On a Mission from God: The Chaotic Making of The Blues Brothers
Updated: Sep 23
By the time The Blues Brothers wrapped filming in early 1980, it had become the kind of production people in Hollywood still talk about decades later. A sketch from Saturday Night Live had somehow turned into one of the most expensive comedies ever attempted, with a script nobody had actually finished when shooting started and a star who was quietly falling apart in the middle of it all. Universal's own head of production, Ned Tanen, later admitted what it felt like from inside the studio partway through the shoot: about the twentieth day in, he said, you start thinking this is the worst piece of garbage out of hell, and nobody will ever see it. MCA chairman Lew Wasserman told stockholders the film would need to earn 40 to 50 million dollars just to break even.
It turned out fine in the end. But almost nobody involved was sure of that for most of 1979. This is the real story, pieced together from the people who lived through it: a small blues bar in Toronto, a friendship that began by accident, and one of the strangest, most expensive comedies Hollywood ever agreed to bankroll.
Quick Answers
● How much did The Blues Brothers actually cost? Universal put the official figure at around 27.5 million dollars against an original budget nearer 24 million, though contemporary press reports put it as high as 30 to 35 million.
● Did Dan Aykroyd really write a 324-page script? Yes. His first draft, titled The Return of the Blues Brothers, was reportedly delivered wrapped inside the cover of a phone book, written in a loose free verse style with no stage directions.
● How many cars were destroyed making the film? At least sixty in the Dixie Square Mall sequence alone, with the total across the whole production running past a hundred, reportedly a record at the time.
● Did the Vatican really endorse The Blues Brothers? Yes. In 2010, on the film's thirtieth anniversary, the Vatican's own newspaper L'Osservatore Romano called it a Catholic classic and recommended it as viewing for Catholics everywhere.
The writing process
A Toronto Bar and an Accidental Friendship
In 1973, Dan Aykroyd was a member of the newly formed Toronto branch of Second City, the same improv troupe that had launched countless comedy careers out of Chicago. He'd left university without finishing his degree in sociology and criminology, an unfinished course of study that still shows up constantly in his later work, from his lifelong fascination with police scanners and law enforcement to Elwood Blues himself, a character who talks about cars and firearms with the precision of someone who studied the subject properly. To make ends meet while performing, Aykroyd also ran a private late night bar called the 505 Club, open only after midnight for comedians, musicians and whoever else wanted somewhere dim and smoky to keep the night going.
That February, John Belushi travelled up from New York, where he'd been performing with the National Lampoon Radio Hour, to scout Second City performers for the show. He and Aykroyd met for the first time at Second City's stage door, and by Aykroyd's own account, decades later, it was love at first sight.
Aykroyd has described that first meeting in detail: Belushi appeared out of a snowy February night wearing a driving cap and a white scarf, underdressed for the weather and completely unbothered by it. Aykroyd brought him back to the 505 Club afterwards, where the jukebox was playing local blues. Belushi, who up to that point had been a fan of heavier rock music, was hooked. It was Aykroyd who gave him his first real education in the blues, feeding him records and history over the following months. Composer Howard Shore, another member of that early comedy circle who would go on to score the Lord of the Rings trilogy decades later, joked one night that the two of them looked like brothers, and the name stuck long before there was ever a band to attach it to.
From Second City to Saturday Night Live
Aykroyd moved briefly through Second City's Chicago company too, then joined Belushi in New York in 1975 as part of the original cast of Saturday Night Live, credited at the time as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Aykroyd had originally been hired purely as a writer, and only ended up in front of the camera once producer Lorne Michaels saw what he could do. The Blues Brothers idea grew slowly backstage over the following months, part running joke and part genuine passion project, before it ever made it onto the actual show. Aykroyd would bring his harmonica into the studio between sketches, and Belushi, always drawn to the idea of performing music as much as comedy, gravitated towards it.
