it also contained a rather mean-spirited scene of John's ghost screaming for help as his body is cut open by a coroner, while a laugh track plays. The movie's reception was overwhelmingly negative, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 4%, and almost derailed Michael Chiklis's career before he bounced back with The Commish.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HistoricalVillainUpgrade/LiveActionFilms

Wired, the biopic of the late John Belushi, was universally reviled by Belushi's friends and family as a glorified character assassination of the beloved entertainer. The film glosses over most Belushi's short-but-illustrious career to focus almost exclusively on his drug addictions, and on top of that, he is portrayed as a boorish, violent, unprofessional, adulterous, openly racist hedonist who cares nothing for the harm his actions cause. In real life, while he did struggle with cocaine addiction, John Belushi was a kind, compassionate, generous man who took his work seriously and made a genuine (albeit sadly unsuccessful) effort to clean up his life.