‘Blues Brothers’: Five things you didn’t know about the movie’s Chicago shoot

How well do you know “The Blues Brothers?”

Nearly anyone of a certain age can recite the film’s most iconic lines:

“We’re putting the band back together.”

“It’s 106 miles to Chicago.”

“We’re on a mission from God.”

Serious fans even know the address of the suburban shopping mall the filmmakers laid to waste and can identify the snooty restaurant, long since closed, where Jake and Elwood terrorized a roomful of Chicago aristocrats.

A few can even spot John Landis, the director of “The Blues Brothers,” in a cameo in the Daley Plaza scene.

Well, here are some things you might not know — five nuggets of “Blues Brothers” trivia drawn from the pages of my book “The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic” (Atlantic Monthly Press, $28), available Tuesday.

1. The filmmakers wanted more R&B stars

Provided

Dan Aykroyd, who, beside starring, was the lead author of “The Blues Brothers” script, wanted the movie to showcase the greats of golden-era rhythm and blues who by then were all but forgotten, swept away beneath the tide of disco and arena rock in the late 1970s. That was the real “Mission from God.”

Aykroyd and Landis ended up enlisting five of the greatest: Aretha Franklin and James Brown, the queen and godfather of soul; Ray Charles, the genius; Cab Calloway, a big-band titan of the swing era; and John Lee Hooker, a first-rank postwar bluesman.

Wait till you hear who turned them down.

Provided

The filmmakers wanted Little Richard, real name Richard Penniman, an architect of the rock ’n’ roll revolution, to play the singing preacher, a role eventually filled by Brown. Landis met with him at his Tennessee church. But Little Richard declined the offer, his fealty to Jesus precluding his participation.

Landis also tried to approach B.B. King, “King of the Blues.” But Sid Seidenberg, King’s manager, apprised the director that B.B. was booked, playing 300 gigs a year. Only years later did the blues monarch learn he had been up for a part in “The Blues Brothers.” He was crushed.

For the Maxwell Street number, Landis planned to film an all-star band led by Hooker and Muddy Waters.

Shortly before the shoot, though, the director learned that Waters had the flu. The production could not wait. And thus the scene became a defining showcase for Hooker.

Atlantic Monthly Press

2. Choking fumes inside Harvey’s Dixie Square Mall

MGM

“The Blues Brothers” crew wasn’t planning to shoot inside an abandoned shopping mall until location scouts spotted the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, which had opened in 1966 and closed in 1978, a victim of crime, vacancy and blight in the struggling suburb.

This was a rare find at the time. Dead malls weren’t so common in the 1970s. Once Landis beheld it, he had to use it.

Set decorators spent weeks restoring the shuttered mall, putting in electricity, air conditioning, lights, realistic signs and truckloads of real mall merchandise. And they painstakingly recreated 32 storefronts, including some familiar Chicago names: Bigsby & Kruthers, Jewel, Lemmy’s hot dogs and R.J. Grunts.

Then, stunt drivers spent several days reducing the mall back to rubble, smashing through real glass, plowing through real merchandise and narrowly missing dozens of stunt actors cast as shoppers.

The crew had sealed and blacked out every exterior door and window to preserve the illusion of a nighttime chase. The screeching cars spewed exhaust fumes and burnt rubber into the enclosed space, befouling the air, already ripe from rotting produce in the supermarket.

The cast and crew resorted to taking periodic 10-minute breaks, filing outside to fill their lungs with fresh air.

3. That tunnel scene with Carrie Fisher was faked

Provided

John Belushi’s showdown with Carrie Fisher’s Mystery Woman inside an old pedestrian tunnel was one of Belushi’s biggest scenes in “The Blues Brothers.” He even took off his sunglasses. Landis had begged him not to ingest anything that would “f--- with your eyes” for six full days before the shoot.

If you watch the scene again, the tunnel certainly looks real, with bare bulbs illuminating sooty walls and water oozing onto grimy ground.