Their first on screen appearance came in January 1976, dressed as bees and performing a version of Slim Harpo's I'm a King Bee, which let them smuggle a taste of real blues music onto national television under cover of a silly sketch. It wasn't until 1978, during an episode hosted by Steve Martin, that they performed in the black suits, hats and sunglasses that would become permanently associated with Jake and Elwood Blues, doing a version of Hey Bartender. That night, the characters properly clicked, and the audience response made it clear there was more to the act than a one-off novelty.
Animal House Changes Everything
Animal House, released in 1978, turned Belushi into a genuine star almost overnight through his performance as Bluto. With that kind of leverage suddenly behind him, he pushed to turn the Blues Brothers from a sketch into an actual working band. A real lineup came together that year, built around serious professional musicians rather than comedians playing dress up, several of them straight out of Stax Records in Memphis, where they'd backed Otis Redding, Sam and Dave and Wilson Pickett as part of Booker T and the MGs. We've written a fuller rundown of who was actually in the band behind the Blues Brothers elsewhere on the site, but the short version is that having them on stage gave the act a level of musical legitimacy that a pure comedy act built around two SNL stars simply couldn't have faked.
The band opened a run of shows for Steve Martin at the Universal Amphitheatre, and the resulting live album, Briefcase Full of Blues, became a genuine commercial hit, reaching the top of the American album charts in early 1979. For two comedians moonlighting as a blues act, that kind of chart success was almost unheard of, and it gave Aykroyd exactly the leverage he needed to push for a film.
A Blank Cheque and a 324-Page Script
Universal moved fast once Aykroyd decided he wanted to make a film. According to the account later pieced together by Vanity Fair writer Ned Zeman, the deal came together almost instantly: production vice president Sean Daniel simply called studio president Ned Tanen and asked whether he wanted to make a Blues Brothers movie, and Tanen said yes on the spot, telling Daniel he would inform Lew Wasserman. Belushi was reportedly paid 500,000 dollars for the role and Aykroyd 250,000, and the deal moved forward with barely any internal discussion at all.
There was, however, one significant problem. Nobody had actually written a script yet, and Aykroyd had never written one in his life. Months later he delivered a 324-page draft titled The Return of the Blues Brothers, reportedly handed over wrapped inside the cover of a phone book. It was written in a loose, free verse style, packed with lengthy digressions on Catholicism and recidivism, and included entire separate storylines for recruiting all eight backup musicians individually. Producer Bob Weiss called it enormous when it arrived, saying they had a great deal of work ahead of them. The sheer density of it was such that Belushi's future wife, Judith, later took Aykroyd's original material and organised it into its own separate reference document just so the people working on the film could keep track of the mythology Aykroyd had built around the two characters, their fictional childhood in an orphanage, and their invented history learning the blues from a mentor named Curtis.
John Landis, who'd signed on to direct after Animal House proved his instincts with Belushi could work, shut himself away with the draft and spent three weeks cutting it down into something that could actually be filmed, though even his version still lacked basic elements like stage directions. It was scheduled to begin shooting within two months of that first delivery, which left very little room for a conventional pre-production process.
Casting the Soul Legends Nobody Else Wanted
Aykroyd's musical ambitions for the film went well beyond the backing band. He wanted Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Cab Calloway in front of the camera, not as novelty cameos but as the actual foundation the whole project was built to honour. By 1979, that was a harder sell than it sounds today. Disco dominated the charts, and several of these artists had spent the back half of the decade being pushed to the margins of the industry they'd helped build. Cab Calloway himself had released a disco version of his own signature song, Minnie the Moocher, the year before, a sign of just how far the pendulum had swung against the kind of music he'd built his name on.
