Mayor Byrne was happy to let Bluesmobile ram Daley Center — part of $3.5M climatic scene in ‘The Blues Brothers’

Editor’s note: The story was originally published on June 24, 2005, as part of a weeklong series to commemorate the 25th anniversary of “The Blues Brothers.” The Sun-Times is republishing the stories to mark the 40th anniversary of the movie in 2020.

If you came upon Daley Plaza on Labor Day weekend 1979, you might have turned and run for cover. Two hundred National Guardsmen, rifles in hand, raced from Army jeeps and tanks toward the Cook County Building. They were backed up by three Sherman tanks, three helicopters and three fire trucks. Not to mention 100 state and city police officers in 50 squad cars and on 15 horses.

There was even a SWAT team crawling across the roof and rappelling down the Corinthian columns of the building.

Of course, this wasn’t a real invasion. It was filming for “The Blues Brothers” dramatic climax, in which seemingly every law enforcement body in the state is trying to catch Jake and Elwood Blues as they try to pay the property tax bill on their childhood orphanage.

The scene, according to news accounts at the time, cost $3.5 million to shoot. It was the largest scene shot for a movie in any big city until that time.

Blues Brothers/Sun-Times files

At attack on the Machine

But even though it was just a movie, in some ways, it was an attack.

Mayor Jane Byrne had been in office only since April that year when actors John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd went to her in the summer, requesting permission to film in the plaza. Not only did they want to shut it down for three days, they planned to crash the Bluesmobile through the glass walls of the Daley Center lobby. They offered to donate $50,000 to charity.

The comedic duo, Byrne recalls, appeared nervous. She gave them a stone face, pretending to be skeptical, and then smiled.

“I said, ‘Be my guest,’” she says now. “I was fighting the Machine. I felt like, ‘Knock it all down.’”

As mayor, Byrne could OK the Daley Plaza and Center scenes because she controlled the Public Building Commission. To get permission to film at the County Building, however, wasn’t as easy, filmmakers recall.

Although there is no record of the Cook County Board ever debating the filming, director John Landis said they were initially rebuffed. But Landis said he received permission after meeting with the late Sidney Korshak, a power-broker attorney here and in Hollywood. The California Organized Crime Commission alleged in 1978 that Korshak had ties to powerful mob figures, but he denied that in hearings before Congress.

As Landis recalled, “[Korshak] said, ‘What do you need?’ We told him. And he said, ‘Let me see what I can do.’ And suddenly all the doors were open.”

1st Mayor Daley no fan of Hollywood

Byrne’s chief administrative officer at the time, Paul McGrath, said that county government, like the first Mayor Daley, was not too interested in opening its arms to Hollywood filmmakers.

“Doing things like that was absolutely unheard of,” he said.

But Landis’ version could ring true, he said. Korshak was “very powerful with all kinds of unions and politicians, and so was his brother. It makes perfect sense,” McGrath said.

Cook County Sheriff Richard Elrod was also skeptical. In an August memo to the film’s location manager, he said he didn’t “fully approve of the contents ... due to the fact that it does not put law enforcement bodies of Chicago in the best light.” Still, he said he would follow instructions from his superiors. Elrod says now that “he didn’t want to go on record as the chief law enforcement officer of Cook County as approving” such a portrayal.

County Board President George Dunne says he wasn’t consulted directly on the filming, but he supported it because his son Murphy was the Blues Brothers’ keyboardist.

Whatever the case, by Labor Day weekend, the crew had free rein — to a degree city officials said would not be possible today because of increased activity in the Loop as well as liability and security concerns after 9/11.

To knock down the glass walls at the Daley Center, glaziers replaced two 9-foot by 9-foot panels with breakaway glass. After the stunt, Glaziers replaced the windows at 4 a.m. the following Tuesday because they refused to work on Labor Day.

But the Bluesmobile was driven so fast that the heat from the tires damaged the finish of 35 granite pavers and a bronze air grille. Repairs cost $7,650.

Movie crews also removed the three revolving glass doors from the eastern entrance of the County Building. They plugged up two with fake stone and installed brass breakaway doors in the middle. In the movie, hundreds of police and Army troops use axes to break down those doors after the Blues Brothers have gone inside.

Belushi gets hurt

Aykroyd remembers a “day of intense concentration” while working with so many extras — more than 500, including 200 real soldiers. Belushi hurt his back pushing a cigarette machine and a bench in front of the fake doors, recalled his widow, Judy Belushi Pisano.

Crews filmed in the lobby of the building, as Jake and Elwood race inside and are pursued by scores of police. The rest of the interior — including the stairwell going up, the elevator and the Cook County assessor’s office on the 11th floor — was re-created on a set. The re-creation was so exact that even stair railings from different periods were faithfully copied. Early 1900s ornamental iron shows up in the set’s first-floor staircase. But when police arrive on the upper floors, the railings change to resemble those installed in the building around 1970.

“It’s amazing that they’d go to this degree of detail,” said Tim Samuelson, the city’s cultural historian.

Contributing: Abdon Pallasch