Placing apart the horrible sequel, the ridiculous online game tie-in and the awkward fan conventions, the unique 1980 movie The Blues Brothers remains to be excellent, largely due to the performances from true music legends like Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway.
Plus, there’s that iconic automotive chase via an Illinois shopping center, which, admittedly, is so much much less enjoyable to observe if you realize that the mall in query was being utilized by a faculty till Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi trashed the place and didn’t hassle to wash their mess up.
Curiously, the model of the film that we’ve all seen is so much completely different than the way it was initially conceived.
Based on director John Landis, The Blues Brothers was going to be an epic “roadshow film with an intermission.” However when he screened the lone 70mm print of the almost three-hour reduce for studio executives and a check viewers of randos, he instantly thought to himself, “Oh shit, that is too lengthy.”
So Landis reduce quarter-hour out, however nonetheless deliberate to retain the epic roadshow packaging. He screened the marginally shorter reduce for “theater homeowners and bookers.” However then one racist theater proprietor ruined every part. As recounted within the ebook The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv and the Making of an American Movie Traditional by Daniel de Visé, Ted Mann, who owned among the prime theaters in L.A.’s Westwood neighborhood, refused to ebook the movie, telling Landis, “I don’t need Blacks in Westwood.”
Because of this, Lew Wasserman, the top of Common on the time, ordered Landis to make but extra cuts. “Effectively John,” Wasserman mentioned, “we’re gonna have hassle reserving it, so we will’t have a street present. You’ve gotta take the intermission out of there.” So the film was whittled right down to 133 minutes, leading to a reduce that Landis calls “lopsided.”
Per Landis, in 1985, somebody at Common threw out the negatives of all the additional scenes. The studio had invited him to revive the lacking footage for a house video launch, solely to find that the Blues Brothers movie had been scrapped and changed with footage from The New Go away It to Beaver.
Whereas the unique roadshow model remains to be misplaced, the second “preview reduce” and all of its further scenes had been finally recovered by the FBI.
Across the time that Blues Brothers 2000 was launched, the feds — presumably their Deleted Scenes from ‘80s Comedies Division – contacted Common, notifying them {that a} “thriller print” of The Blues Brothers was listed on the market on eBay. The FBI ended up seizing the 70mm print, which turned out to be the preview reduce. Landis revealed that it had been “stolen” by the son of a theater supervisor following the 1980 previews. The longer reduce (containing an additional 20 minutes) was finally launched on Blu-Ray because the “Prolonged Model.”
However they’d have offered much more copies had they known as it the “Seized By The FBI After Two A long time of Sitting in A Thief’s Storage Model.”