John Landis has since explained the thinking behind the casting plainly in interviews: the whole point was to put the spotlight back on great American artists whose careers had cooled through no fault of their own. In the finished film, Calloway performs Minnie the Moocher the way he actually wanted to, in full 1930s big band style complete with white tie and tails, rather than the disco arrangement he'd been talked into a year earlier. Aretha Franklin was cast as a diner owner and the wife of guitarist Matt Guitar Murphy, delivering a five minute performance of Think that became one of the film's most celebrated scenes and one of only two occasions in her entire career that she agreed to act in a film. James Brown played a fiery preacher whose sermon sequence was staged less like a film set and more like an actual church service, and Ray Charles appeared as a pawnshop owner who sells the brothers their instruments, playing keyboard himself in character. All four were, by any measure, treated as the heart of the film rather than decoration around its two stars, and the gamble paid off in ways nobody at the studio had predicted: after the film's release, all four saw renewed interest in their back catalogues from an audience too young to have caught them the first time round.
Chicago Welcomes Home a Son
Filming moved to Chicago in the summer of 1979, and Belushi personally flew in on 1 July to help smooth the production's path with the city's new mayor. Jane Byrne had taken office that spring as Chicago's first female mayor, and according to Daniel de Visé's account in his book on the making of the film, later excerpted in Chicago Magazine, she granted the production a level of access that would have been unthinkable under her predecessor. She allowed the crew to drive a convoy of cars across Daley Plaza and to crash a vehicle through a window there for one of the film's most famous shots, reportedly reasoning that the political establishment loyal to the old regime already disliked her anyway, so there was little to lose.
Byrne's authority only stretched so far, though. She could hand over the plaza itself, but the Daley Center building next to it fell under county jurisdiction rather than the city's, and she had no direct power over Chicago's famously entrenched labour unions, whose cooperation the production also badly needed. To get around that, Landis reportedly turned to Sidney Korshak, a Chicago-raised attorney and fixer whose client list stretched from Frank Sinatra to Ronald Reagan and included Universal's own Lew Wasserman. Korshak's connections, built over decades defending Al Capone's associates before moving into labour law, opened doors in Chicago that the mayor's office alone couldn't.
Chicago itself became a genuine character in the finished film. Belushi, the son of Albanian immigrants who'd grown up in nearby Wheaton, was treated less like a visiting film star and more like a returning local hero throughout the shoot, and the production leaned into that goodwill wherever it could, filming large scale sequences on Lower Wacker Drive and around Daley Plaza that no other production could likely have secured permission for at the time.
The Bluesmobile Was a Real Retired Police Car
The car at the centre of nearly every chase in the film started life as an ordinary decommissioned police cruiser, and the production leaned into that fact rather than disguising it. According to studio production notes, Universal bought a fleet of retired police cars from California at around 400 dollars each to use and destroy throughout filming, alongside a dozen specially outfitted Bluesmobiles built to survive repeated stunt work and a handful of Ford Pintos, most of which ended up wrecked as well. A dedicated garage and mechanic crew worked continuously through the shoot just to keep enough driveable cars in rotation, repairing or rebuilding vehicles nearly as fast as the stunt team could destroy them.
A Real Street Market Playing Itself
Not every Chicago location needed dressing up. The Maxwell Street Market, a genuine open-air flea market that had been running since the late 1800s and had long served as an early proving ground for Chicago's blues musicians, appears in the film essentially as itself. Blues legend John Lee Hooker performs Boom Boom on the street directly outside what was dressed as Aretha Franklin's diner, surrounded by real vendors and real market-goers going about an ordinary Sunday rather than hired extras. The block itself no longer exists in that form. It was demolished in the mid-1990s to make way for the expansion of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, which means the footage shot for the film now doubles as one of the only moving records of what that stretch of the market actually looked like.
Wrecking a Real Shopping Mall
One of the film's most famous sequences was shot inside the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois, a genuine shopping centre that had been abandoned since 1978. Rather than build a set, the production dressed the empty mall back up to look open and functioning, stocking real merchandise on the shelves, before driving cars straight through it for the chase sequence. At least sixty vehicles were destroyed in that sequence alone, and by the time the whole production wrapped, well over a hundred cars had been wrecked across the shoot, reportedly a record for a film at the time. The mall never reopened, and the site was eventually demolished decades later.
