7 /10 1 Votes
3.3/5 Barnes & Noble Country United States Originally published 1984 | 3.7/5 Goodreads Cover artist George Corsillo Language English Publication date 1984 Page count 461 (Hardback) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Belushi: A Biography, The Brethren, Secret Wars of the CIA, Plan of Attack, The War Within | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, is a 1984 non-fiction book by American journalist Bob Woodward about the American actor and comedian John Belushi. The hardcover edition includes 16 pages of black-and-white photos, front and back.
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Many friends and relatives of Belushi, including his widow Judith Belushi Pisano, Dan Aykroyd and James Belushi, agreed to be interviewed at length for the book, but later felt the final product was exploitative and not representative of the John Belushi they knew. Pisano wrote her own book, Samurai Widow (1990) to counter the image of Belushi portrayed in Wired.
In 2013 Tanner Colby, who had co-authored the 2005 book Belushi: A Biography with Pisano, wrote about how Wired exposes Woodward's strengths and weaknesses as a journalist. While in the process of researching the anecdotes related in the book, he found that while many of them were true, Woodward missed, or didn't seek out, their meaning or context.
For example, in Woodward's telling, a "lazy and undisciplined" Belushi is guided through the scene on the cafeteria line in Animal House by director John Landis, yet other actors present for that scene recall how much of it was improvised by the actor in one single take. Blair Brown told Colby she was still angry about how Woodward "tricked" her in describing her and Belushi preparing for a love scene in Continental Divide. Colby notes that Woodward devotes a single paragraph to Belushi's grandmother's funeral, where he hit a low point and resolved to get clean for that film, while diligently documenting every instance of drug abuse he turned up. "It's like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn't very good at playing basketball," he concluded.
The book was later adapted into a feature film also called Wired, in which Belushi was played by Michael Chiklis and Woodward was played by J.T. Walsh. Belushi's friends and family boycotted the film, which took many liberties from the book and turned it into a non-linear fantasy drama. The film was a commercially and critically panned failure.