Jake Blues has just been released from prison and now he and his brother, Elwood, must find a way to help the orphanage they grew up in raise five thousand dollars before it closes. Jake and Elwood are told by their mentor, Kurtis, they should go to church. While they are in church, Jake hears a message from God saying they should put the band back together in order to raise the money. Jake and Elwood look for and gather up their old band mates, but they manage to get themselves into trouble while doing it.
Blaine: Dan Aykroyd was always a fan of Blues music and he played Blues records at this party he attended. John Landis never heard any Blues music before because he was more of a Grand Funk and Allman Brothers type of guy. Dan and John would discuss music a lot and then they both thought about putting their own band together. John Landis thought about calling the band The Blues Brothers and at the time it was just about exploring the music and creating something they thought would be fun. Dan and John listened to a lot of Blues music and John Belushi got involved because the three of them were good friends. They would rehearse whatever songs they wanted to sing. The Blues Brothers thing was just something to have fun with at first, but a lot went into bringing it to life. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi would sing songs on weekends at the Lone Star Cafe, then they decided to have The Blues Brothers be on “Saturday Night Live” while Carrie Fisher was hosting. They would be showing Jake and Elwood Blues to the world. No one expected The Blues Brothers to be successful. After their appearance on “SNL”, Steve Martin asked if The Blues Brothers could open for him at the Universal Amphitheater. An album was made of their performance and it got sold out shorty after it’s release.
Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Paul Shaffer then started putting together a band. Three of them, Lou Marini, Alan Rubin and Tom Malone, were already apart of “SNL” playing the music in the background. Dan was told about Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn and how good they are. John Belushi made the call to Steve and Duck and they both believed they were getting a call from a friend of theirs. John told them about the band they were putting together and they had to think about it first. When they finally decided to join, it became a comedy act because they were funny. Another guy who was mentioned was Matt “Guitar” Murphy and he was happy enough to say yes when Dan and John told him they were going to make an album. Paul Shaffer was supposed to be the pianist in the band, but he couldn’t do it. He was already involved with something else and he couldn’t get out due to his contract. So Murphy Dunn was hired.
During the rehearsal, everyone was amazed to hear Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi sing because they never knew they could sing so well. Dan knew Blues very well and had a passion for it. The deeper Dan and John got into this idea of their’s, the more they wanted to know who Jake and Elwood Blues were. Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and his wife, Judy Belushi, thought about a backstory for The Blues Brothers. They had to think about who they were and where they came from. Dan thought about them being orphans, then became homeless and ended up being criminals. Dan had read about criminals who were orphans and that’s where the idea came from. Dan had a lot of adventurous ideas The Blues Brothers could have. When Dan and John Landis pitched "The Blues Brothers" to Universal Pictures they described it as an adventure film. After a deal was made, John and Dan started to put together a script. Writing a script for a movie was something new for Dan Aykroyd. He had written a lot of skits for “SNL”, but never a movie script. He didn’t know how they were written. Dan was told that scripts were 120 to 150 pages long, so this was a new learning experience for him. Dan did write down what was on his mind, which became very useful for the script. Dan Aykroyd had written a 324 page script that was the size of a phone book. John Landis knew he couldn’t make a movie with a script that long, even though the ideas were great. John re-wrote the script and made it shorter.
They started shooting the movie before the script was finished. The songs that were chosen for “The Blues Brothers” depended on what Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and John Landis liked, interested or went with a scene. They listened to a lot of music to decided what they liked. John Landis felt like he was developing a musical. It cost a lot of money to get the permission for the movie to have the songs they chose. John Landis hired choreographer, Charlton Johnson, to choreograph all the dance moves in the movie. He taught Dan and John to dance. All The Blues Brothers' moves were taught by him. They hired professional dancers for the church scene. There’s also a scene where people are dancing to the song Ray Charles is singing and the air was 25 degrees and everyone was dressed like it was the Summer.