There’s Belushi, on hands and knees, pleading: “I ran outta gas. I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from outta town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake, a terrible flood, locusts.”

When I rewatched the sequence while writing the book, I wondered whether the tunnel was a particularly nasty iteration of the pedestrian underpasses along DuSable Lake Shore Drive.

Fans floated other theories. On the film-location website itsfilmedthere.com, one wrote: “This is a pedestrian tunnel under LaSalle Dr., between Clark St. and Lakeshore Dr.”

No one in the senior “Blues Brothers” crew could recall just where the Mystery Tunnel lay. In the final stages of editing the book, I asked Landis. He remembered.

It turns out the tunnel scene was a marvel of forced perspective, built on a Universal soundstage. The section where Fisher and the brothers meet was full-scale, fitted with a wall that could be removed “to make it easier to shoot,” Landis said. “Everything behind John and Danny is miniature,” shrinking away to nothing. An optical illusion.

4. The horn section cut lines of coke inside Ray’s Music Exchange

Cocaine was currency on “The Blues Brothers” set, several members of the cast and crew affirmed in interviews for the book, though Landis and the studio execs maintain the film’s druggy reputation is overblown.

Few of the musicians were sober, and the Blues Brothers horn section made creative use of the glass-topped display cases inside Ray’s Music Exchange when they gathered in Los Angeles to shoot the big Ray Charles number.

The exterior shots, with dozens of dancers filling the street outside the pawn shop, were filmed in Chicago on a chilly autumn day. And the interiors, with Uncle Ray and the band shimmying inside the shop, played out on a Hollywood set.

The smooth glass surface gave the musicians an idea. In one take, they produced a dollar bill and pantomimed chopping it up and snorting it, “all for the amusement of the crew,” saxophonist “Blue” Lou Marini told me.

In the next take, they repeated the routine with a price tag.

In the third take, on a dare, “Alan Rubin,” Mr. Fabulous, “pulls out a gram of coke and lays it out on the glass countertop, and we start to snort it,” said Tom “Bones” Malone, the trombonist.

A careful viewer can glimpse their antics in the background of the sequence as Charles negotiates with Jake Blues and Murphy “Murph” Dunne, the keyboardist.

Landis finally spotted them. He yelled “Cut!” and stormed up to the group, demanding, “What the f--- are you guys doing?”

One of the horn players reminded the director that he had instructed them to act like musicians.

5. One of the biggest set pieces ended up on the cutting-room floor

The filmmakers built a replica of an old-fashioned country service station out on Route 59 in the far west suburbs for a scene that, let’s be honest, did little to advance the “Blues Brothers” narrative.

Jake and Elwood arrive at Lloyd’s Tire Clinic to gas up the Bluesmobile. A sporty convertible pulls up, driven by Twiggy, the British model. She mistakes Elwood for an attendant. They flirt. She drives off. Elwood, mesmerized, forgets to turn off the pump. Jake and Elwood dash off to their make-or-break gig. Jake tosses a lit cigarette butt out the passenger window. It triggers a massive explosion.

To create an impressive blast, the filmmakers hauled a 55-gallon drum of gasoline into the hut at the center of the station. A special effects man planted sticks of dynamite around its rim. Just before the timed explosion, police cleared some kids from the trees. The detonation shattered windows and rattled homes.

The explosion made it into the original “Blues Brothers” rough cut, which ran to nearly three hours, complete with a Broadway-style intermission.

But the studio heads demanded cuts. The final film wound up going two hours and 13 minutes. Out went “Sink the Bismarck,” a Johnny Horton number that Jake and Elwood performed at Bob’s Country Bunker. Out went the scene at the aerosol factory where Elwood Blues worked. Out went precious seconds of “Boom Boom,” the John Lee Hooker number. Out went the intermission.

And out went the gas-station explosion, one of the film’s most audacious set pieces.

“Blues Brothers” fans would see it restored in 1999, when Landis added back 17 minutes of lost footage for an extended edition.

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