Belushi’s manager on Woodward’s biography

*Wired* is so wrong “it makes you think Nixon might be innocent.”

Wish I’d said that:

Wired is so wrong “it made you think Nixon might be innocent.”

Author: Mark Kleiman

Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out. Books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993) Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989) UCLA Homepage Curriculum Vitae Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com

7 thoughts on “Belushi’s manager on Woodward’s biography”

  1. I’m partial to Tom Davis’ commentary, myself:

    “Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: “Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,” Franken told me. “He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.””

  2. I swear to myself that I’m going to stop reading purely inside-baseball articles, that life’s too short, and then there’ll be ones like this. Really well told.

  3. For a palate cleanser, see the recent Vanity Fair article on the making of The Blues Brothers. Belushi was busily self-destructing at the time, but the view of Belushi - or perhaps more accurately of the social phenomenon he embodied and the reception he received at the time the film was being made - is fascinating.

    1. Thank you for posting that link. By the third page I realised I need to get back to my life and put it in favourites before tearing myself away.
      It must be pointed out here that in the late seventies we all (well, everybody I can think of) were busy in some level of self destruction and only God knows how we survived. Money and success only added fuel to the bonfire. But ah my friends and oh my foes it made such a lovely light.

    2. Great article! Great movie — now I gotta see it again.

      Thank goodness the execs didn’t get their way — Rose Royce instead of Aretha??? They would have completely ruined the movie with ideas like that.

  4. People thought Woodward was liberal and counterculture because of Watergate, but he was the former Naval Intelligence Officer, who got people like FBI agent Mark Felt and General Alexander Haig and White House Staffer Hugh Sloan to be his pals, so it’s not surprising that he would have no sympathy or understanding for John Belushi.

    “Wired” was another stepping-stone on Woodward’s path to being the most famous journalist in the country, advancing a career about which his first wife said he has no morality.

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