
Paul Reubens has a small but visible role in The Blues Brothers. Universal later generated a PR effort to get Aretha Franklin an Oscar nomination for her performance. Universal wanted new acts like Rose Royce, the band behind hits like "Car Wash" and "I Wanna Get Next to You." But Aykroyd and company said no. The studio wanted the band who sang "Car Wash" instead of Aretha Franklin for The Blues Brothers. He was of course the man behind Yoda, who made his debut in The Empire Strikes Back, which debuted one month earlier, and was still number one at the box office when The Blues Brothers premiered (and had to settle for second place). Carrie Fisher wasn’t The Blues Brothers’s only connection to Star Wars.įrank Oz, known mostly for his work as a puppeteer, plays the corrections officer who returns Jake’s belongings in the very beginning of the movie. wow, what if that happens again? I should probably marry him." (The wedding never happened.) 8. "He saved my life, and then he asked me to marry him. "I almost choked on some kind of vegetable that I shouldn't have been eating: Brussels sprouts," Fisher told CNN. Universal Studios Home Videoĭan Aykroyd and Carrie Fisher were already a couple, set up by Belushi, who became engaged after Aykroyd successfully administered the Heimlich maneuver on her. Dan Aykroyd and Carrie Fisher became engaged while filming The Blues Brothers.Ĭarrie Fisher in The Blues Brothers (1980). But he supplemented his work in front of the camera with a handful of stunting stints-including one on The Blues Brothers. The Duke's youngest son, Ethan Wayne, began acting in 1970.
#Blues brothers cast drivers#
One of The Blues Brothers’s stunt drivers was John Wayne’s son. Amazingly, only a few minor injuries were ever reported.
#Blues brothers cast driver#
One stunt driver drove off a 150-foot-long ramp. A ditch was dug so the cars in the big pile-up scene would flip when they hit it. After one take, Landis realized it looked like he was just speeding up the film, so he got stunt pedestrians to walk down the sidewalks to show just how fast the cars were really going. The filmmakers got permission to drive down Lake Street at speeds of over 100 MPH. Sixty old police cars were purchased for $400 apiece. Forty stunt drivers were flown in every weekend to do the work. The Blues Brothers used 13 different Bluesmobiles.Īll of the car chases and stunts were real and not created with CGI. Though the mall never reopened, it was only (finally) torn down in 2013. The scene was filmed at the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois, which had been shuttered in 1979-before filming commenced. The mall car chase in The Blues Brothers was shot in a real shopping mall. While it pumped about $12 million into the local economy, all those car stunts scared residents enough that many of them called the local newspapers to report what they were seeing. Most of The Blues Brothers was shot throughout Chicago, which wasn't a major film production hotspot at the time. Chicago created its own film office for The Blues Brothers.
#Blues brothers cast movie#
John Belushi was paid twice as much as Dan Aykroyd for The Blues Brothers.īelushi earned $500,000 for his work in the movie Aykroyd received $250,000. John Landis put together a shorter, filmable version in just three weeks. It didn’t help matters that he had never read a screenplay before either. In his first attempt at writing a screenplay, Dan Aykroyd penned a script that was nearly three times the length of the average screenplay (given that one page usually equals one minute of screen time). Dan Aykroyd wrote the first draft of The Blues Brothers, which was 324 pages long. The Blues Brothers made more than $115 million in theaters worldwide after it was released on June 20, 1980-even though director John Landis and the crew couldn’t identify whether the movie was a comedy, a musical, a classic, or an expensive disaster. It has been 40 years since John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd brought their Saturday Night Live characters Jake and Elwood Blues to the big screen with The Blues Brothers, a loud, money-making, car-smashing love letter to both Chicago and rhythm and blues.