The Night Belushi Vanished in Harvey
It was during a night shoot near that same location that one of the production's most enduring stories took place. Cast and crew realised partway through the evening that Belushi had gone missing between takes. Dan Aykroyd later told the music magazine The Blues that nobody could find him on set, so Aykroyd went looking himself, following a lit track through the grass to a small nearby house. A stranger answered the door and, without much surprise, confirmed he had a guest: he's been here two hours, raided my fridge, he's asleep on the couch. Aykroyd found Belushi curled up peacefully inside, and gently woke him to bring him back to work. It became one of Aykroyd's favourite stories about his friend, a small, harmless episode that also hinted at a much harder pattern developing underneath it.
Cocaine, Missed Calls and a Production Under Strain
Away from the mall chases and the celebrated musical numbers, the production was fighting a much quieter battle. Belushi's fame in Chicago had become so overwhelming that, according to reporting later compiled by Vanity Fair, even police officers treated him like a celebrity rather than a citizen.
Producer Mitch Glazer later described how casually cocaine circulated around Belushi during this period, recalling that friends, fans and hangers-on would simply hand it to him unprompted, sometimes slipping vials into his pockets without even being asked. Landis and the production team were, by several accounts, effectively managing two separate productions at once: the film itself, and the ongoing effort to keep its star functional enough to finish it.
The pattern became familiar to the crew as the shoot wore on. Belushi would arrive late or miss calls entirely, and unit days that should have run smoothly instead slipped by hours while people waited to see whether he'd appear. None of this showed up in the finished film itself, where Belushi's performance remains sharp, physical and full of the same manic energy that had made him famous in the first place. That contrast, between what audiences eventually saw on screen and what the people making the film were dealing with off it, is part of what makes the production's back story so much darker than the finished comedy ever lets on.
The Illinois Nazis Scene Was Rooted in a Real Court Case
One of the film's most talked about sequences, in which Jake and Elwood drive a group of neo Nazi demonstrators off a bridge and into the water below, wasn't pure invention. It drew directly on a real and recent legal fight, the 1977 to 1978 Skokie Affair, in which the National Socialist Party of America won a US court battle for the right to march through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb home to a large Holocaust survivor community. The film's fictional Illinois Nazis are explicitly described as having just won their own court case, a detail lifted straight from that real controversy.
The bridge sequence itself was filmed partly on the Daniel Hoan Memorial Bridge in Milwaukee and partly at the Jackson Park lagoon in Chicago, the two locations cut together to look like one continuous stunt. One of the extras who played a Nazi in the scene, Gene Schuldt, later described roughly 300 extras taking part in the rally, and recalled a moment where the stunt car performing the jump overshot its landing ramp badly enough that crew members had to physically hold the rear of the vehicle down while the stunt performers scrambled out, before a crane was brought in to pull the car back to safety. Twelve stunt performers eventually did the actual jump into the lagoon after several rehearsed takes.
The Budget Spirals, and Wasserman Notices
The film's finances tell their own story. Contemporary press reports in 1979 put the budget as low as five million dollars. By the time filming wrapped, industry trade papers were reporting figures as high as 30 to 35 million, while Universal itself, through Ned Tanen, put the official cost closer to 27.5 million against an original budget nearer 24 million. Landis later attributed the overrun to production costs running 300 to 400 percent over initial estimates, largely driven by the sheer scale of the stunt work, and pointed out that around 10,000 people ended up on the film's payroll across the shoot. Lew Wasserman, MCA's chairman, told stockholders the film would need to gross 40 to 50 million dollars simply to recoup its costs, a genuinely alarming target for a comedy in 1980.