The musicians John Landis and Dan Aykroyd wanted to be in “The Blues Brothers” were Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles and James Brown. Besides Ray Charles, the others were looking for work, so it was easy to get them. Aretha had trouble lip singing her own voice during a take because she had never done it before. James Brown and John Lee Hooker didn’t want to lip sing because it wasn’t their thing. They rather sing live. The people in the church were dancing to a playback of James Brown singing “The Old Landmark” whenever they were shooting a take that wasn’t focussed on him. The reason they did a playback was because James Brown couldn’t sing the same way twice to the same song. All the Blues Brothers stuff was playback.
Dan Aykroyd’s idea of having a good time is to get in a car in Los Angeles and drive to New York because he loves cars. Dan thought of the Bluesmobile being an old police car because the car represented the style of his and John Belushi’s outfits. John Landis thought about the car being magic and being able to do all theses things like jump and flip in the air. Dan Aykroyd asked what makes it a magic car and John said "it doesn’t matter how it’s magic, it’s just that way”. But Dan felt there should be an explanation. Dan had thought that Elwood should park it under the El Train in Chicago in a transformer room. Elwood would park it there and it would absorb some power from the electrical transformer. John Landis didn’t think that made sense. The scene where the Bluesmobile is being chased by cops cars through the mall was shot at The Dixie Mall in Harvey, Illinois. That mall had been abandoned for over a year, so they felt lucky to have found it. That way they could have the Bluesmobile crash through things. What John Landis had to figure out was how they were going to fill up the parking lot. The production manager managed to get a lot of new cars filled in the lot, but he warned John and everyone else to make sure they didn’t hit one car. They shot the mall scene for a week and there were 140 stores in there that had to be remodeled just so it could be destroyed. All the merchandise was millions of dollars. It cost $27 million dollars to make “The Blues Brothers”. The special effects department had a little model of the Bluesmobile for the take when it is supposed to flip in the air. The scene where the Pinto car, driven by the Illinois Nazis, falls past the skyline had to be picked up from a helicopter and it had to hit a specific place that was away from a populated area. They used an area where salt is stored during the Summer. When it hit the ground it flattened like a pancake. They had to block off a lot of streets to shoot the big chase sequence where hundreds of police cars are going after the Bluesmobile. They only did it in early mornings during the weekend. They had to make sure all traffic was stopped while the cars they shot on camera were going 100 miles an hour. “The Blues Brothers” was the first big picture to be shot in Chicago. Before then, Mayor Daley’s rule was not to shoot a movie in Chicago because he didn’t like this episode of a show called “M Squad” where Lee Marvin was a Chicago cop and he accepted a bribe. But Mayor Daley died and the new Mayor, Jane Byrne, was nice enough not to just allow them to shoot “The Blues Brothers” in Chicago, but also offer them anything they needed. They got the permission to shoot anywhere in Chicago.
No one had ever seen a movie where it had these musical numbers and these car chase scenes mixed together in one movie. The crew felt like they were making a war movie when it came to the scene where all the cops, soldiers, firefighters and tanks show up at the State office building going after Jake and Elwood. It required 3 helicopters, 42 cop cars, 350 fake guns and 4 tanks. They were about to shoot the concert scene and John Belushi went missing. Everyone was looking all over for him. John Belushi was found in the neighborhood on the other side of the street. He went across the street, invited himself into a strangers house and had fallen asleep on their coach.
“The Blues Brothers” helped bring back attention to Blues music and other types as well. Younger audiences were introduced to artists like James Brown and Aretha Franklin. All the musicians in “The Blues Brothers" were getting a lot of attention. People would see them on the streets or at a restaurant and recognize them from “The Blues Brothers”. The reviews for “The Blues Brothers” didn’t turn out so great, but it didn’t matter because it was popular. A lot of credit went to Dan Aykroyd and John Landis for starting The Blues Brothers and John Landis was starting to be known as one of the great directors after making “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers”.
My rating on “The Blues Brothers” is five out of five stars.
