Emile Hirsch, via imdb.com
Belushi’s back! According to the Hollywood Reporter, “Speed Racer” and “Into the Wild” star Emile Hirsch has been cast as John Belushi in a forthcoming film based on the oral history “Belushi,” by Judith Belushi Pisano and Tanner Colby. The project stalled at the studio level and has been revived as an indie.
Written and directed by Chicago screenwriter Steve Conrad (The Pursuit of Happyness, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty), the biopic is slated to begin shooting next spring in New York and will focus on Belushi’s post-Second City years, when he starred in such iconic big-screen comedies as “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers.” Conrad’s script also explores Belushi’s sudden death in early March of 1982 from a drug overdose at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont.
Conrad tells the Sun-Times that he’s currently in the middle of a production rewrite, and that Pisano “has been elementally involved from the onset and remains so.”
Pisano is also one of four producers, and Belushi’s close pal and fellow Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd will executive produce.