The Fight to Get It Into Cinemas
Even finishing the film didn't guarantee an audience would see it. The Blues Brothers opened in roughly 600 cinemas in June 1980, about a third of the number a major studio release would typically command at the time. Some theatre chains were reportedly reluctant to book a long, unconventional comedy built around older Black musicians, worried that suburban white audiences simply wouldn't turn out for it, a concern that reflected the same disco era marginalisation the film itself was trying to push back against. Its length didn't help either. At well over two hours, some chains balked at giving up extra daily screening slots for a film they weren't confident would sell out.
Reviews on release were mixed at best. Some critics dismissed it as bloated and self indulgent, complaining about its runtime and the scale of the car chases. Roger Ebert, reviewing it at the time, was more forgiving, giving it a broadly positive write-up that praised its energy and music even while acknowledging its flaws. Gene Siskel went further, calling it one of the great comedies of its era. That split between the harsher trade press reaction and the more enthusiastic response from general audiences and some individual critics became one of the defining stories of the film's release.
None of that stopped audiences once they got the chance to see it. The film opened to strong numbers, ultimately grossing around 115 million dollars worldwide against its ballooned budget, with a significant share of that total coming from overseas markets, Australia in particular, where it became a genuine phenomenon. It became one of Universal's biggest hits of the year despite everything working against it on paper, and despite opening the same summer as one of the biggest blockbusters in cinema history, The Empire Strikes Back.
A Cult Following, a Soul Revival and an Unlikely Vatican Endorsement
The film's afterlife turned out to be even stranger than its production. Rather than fading after its opening run, The Blues Brothers became a genuine cult phenomenon, drawing repeat audiences, midnight screenings and costumed fans for decades afterwards. Cinemas that scheduled late night showings found audiences turning up dressed as Jake and Elwood, reciting lines along with the screen and dancing in the aisles during the musical numbers, treating a night at the cinema more like a live event than a passive screening. It's credited with reintroducing Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Cab Calloway to a younger generation at a point when all four had drifted from the centre of popular music, giving each of their catalogues a fresh commercial life that none of them had seen in years.
In 2010, on the film's thirtieth anniversary, the Vatican's own newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, formally praised it as a Catholic classic and recommended it as viewing for Catholics everywhere, pointing to its themes of redemption and its framed photograph of Pope John Paul II in one scene as evidence of its sincerity. Dan Aykroyd, a lapsed but formerly devout Catholic who'd served as an altar boy from the age of six, told the New York Post he was delighted with the endorsement. Two years later, on the film's fortieth anniversary, the same newspaper revisited it again, this time calling it a modern classic and noting that its old school dance numbers and analogue effects still held up against far more technically advanced modern comedies.
In 2020, the film was formally inducted into the United States National Film Registry, joining a list of just 25 titles selected that year for preservation on grounds of cultural, historic or aesthetic significance to American cinema. John Landis, accepting the honour, called it a delightful surprise, and said the film was ultimately the result of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi's genuine passion for rhythm and blues. A belated sequel, Blues Brothers 2000, arrived nearly two decades after the original and reunited much of the surviving cast and crew, though it never came close to replicating the original's cultural impact, a reminder of just how specific the circumstances behind the first film really were.
The Shadow That Followed the Film
The joy of the film sits alongside a genuinely sad postscript. Less than two years after its release, John Belushi died at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, and the pattern visible during the Chicago shoot, the constant offers of drugs, the missed calls, the production quietly working around its own star's decline, reads in hindsight like an early chapter of the same story. We've covered what actually happened during his final hours at the hotel in full elsewhere on the site. Dan Aykroyd has spoken since about wanting people to remember the version of his friend captured on screen in this film: not the chaos, but the joy, the music and the humanity underneath it.
A Toronto bar, a phone book stuffed with a 324-page script, a mayor who let a film crew wreck her city, soul legends nobody else in Hollywood wanted, and a budget that kept climbing past every figure anyone quoted publicly. None of it should have worked. Somehow, on a mission from God, it did.
