Scratch That Itch Movie Theater

With B off to tropic locales (seriously, it was 88 degrees Fahrenheit when she switched planes on Sunday; the weatherman is talking about snow here within the week), I'm letting my rubbernecker curiosity run free by checking out a number of films that always held a fascination with me, sort-of looked interesting, or were notorious in their day. Thanks to the wonders of quasi-legal movie sharing sites that are proliferating on the web these days, I've found that most of these films-- even the hard to find ones-- are out there.

While I'd just as soon not talk about this weekend's cinema oddity Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles (review: amiable enough family film, but totally empty calories), last night's movie was Wired (1989), an itch I had to scratch. The story behind this biopic of the rise and fall of legendary comic actor John Belushi makes for a better tale than the film itself: The Bob Woodward book this film was (very loosely) based on named a lot of names (I did not know that both Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro hung out and did drugs with Belushi the night he died), and laid fault squarely at the feet of the studios and entertainment industrial complex that kept its stars both supplied & heavily medicated and largely protected from any blowback. When this movie was coming into being, a lot of Hollywood power brokers (Michael Ovitz, known as the most powerful man in Hollywood, for one) called in their favors and let it be known far and wide that anyone associated with this film would be essentially blackballed for life. So no major studios touched it; no major actors, directors or writers came near it, and the script was so heavily revised as to steer clear of the multiple threatened lawsuits that major persons in this story were rolled into watered-down unnamed "composite characters." So what we have is an extremely tame, made-for-TV movie-feeling film that relied on an awkward framing device (dead Belushi wakes up in the morgue and is driven around key events in his life in a cab driven by his guardian angel), paralleling the other narrative of Bob Woodward doing an investigation of the cause of Belushi's death. Could have been decent and edgy, but it was pretty toothless. To his credit, actor Michael Chiklis (who had exactly 2 TV show episodes to his resume) did a great job playing Belushi-- that's him singing on the soundtrack CD!-- given the constraints he had. True to the threats, a lot of people in this film had difficulties working in showbiz after-- for example, the screenwriter never wrote another movie, and the director helmed only one more feature film (which went straight to video). Indeed, the distribution of this movie was so poor that it only played in half the theaters of a normal release, guaranteeing (along with the savage reviews) a bomb. To this day, Wired has never been released on DVD. Thanks to his persistence and talent, Michael Chiklis has found steady work however, first as the star of TV's The Commish, then as anti-hero Vic Mackey in the late, great The Shield. He was the best thing in an otherwise disappointing picture.